The old man is dead. on his last journey he made his way from Paris to Cairo and on to the shattered compound in Ramallah, a fitting monument to the reality of Palestinian national aspirations Yasser Arafat embodied.
In Ain al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a twenty thousand strong crowd bore a symbolic coffin as Arafat loyalists fired guns and rockets into the air to mark what one fighter described as the ‘end of hope’.