Ian Black: World Watch

Yasser Arafat has sustained an entire cottage industry of biographers and experts during his long and eventful career, but the book that comes closest to explaining what makes him tick is by the veteran Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein.

The Mystery of Arafat was published 10 years ago, but it is still an indispensable guide to "Mr Palestine" and especially to how, as long ago as the 60s, he cultivated his iconic image: keffiyeh headscarf, three-day stubble, olive-green battledress and pistol on hip.

Old and sick he may be, but there was more than a hint of the theatrical when Arafat - sans keffiyeh but grinning bravely for the cameras - left the carefully preserved ruins of his Ramallah HQ last week en route for a Paris hospital.

It was the same in 1992: his plane was about to make a hazardous crash-landing in the Libyan desert, so he took off his tracksuit and put on his uniform and holster - determined, if killed or injured, to keep up appearances to the end.

Reports of Arafat's demise turn out to have been exaggerated, though the excitement is an indicator of the power of the global brand he has become. But it is clear that whoever does succeed him, and whenever they do so, none will wield his unique, symbolic authority, somehow respected even by his many bitter enemies.

And while it may be true that without the man Palestinians call Abu Ammar, Ariel Sharon and a re-elected George Bush would no longer be able to argue that there is no "partner for peace", the danger of factional fighting and warlordism in the disconnected territories of the West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of Lebanon and the wider diaspora will be very real.

Arafat's illness underlines his extraordinary staying power. Every journalist who has ever covered the Middle East has written him off at some time. I confess to burying him first in 1983 after he survived Israel's invasion of Lebanon only to face a rebellion fomented by the Syrians.

Next time I saw him in action, he was manoeuvring to hold the PLO together with his stirring but windy rhetoric at the 1987 Palestine National Council in Algiers, months before the outbreak of the first intifada. It was that popular uprising, more effective than years of armed struggle, that led him finally to recognise Israel and renounce terrorism, two fundamental moves he has never withdrawn.

Arafat was born for the long haul, and things were looking up in his Tunisian exile in December 1992, just prior to the start of the back-channel negotiations that led to his ill-fated Oslo deal with Yitzhak Rabin.

It was hard, as ever, to know exactly what he meant when I spoke to him then: the overheated language masked any obvious substance. He was effusive, friendly, but evasive, a parody of himself. (At the end of the interview, he gave me a mother-of-pearl box with red plush lining - the sort made in Bethlehem before tourism collapsed. Back in Europe, boarding a flight to Tel Aviv, the El Al security man asked: "Has anyone given you anything to take with you?" Times were changing, but I decided not to say I had a gift from the PLO leader in my suitcase).

Arafat's legacy will be the subject of many books. The moment is certainly past when the world was persuaded, as Rubinstein put it, "that Arafat was the Palestinian problem and accordingly he and only he could solve it". His flaws and failures weakened the Palestinian Authority and boosted Islamist rivals such as Hamas.

But there is no mystery about one central point: in the 60s and 70s, his people were refugees whose national rights were barely recognised. "Only in Palestine," an astute US commentator wrote then, "is it still possible for liberals to cheer the cowboys gunning down the Indians or pushing them back into the badlands." As Israelis now know to their cost, that is no longer remotely true.