“In the spring of 2002,” says Hassan Khader, “I accompanied a coterie of foreign writers to Yassir Arafat‘s headquarters in Ramallah. The group, who had come to visit poet Mahmoud Darwish in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, included Nobel laureates Jose Saramago and Wole Soyinka — Portugese and Nigerian, respectively — and poets and novelists from France, South Africa, the United States and Italy, as well as a Chinese poet living in exile.” In an essay for Al-Ahram, Khader notes how, “In addressing his visitors, Arafat kept moving from one story to another, occasionally leaping mid-sentence to fetch something off his desk in the corner, and frequently interrupting the translator to repeat, in broken English, a sentence he had just finished in Arabic. Before too long the visitors by and large were charmed.” But what did his manner of speaking, his syntax, and his command of the facts imply about Arafat’s leadership, and the Palestinian situation as a result? Quite a bit, says Khader.