The Palestinians, indeed the entire Arab world, have yet to recover from the collaboration and betrayal of King Abdullah I and that whole era of "Arab leaders" some 50+ years ago. Tragically it will be many more years before the Palestinians, and indeed the whole "modern" Arab world, recover from the collaboration and betrayal of King Abdullah II, the Arafat regime, and today's group of Arab "client regimes" whose only real goal is to keep themselves in the power and money at all costs, no matter the terrible price is blood, dishonor, and historical oppression.

[The Guardian - London - Friday December 14, 2001]: If all had gone according to plan, Yasser Arafat would, round about now, have been installing himself in Jerusalem as president of the state, coexistent with Israel, which has been the object of all his strivings. But the closer he gets to the fulfilment of his long-standing dream the more his plans seem to go awry and instead he is confined, like a prisoner, to an old hilltop British barracks in Ramallah, a mere six miles from the Holy City, his chances of ever entering it looking just about their bleakest ever.

His arch enemy, Ariel Sharon, himself facing prosecution in a Belgian court for his role in the Sabra and Chatila massacres, calls him - Nobel prizewinner and architect of the "peace of the brave" - a congenital liar and murderer with whom business is no longer possible. Yesterday, the Israeli government pronounced Arafat irrelevant, and cut off all relations with his Palestinian Authority. Sharon demands the arrest and punishment of all terrorists but bombs the very institutions of the Authority which are supposed to carry out this task - not just barracks and police stations, but, yesterday, the headquarters of the Palestine Broadcasting Authority. Indeed he bombs the Arafat compound itself. Yesterday, as the army stormed into Palestinian towns, a rocket fired from a helicopter struck metres from Arafat's office. This is Sharon's way, apparently, of amplifying the message that the rightwing Israeli establishment has been trumpeting forth this past week: if Arafat won't do the job, Israel will do it for him and banish or kill him into the bargain.

The Great Survivor has been written off many times before. Yet his resilience in adversity is legendary, his political comebacks are only outdone by his narrow escapes from violent death. So while this is one of the most desperate crises of his long and turbulent career, it may still not be his last.

It has deep roots in both the sheer, endemic implacability of the Arab-Israeli struggle, and the manner in which he has waged his side of it. A former terrorist and current, though surely reluctant, harbourer of terrorists he may be; but of all the villainies Israelis ascribe to him, intransigence, an unwillingness to compromise, is the most undeserving.

For his whole career is one of ever growing moderation. True, it may have been his endless setbacks that forced it on him. Or his indomitable egotism - only thus could Mr Palestine retain the position of sole and indispensable embodiment of his people's cause, which has been his for more than 30 years. But the fact is that, out of failure and retreat, he always managed to build a new platform for another seeming advance in his personal odyssey, or, as he puts it, his "long march" to the "spires and minarets" of Jerusalem. He did so by ever greater curtailment of his original goals. For a long time he carried most of his people with him, using the institutions of his "Palestinian democracy" to endorse them. But however drastic the curtailments, they were never enough for the most moderate of Israelis, while he found it increasingly difficult to persuade his own people that he could ever achieve goals which, in their eyes, were becoming modest to the point of treason. And the greater his difficulties the more he relied on dubious methods - a shelving of his democracy, and all the well-known flaws and frailties of his Authority - that have merely compounded them in the end.

If there has been one single infirmity of his from which, above all, these methods have flowed it has probably been his notorious egotism. No one has ever doubted his virtues: such as physical courage in the face of mortal danger or his dedication and indefatigability; the "old man" - as the now 72-year-old leader has been known as long as anyone can remember - was, until recently, a virtual insomniac, rarely completing his day's work before 4am.

But no one close to him has ever doubted his preoccupation with himself either. The egotism doubtless accounts for that high sense of destiny which seems always to have possessed him; one of its first publicly recorded manifestations came when, at a student conference in Prague in the early 50s, he astonished his audience by pronouncing himself Mr Palestine and donning the checked keffiyah that has been his trademark ever since. But it also underlies his obsessive desire for personal control and domination, his interference in the minutest details of administration, his deviousness and whimsy, his preference for loyalty over competence, his readiness, though entirely uninterested in wealth and luxury himself, to exploit, through patronage and corruption, the weaknesses of those around him who are. It is ultimately thanks to such egotism that his popularity ratings have fallen to their lowest level ever, just when he can least afford it, just when, trapped between Israeli diktat and the popular militancy of his Islamist rivals, the embattled Mr Palestine toys with the terrible necessity of carrying his moderation to the point of open war on Palestinians.

His original goals were absolute, essentially the same, in secular-nationalist guise, as those which, in religious guise, Hamas has made its own. On January 1 1965, a group of ill-trained guerrillas mounted their first raid against the "Zionist gangster-state". They belonged to Arafat's then clandestine Fatah organisation. Their aim was the "complete liberation" of Palestine, the return of the refugees and the dismantling of the Zionist settler-state. But all these early Arafat exploits led to was his first great setback.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war Israel seized the 22% of original Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, that remained outside its grasp, and on which, 30 years later, he now wants to build his state.

