Ailing Arafat deserves fair judgment.

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A double consensus is forming around Yasser Arafat: one, that the old man is dying and two, that he was a failure. The first assumption is, alas, all too plausible. The second is based almost entirely on an Israeli perspective.... Abu Amar, the old man, won his father-of-the-nation tag by being a fighter. His undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader was put into the shade by his extraordinary courage in accepting the basic premise of Oslo: the Palestinians would, for the first time, recognise Israel and accept an inferior state of their own.Inferior, because it would comprise less than a quarter of the land of Palestine, and because that land would be the poorest and least productive. Inferior, because Israel would still be the regional superpower, and would dictate defence, economic and development issues. Inferior, not least, because Israel would control the water supplies. All this Arafat swallowed. What he did not realise is that the Israelis saw Oslo not as a compromise, but as a victory. And as victors, they demanded more and more spoils: permanent sovereignty over Arafat's beloved Jerusalem; a permanent settler presence in the West Bank; a permanent security cordon along the Jordan, and complete control of airspace and coastline. There was to be no question of any right of return for the Palestinian diaspora, nor any compensation for up to six million refugees and their descendants... Many Israelis are genuinely bewildered Arafat did not grasp, with both hands, what the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, offered. The common cliche is Israel was prepared to give way to 95% of Palestinian demands. That was, and remains, a complete nonsense, as is the myth Arafat lacked the courage to accept. He didn't because he couldn't. It would have meant giving up Jerusalem, giving up chunks of the West Bank, giving up dignity itself. It would have meant betraying the refugees, the most sensitive of all Palestinian issues. And in that winter of 2000-01, Palestinians were dying by the score in the intifada provoked by Ariel Sharon's infamous walkabout in the Haram as-Sharif, Islam's holiest site in Jerusalem. To have surrendered to Barak in that context, would have been political - and possibly literal - suicide. Israelis were dying too, of course, in unprecedented numbers. The present ratio of death is 3.5 Palestinians for every Israeli; about 4,500 in all. However, it has always been a given in Israel that Jewish lives are more important than any others, and the death toll of the past four years has stunned, shocked and enraged Israelis.