In recent weeks, law and order, the very hinge upon which the health of the body politic rests, began to collapse in the West Bank and Gaza, the end result of discontent by the mass of Palestinians with a leadership elite that has repeatedly failed to find them a way out of their life of destitution, and whose members they accuse of financial malfeasance, mismanagement, cronyism, corruption and the rest of it.

Anarchy and violence cry havoc, with police stations torched, shootouts between militants and security officials, and PA appointees abducted by gunmen and paraded through the streets. And Yasser Arafat, under siege by Israel in his Ramallah compound, now appears to be under siege by his own people. Is this display of mobocracy a harbinger of civil war, and why has it come to this?

To his legion of supporters in the old days, he was known as Abu Ammar, the Building Father, a famous revolutionary who imbued his people with a nostalgia for the absolute of Palestine, and a commitment to national liberation, statehood and independence.

Today he is still famous, as famous now as he was when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in Nov. 1974, the time he walked into the UN building in New York, packing a .45 on his hip and wearing his characteristic checkered head-dress (a cultural fashion statement appropriated from the 1936-1939 Great Revolt in Palestine) to address the General Assembly, telling the delegates that he had come “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” and imploring them “not to let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Those were heady days, when Arafat ranked as one of the most influential leaders in the world, his influence clearly connected to his leadership of a great and much sympathized with liberation struggle.

Alas, the man has not measured up to expectations. After 30 years of administering his people’s affairs from exile and another ten in Palestine, he succeeded only in leading them from one military defeat to another, one diplomatic disaster to another and one act of social grief to another.

After four decades of struggle, sacrifice and unspeakable suffering, the people of Palestine appear to be worse off today than they were when their then 34-year old leader took the helm of the PLO, an organization in the pursuit of whose aims tens of thousands of Palestinian and other Arab patriots have fallen.

Why then has it come to this?

I cannot accept the facile notion that this catastrophe was the result of calamitous mishaps or miscalculations rooted in the persona of one ruler.

A major building block in the classical world of Arab political discourse is the premise that the “leadership a people has is the leadership they deserve.” Leaders, in other words, are not instigators of events but are themselves a mere product and symptom of the social world they lead.

The crisis in Palestine today — of a people with a choked national psyche lashing out at one another, and of a leader struggling to keep a grip on a chaotic situation progressively slipping out of his control — has risen, because, put plainly, of the absence in Palestinian society of laws and institutions, governed by a social contract between ruler and ruled, of checks and balances, of accountability, the very norms that sustain order and act as a humanizing force in the community.

When the established media of a culture — its habits of socialization, its family system, its life of the mind, its book world, its faith-based values, its universities — are corroded by corruption, then chaos — chaos in the streets as chaos in the soul — ensues.

In Palestine, as indeed in many parts of the Arab world today, because of that very absence, distorted social change has become more aggravated, backwardness more acute, and the spiritual exhaustion of the age more complete.

Why vilify Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority? It is but a subsystem of the social system that created it and from whose bosom its functionaries hail.

Meanwhile, asked by visiting Arab diplomats last week about the crisis in the territories, the Palestinian leader responded, as if to deny that reality is real, by saying, “No, no, there’s no crisis here.”