YITZHAK RABIN & YASSER ARAFAT

By NANCY GIBBS James Gaines, Joelle Attinger, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat

Tunis is quiet after midnight, when the phone rings. This is a Yasser Arafat tradition, summoning visitors at all hours to make their way through a gauntlet of steel barricades to a villa in a quiet residential corner of the city. The stucco house looks like any other, except that it is surrounded by young men in jeans, bearing Kalashnikovs, smoking cigarettes. Their job is to keep the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization alive -- and they take it seriously. Male guests are patted down, their pockets emptied, wallets searched. Women are scanned with ultrasensitive metal detectors, their purses % ransacked. The bodyguards, members of Arafat's elite Force 17, open the matchboxes and start striking the matches in the dark courtyard to be sure they do not contain detonating devices. Over the years Arafat has probably had more people trying to kill him than any other public figure in the world. Closest to succeeding were the Israelis, who might have buried him under the rubble in the Tunis bombing raid that killed 73 people in 1985, had the Chairman not been running late that day. Now Israel wants to keep him alive -- to hold him to the pledge of peaceful coexistence that he made with a handshake on a sunny September day in Washington. At that moment, in accepting far less than the independent state he has always promised his people, he became a traitor to many of his own. So now it is the Palestinian extremists who seek to kill him in order to kill the peace accord. There is an air of bravado in the room this December night. The peace on which Yasser Arafat has staked so much is not yet real for the men and women and children dying in the streets of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Yet the P.L.O. leader greets his guests warmly, giving no sign he is troubled by the turmoil of things not done. He is direct and engaging, full of a charm half calculated, half natural as he makes his case. Asked if he has concerns about his own personal security, he chuckles. ''I only fear God.'' Visitors to Yitzhak Rabin's modest office in western Jerusalem expect their sessions with him to be strictly business. He is known to be abrupt, omitting from such visits so much as hello or goodbye. The office is hectic. Chants of angry Jewish settlers camped outside to protest the peace agreement fade in and out. A delegation of conservative Knesset members argue against giving weapons to the future Palestinian police force. But Rabin is calm, almost relaxed. Those who know him well say that since he signed the Declaration of Principles with Arafat, his manner has softened; he smiles more and grimaces less. Though he has taken a great gamble with his country's future, the mission of seeing it through -- and the confidence that he has made the right choice -- has energized him. As he talks to his guests, it is clear he has thought deeply about what he wants to get across. ''Arafat carried out what I consider to be atrocities,'' he says. ''But I've said more than once in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we make peace, or we negotiate meaningful steps toward peace, with enemies. Sometimes bitter enemies.'' Peace is not yet a fact between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Rabin and Arafat are Men of the Year because they have taken those meaningful steps from which it will be difficult to turn back. The idea of peace, once planted, is a powerful incentive to two peoples who have lost so many lives, so much time, so much prosperity in bloody wars. Both leaders proved, against expectations, that they could grasp the moment. Perhaps that recognition grew out of their historical memory: between them they have given nearly 100 years of full-time service to the struggle. Would the next generation of young radicals feel the same urgency to settle for compromise that these two aging men share? During a heated debate with reluctant associates earlier this year in Tunis, Arafat pounded on the table and boomed, ''I cannot be excluded from this historical process!'' They also share a confidence in their ability to deliver on their promises. Arafat has the mystical arrogance of the survivor, so often has he cheated death at the hands of his enemies and political destruction at the hands of his friends. Rabin's confidence is that of a proven warrior committed to peace -- a ''carnivorous dove,'' as Ariel Sharon put it. Rabin told aides privately that he was prepared to step ahead even if most Israelis were not ready. ''For a peace agreement,'' he told them, ''the people will support us.'' But not all the people. Both men are dangerously flanked by extremists. Muslim fundamentalists and other militant factions have vowed to break any deal that delivers less than an independent Palestinian state now, this instant. Fanatical settlers and other right-wing Jews swear never to give up one inch of the West Bank soil that is part of what they call Eretz Yisrael, the land God gave to the Jews. The pressure from enemies only complicates an already