After 1967, he settled in Jordan, a half-Palestinian state. In the Black September civil war of 1970, he suffered the second of his great setbacks, this time at Arab hands. He settled in Lebanon. Though it was a stronger power base than Jordan, it took him further from his natural Palestinian environment, and the possibility of effective armed struggle. After the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, and the serious bout of US peace-making it engendered, he edged towards a "doctrine of stages".

He would now seek "immediate gains" from a political settlement without renouncing the "historical" right to all of Palestine. Thus began that "moderation" which would eventually take him further than he could ever have imagined.

In 1982, the Israelis invaded Beirut, where Sharon, then defence minister, tried countless times to kill him. Driven into yet another far-flung exile, this time in Tunisia, his political fortunes sank to their lowest ebb. They were revived less by his own endeavours than by those of the Palestinian "insiders", inhabitants of the occupied territories, who now took on the main burden of the struggle from the "outsiders" of the refugee diaspora. Their unarmed "intifada of stones" proved more effective than the Kalashnikovs of the "outsiders". Seizing the opportunity for another great advance in moderation, in 1988 Arafat reduced his goals to a "two-state solution" involving the renunciation of 78% of original Palestine.

It earned him the slender reward of a "US-Palestinian dialogue". More setbacks followed, chiefly the largely self-inflicted one of siding with Saddam Hussein in his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That led to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, which the Palestinians - though not Arafat himself - attended at the price of yet more concessions. But in the end it got him nowhere either, and so it was that, in 1993, he staged the greatest coup of his career, that quantum leap in moderation, the Oslo accord. With this, Mr Palestine reclaimed, with a vengeance, the role of sole, indispensable, internationally acknowledged peacemaker from which the rise of a new, articulate "insider" leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, had threatened to exclude him.

But the price of this Faustian compact was great. He claimed that it set in train a momentum that would lead inexorably to the end of occupation and the establishment of his state. Nine months later he did himself return "home". But only his coterie of loyalists, and guerillas-turned-policemen, came with him. The diaspora saw it as a betrayal of the refugees on whose sufferings and sacrifices he had built his now abandoned revolutionary career.

And he came as collaborator as much as liberator. For the Israelis, security - theirs, not the Palestinians' - was the be-all and end-all of Oslo. His job was to supply it on their behalf.

But he could only sustain the collaborator's role if he won the political quid pro quo which, through a series of "interim agreements" leading to "final status", was supposedly to come his way. He never could.

Obeying the logic of "take what you can now and seek the rest later" which weakness thrust upon him, he acquiesced in accumulating concessions that only widened the gulf between what he was actually achieving and what he assured his people he would achieve, by this method, in the end. He was Mr Palestine still, with a charisma and historical legitimacy all his own. But he was proving to be grievously wanting in that other great and complementary task, building his state-in-the-making. Economic misery, corruption, abuse of human rights, the creation of a vast apparatus of repression - all these flowed, wholly or in part, from the Authority over which he presided. At the Camp David summit in July 2000, the Oslo fallacy was finally, brutally exposed. The former Israeli premier Ehud Barak may have offered more than ever before. But he was still demanding much more than 78% of Palestine, plus a whole array of other gains which Arafat, standing firm, could not accept.

>From Camp David's collapse grew the second intifada. In essence, it was a popular revolt, first against the continued Israeli occupation, and the realisation that the Oslo accord would never end it, and, potentially, against Arafat and his Authority which had so long connived in the fiction that it could. It took on a momentum of its own, with an ever weaker Arafat in nominal control at best. He did not stem the armed violence and outright terrorism, outlawed by Oslo, into which it slid, either because - with Israel's violence killing far more Palestinians than vice versa - he could not, or because he simply would not, without securing real political movement in return.

So all Israelis, left and right, laid their anguish at Arafat's door, a national consensus that led to the rise of Sharon at the head of the most extreme, bellicose government in Israel's history. Sharon had one ill-disguised ambition: to suppress the intifada with as much brute force as he could risk politically. If, as a result, he brought Arafat down he did not mind one bit; he would thereby escape from any obligation to pursue the peace process he abhorred by eliminating the only party he could pursue it with.

When, on September 11, Osama bin Laden struck, the two arch enemies competed to put themselves on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror", Arafat tried to end the intifada; his police arrested militants who broke the new ceasefire, and shot and killed demonstrators against the assault on Afghanistan. But this appeasement did not yield the commensurate, tangible gain from the Americans he was banking on. For his part, Sharon contended that Arafat and his Authority had exactly the same relationship to the Islamic militants as the Taliban had to al-Qaida. He won the argument hands down, after he assassinated one of Hamas's top militants just as a new American peace mission arrived in the region. Hamas obliged with its latest suicidal rampage through Jerusalem and Haifa.

