Arafat leaves a troubled legacy but no doubt that there is a Palestinian people

In 1990, he reversed earlier avowals that he was "married to the cause" and married Suha Tawil, a Palestinian Christian who'd worked for him in Tunis. She converted to Islam when they married, but the fact that he chose a Christian for a wife was reassuring to Palestine's large population of Christians. In 1995, they had a daughter, Zahwa.

Arafat was always a controversial figure. His role in organizing and, later, apparently condoning Palestinian violence made Israelis fearful and angry. But for Palestinians at home and abroad, the guerrillas' actions - though militarily negligible - restored a sense of confidence and nationhood.

After 1973 he switched his emphasis from guerrilla struggle to diplomatic engagement. In 1974, Fatah adopted a new, more moderate program of creating a Palestinian state in just the West Bank and Gaza, instead of replacing all of Israel as it and the PLO had earlier urged. In 1975, I saw Arafat at a huge rally here in Beirut, using extravagant hand gestures and emotional evocations of the Palestinians' many losses to argue for the new "two-state" program.

In 1993 the push for this program achieved some success when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin concluded the Oslo Agreement with the PLO. (Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres for that breakthrough.) The following year, Arafat met an adoring welcome from residents of Gaza and the West Bank. Two years later, they swept him to victory in the only free and fair election they have ever been allowed to hold. By then, though, Palestinian leadership was already in disarray. Fatah had started out with a deliberately collective leadership. But by 1994, other key leaders had died or been killed, and Arafat was alone, aided only by figures of lesser political weight.

In addition, after his return to Palestine in 1994, the tactics of underground organizing and military planning that Arafat had perfected during long exile proved quite incapable of winning the full-fledged state for which he and his people yearned. Thus started a decade of slowly unfolding tragedy - for him, for Palestinians everywhere, and for the large number of Israelis who wanted to see a two-state solution to their nation's dilemma.

Other Israelis, led by Ariel Sharon and his Likud Party, had other ideas. They used the "interim period" decreed by Oslo to expand their grip on Palestinian lands, and absent any braking hand from the US, they were very successful. The number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank doubled in the Oslo years. Arafat never developed an effective strategy to resist that land grab. Instead he drifted - sometimes condoning the violence by some Palestinians, sometimes cracking down hard on internal opponents.

Arafat's tragedy and that of his people was that he wasn't up to the challenges that history assigned him. He was not a Mandela; but equally, he did not for long have a De Klerk figure to deal with. Rabin, who started to play that transformative role, was killed by an Israeli extremist before he achieved anything lasting.

But at least Arafat and his colleagues achieved this: Back in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir voiced a judgment shared by many in the West when she said, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people." But today, few people doubt that the Palestinian nation exists, and neither Israel nor its supporters can ignore the Palestinians' claim to establish a sovereign state in a portion of historic Palestine.

• Helena Cobban is author of 'The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power, and Politics.' (Cambridge University Press, 1984, still in print).

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