After Arafat; Power Struggle: Whoever is acceptable to the Palestinians and their Arab allies may not be to Bush, and vice versa.(Yasir Arafat)

Byline: Gilles Kepel (Kepel is professor and chair of Middle East studies at Sciences Po in Paris and author of "The War for Muslim Minds.")

The last picture of Yasir Arafat before he left Palestinian soil and was flown to a French military hospital for intensive care shows him in blue pajamas, his face adorned by a white beard--with a wide and already absent smile. This striking image of physical decay was all the more impressive because Arafat had always appeared in his military suit, a checked kaffiyeh on his head--whatever the circumstances. One could not help thinking that the man who had symbolized the Palestinian cause suddenly epitomized its trials: as Arafat struggled for his life in a sickbed on the outskirts of Paris, so did the Aqsa intifada he had started on Sept. 29, 2000.

Launched by Arafat mainly against soldiers and settlers with a view to pressuring Israel into giving Palestinians a better deal out of the Oslo peace process, it failed miserably. Islamist radicals from Hamas hijacked the intifada and turned it into a jihad against civilians. Arafat's political calculations began to backfire: the bloody jihad encouraged Israelis to vote for a tough leader. That secured the election of Ariel Sharon, who had provoked an armed response from Arafat by becoming the first Israeli leader to walk the disputed Esplanade of the Mosques in Jerusalem on Sept. 28, 2000. Sharon's goal was to isolate Arafat as a terrorist and oust him from the Middle Eastern scene. This Sharon achieved, with help from Arafat's failing health.

But the price paid by Israel for its heightened security (the fence) and by the Palestinian Authority for its intifada turned jihad (havoc) has doomed both sides economically and politically. Arafat, isolated in the ruins of his headquarters, the Moqata, was surrounded by a political vacuum. Within his own age group, no one had the charisma to transcend the strife within Palestinian society. The exception, to an extent, was Hamas leader Sheik Yassin, who first challenged Arafat as the incarnation of resistance in 2002. But Yassin's life was terminated by an Israeli missile last spring, and the same fate awaited his successor, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a few weeks after. Islamists are without a leader ...