Now, in its fateful aftermath, Arafat is called upon to carry to impossible lengths the collaborator's role that the Oslo accord requires of him. Whether he does or not, he risks his own political, even physical, elimination. For Hamas is now so popular that to move against it could spell civil war. Not to do so exposes Arafat and his Authority to further military onslaughts from a vengeful Sharon. A Sharon who patently does not want him to succeed - for that would rob him of the pretext to get rid of him altogether.

If, at last, the Great Survivor does go down, he will take a lot with him, not merely the failure of that whole generation of Palestinian struggle he embodied, but also any chance - and some Israelis' hope - that the succeeding generation will be significantly more moderate. The more the end looks nigh, the more intense the speculation about what will follow. He himself, in his egotism, has groomed no one to step officially into his shoes. There are a few obvious candidates from his loyalist entourage, with a vested interest in preserving their own positions, who might try. But anyone from this "old guard" would face the selfsame challenge that Arafat did from the Fatah "young guard" - men such as Marwan Barghouti, who are the real moving spirits of the intifada. And in the chaos that will probably ensue, Hamas and the Islamists may become even more potent champions of that goal of "complete liberation" which Arafat and his secular-nationalist generation laid aside.

"The European Union, Yasser Arafat's main backer, has asked him to crack down on extremists ... setting off fears among Palestinians who feel betrayed by their top ally."

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP) - Excerpts - The European Union, Yasser Arafat's main backer, has asked him to crack down on extremists in a message with strong US and Israeli undertones, setting off fears among Palestinians who feel betrayed by their top ally.

The harshly-worded statement issued on Monday by Brussels contradicted the usual soft-peddling approach of the EU towards the Palestinian leader and was seen by Israelis as a slap in Arafat's face.

Arafat aides, however, appeared resigned to please the EU, which is widely considered the financial backbone of the Palestinian National Authority's economy, and said they were ready as always to cooperate.

"The statement is balanced and the European position is always balanced but what is needed now is a mechanism rather than just a statement that spells out what should be done," Palestinian Cabinet Secretary Ahmad Abdul Rahman said.

Abdul Rahman told AFP such a "working plan" should also apply to Israel to stop its military escalation on Palestinian targets, end the targetted assassinations of militants and pullout of Palestinian territories.

Palestinian analyst Ghossan Khatib said such a position confirms the fragility of Arafat's administration which is facing the formidable challenge of reining in Islamic suicide bombers who enjoy increasing popular support. . . . Khatib told AFP the EU statement was "not constructive," one-sided and reflects the US position of support for Israel and its demands for a Palestinian crackdown. . . . Monday's statement asked Arafat to dismantle "terrorist networks" within the hardline Islamic groups like Jihad and Hamas, arrest and prosecute suspects and issue "a public appeal in Arabic for an end to the armed Intifada" or 14-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation.

The EU also asked Israel to pull out its troops from Palestinian-ruled territories, stop "extrajudicial executions" of suspected militants, lift a crippling blockade of Palestinian areas and freeze Jewish settlement constructions. . . . Former Israeli MP Yehuda Ben Meir, a senior research fellow at the Jaffa Centre for Strategic Studies, said for once the EU "translated condemnation of acts of terrorism into a concrete demand" for Arafat to act.

Ben Meir expected Arafat to meet the EU requests because "the EU is his major ally, diplomatically and financially, and he must act or else he will lose all credibility."

Ben Meir, who describes himself as a firm supporter of the 1993 Oslo Palestinian-Israeli accords on Palestinian autonomy, said the latest spate of suicide bombings in Israel has left him sickened.

In this context, he said, the EU statement is a first step and clear message to Arafat that the violence "cannot go on, he must act responsibly or lose credibility" as a partner for peace, Bein Meir said.

Israeli military sources said the current military operation is meant to whittle away Arafat's rule until the point where he either flees into exile or succumbs to the demands of Israel and the United States to crack down on Islamic insurgents. The sources said Arafat himself is not a target of assassination.

"The idea is to remove all pretense of power so he can answer to his people without his weapons, security forces and prisons," a senior military source said.

The sources said the Israeli operation is based on a large number of Palestinian targets. The aim is to whittle down Palestinian assets and destroy Arafat's basis for power. This could pave the way for a takeover by more moderate Palestinians.

With each attack, the sources said, Israeli forces reach closer to Arafat himself. One target, the sources said, has been Fatah chief Marwan Barghouti, whose Ramallah home was taken over by Israeli troops.

On late Thursday, Israeli aircraft struck PA installations in Gaza City, Jenin and Ramallah. The installations included the headquarters of the PA military intelligence, headed by Arafat's nephew, Mussa.

Hours later, Israeli troops, tanks and bulldozers entered the Gaza city of Khan Yunis and destroyed several buildings. Israeli forces also entered the Hebron-area town of Dura and the northern village of Salfit. Salfit is located outside the Israeli city of Ariel in the West Bank.

The targets, the sources said, first focused on the PA security infrastructure. The next step - launched on Thursday - was meant to destroy Arafat's propaganda machine, including PA radio and television. The third step would be targeting key Arafat aides.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/12/504.htm