YASSER Arafat, the great survivor - a militant for half a century - is dead. He escaped a dozen assassination attempts plus targeted shootings by the Jordanian air force in Amman in 1970 and the Israeli air force in Lebanon in 1982 and in Tunisia in 1985. He thwarted endless attempts to destabilise his movement. He and his weaponry were thrown out of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria; then he was confined in Tunisia for 10 years.

He knew exile, concealment and imprisonment (in Damascus before the 1967 war), and was in the end held hostage in Ramallah for almost three years. He wore out several Israeli prime ministers; outlived the Arab heads of state who viewed him with distrust or outright hostility; and from the 1960s met all the presidents of the United States.

His political longevity was not due to baraka (divine benediction) or chance. Arafat was pragmatic. He steered by sight but, whatever the winds and tides, did not lose sight of his final objective: the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.

And, as a realist, he quickly abandoned his initial plan to establish a unified democratic Jewish-Arab state encompassing all of Palestine: in 1974 he persuaded the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the "parliament" of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), to adopt a resolution that would lead implicitly to a Palestinian mini-state. He promoted the idea of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, an idea that Israel and the international community adopted two decades later.

He concluded in 1973 that armed struggle alone was not the answer for the Palestinian movement. The following year he made that point before the United Nations General Assembly; he came with an olive branch in one hand, a gun in the other, and delivered a ringing speech.

The violence continued on both sides but Arafat resolutely embraced compromise, first through secret contacts with peace-minded Israelis, then with representatives of Zionist political parties; this contact continued up to the 1993 Oslo accords. In 1976 he offered then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin an end to the conflict in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza which, he said, would be "demilitarised". Ten years later when I was the French ambassador in Tunisia he asked France (through me) to arrange a top-level meeting, secret or public, with Israel’s National Unity government, then led by Shimon Peres.

In 1988 he took a decisive step: at a stormy session of the PNC he got it to adopt a resolution endorsing UN Security Council resolution 242, implicitly recognising the state of Israel, and then unambiguously condemned terrorism. This was in vain. The consensus in Israel was that there should be no negotiation with a "terrorist" organisation; but in truth the Israeli leaders did not want to hear any discussion of a Palestinian state which would replace their favoured "Jordanian option", under which part of the occupied territories would revert to Jordan and the other be annexed by Israel.

Arafat’s diplomatic manoeuvres were often secret, which reduced his ability to pressure Israel. He had no choice in this. He was fighting a parallel battle on the domestic front with opponents who rejected any dialogue with the "Zionist entity". Most of all he needed to change Palestinian public opinion, to end the decades-long myth that the only solution was the eradication of the Jewish state; Palestinians needed to be convinced of the inevitability of a historic compromise.

Again and again "Abu Amar" (Arafat’s nickname) and close colleagues faced angry crowds, desperate sessions of the PNC and repeated rebellions at the heart of the PLO. He was advised several times to eliminate his opponents by force, as other national liberation movements, such as the FLN in Algeria, had done. He always refused.

Arafat wanted to be a unifier. His political trajectory is evidence of this: as a young militant in Egypt early in the 1950s, he was elected president of the Union of Palestinian Students with the support of all, from the Islamists to the communists. When he became head of the PLO in 1969, he voluntarily reduced the representation of his own Fatah movement, founded at the start of the 1960s, to encourage other organisations and smaller groups on the national scene to join. Even when they joined the PLO, these organisations remained mostly autonomous, which created problems, especially over terrorism. He did not succeed in integrating the Islamists into the PLO at the end of the 1980s: in fact they contested his leadership of the Palestinian movement.

Arafat has often been criticised for his double-talk, ambiguous statements, half-truths and unfathomable silences. But considering the ideological diversity of both his allies and opponents, and the balance of forces on the international scene, he would otherwise hardly have survived, and neither would the Palestinian movement.

