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"Arafat's opposition - made up of the Islamic bloc and the left - now enjoys the majority of the support of the Palestinian public. Adding Arafat's opponents within Fatah, the hardships of the Palestinian leadership are greater today than they have ever been."
MID-EAST REALITIES © - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington -10/20: Yasser Arafat is losing both his grip on power (extended to him by the Israelis and the Americans for the past decade since the Gulf War) and his credibility (with his own people) at the same time.
The Israelis, as usual with considerable American help no matter what the public relations theatrics of the moment, have him cornered. After so many years of being infiltrated and manipulated, after taking so many wrong turns in the past, after so much corruption and ineptitude, Arafat is now up against the wall with his own people, having nowhere to turn but into an even a tighter embrace with his life-long nemesis.
This is the great fear many of the most astute Palestinians have of the situation they are now in, a fear that their long-time but actually widely mistrusted and despised "leader" will react as he has in the past and in desperation try again to save himself at the great expense of his own people. Intense secret negotiations with the Israelis and the CIA are known to be ongoing, Arafat's de facto Prime Minister, Nabil Sha'ath, whom many Palestinians also consider a kind of de facto American agent in their midst, frantically trying to bring about some kind of deal to save the "Palestinian Authority" (i.e. the Arafat regime) at nearly any cost.
Of course this is precisely the predicament the Israelis want Arafat in and have worked so hard for so long to achieve. Their first preference is to use Arafat while he is still alive to sign some kind of historic agreement -- one that purportedly will create a kind of fractured, disjointed, near-stillborn Palestinian statelet (which will of course be publicly touted as far more), but which will actually be designed to legitimize and mask continuing Israeli rule; certainly one that won't even come close to meeting the basic minimal requirements of legitimate Palestinian aspirations. A second preference for some (first for others) from the real yet unspoken Israeli point-of-view, would be that they finally to get Arafat assassinated -- by other Palestinians that is. Just imagine how the Israeli propaganda machine is going to play that one. As for the Americans, they might even send Colin Powell to the funeral!
* PLO fears leader is target of assassination plot * Sharon warning of war within a week
[The Times (London), Jerusalem, 19 October]: THE Middle East moved closer to a new war yesterday as Ariel Sharon declared the Arafat era over and moved tanks into three West Bank towns.
Israel also killed a leading Palestinian militant, and the PLO claimed to have evidence that the Jewish state was plotting to assassinate its leader, Yassir Arafat.
The rapid collapse of the peace process followed the murder of Rehavam Zeevi, the Israeli Tourism Minister, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on Wednesday. Mr Sharon said: "Arafat has seven days to impose absolute quiet in the (occupied) territories. If not, we will go to war against him. As far as I am concerned, the era of Arafat is over."
The Palestinians suspect that Israel has decided on its response to the killing of Mr Zeevi. Nabil Abu Rdainah, an Arafat aide, said that the Palestinian Authority had evidence that Israel was planning to assassinate Mr Arafat.
Israel's Security Cabinet is understood to have sent a blunt message to Mr Arafat that unless Israel's conditions for the extradition of the killers and the outlawing of all Palestinian terror organisations were adhered to within one week he "would be treated in the way in which the US treats the Taleban".
Although there was some confusion about the precise timing of the new Israeli deadline for the surrender of the PFLP killers - whose identity ministers claimed to know - officials said that it would run out at the end of the seven-day mourning period for Mr Zeevi.
In a reflection of the mood across much of Israel as Mr Zeevi, a former army general, was buried with full military honours in Jerusalem, his family and other mourners called for retaliation on a massive scale to avenge his murder.
The latest Israeli "targeted killing" near the West Bank town of Bethlehem was that of Ataf Abayat, a member of the Tanzim militia of Mr Arafat's Fatah faction. He died instantly in a car bomb explosion. He was high on Israel's wanted list and blamed for the recent death of a woman settler.
At least three other Palestinians were killed in clashes across the West Bank, as Israeli tanks entered the Palestinian towns of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah. A 10-year-old schoolgirl was killed in Jenin and two Palestinian security men using automatic rifles to try to prevent tanks advancing into Ramallah also died. The Palestinians said that four other schoolgirls and three adults were wounded in Jenin.
