Now that Yasser Arafat, suffering from an ailment serious enough to make his doctors worry for his life, is to be moved to a French hospital, there is an immense sense of relief not only among his people but around the world that this icon of Palestinian resistance will get all the medical care he needs. Welcome also is Israel’s assurance that Arafat would be free to go back to Ramallah after treatment. While assurances and promises in politics, especially in its Middle Eastern variety, have proved to have an extremely short span of life, for the moment at least, they put to rest speculations about what happens once Arafat is well enough to return to his headquarters and to the thick of Palestinian politics. In fact, the assurance that he can return may have a great bearing on Arafat’s will to fight for recovery.

For almost four decades Arafat has symbolized both the best and worst of Palestinians. He represented more than anybody else their will not to surrender his people’s right to their patrimony, their history and their future, no matter how overwhelming the odds were. He fought Israel’s war machine, betrayal by his allies and friends, diplomatic isolation, assassination attempts and every other trial that would have broken a lesser man. But for his indomitable will and ability to snatch survival from the jaws of certain destruction, if not victory from certain defeat, it is doubtful if the Palestinian struggle for self-definition would have persisted.

He also symbolized some of the worst aspects of the Palestinian struggle that, many believe, have contributed to the tragedy that Palestine is today. His reluctance to delegate authority and his insistence that he should control all the levers of power have had the result of reducing the entire Palestinian struggle, its government, its political organizations and socials movements to a one-man show. Whatever his intentions, the result has been nepotism, corruption and denial of rights to his people. There have been times when one got the impression that the Palestinian people were under a double occupation.

For good or bad, so tied has become Arafat’s image to the Palestinian cause that many find it hard to envisage Palestine without him. However, no one is eternal; no one is indispensable. Contrary to common assumptions, Palestinians have a pool of talent from which to select their future leader. The only way to do that is through elections — genuine ones, where there is no attempt to thwart the right of the people to choose. True representative leadership emerges only when popular choice is not manipulated. To get an idea of what happens when it is, one has to only look at the virtual anarchy that rules Palestine now. It is the result of the power struggle between leaders, all claiming to represent the Palestinians. Let the people decide. That defines the immediate task of the Palestinian leadership — accelerate the electoral process already in motion. Let them start with speeding up the voter registration process now under way.