Even as Yasser Arafat lies dying, he lives up to the reputation he earned in his active life. One couldn’t even trust the opposite of what he said, or what was being said on his behalf. Arafat seized a place for Palestinians on the world agenda. As Hebrew University professor Menachem Milson once put it, Arafat raised the Palestinians from the dust and formed them into a people in the eyes of the world. But he could not, or would not, move beyond the revolutionary stage.

Arafat had no interest in the details or content of governance: what kind of state would the Palestinian state be? Beyond the de facto emergence of a corrupt kleptocracy, he provided no answers. He left no sons, and kept potential successors perpetually off balance. Most damaging to his people, he did not preside over the founding of a state, which might have eased the pangs of transition now afflicting the Palestinians.

That failure resulted from his preference to avoid resolving the difficult issues separating Israelis and Palestinians. Like his medical condition, Arafat kept the peace process with Israel lingering “between life and death.”

In this respect, Arafat’s truest moment came when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly, packing heat. Arafat the peacemaker, Arafat on the White House lawn, Arafat at too-many-to-count negotiating sessions with Bill Clinton and his team: that was not the real Arafat. Arafat the Nobel laureate in peace, that was a cruel joke proving only how eagerly the world wants to see an end to Israel-Palestine strife.

When two Polish Jews, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Menachem Begin, won Nobel prizes in 1978, Singer acidly told reporters that he was receiving his literary honor for work already accomplished while Begin was receiving the Peace Prize for work still to be done. What then of Arafat, whose cruelty undid the promise of Oslo for which he received the peace prize?

Arafat was, in the term used by Israeli intelligence chiefs, a “peace-refusenik.” When push came to shove, Arafat could not, or would not, compromise over the Palestinians’ so-called Right of Return, that is, their claim to their original villages and homes in what has been, for more than half a century, the state of Israel. It is not in the interest of all Palestinians to emphasize these demands, which represented the delusions of the refugees and their self-anointed representatives, packed into camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and most importantly Lebanon.

Unable to breathe, the refugees have been kept by the Arab states and the United Nations in a state of suspended animation, now into the third generation, on the premise that a half century of Israeli nation-building would someday, somehow, be undone. In this regard, the quintessential Arafat was the man who left Camp David in the summer of 2000 launching an armed uprising in response to the most far-reaching proposal ever made by an Israeli leader.

Will Arafat’s death, whenever it comes, change anything? Arafat watchers disagree, sharing assessments that the small semblance of order that remains in the Palestinian areas will crumble before a wave of violent chaos as factions vie for control. Optimists hope for a smooth transition. The old guard, which returned with Arafat from Tunis, will not easily surrender power. Hamas will attempt to exploit divisions within Arafat’s Fatah organization, the core of his political strength.

During the year and a half since the launch of the Road Map, Arafat lapsed into irrelevancy. It’s true that the internationally supported coup d’etat failed to establish any authority to replace him. But Arafat’s presidency has been empty of real power save for terror, which his allies continued to refer to as “security.” Mahmoud Abbas, the first Road Map prime minister, told Newsweek in June that he resigned after receiving credible threats on his life. Asked whether the threats “were instigated by Chair man Arafat,” he replied, “I wouldn’t want to mention anyone by name. But I’ll give you something to understand: I don’t have any relationship with the chairman from the resignation to this day.”

Arafat’s strategic miscalculations included his support for the communist bloc and for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His isolation increased exponentially when he crossed President Bush over the Karine A arms shipment, swearing that he had had nothing to do with it. When the Israelis presented incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, Mr. Bush washed his hands of the Palestinian terrorist. In Mr. Bush’s eyes, Arafat became the obstacle to, rather than the instrument of, Palestinian statehood.

One of the ironies to the Arafat story is that, lately, elements of the European Union and the United Nations have begun to move toward the Bush-Sharon position. A notable exception is France, whose foreign minister Michelle Barnier continued to repeat the tired mantra until Arafat slipped into the coma (or died) that “nothing can be done without him, and nothing can be done against him.”

Earlier this fall, Israeli military intelligence estimated that Arafat thought he would escape his isolation if John Kerry defeated Mr. Bush and if Ariel Sharon fell from power. If you parse this hope, Arafat must have been banking on the probable resulting friction between a Kerry administration bent on securing a deal and a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, which would be less flexible than Mr. Sharon. Now his departure could thwart Mr. Sharon’s disengagement plan. Having demonized Arafat for so long, Israel will be hard struck to argue that his successors, such as they may be, are also unacceptable. If you can negotiate, why disengage unilaterally? Even as he was getting ready to exit, it was just like Arafat to scheme of putting a spoke in the wheels of the peace process.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.