These are difficult days for Yasser Arafat - as he himself is making clear. He's taken to sending frequent messages to overseas leaders, pleading for monitoring forces to be dispatched to the West Bank and Gaza, for international intervention. He indicates that his own life is in danger - from the Israeli government, which would hold him responsible if Islamic militants were to pull off another major suicide bombing, or from the Islamists, were he to move too fiercely to confront them.
The vast majority of Israelis have long since stopped believing that he is genuinely committed to making peace with them - why else, in February, would they have voted by two-to-one to elect as their Prime Minister the controversial ex-general, Mr Ariel Sharon, who has never made any secret of his abiding antipathy to Mr Arafat? Many in the United States administration seem to have drawn a similar conclusion: President Bush won't even have the Palestinian Authority President in to visit at the White House.
And yet many of Mr Arafat's problems at home derive from the very opposite analysis. A growing body of Palestinian public opinion deems his Palestinian Authority to be overly deferential to Israel, and unwarrantedly prepared to continue peace negotiations, should Mr Sharon ever assent to so doing, despite the hundreds of lost lives in the more than 10 months of the new Palestinian Intifada.
Practically, too, Mr Arafat is apparently in trouble - his Palestinian Authority coffers are said to be emptying out, as Arab backers promise handouts but don't deliver, and other previously generous international donors demand more scrupulous controls over funding because of mounting evidence of corruption among Mr Arafat's ministers.
In contrast, the militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad appear to be riding high - both in terms of funding, from Iran and Saudi Arabian sources among others, and in the popularity stakes.
The Islamists are evidently having little difficulty in recruiting suicide bombers - barely a day goes by without such a bombing attempt. And the Sharon government's policy of "targeting" - i.e. assassinating - the alleged orchestrators of such bombings provides the context. Support for Hamas is burgeoning among ordinary Palestinians, who are deeply bitter over the mounting death toll and over the restrictions and economic hardships resulting from a longer-standing Israeli policy - blockading individual West Bank cities to try and prevent suicide bombers setting out on their missions.
For Mr Arafat, therefore, this is something of a moment of truth. But of his two main alternatives, neither may strike him as particularly attractive.
He could accede to Israeli pressure, and use his tens of thousands of police and security personnel to confront directly the Islamic activists, starting perhaps by arresting the seven men officially characterised by Israel as key militants - the apparent next names on the Israeli hit-list. Were he to do so, and the level of daily violence to fall dramatically, peace talks would presumably resume, and that White House invitation would doubtless be forthcoming. But in the current climate, also forthcoming would be a Palestinian public backlash, a wave of anger that Mr Arafat was doing the bidding of the Israeli "aggressors", and a further rise in support for Hamas.
On the other hand, Mr Arafat could ignore the Israeli pressure, and allow a deepening of the already close ties between some of his own Fatah loyalists and the Islamists, who now often work in partnership in planning and executing attacks. If so, however, there could be no return to the peace process, and no renewal of moderation and readiness for compromise among the Israeli public - who only two years ago overwhelmingly elected Ehud Barak as prime minister, with a clear mandate to partner Mr Arafat towards Palestinian statehood, but 70 per cent of whom nowadays, according to a new survey, endorse the government's "targeting" policy.
All the signs, for now, point to Mr Arafat opting for the latter alternative. Far from moving against the militants, his aides derisively rejected the seven-name Israeli arrest list. As some Islamic sources have spread rumours that information from Palestinian Authority officials has helped Israel mount its series of devastatingly accurate hits on Hamas leaders, he has rushed, defensively, to arrest dozens of the "collaborators" whom he alleges are providing the Israelis with their intelligence. And his West Bank Fatah leader, Mr Marwan Barghouti, is now openly calling for the restructuring of Palestinian government to include Hamas representation.
Presumably, Mr Arafat's reading is that he would have little to gain from the hardline Mr Sharon in any renewed peace talks - the Prime Minister would certainly offer less generous terms than did Mr Barak - while the ongoing conflict still leaves open the possibility of eventual international intervention and, who knows, even concerted pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory.
The dangers for Mr Arafat in following this line, however, are acute - he may find himself forced back into exile, or worse, should Mr Sharon ultimately decide to bow to right-wing pressure and directly confront the Palestinian Authority. Or he might find that the Islamists have become so popular among his public as to eclipse him. Difficult days indeed.