It is not for nothing that Yasser Arafat is known as Mr Palestine. For over 30 years he has dominated the Palestinian national struggle.

First, he was the leader of the armed resistance he helped to found; then, ever more controversially, he became the champion of a what he called his "peace of the brave"; and now, in addition, he is the would-be president of his Palestinian state-in-the-making.

His dominance has grown with time. He occupies no fewer than 30 official posts. He occupies himself with the minutest details of control and management in both Palestine proper and the diaspora.

He may be excoriated for cronyism, corruption, the brutalities of his police and his disdain for what he used to call his Palestinian democracy, but his people still look to him as their only possible chief. All possible rivals have been killed. He has appointed no successor and there is no obvious one. He is an egoist; he tends to assume he is immortal.

Yet who, or rather what, comes after him has suddenly become a very pertinent question. A mere two weeks ago one could, at a pinch, have prophesied that he was close to his promised land, his Palestinian state within grasp. But, with Israeli helicopters now in action against the very institutions of his Palestine Authority, Arafat faces a supreme personal test, which is at the same time the supreme crisis of the whole generation of struggle which he embodied.

Certainly his political survival, and very possible his physical survival also, is on the line.

Arafat will not go easily. In so far as the continued survival of this arch-survivor depends on his own decisions, he probably faces a basic choice. It has been long foreshadowed by all that he has done in recent years, as he moved further and further away from his original role as freedom fighter towards his "partnership for peace" - a partnership which, if it was to continue at all, was leading him into compromise after ever more discreditable compromise.

It is a choice, which, at its most dramatic, could mean his dying, all his original revolutionary credentials restored, as the true hero of his people and martyr to the cause - or else as a traitor to his people, and agent of Israel and the Americans. Less dramatically, it could mean his capture and expulsion by the Israelis, or his repudiation by his own people when the Intifada that first erupted against the enemy turns against him and his Palestinian authority.

Ever since Gen Sharon walked on to the esplanade of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the inevitability of that choice has been growing more and more acute. To begin with, Arafat tried to exploit the spontaneous wrath of his people as an instrument in the negotiations.

Reports have it that he himself gave orders for his own Fatah militants to play a key role in the street battles. This was partly for diplomatic purposes. But it was also a means of keeping control, of burnishing his own patriotic reputation. That would make it easier for him to sell to his people the dangerous compromises he knew he would have to make if the peace process resumed.

There was already a danger of his losing control over his own followers; some of his followers, quite independently of him, were distributing leaflets calling for a true "people's war".

There were also the Hamas religious militants, ideologically wedded to the armed struggle which he has long since renounced. He needed to upstage them. And, for the time being, secularists and fundamentalists are making common cause as never before.

"Blood is uniting the Palestinian people," said Imad Falouji, an Islamist cabinet minister.

But clearly the passions unleashed were growing too large for Arafat. And now - after the helicopters and all they could portend - they will grow larger still. The only way he can preserve himself is for the former guerrilla leader to assume the mantle of the leader of a nation at war, in the hope that, with the stature thus acquired, he can eventually end the war and achieve a peace with honour.

At the moment, the other course - to bow to Israel and America and end the violence - hardly seems to be possible. Not at least in the unreciprocated one fell swoop which the Israelis seem to expect. That would be the traitor's choice. He could perhaps work on it by stealth and in stages.

But even if, in the end, he did manage to call a halt, the Palestinian people would surely not accept that the price of their blood was the resumption of the peace talks on the same old basis.

But what will be the price of the first course? The reconquest of all the occupied territories? Huge civilian casualties? A full-scale war between the Israeli army and the Palestinian police? The storming of Arafat's headquarters? The very worst seems possible.

If Arafat does go, one way or another, there will be no successor to lead the Palestinian people out of the catastrophe that would accompany his departure.

In destroying Mr Palestine, the Israelis will have destroyed the very instrument of all their expectations. And there will only be chaos, burning hatred - and a conviction, whose portents are already clear, that there can be no peace, ever, with enemies such as they.