Victory Leaves a Bitter Taste

Yasser Arafat emerged from his months of confinement behind Israeli tanks and snipers yesterday waving two fingers in a Churchillian salute.

To some Palestinians his freedom to roam the streets of Ramallah once again was indeed a victory. He had, they said, survived Israel's latest attempt to destroy him, to drive him into exile, even to kill him.

It was the Israelis who blinked, they argued, by giving up their claim to the six Palestinians whose transfer to British and American custody at Jericho had ended the siege.

But as the Palestinian leader's motorcade was escorted by a phalanx of armed men from hospital to education ministry to police station to cultural centre on his victory tour of Ramallah yesterday there was not much of a mood of celebration.

Even Mr Arafat vented more anger than rejoicing, or even relief. He renewed his claim to be a man of peace and he said that he remained free under the barrels of Israeli guns because he was still leading the Palestinian people.

But at every stop he came back to his favoured target: Ariel Sharon, who kept the Palestinian leader incarcerated in his own headquarters for five months in ever more humiliating conditions.

The bitterness welled up, and a furious Mr Arafat called the Israeli government "terrorists, Nazis and racists". He accused the Israeli prime minister of murdering prisoners of war. He likened the Israeli assaults on the West Bank to Stalingrad.

In doing so, he brushed aside the questions about how he hopes to revive the prospect of an independent Palestinian state. But a few in the crowds did not seem to mind.

"With our blood and our souls, we will redeem you, Abu Ammar," people chanted, using the Palestinian leader's nom de guerre .

The end of the siege came suddenly. Not long after midnight the tanks seemed to evaporate from around Mr Arafat's compound. Within minutes, Palestinian policemen were back on the streets, waving their guns for the first time since the Israelis tore through Ramallah a month ago and they fled in terror or were rounded up.

At the compound, the 200 or so people who were confined with the Palestinian leader stumbled out to celebrate among the wreckage left behind by the tanks. Among them was the lone Jewish Israeli, Neta Golan, who was euphoric but a little stunned to have made it.

"Look up there, just a few feet away, right opposite the building we were in, that's where the Israeli snipers were," she said, pointing to the snipers nest no more than 20 feet away. "They played psychological war games with us. They let sound bombs off every hour. They took the cars one by one and crushed them. It was as if they were demonstrating they could crush us. One of the cars they ground into the dirt was the one Clinton gave to the president [Arafat]."

The Israelis clearly took some delight in flattening the cars according to the Palestinians who watched it happen. By the time the tanks pulled out yesterday, what had been a car park was a mass of crushed and twisted metal ground into the dirt. Some of the destroyed vehicles were piled up to make barricades.

Conditions were tough inside the compound. The Israelis cut the power and water early on. Food supplies quickly dwindled. Many in the compound found themselves living on a thin soup, rice and olives or an apple and an egg a day.

Worst of all, they were restricted to one glass of water a day. The toilets had to be emptied using plastic bags.

The Israelis turned the water back on a couple of days before the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, arrived for a meeting with Mr Arafat in the few fetid rooms he was confined to. The Palestinians say the Israelis did not want Mr Powell to smell just how bad things were. And then food started trickling through again.

Ms Golan is in a unique po sition because she is the only one who held out during the siege to face the prospect of a treason charge. "The first thing I have to find out is if I'm looking at jail time," she said.

On hand as the siege was lifted was Ifham Quran whose son, Hamdi, was one of the six taken away hours earlier under British and US guard. He fired the shots that killed Israel's tourism minister last October.

"I came to see if they have really taken my son away. He was defending Palestine. He does not deserve to be put in prison for that," said Mrs Quran. But she was not about to blame Mr Arafat for it.

Many in Ramallah admire the Palestinian leader for sitting out the siege and saying he would fight to the death if the Israelis tried to capture him. But others were clearly uneasy about the deal that was done to end the blockade.

"It is wrong that we should have to hand them over to the British and Americans," said Aref Issa, who watched from a distance without cheering. "They are Israel's allies so it is the same as giving them to the Israelis. It is shameful for us. But I am happy Arafat is free."

But men like Aref Issa, a bookshop owner, also have few illusions about the nature of Mr Arafat's "victory".

The raid on Ramallah and subsequent siege made only too clear the limits of Mr Arafat's power as the head of a non-state, without an army and half-hearted friends abroad who are no match for the muscle of Israel's allies.

"If I am truthful, I must admit that I think a Palestinian state is less likely now than a year ago," said Mr Issa. "If you look at what the Israelis destroyed and you ask yourself why they did it, then you can only conclude that they do not want us to be able to run our affairs. They want us to be dependent. They want to control us."

Certainly the systematic destruction of the Palestinian Authority's infrastructure, including the Israeli army's removal of hard drives from official computers in West Bank towns, suggests Mr Issa is right. The Israelis say they took the computer data in their hunt for information on terrorists, but that seems unlikely in the case of the Palestinian education ministry and it does not explain why they then wrecked the hardware.

None of that mattered to the children from a Christian primary school who greeted Mr Arafat's arrival at a cultural centre yesterday with a chant. "We are ready to die for Palestine," they pledged.

Mr Arafat was evidently proud of the children, but again it was his anger that got the better of him.

He said he wanted to go to Bethlehem, where another siege has been under way for the past month - this one at the Church of the Nativity. But then he realised that he had no means of getting there without passing through Israeli hands because the army destroyed the two Russian-made helicopters he used to move around Palestinian territory.

Mr Arafat has other reasons to be concerned about where he goes. Mr Sharon has warned that if he leaves the West Bank, he may not be allowed to return.

The train of thought about Israel's prime minister, who is a former general, set off another stream of invective.

"He is the only general in Israel who killed Egyptian prisoners of war. Then there was Beirut and the massacres in Sabra and Shatilla. Now we have the Stalingrad of Palestine - Jeningrad. It is very difficult for our spirit, what he has done," Mr Arafat said.