knotty negotiation. When the two were alone with President Clinton just before the ceremony in Washington, Rabin recalls, ''Arafat and I didn't exchange anything, except I told him it's going to be very difficult to implement the accord. He said, 'I know.' '' Unlike many Israelis, Rabin has managed to accommodate his view of Arafat as a terrorist and a murderer with the belief that he is a man with whom Israel can do business. ''I came to the conclusion that it's in their interest as well as our interest,'' he says. ''It is not based on any feeling of affection or affiliation.'' Arafat is just as sternly pragmatic. ''He is the boss, and without him, the accord will not work. He was my enemy, but he is a man who fulfills his commitments.'' After he grudgingly shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn, Rabin said, ''Of all the hands in the world, it was not the hand I wanted or even dreamed of touching.'' Perhaps only a man so lacking in charm can be immune to it in others. A Scotch drinker and chain smoker, Rabin has never had a nickname, and there is no such thing as a Rabin joke, either about him or by him. Emotion and warmth seem foreign to him. Once on a visit to the White House in 1977, Rabin was asked by President Carter if he would like to drop by Amy's room and say good night. He said no, he wouldn't. While Rabin labors in the shadow of great nation builders -- David Ben- Gurion and Golda Meir -- Arafat stands alone as a folk hero to his people. The teetotaling vegetarian is conniving, disarming, engaging, and quick with such perfect sound bites as the fact that his favorite cartoon is Tom and Jerry, since the mouse so often wins. He is a master of symbolism: never much of a soldier, he chose a fighting man's khakis and holster for his daily costume. His checkered kaffiyeh provides instant recognizability in a crowd -- a risk, perhaps, to one who lives in the cross hairs, but a shrewd asset when it comes to maintaining his mythic stature. The headdress had no special meaning until he draped it to approximate the shape of mandatory Palestine. Then it became an emblem of Palestinian identity. Golda Meir once argued that there was no such thing as a Palestinian; at the time, she wasn't entirely wrong. Before Arafat began his proselytizing, most of the Arabs from the territory of Palestine thought of themselves as members of an all-embracing Arab nation. It was Arafat who made the intellectual leap to a definition of the Palestinians as a distinct people: he articulated the cause, organized for it, fought for it and brought it to the world's attention as no Kurd or Basque had ever managed. Until 1991, when he wed Suha Tawil, a Christian less than half his age, he was always said to be married to the revolution. Now it would be more accurate to say Suha is married to the revolution. As a boy growing up in Jerusalem and Cairo, the son of a spice merchant and grocer, Arafat had no revolutionary ambitions. He applied to a Texas university in 1949 to study engineering, but by the time the State Department had sorted out his visa, he was caught up in the struggle between the Palestinians and the newly created state of Israel. After graduating from Cairo University, he went to Kuwait to make his fortune in construction. By age 30 Arafat was a rich man, driving a Thunderbird, moving smoothly through the prosperous circles of Palestinian exiles, and preparing to launch his crusade. His Fatah organization, which he founded in the late 1950s with other educated, well-to-do Palestinians, eventually became the heart of the P.L.O. During the first few years, he had the most to fear from other Arabs: he came to know his way around the jails of Syria and Egypt; it was Israel that never once held him in prison. By the 1960s, Fatah was divided into two factions. There were the ''sane ones,'' who urged building up the infant group before launching guerrilla attacks against Israel. And there were the ''mad ones,'' already out for blood: Arafat was their leader. Whether he gave the orders or not, his organization has always been linked to some of the bloodiest acts of terrorism in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and the 1974 murder of Israeli schoolchildren at Maalot. For years the Israelis saw Arafat as the main obstacle to peacemaking. Israeli troops had his head in their gunsights when he led his defeated soldiers, under a U.S. guarantee, out of the wreckage in Beirut in 1982. The alternative to killing him was making him irrelevant. Even when the Palestinians joined in Mideast peace talks in Madrid in 1991, Arafat was officially kept out. When Rabin came to power in mid-1992, he looked for more moderate leaders to speak for the Palestinians. But the negotiators made no secret that they took their orders from Arafat and that it would be dangerous to cross him. ''They believed,'' says Rabin, ''that whoever will emerge as a leader, he will not survive.'' So he was left with Arafat. Four months ago, as the secret talks in Oslo were close to success, Rabin told his aides, ''It's about time we took off the masks at the masked ball and talked to the man in charge.'' Arafat was