By Henryk M. Broder

Arafat is dead. But that's not 100 percent certain. Perhaps this news also belongs to the program of disinformation we've experienced in recent days. Arafat is brain dead. Arafat is in a coma. He is no longer in a coma and is communicating with his doctors. Arafat is now in a deeper coma. His vital organs are functioning. Only the machines are keeping him alive, no organs are functioning.

Arafat's struggle with death was just like his entire life -- full of contradictions, uncertainties and ambiguities. His specialties -- the unwillingness to commit himself and his aversion to clear statements -- were also the secret of his "longevity." During his first major appearance before the United Nations in 1975, he waved an olive branch and wore a pistol on his belt. He condemned the terrorism of his own youth brigades but still gave them free reign. And, of course, the interviews he gave and the statements he made in English always sounded very different than the speeches and appeals he made in Arabic.

No other politician has been received and blessed as often by the Pope as Arafat -- even as his martyrs blew themselves up in Israeli buses. He ruled, both as Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief and as the "President" of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), without a mandate. The last elections for the PLO Council took place 20 years ago, and his time as the elected president of the PNA had also expired. The second intifada, whose leadership he soon took over, was also a tool he used to avoid elections. At the same time, he always spoke of the "democracy" he wanted to establish. Arafat's kingdom was a private enterprise, he was one of the last great autocrats -- and with his death, the only ones who are still with us are Moammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il.

And he was, just after the Israeli occupation, the worst misfortune that could have befallen the Palestinian people. Arafat was neither a tactician nor a strategist -- he misread every situation: The Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the peace accord between Israel, Egypt and Jordan, the first Gulf War, in which he pledged his solidarity with Saddam Hussein, as well as the consequences of the Oslo Accords, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Price. His greatest accomplishment in the end was that, despite all of his mistakes and misjudgments, he remained in power. He didn't achieve this because he was any genius but rather because he was inscrupulous and had no shame.

His appearance at the signing of the Oslo 2 Accords in Cairo in September 1995 will never be forgotten. Even though the official speeches had already been given, he stood on the stage and refused, at the last minute, to sign the papers until Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak approached and ordered him to "Sign it, you dog!" Mubarak hosted the celebration and would have been forever disgraced if it had fallen through because of Arafat.

Even during the times when Arafat was confined to his compound in Ramallah, he still played master over life and death insofar as he signed the judgments against "traitors" and "collaborators," who were sentenced to death in show trials. The condemned were then publicly executed, to the pleasure of huge crowds.

Someday, when the Palestinians finally have their own country and no longer have to fight against occupation, they'll be in a position to take stock -- like the Russians did after the death of Stalin or the Spaniards after Franco died. And they will realize that their beloved leader did everything he could to cement their fate, that he was responsible for no fewer Palestinian victims than the Israeli occupiers and that he didn't just terrorize Israelis, but also his own people. In order to control 4 million people, he established 12 different secret services who were exclusively under his command and supported by financial subsidies from the European Union. Pity that the Palestinian people barely saw a cent from Brussels.

There is no other place in the world with so many agents relative to the population. Arafat didn't invest in the economy, education or public health -- he left that to the aid organizations -- he invested in his own security. And even when it surfaced that, over the course of years, he had redirected up to $900 million of the PNA's budget to his own private bank accounts -- and that he was subsidizing his wife in Paris to the tune of $100,000 a month -- he managed to quickly quiet his critics with a few concessions and promises.

The Palestinians thought he would lead them back to their homes in Akko, Ramle and Ashdot. There was just one thing they couldn't imagine: that he might one day die and leave them on their own. But time is working against the Palestinians rather than for them, despite Israel's status as the world's scapegoat. To stage an insurgency, all one needs is a few martyrs and hand-made missiles. But to lead a state, one must have the ability to differentiate between a wish and reality. But Arafat with all of his revolutionary affectations, never managed to do that. He misled the Palestinians and his power was built on a foundation of violence, corruption and illusion.

The astounding thing is that nobody -- not even the biggest conspiracy theorists -- ever proferred the idea that Arafat might actually have been an Israeli agent. It was the Israelis who brought him out of exile in Tunisia in 1993 and bestowed upon him the legitimacy to be a negotiating partner. For a time, he not only had Israeli advisors, but also Israeli security people who were there to protect him from dangers within his own ranks. But he didn't accept that in the end. Still, by following his own path, he became exactly what the nationalistic Israeli right needed in order to continue with its insane policies. The occasional threats to deport or assassinate Arafat only served to help his reputation.