They say that you can never really judge a person unless you have walked a mile in his shoes. True, and nobody in the Arab world today has walked a mile in the shoes of Yasser Arafat. Lately, accusations have been mounted against the Palestinian leader by so-called radical elements of Arab nationalism, claiming that his concessions to Israel are "unacceptable."

Conservatives have slammed Arafat for his willingness to deport the Palestinian hostages in the Church of Nativity, and his May 4 speech where he coined suicide attacks as terrorist. Everyone, however, is judging Arafat by a nationalist yardstick from the distant luxury of their air-conditioned offices, claiming that he "should have" shown less flexibility with the U.S. negotiators and "should have" refused the Israeli deportation of the armed guerillas.

In order to understand the logic behind Arafat's reasoning, one must first walk a mile in his shoes.

Arafat is probably the only leader in the world with a record of defeat that he has managed to transform into victory.

His enemies in theArab world are currently trying to portray him as the Marshall Petain of the Middle East, in reference to the World War I French war-hero who collaborated with the Nazi regime in World War II, allegedly to save occupied France, and was tried in Paris following the fall of the Third Reich as a traitor.

Arafat on the other hand, unlike Petain, has managed to convince his people that any decision he may take is best for Palestine - and they have always believed him. No matter how badly defeated he was, no matter how many people died, and how long it took to recover Palestine, the Palestinians have stood by their leader.

Opponents of the PLO Chairman would argue that his success is derived from the lack of alternative leadership. However, Arafat was threatened by other leaders before, especially during his distant and prolonged exile in Tunis, yet remained atop the Palestinian movement.

In the late 1980s, during the first Intifadah, Abu Ammar was far away from day-to-day affairs in Palestine, and was nearly isolated by leaders who had stayed behind in the Occupied Territories.

In 1991, while preparing for the Madrid Peace Conference, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker punished Arafat's alliance with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War by not inviting him to the peace talks. He approached a group of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and asked them to represent their country instead.

His choice of leaders could not have been better: Dr Haydar Abdul Shafi, Dr Saeb Erekat, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, and Dr Faisal al-Husseini. All of them went to Madrid, but rather than take decisions on their own, flew to Tunis on every single night of the conference to confer with Arafat.

He was making his point - if he could not go to the Madrid Conference, then simply, the Madrid Conference would have to come to him. And, eventually peace was signed by none other than the same person Baker had sidelined in Madrid.

Earlier this year, Israel tried following the same policy by alienating Arafat and marketing several Palestinian leaders as possible alternatives. All of them; Jibril Rajoub, Mohammad Dahlan, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ahmad Qure' also rallied around Arafat and refused to deviate.

The reason, simply put, is Arafat's ability to lead and impose himself on world events and leaderships.

True, Arafat's willingness to coin martyr attacks as terrorist and his readiness to deport Palestinian citizens to Cyprus and Portugal might seem offensive to the Arab public at first glance, but one has to observe the pressures he is facing and the pluses, rather than the minuses, that he has scored.

By internationalising the Church Affair, he has achieved two objectives: proven to Israel that force alone cannot defeat a resistance movement, and brought his struggle to the limelight of the world arena. He has transformed it from a clash between Hamas and the IDF into a clash between Zionism and Christianity.

By Christianising the affair, and forcing the U.S. and EU into it, Arafat has made the Palestinian cause always relevant and impossible to ignore. One would argue that Arafat survives as long as others are willing to die for the cause; that he lives through themartyrdom of others.

This is also true, but then again, in the world of revolutionary politics, the rule of law and logic is absent. Hanan Ashrawi once gave a lecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and advised: "The first rule in being a revolutionary is to break all the rules."

That's exactly what Arafat has done - break every rule there is to break in conventional politics. Arafat does not ask his people to die, but rather invests in their death, and contrary to what President Bush believes, nobody in Palestine is complaining.

At the end of the day, even if Arafat dies before attaining statehood, he will be remembered as having re-shaped the Palestinian identity in the 20th century.

He did for the Palestinians what Zionism did for the Jews; bring them from oblivion, persecution of the 1950s, and ghettos (or refugee camps) into the world order as key international players in the Middle East.

This identity was first established as "revolutionary" in the 1960s, where Arafat courted revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Gamal Abdul Nasser. Once an ally of the rebels, he turned to the statesmen at a time when it became un-popular to be a revolutionary in the 1980s and 1990s.

Arafat became a freedom seeking, peace-loving statesman and portrayed his people as such. From Chairman Mao and President Castro he shifted to world leaders like Charles de Gaulle, Jacque Chirac, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Arafat also derived legitimacy by managing to keep all factions of the resistance under his "spiritual" leadership. He achieved this at times through the patron-client system, through fake promises, bribes, and in some cases, lies. His fluid nature made him lose credibility with hard-line groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but they too rallied behind him during his six-month siege in Ramallah.

As a national leader, however, he is entitled to punish those whom he sees as taking miscalculated decisions, like Hamas following last week's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The attack embarrassed him before the world order and gave Israel all the reason it needed to victimise itself before President George Bush.

If Sheikh Ahmad Yassin or Khaled Meshal were at the apex of Palestinian leadership and Fatah carried out such a foolish operation, they too would have ordered a similar clampdown.

The only common denominator between all Palestinians is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. This position was agreed to by everyone and included in the PLO Charter that was drafted in Cairo in 1964. Apart from that, Arafat has kept himself loose from any ideological commitments and bended with the prevailing wind, whether it is coming from Washington, Moscow, or Tel Aviv.

By doing so, he has managed to survive bombardment, siege, plane crashes, warfare, and repeated assassination attempts by Israel, Libya, Jordan, Syria, and rival Palestinian groups. Everyone who meant anything in the Middle East tried