Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
As Israel cuts off contact with the Palestinian leader after another bloody attack, the question of who might succeed him gains urgency.
Dec 13, 2001 | Israel cut off contact with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat early Thursday and launched military operations in the West Bank and Gaza to crack down on militants, blaming Arafat for the latest bloody attacks that killed 10 Israelis and wounded more than 30 others.
A statement released after Israel's Security Cabinet met in Tel Aviv said Arafat is "directly responsible for the series of attacks and therefore is no longer relevant to Israel, and Israel will no longer have any connection with him."
Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit said there would be no more contact with Arafat or his Palestinian Authority. He added that Israel had no plans to kill Arafat.
The larger political ramifications of Israel's move remained unclear. But its action in cutting off contact with Arafat, and possibly the Palestinian Authority which is charged with governing part of the occupied West Bank and Gaza territories on an interim basis under the 1993 Oslo agreement, probably represented a 10-year low in official Israeli-Palestinian relations, and gave rise to renewed speculation about the fate of the Palestinian Authority leader. While increasing numbers of Israelis have apparently come to believe that any alternative would be preferable to Arafat, many analysts, Israeli and Palestinian, argue that removing the 72-year-old Palestinian leader would only further destabilize the deteriorating situation.
The developments made a mockery of the latest American efforts to bring both sides to a cease-fire. U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni has spent the last two weeks trying to implement a truce agreed to last May. He has set up three meetings of Israeli and Palestinian security commanders, but the sessions have reportedly degenerated into shouting matches, with each side blaming the other for continuing violence. The latest violence followed Zinni's call for 48 hours of peace.
The first attack took place Wednesday evening, when a bus traveling near a Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank hit an explosive charge and was sprayed with gunfire by Palestinian assailants. Two of the people killed in the shooting, which continued after medics and Israeli soldiers arrived on the scene, were soldiers. Almost at the same time, two suicide bombers struck at settlers in Gaza, wounding four people. The attacks followed an Israeli tank raid into the West Bank city of Jenin and the death, overnight, of four Palestinians in Gaza whom Israel accused of firing mortars into Israeli settlements.
In response to the Palestinian attacks, the Israeli Security Cabinet authorized widespread military operations to arrest militants and seize weapons. Israeli forces launched an incursion into the southern Gaza Strip and fired tank shells at a Palestinian checkpoint in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Earlier, Israeli missiles pounded Arafat's beachfront presidential compound in Gaza, a naval building in northern Gaza and the passenger terminal at the Palestinian airport in southern Gaza. Palestinians say a 65-year-old woman was killed in these strikes.
Feeling the heat from American envoy Anthony Zinni, who asked Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to move immediately against terrorist groups, Palestinian officials decided at a cabinet meeting in Ramallah late Wednesday night to close down all institutions belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. If the order is implemented, it would presumably silence for the first time the movements' political leaders (not just outlaw their military branches, as the Palestinian Authority has done numerous times in the past) and affect their charitable organizations.
Like many previous Palestinian attacks in the current intifada, Wednesday's killings were conceived as acts of revenge for Israeli strikes. The Palestinian Authority issued a routine statement condemning the attacks, although an armed group called the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is affiliated with Arafat's mainstream Fatah party, claimed responsibility for the bus ambush, as did the radical group Hamas. Just as mechanically, Israel blamed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the attacks and began firing missiles at targets in Gaza in response.
But by breaking off contact with Arafat, Israel upped the ante it threw on the table when it accused him and the P.A. earlier this month of supporting terrorism. The latest developments, both politically and militarily, carried a growing risk that the two sides would depart from the well-worn scenario and usher in an ominous new phase in the almost 15-month-old intifada. Since last week, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Arafat "the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East" following terrorist attacks that killed 26 people in Haifa and Jerusalem on Dec. 1 and 2, the attacks on Arafat have become far more intense.
Almost 20 years after Sharon, then Israel's defense minister, tried to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader by invading Lebanon and ultimately bombing Arafat's headquarters in Beirut, Israeli helicopter gunships came after the Palestinian leader's assets in Gaza and in the West Bank, destroying his helicopters, helipad and airstrip. In an intimidating show of force, an Israeli helicopter moved toward a building in Ramallah in which Arafat was sitting at the time and fired missiles into the office next door. Although Sharon stopped short of killing the head of the Palestinian Authority, an entity he has compared to the Taliban regime because it harbors terrorists, the bombings were clearly intended to underscore Arafat's physical vulnerability.
The blows, so far, have been mostly diplomatic -- but Arafat has also inflicted some on himself. A few days after the Israeli bombings went ahead, with the virtual blessing of the United States, Arafat apparently lost all self-control and blurted on Israel's Channel One, waving his hands hysterically: "Good lord! What do I care about the Americans! The Americans are on your side and they gave you everything. Who gave you the planes? The Americans! Who gave you the tanks? The Americans! Who gives you money? The Americans! Don't talk to me about the Americans." The interview, aired at prime time Friday night, startled Israelis, who suddenly saw Arafat as a raging, aging fool, not the formidable mastermind and nemesis they imagined nor the kind of negotiating partner they hoped for.
Perhaps even more humiliatingly for Arafat, the European Union's foreign ministers put out an unusually tough-worded statement on Monday in which they asked him to dismantle the terrorist infrastructures of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and to call --in Arabic -- for the end of the intifada. The statement implied that Europeans were fed up with Arafat's double game, in which the leader says one thing in English for foreign consumption and another in Arabic for his domestic audience. Although balanced by a call for Israel to stop building settlements and cease its practice of "extra-judicial" executions -- appeals noticeably lacking from the U.S. demands to Arafat -- the statement carried special sting because Europe has traditionally been sympathetic to the Palestinian argument that resistance to Israeli occupation is a legitimate struggle.
This combination of strikes, clownish missteps and diplomatic pressure has many people wondering whether Arafat's days may be numbered and given new urgency to the old question of who might represent the Palestinians if Arafat were to fall from power.
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