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- Israel runs risks with assault on its ‘deputy sheriff’
by Tim Llewellyn
The Israeli onslaught against Yasser Arafat,
his people and his security forces over the past months and most
especially of the past six days, with the accompanying isolation
and attempted humiliation of the Palestinian leader, is likely to
achieve for Israel the very reverse of what it appears to want:
security and peace inside the occupied territories and effective
measures by Mr Arafat to end the suicide bombings.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, is clearly intent on
deactivating, detaining or deporting Mr Arafat to render impotent
the Palestinian Authority - but it is a desperate solution for a
man he sees as his ancient and persistent foe and likely
promulgator of the independent Palestinian state that he cannot
abide.
If he is sent into exile, Mr Arafat can fairly pronounce: Après
moi, le déluge. For it may seem impossible to credit - when
Israeli and Western leaders are blaming the Palestinian leader for
failing to restrain suicide bombers - but a short time ago Mr
Arafat was under attack from the Left, at home and abroad.
He was under fire from Islamic militants for his reliance on the
United States for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
Indeed, he was assailed for his perceived willingness to act as
Israel’s "deputy sheriff" in the Occupied Territories.
Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and virulent critic
of Mr Arafat, made this point earlier this year, claiming that "a
silent majority of Palestinians is neither for the [Palestinian]
Authority’s misplaced trust in Oslo ... nor for Hamas’s violence".
For three weeks over Christmas, Mr Arafat harried the Islamic
organisations - at that time the groups prominent in suicide
bombings - and by January had arrested 60 members of the radical
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) , which had
assassinated a right-wing Israeli cabinet minister.
However, during the Palestinian leader’s three-week Christmas
ceasefire, one Israeli was killed while 21 Palestinians, many of
them civilians, died in 16 incursions by the Israeli army into the
autonomous areas of the Palestinian Authority.
In fact, Mr Arafat has since the mid-1990s a full record of
arresting and trying to restrain militants and opponents of the
Oslo peace process he so believed in. His crackdown o Palestinian
militants horrified civil rights campaigners and many of his own
people, who saw him as a lackey, a Pétain, almost, of Israel and
the United States.
Now the Palestinian public has rallied to Mr Arafat as at no time
since the present uprising started more than 18 months ago.
The popular support among Palestinians for armed resistance, for
shooting Israeli soldiers and settlers and blowing up Israelis
whoever they are and wherever they can be found, is at its zenith.
If Mr Arafat’s "isolation" is transmuted into capture and/or
deportation - Egypt is seen as a likely destination - Israel will
have lost the one effective interlocutor it has. No successor to
Mr Arafat exists, either in his political or his security
structure. The very national force he has set up to impose
internal discipline is being besieged and depleted.
Exiled, he would be a potential "martyr", a voice in the
wilderness, perhaps, but whose appeal and symbolism as leader
would be enhanced within the occupied territories and even in a
sympathetic international community beyond.
His forced exile would be an inflammatory exercise, reaffirming to
the Palestinians that the one man they trusted, if warily, to lead
them to justice has been cast out and down by Israel and its
allies.
In fact, Ariel Sharon, has tried this before. As defence minister
20 years ago, he tried to hammer Mr Arafat into the ground,
expelling his Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from its
Lebanese base, where it was firing up nationalist feelings in the
West Bank and Gaza.
Mr
Arafat was exiled to Tunisia, but all Israeli attempts to create
"quisling" leaderships in the West Bank’s villages, and all the efforts by
Jordan and the United States to talk the Palestinians in the occupied
territories into a compromise of a union between them, Jordan and Israel,
produced only the intifada of 1987-1991 - as it turned out, a potent
forewarning of the present resistance struggle.
From
Tunis, Mr Arafat and his lieutenants seized the intifada and started the
journey back to Palestine.
This
Israeli government - perhaps all Israeli governments - seem unable to draw
the obvious conclusion - an increasingly dynamic, pervasive and now
blood-drenched one - that the majority of Palestinians are simply seeking
an end to military occupation and the promise of self-determination in a
viable, independent state.
This
must be the sine qua non of any ceasefire. Mr Arafat’s exile or severe
containment will not end that quest, only reconfirm and intensify it.
Without him, leaderships will arise in fractured communities which will
continue to take the war against Israelis into Israel.
While Mr
Sharon’s aim may be to have the Palestinian factions turn against each
other, he will have opened a Pandora’s box of two million people on the
West Bank and a million in Gaza who no longer have anything to lose and
who seem to be nonchalant in the face of Israel’s firepower.
Extended
Israeli forces would be even more exposed to guerrilla warfare; most
Jewish settlements would be isolated and vulnerable as never before.
Mr
Sharon cannot kill all Palestinians and he cannot deport them or scare
them over Arab borders, as happened to much smaller and less-organised
Palestinian populations in 1948 and 1967.
With Mr
Arafat gone, no Palestinian would dare try to inherit his mantle, with or
without Israeli connivance - he would be a dead man. Even an Arafat
"nominee" would be unable to control his people’s anger and their
determination to attain an end to occupation and a free state.
Mr
Arafat, in any case, is unlikely to name such a person. Israel
assassinated Mr Arafat’s only likely successor, Abu Jihad, in Tunis, in
1988. Radical Palestinians did for another candidate, Abu Iyyad, also in
Tunis, in 1991.
Now the
only man to deal with is the man they say has orchestrated the intifada,
whereas the evidence is to the contrary - the force of Palestinian
frustration and discontent has swept Mr Arafat along: despite his efforts
at control, he has had to side with his people and lead from the front.
Ironically, if anyone is cornered by this tragic confluence of continued
occupation and diplomatic paralysis, it is likely to be Ariel Sharon, not
Yasser Arafat, wherever the Palestinian leader ends up.
Tim Llewellyn
is a former BBC Middle East correspondent.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2002 Tim Llewellyn & The Scotsman
by the same author:
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