So much of life in the occupied West Bank seems to revolve around the management of boredom. Life under occupation involves dealing with a number of delays to your every day life, whether queueing at a checkpoint or sitting around waiting for the latest closure to be lifted. The sheer tedium of Palestinian life is the only part which an outsider can fully experience.
Three years ago I was sitting in a school in the city of Nablus, watching hour after hour tick by, waiting for the latest closure to be lifted so that we could return to the town of Bir Zeit, outside Ramallah. To break up the monotony our host produced a set of black and whote photos depicting life in the city of Jaffa in the 1930s. As he passed the pictures around the group, he explained each one "this is the convent", "here you see a school choir", "collecting the orange harvest". As you can tell, these photos were not exactly thrilling.
But by showing us these photos, our host wished to make a political point, rather than to entertain. One of the founding myths of Zionism is the slogan: "a land without people for a people without land". By showing us the mundanities of Palestinian society in a city which was to become part of Israel ten years later, our host was demonstrating that the first part of this slogan was a fiction. There, in black and white, was a real society with farms, factories, schools, churches, mosques. Palestinians were not just some random collection of Bedouin who could just as happily wander around the Sinai as the Negev, they were a settled people with a functioning society. It was this society, of orange pickers, nuns and choristers which was fractured by al-Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948.
Looking at the pictures I remembered the words of Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister in the early 1970s. She once notoriously claimed that "there are no Palestinians", a statement as gratuitously offensive as it was demonstrably ludicrous. On the wall of the classroom that day hung the portrait of the man who, more than anyone else, had shoved Meir's disgraceful words back down her throat. As so often in the West Bank, there was a picture of Yasser Arafat smiling benignly in that slightly creepy, Third World "el presidente" way.
While Meir has long since passed from this world, the leader of the people whom she insisted were not there, still holds the world attention. The leader of a small and stateless people lies near death in a military hospital outside Paris, and the world holds its breath. From supposedly not existing, the Palestinian people are now front and centre in the global consciousness and they owe it all to their leader of four decades.
Even Arafat's bitterest opponents can't deny his significance. Before he came on the scene in the late 1960s, the Palestinians were not considered as a people but rather as a "problem". They were seen as a wretched collection of refugees, a burden to the Arab states as much as to Israel. The PLO under Arafat's leadership changed all this. Form being a problem, the Palestinians were recognised as a people, an actor in the conflict..
Arafat is often described disparagingly as a "symbol", but this ignores just how vital it was for Palestinians to have such a symbol, a figurehead whom they could point to and say "see, we do exist". This explains why so many Palestinians cling to Yasser in spite of all his failings.
And it is as a symbol rather than a leader that Arafat excels. It is somehow fitting that Yasser will pass from this world in France. For years he has pulled off the remarkable double act of impersonating both of France's wartime leaders. As a politician, he is Petain: craven and snivelling to his people's oppressors. But as a symbol he is de Gaulle: proud, defiant, the rallying point for a people under occupation.
It is in the latter role that I will try to remember him.