BEIRUT -- The closer Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat gets to the fulfillment of his long-standing dream of establishing a Palestinian state, the more his plans seem to go awry. Now holed up in Ramallah, just 10 km from the holy city, his chances of ever entering it look their bleakest ever.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demands the arrest and punishment of all the Palestinian terrorists in Arafat's midst, but bombs the very institutions of the Palestine Authority that are supposed to carry out this task. It is his forceful means of reinforcing the message that the dominant rightwing Israeli establishment trumpets forth: If Arafat won't do the job, Israel will do it for him, and banish, or kill, him in the bargain.

Arafat has been written off many times. Yet his resilience in adversity is legendary. So while this is one of the most desperate crises of his long and turbulent career, it may still not be his terminal one.

Out of failure and retreat, Arafat has always managed to build a new platform for another seeming advance in what he calls his "long march" to the "spires and minarets" of Jerusalem. He did so by ever greater moderation of original goals.

Now, trapped between Israel diktat and the popular militancy of his Islamist rivals, an embattled Arafat toys with the terrible necessity of carrying moderation to the point of open war on Palestinians.

His original goals were absolute, essentially the same, in secular-nationalist guise, as those which, in religious guise, Hamas has made its own. On Jan. 1, 1965, a group of ill-trained guerrillas mounted their first raid against the "Zionist gangster state." They belonged to Arafat's then clandestine Fatah organization. They aimed at the "complete liberation" of Palestine, the return of the refugees and the dismantling of the Zionist settler-state.

But all that these early Arafat exploits led to was his first great setback. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel seized the 22 percent of original Palestine that remained outside its grasp, the West Bank and Gaza, and on which, 30 years later, he now wants to build his state.

After 1967, he settled in Jordan, a half-Palestinian state. In the 1970 "Black September" civil war, he suffered the second of his great setbacks, this time at Arab hands. He then settled in Lebanon. Though it was a stronger power base than Jordan, it took him further from his natural Palestinian environment, and the possibility of effective "armed struggle."

After the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the serious bout of U.S. peacemaking it engendered, Arafat edged toward a "doctrine of states." He would now seek "immediate gains" from a political settlement without renouncing the "historical" right to all of Palestine.

Thus began the "moderation" that would take him further him than he could ever have imagined. In 1982, the Israelis invaded Beirut, where Sharon, then defense minister, tried countless times to kill him. Driven into a yet another far-flung Tunisian exile, his political fortunes sank to a low ebb. They were revived less by his own endeavors than by those of the Palestinian "insiders" -- inhabitants of the occupied territories who now took on the main burden of the struggle from the "outsiders" of the refugee Diaspora.

Their unarmed "intifada of stones" proved more effective than the "outsiders" Kalashnikovs. Seizing the opportunity for another great advance in moderation, Arafat in 1988 reduced his goals to a "two-state solution" involving the renunciation of 78 percent of original Palestine. It earned him the slender reward of a U.S.-Palestinian dialogue.

More setbacks followed, chiefly the largely self-inflicted one of siding with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That led to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, which the Palestinians -- though not Arafat himself -- attended at the price of yet more concessions.

That got him nowhere either, and so it was that in 1993 he staged the greatest coup of his career, that quantum leap in moderation, the Oslo Peace Accords. With this, Arafat reclaimed with a vengeance the role of indispensable peacemaker from which the rise of a new, articulate "insider" leadership and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists had threatened to exclude him. But the price of this Faustian compact was great. Arafat claimed that it set in motion a train whose momentum would lead inexorably to the end of occupation and the establishment of his state.

Nine months later he did return "home." But only his coterie of loyalists and guerrillas-turned-policemen came with him. The diaspora saw it as betrayal of the refugees on whose sufferings and sacrifices he had built his now abandoned "revolutionary" career.

And he came as collaborator as much as liberator. For the Israelis, security -- theirs, not the Palestinians' -- was the be-all and end-all of Oslo. His job was to supply it on their behalf. But he could only sustain the collaborator's role if he won the political quid pro quo which, through a series of "interim agreements" leading to "final status," was supposedly to come his way. He never could.

So-called momentum worked against him, not for him; inevitably so, because in this new dispensation that outlawed violence, spurned the whole accumulated corpus of pro-Palestinian international jurisprudence and consecrated a congenitally pro-Israel U.S. as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power shifted more overwhelmingly in Israel's favor than ever.

Obeying the logic of "take what you can now and seek the rest later" which weakness thrust upon him, he acquiesced in accumulating concessions that only widened the gulf between what he was actually achieving and what he assured his people he would achieve, by this method, in the end.

He was still "Mr Palestine," with a charisma and historical legitimacy all his own. But he was steadily losing them, not only because of the abortive peace process, but because he was proving grievously wanting in that other great and complementary task: building his state-in-the-making. Economic misery, corruption, abuse of human rights, the creation of a vast apparatus of repression -- all those flowed, wholly or in part, from the Palestinian Authority over which he presided.

At the Camp David summit in July 2000, the Oslo fallacy was finally and brutally exposed. Former Israeli Premier Ehud Barak may have offered more than ever before. But he was still demanding much more than 78 percent of Palestine, plus a whole array of other gains which Arafat, standing firm this time, could not accept.

From Camp David's collapse grew the second intifada. In essence, it was a popular revolt, first against the continued Israeli occupation and the realization that the Oslo peace process would never end it, and potentially against Arafat and his Authority, which had so long connived in the fiction that it could.

It took on a momentum of its own, with an ever weaker Arafat at best in nominal control. He did not stem the armed violence and outright terrorism, outlawed by Oslo, into which it slid, either because, with Israel's violence killing far more Palestinians than theirs was killing Israelis, he could not, or because he simply would not without securing real political movement in return.

So all Israelis, left and right, now laid all their anguish at Arafat's door, a national consensus led to the rise of Sharon at the head of the most extreme, bellicose government in Israel's history.

Sharon had one, ill-disguised ambition: to suppress the intifada by using as much brute force as he could politically risk. If, as a result, he brought Arafat down he did not mind one bit; he would thereby escape from any obligation to pursue the peace process he abhorred by eliminating the only party he could pursue it with.

When, on Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden struck, the two arch-enemies competed to put themselves on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror," Arafat tried to end the intifada; his police arrested militants who broke the new ceasefire and shot and killed demonstrators protesting the assault on Afghanistan. But this appeasement did not yield the commensurate, tangible gain from the Americans he was banking on.

For his part, Sharon contended that Arafat and his Authority had exactly the same relationship to the Islamic militants as the Taliban to al-Qaeda. And he won the argument hands down after he assassinated one of Hamas's top militants just as a new American peace mission arrived in the region. Hamas obliged with its latest suicidal rampage through Jerusalem and Haifa.

Now, in its fateful aftermath, Arafat is called upon to carry the collaborator's role that Oslo requires of him to impossible lengths. If he does or doesn't, he risks his own political, even physical, elimination. For Hamas is now so popular that to move against it could spell civil war. Not to do so exposes him and his Authority to further military onslaughts from a vengeful Sharon, who patently does not want him to succeed -- for that would rob him of the pretext to get rid of him all together -- and whose actions virtually ensure that he won't.

If at last Arafat does go down, he will take a lot with him, not merely the failure of that whole generation of Palestinian struggle he embodied, but also any chance -- and the hope of some Israelis -- that a succeeding generation will be significantly more moderate than he was.

In the chaos that will probably ensue, Hamas may become an even more potent champion of that goal of "complete liberation" that Arafat and his generation had laid aside.