BEIRUT -- It has been three months since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon laid siege to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. Physically, his position remains dire. An Israeli tank is stationed a mere 70 meters away.

Earlier this week, in Israel's land-sea-and-air assault, a missile struck a police post in Arafat's compound, and gunboats killed four presidential guards at his Gaza office. But, with the violence mounting wildly, who, in a larger sense, is really besieging whom? No better place to look for an answer than that earlier, epic encounter between the two and the dress rehearsal for this one -- Sharon's three-month siege of West Beirut in 1982.

Then, in what Menachem Begin, premier at the time, called Israel's first "chosen war," the idea was virtually the same as today. Then, too, Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, deemed the source of all opposition to Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza, had to be eliminated to make way for an acquiescent "alternative leadership."