ACT I, SCENE XLVI: Jim Hoagland tries to get informal by trying to give a glimpse of how Yasser Arafat would see himself if he was the star of a one-man play:
No one will ever say I did not change. I am chimera, I am quicksilver, I am Arafat. I have had to turn on a dime every hour of my life to survive these murdering Israelis and my Arab brothers, who see me as a threat to them, too.
They are right. All Arab leaders have betrayed me, dissed me, tried to use me, to kill me and to kill the Palestinian revolution that I alone now embody. They will pay in time. Except brother Saddam Hussein. He knows that through it all, down deep, I did not change at all. I owe the guy, and this time I deliver.
Sure, I shed skin after skin. Watched as lieutenant after lieutenant was murdered when they began to upstage me. Jumped from burning deck to burning deck in the 1970s, ran to catch up with the kids' intifada of the 1980s, and hugged Shimon Peres to survive in the 1990s.
At Camp David, Clinton wanted to make me the George Washington of Palestine. But I would have had to sell out my people, in the miserable camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, to become emir of the West Bank. Remember, that was the deal on offer. The money underneath the table was already pretty good -- not as good as what Saddam offers, but more secure.
Those Israeli hacks say I could have achieved my strategic goals without bloodshed with that deal. But they miss the point. Bloodshed is the point. I had to seize, not passively receive. The Israelis now give me total credit for this intifada. History will remember me as warrior, resister, struggler.
I am not a turncoat. Armed struggle has always been my way, my meaning, my religion. The borders of Palestine will be traced in blood, as a great nation's should be. The frontiers will be demarcated and protected by international troops, not by a groveling peace treaty. That is and was my plan. When Israel elected Sharon, to prove to us that brute force could make Israelis secure, it fell into place: We had to show them they were wrong.
These fools in Washington and Europe chase their own tails by debating whether I am a terrorist or not. Did I ever shrink from murder when it was needed? They think if they come up with the right label, like "Enduring Freedom" or "homicide bombers," then everything is fixed. And they say we Arabs are prisoners of rhetoric.