So you might think that Zaki supported George W. Bush’s call last week to replace Arafat with a leader “not compromised by terror.” Not so. As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s tanks and soldiers reoccupied the West Bank and placed 800,000 people under curfew, the American president’s emphasis on Palestinian malfeasance rather than Israel’s 35-year occupation provoked disappointment and anger throughout Palestine and the Arab world. Bush’s carrot to the Palestinians–that if they make substantial government reforms, a final agreement on a new state “could be reached” in three years–sounded hollow. Zaki, for one, doesn’t think that Arafat is going anywhere. “The reaction on the street is, ‘Let’s support Arafat with all his ugliness and all his corruption, because the United States doesn’t want him’,” he says.

The self-defeating logic of that approach is evident to at least some Palestinians. For the first time since the Aqsa intifada began, many are openly blaming Arafat for leading them to ruin. “Eight years ago he came to Gaza and Jericho and said, ‘I’ll make it into Hong Kong.’ Instead he turned it into Somalia,” says a Bethlehem schoolteacher whose militant brother was forced into exile last month. “He’s like a pair of old shoes. It’s time for him to be cast aside.”

Arafat is now routinely attacked for mismanaging the uprising, as well as for allowing corruption and cronyism to flourish in his government. Last week the Palestinian Authority launched a “100-day plan” to set up transparent bank accounts for PA funds, to merge the myriad security forces into a single entity and launch other economic reforms. Even so, Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and an influential leader of Fatah in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, says that Arafat blew his credibility long ago. “I don’t think that Arafat cares about anything other than being in power,” he says. “When Arafat disappears, they will write about him as they wrote about Mao–they will write about his criminality and his catastrophes.”

But can anybody emerge to challenge the “symbol of the nation”? Virtually all the older members of the Palestinian Authority have been tarnished by allegations of corruption. The powerful directors of Arafat’s Preventive Security service, Jibril Rajoub and Mohammad Dahlan, are regarded as favorites of Washington and, as such, have lost popularity. Many charismatic younger figures are languishing in Israeli prisons. The most notable is Marwan Barghouti, 42, the leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, accused of masterminding the killings of settlers and soldiers. The few Young Turks who haven’t been incarcerated say that challenging Arafat is futile. “Arafat will win this election in spite of the fact that everybody blames him for destroying Palestinian life and keeping thieves in his government,” says Khader, 39, who has put his own political aspirations on hold until Arafat is gone. “We are like the Bedouins. We follow our sheiks. It is not easy to leave your traditional culture. We have to wait until God takes this sheik to him.” Bush and many others who’ve lost faith in Arafat may be in for a long wait.