The killing of Mr Abayat, and two other Palestinian militants who were with him, led to reprisals by Palestinian gunmen, who fired on the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo, which Palestinians regard as an illegal Jewish settlement. A mortar bomb was fired late in the evening but there were no reports of injuries.
In another incident an Israeli man was shot and killed and two of his companions were wounded in a drive-by shooting on the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Jericho.
Israeli sources refused to comment on the killing of Mr Abayat, who had recently been picked up by the Palestinian police and released soon after. He was on a wanted list Israel had given to Mr Arafat.
The Palestinian Authority said that it had arrested 11 PFLP members, although it was not clear if they included the suspected assassins. Ziad Abu Zayad, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, said: "If indeed the people behind Zeevi's murder are inside Palestinian Authority territory, Arafat needs to arrest them and bring them to trial, but not to extradite them to Israel."
Sending tanks into the Palestinian towns, the Israeli Cabinet said that it reserved the right to enter Palestinian-ruled territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip whenever "there is an operational need to act against terror".
Even moderate Israelis appeared ready for a new cycle of violence. Yossi Sarid, leader of the main left-wing Meretz party, said that the country was heading inexorably towards a repeat of the Lebanon invasion of 1982, which followed the attempted assassination of its London ambassador, except this time against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In advance of the harsher action against Mr Arafat, Mr Sharon nominated four senior ministers to fly to the US to convince the Government and people there that the Palestinian leader was not cracking down on terrorism.
[Ha'aretz - 20 October]: The severe deterioration of the situation in the territories is weakening Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and is undermining the authority of Palestinian leadership. Palestinian spokesmen said Thursday that they have no doubt that Arafat has wanted to achieve a cease-fire in recent weeks, so as to regain the trust of the United States and European nations.
According to the Head of the Jerusalem Media Center, Rassan al-Hatib, the person who prevented Arafat from reaching the relative calm and cease-fire was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who, even before Wednesday's murder of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi, had renewed his policy of assassinations, elevating tensions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
According to a speech given Wednesday in Jerusalem by researcher Dr. Khalil Shikaki, of Ramallah, Arafat's oppostion - made up of the Islamic bloc and the left - now enjoys the majority of the support of the Palestinian public. Adding Arafat's opponents within Fatah, the hardships of the Palestinian leadership are greater today than they have ever been.
An example that highlights the huge gap between Arafat's policies and the Palestinian public opinion is the attitude towards Ze'evi's assassination. While Arafat and his associates denounced the murder, opposite opinions were voiced on the Palestinian street.
An interviewer on an Arab television station Thursday asked Dr. Mustafa Barghouti of Ramallah if committing the murder had been a mistake on the part of the PFLP, because of the barriers it imposed on the PA's attempts to win international support. "Why should we blame ourselves? The Israeli government assassinates and kills us every day, and we should remain silent?" Barghouti replied.
The Palestinian Islamic organizations chose sharply worded responses, while the main headline of Thursday's edition of the Islamic Jihad's Al-Istiklal journal read: "The intifada crushed the head of Ze'evi the snake and sowed fear in the Zionist establishment."
Last week, when the journal used harsh language against the actions of the Palestinian police, news spread that Arafat had ordered the arrest of the editor, but it now appears that this never transpired and the editor and his journal continue to function as usual. In Gaza, estimates were made Thursday night that any attempt by Arafat to take action against the Islamic organizations and the left-wing bloc would be an act of political suicide.
The differences between the claims made by Arafat and his associates and what actually takes place on the ground was exemplified Thursday when shooting was renewed on the Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem. Also Thursday, a demonstration took place near the prison in Bethlehem, with the demonstrators demanding that individuals suspected of cooperating with Israel be put to death. Bethlehem residents said Thursday that nothing would stop the demands for revenge called on by the Abayet clan, who lost a family member to IDF gunfire at the start of the intifada, and has suffered three more deaths since.
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| Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/10/477.htm |