ready to listen. He tells a strange story of what brought him to Oslo. Just before a plane he was riding in crashed during a sandstorm in Libya last year, he saw images of two slain comrades, which he took as a sign of his own approaching death. Then he saw a vision of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which he believed meant he would pray there before he died. He realized that the only way to fulfill that dream was to work out a peace with Israel. The realities of the moment left him little choice: Arafat and his organization were in trouble. After losing his Soviet sponsors, he alienated his rich Arab patrons by siding with Iraq in the Gulf War. Strapped for cash, he had to cut back funding for Palestinian schools and hospitals, students' tuition and widows' pensions in the occupied territories, which hurt his popular support. The militant fundamentalists of Hamas were winning converts and beating his candidates in elections for chambers of commerce, labor unions and student organizations. Bankrupt, dismissed by some U.S. officials as a spent force, Arafat needed Rabin. And in turn Rabin needed the Chairman. Like Arafat, Rabin had not intended to make a life of soldiering; he too wanted to go to the U.S. to become an engineer. But he had earned a reputation as a gifted military commander in the Palmach, the commando unit of the Haganah underground army. On the eve of his country's war for independence in 1948, Rabin was persuaded by his military superiors to abandon his study plans and join the battle. He was charged with helping to break the Arab blockade of Jerusalem and to keep the road to Tel Aviv open for convoys. The brigade he commanded lost 70% of its members before the fighting was done. To this day, Israel maintains the rusted wreckage of the convoys as memorials along the highway. ''I remember the names of those who died inside those vehicles,'' Rabin says. By age 32 he was a general; 12 years later, he became chief of staff and devised the tactics for Israel's brilliant victory over Syria, Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. Swashbuckling Defense Minister Moshe Dayan took most of the credit -- an injustice that rankles Rabin to this day. Nevertheless, he always subscribed to the Labor Party doctrine that one day Israel would have to trade back territory for peace. The general first became Prime Minister in 1974 after a stint as ambassador to Washington. His tenure cut short in 1977 by a scandal over a small but illegal U.S. bank account he maintained with his wife, he retreated to Labor's back bench until 1984, when the national unity government of Shimon Peres, his bitter rival within the Labor Party, turned to him as Defense Minister. Rabin seemed just the man to suppress the intifadeh -- the uprising against Israeli rule in the occupied territories that began in December 1987. Tough and unrelenting toward the protesters, Rabin is said to have told his troops to ''break their bones,'' ordering deportations and the destruction of Palestinian houses. Yet he was quicker than many to grasp the import of the uprising. As early as February 1988, Rabin was telling Labor Party activists, ''I've learned something in the past 2 1/2 months -- among other things that you can't rule by force over 1.5 million Palestinians.'' Annexing the occupied territories would dilute the Jewish character of Israel, he believed. But military rule would mean endless war. In the 1992 elections, Rabin campaigned as the man who could bring the country peace with security. But to succeed, Rabin told Israelis, they would have to relinquish a central part of their identity -- their sense of fearful isolation. ''For many years, by necessity, by threat from wars, terror,'' he explains, ''we developed a feeling of a besieged country, that the whole world is against us. This created a certain national psychology: Don't trust anyone; everybody is against you. It created a mistrust of peace.'' As a sabra -- a native-born Israeli -- Rabin does not have the refugee mind-set shared by the country's founding fathers. They feared any concession toward the Arabs was the first step toward annihilation. Rabin also had a special plea for the Palestinians. ''You who have never known a single day of freedom and joy in your lives: listen to us, if only this once.'' The Prime Minister has a keen sense of history, and especially of his own place in it. He confides to close friends the feeling that he has never been given the prominence in the annals of Israel that he deserves. Now, as an old soldier who has seen too much death, he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. He went some distance toward that end on the White House lawn, where the man not known for eloquence delivered himself of an exhortation for the ages: ''Enough of blood and tears! Enough!'' Arafat is no less aware -- and no less the engineer -- of the historic role he is enacting. ''This is my destiny,'' he tells his visitors, not long before a new day dawns in Tunis. ''No one can escape his destiny.'' In the ancient lands of Moses and Jesus and Mohammed, two men are playing to history -- and history is paying them back.

