Te Radar: Soft hands at odds with hard man

HUMOUR

It came as a great surprise to me to discover that Yasser Arafat had the hands of a beautiful woman - or if not the hands of a beautiful woman, then at least the hands of a woman with beautiful hands.

It wasn't that they were endearing to the eye. On the contrary, they were splotchy, and pale, but they did possess an incredible softness and delicacy.

I had assumed they would be hardened or calloused, but, as he clutched my hand in his while we posed for a photograph, I marvelled at its texture.

I had accidentally found myself in the boardroom of his compound in Ramallah, a town encircled by a ring of barbed wire and plastic shopping bags. Caught on the wire, fluttering and filthy, the bags were as empty as so many of the promises he had made to the people he claimed as his.

Over the decades he has been at war with virtually everyone he has come into contact with, and he perfected the art of turning a defeat into a victory parade.

Yet, somehow he managed to remain alive and politically viable. How he did this is as much a mystery to me as how Jim Anderton continues to do so.

From a hotel room in Las Vegas, I followed news reports of his illness on the television. This meant subjecting myself to degrading US television adverts.

Sandwiched between news of Arafat, the battle for Fallujah, and pundits' endless post-election analysis of their own pre-election predictions, one recurring ad touted a drug that claimed to eliminate fat. With typical American media introspection, it described the overweight as being members of "the loneliest club in the world".

I continually found myself lurching to my feet, my belly distended by the vast portions of food served in a country where quantity is preferable to quality.

"What of the clubs for people who have been raped, or have cancer, or are forced to live through the horrors of civil insurrection?" I hollered vainly at the screen. "They must be pretty lonely!"

Later, I sat disconsolately nursing one of many medicinal scotches, soaking in the sights of Vegas - which at this late stage consisted of several scantily clad women, and a roomful of men silently leering at them.

I concluded that in many ways strip clubs resemble Middle East peace negotiation meetings. They are places of faux optimism, mutual exploitation and degradation, and overwhelming glumness.

Like Vegas's casinos, virtually everyone who enters hoping to win walks away empty-handed.

Yasser Arafat was many things to many people, but for me he was simply a tourist attraction, an apt symbol of the Palestinian cause he espoused: reduced to virtual imprisonment, everything around him demolished, raging impotently at the world.

Still, at least he took care of his hands, or maybe it was just the blood on them that kept them so supple.