Abu Amar communicated little and badly. He rarely addressed his people, and his speeches, usually short, were declamatory rather than instructive. He spoke in a consensual haziness, in slogans meant to mobilise: of the need to liberate Palestine, to recover the holy city of Jerusalem, to assure respect for the right of return of millions of refugees, to work to secure a just peace. None of this stopped him being as conciliatory as he thought possible. The day after the Taba conference in January 2001, before Ariel Sharon came to power, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators both announced that both sides had never been so close to a definitive settlement. The areas of agreement were substantial. Arafat agreed that the right of return could apply to the whole of historic Palestine and no longer just within Israel, as specified by UN resolutions: Israel said it would accept a modest number of refugees, the figure to be mutually agreed, over several years.

Arafat’s serious failure was in communication: he was unable to defend himself against the Israeli-orchestrated demonisation that followed the conference. He allowed the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, to claim that Arafat had rejected the "generous offer" that Barak made to him in July 2000 at the Camp David summit. Although the Americans and Israelis present at the meeting denied this, the lie was skilfully transformed into "truth". Arafat also failed to react when Barak admitted the real truth, that he had "given nothing, strictly nothing" to Arafat, merely enjoining him to agree to all of Israel’s "preconditions" (1). When I asked Arafat about the reasons for his strange silence, he asked in turn: "What would have been the use of denying it? The Israeli media would have greeted that with scorn or derision."

Some Palestinian intellectuals reproached Abu Amar for being too soft, to the point of betraying the cause, and accused him of reaching an accord at Oslo that was clearly in Israel’s favour. The Israeli right and far right, now in power, accused Rabin of just the opposite. Both accusations are wrong. Rabin succeeded in ending the first intifada and moving Israel on to the tracks of a negotiated peace settlement. For Arafat, who had been sidelined since the 1991 Gulf war because of his attitude towards Saddam Hussein, deprived of his subsidies from the Arab Gulf states and subjected to the unreserved hostility of the US, it was a matter of opting for the lesser evil. That meant agreeing to a compromise that reflected the balance of power at the time. He had historic achievements to his credit. He had persuaded the PLO to recognise Israel, overseen the return of the fedayeen to their Palestinian homeland, the progressive disengagement of Israel’s army of occupation and the opening of negotiations on all the aspects of the conflict.

Was Arafat right to take measures judged dishonourable by Palestinian opponents of Oslo? These opponents felt supremely humiliated when Arafat established close cooperation between the Palestinian and Israeli security services, joining the hunt for "terrorists", imprisoning hundreds of Islamist militants who would not give up armed resistance and even actual terrorism. This shocking collaboration with Israel was without precedent in previous colonial conflicts, yet Arafat and his supporters maintained that it was inevitable once Rabin had declared that he would "fight against terrorism as if there were no negotiations and negotiate as if there were no terrorism".

Palestinian public opinion, overwhelmingly certain that a settlement was in sight, disapproved of the Oslo dissidents; so Arafat could discipline them from a position of strength. But he lost that position when the Israeli right came to power. Israeli extremists ended the peace process with Rabin’s assassination and their rise to power, achieved with the complicity of some Labour leaders, who launched a smear campaign against Arafat and then joined the Sharon government. Abu Amar, weakened as never before, could neither contain the anger of his people nor end the second intifada, although he recognised its pernicious effects.

The dissidents did not disarm. They continued to defy Arafat, especially through the press, and they had enough influence in the Legislative Assembly (the elected parliament) to block some of its initiatives or even occasionally to check its chosen government. Arafat did not take offence. He let the storm pass, then tried and often succeed ed in getting round problems. As president of a dismembered "state" without recognised borders, under an occupation of unusual brutality, Arafat used the paternalistic methods of his exile, those of a tribal chieftain. He held interminable discussions, consulted, argued, retracted where necessary, and used sovereign power if he had to. The power of the patriarch was founded on the allegiance of his people, the control of finances and of the security forces. Whatever his errors of judgment and faults of behaviour, Arafat was the founding father of the Palestinian nation.