In mid-December TIME'S Jim Gaines, Joelle Attinger, Lisa Beyer and Dean Fischer met separately with Rabin and Arafat and asked them about common issues. Excerpts from the two interviews:

RABIN: I've said more than once, we make peace with enemies, sometimes with bitter enemies. ARAFAT: It was the results of the Israeli election last year against Yitzhak Shamir's policy that made a deal first seem possible. This was a very important signal for me that the Israelis are willing to achieve peace. RABIN: I knew that the key for any meaningful movement toward peace was with either Syria or the Palestinians. Through my explorations done quietly, I concluded that there would be a better chance to do it with the Palestinians. And I realized that everything is dictated by the P.L.O. What we did in recognizing them would have been unheard of four years ago. I believed that I had to do something which is not expected. ARAFAT: The intifadeh motivated the Israelis. There were no signs that it would end anytime soon. There was no military solution, only a political solution. This superarmy was running after kids and fighting against women. RABIN: No doubt the intifadeh brought the Palestinian case to the headlines of the world. It created problems for us, and it continues. Now it's less an uprising and much more terror in opposition to the agreement. I didn't believe the present situation could last without an increase in extremism among the Palestinians. The tendency shifted more and more toward extreme Islamic, fanatic, terrorist movements. That is the threat to hopes for peace. I believe that we have a window of just a few years to try to face this threat with the Palestinians, with the Syrians -- at least to have peace with the inner ring. ARAFAT: It is very accurate to say there is opposition from some Palestinians. There are 10 Damascus-based organizations supported by the Arab opposition. They have been financed by some Arabs from the gulf states and also by the Iranians. But this opposition does not have the ability to overcome the masses. Now I am sorry to say that the Israeli settlers and the army are leaving very deep scars, and everybody is asking, What is the meaning of peace? I asked Rabin many times, Why are you giving more cards to the opposition? Withdraw. Leave it to me. ARAFAT: There must be compromise. Not compromise just from one side, not mutual concessions, but mutual agreement. I haven't the ability to get what I need. And the other side hasn't the ability to get all it wants. RABIN: What we are trying to create here is peaceful coexistence between two entities who do not much love each other. Geographically they are mixed up; they crisscross one another daily by vehicles. There is no line that divides. We have to create the confidence that will allow this unique interim arrangement to work. The real problem is to what extent the P.L.O. will have the ability to take over what we are ready to give them and to fulfill their commitments. The P.L.O. has never been responsible for running the life of a large community. ARAFAT: George Washington did it. So did De Gaulle. I will show you something. ((He pulls out a gold cross of Lorraine, on a chain around his neck.)) De Gaulle sent it to me in 1970. Mugabe, Ben Bella and Nehru all did it too. For us it is easier because the P.L.O. is more than just an organization. We are responsible for the whole life of our people. We have a parliament representing Palestinians everywhere; no revolution ever had a parliament. We have democracy. We have established universities, schools and hospitals. We have a political department, one of the strongest in the Arab world. RABIN: Let the Palestinians run their affairs, create a situation in which no Israeli soldier will have to maintain public order, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. Let's give it to the Palestinians, as long as there is security for us. No more occupying another people. ARAFAT: What is important for me is to fix my people on the map of the Middle East and not to be like those who have been canceled out in international agreements, like many communities after World War I and II. It is the continuous tragedy of my people that I cannot forgive. We have paid a very high price. RABIN: I've never tried to put myself in their shoes. I don't pretend that I can imagine myself as a Palestinian. I understand their desire for their own entity, but at the same time I can't understand why they missed so many opportunities in the past that could have prevented much, much bloodshed, at certain moments in which we were ready for compromise. I hope that Arafat learned a lesson, as I learned the lesson, that you have to be more forthcoming. ARAFAT: I have many dreams: a Middle East without wars and violence and oppression; a Middle East that cooperates, that is prosperous, that could contribute to the new world order. If I am elected ((in balloting for a self- government council scheduled for mid-1994)), I will carry on in my responsibilities. If not, I will return to work as an engineer. When I was in Lebanon I built a bomb shelter outside my residence. Beside it another shelter was built by a big company. The Israelis bombed them. The other one, which was deeper, was destroyed. The one I built was not destroyed. I will design my own house -- not in Jericho but in Jerusalem. I remember living there with my uncle, near the Wailing Wall. The house was demolished. I imagine a future Jerusalem as a capital of two states, without a Berlin Wall. RABIN: Jerusalem is a different issue from others. For us it's the symbol. In the Jewish tradition, there is at the same time Jerusalem in the heavens and Jerusalem on the ground. Jerusalem is a living city, but also the heart, the soul of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. We understand that Jerusalem is holy to Christianity and Islam. We believe that we have to secure free access for the believers of the other religions. We believe the administration of the holy shrines, not the holy city, should be by them. ARAFAT: For centuries we lived together with Jews. When Europe was in the dark ages, we lived together. We called them our cousins. It is a part of our tradition. RABIN: The historic breakthrough was not now. It was when President Sadat, the leader of the largest Arab country, came to Jerusalem and succeeded in bringing down all the walls of suspicion, hatred, prejudices vis-a-vis Egypt. Arafat is not in a position to do it because he is not in control of the people in the territories. His influence is limited to the members of his organization. Because of that we need minimum security assurances. Still, I believe that we have passed the point of no return. ARAFAT: Everything comes at the right time. When I started with my revolution, everything was destroyed. We said then that we wanted to live peacefully with the Jews. Some of the Arabs said we were traitors. It took many years for this to be accepted by the Arabs. Things will work out, if not this time, the next time. There is no other alternative. Wars are an impossibility for everybody.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem and Dean Fischer/Tunis