Arafat Picks Words Over Actions
ANALYSIS
washingtonpost.com
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 3, 2001; Page A01
JERUSALEM, Dec. 2 -- As the West trained its rhetorical wrath on Yasser Arafat and Israel prepared military reprisals for one of the bloodiest series of terrorist attacks inside the country in decades, the Palestinian leader today did what he has done so often: He issued statements.
He condemned the suicide bombings and other attacks that killed 26 Israelis in barely 14 hours. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Palestinian territories. He vowed to arrest terrorist leaders and warned militant groups they could be outlawed. He pleaded with Palestinians to accept these measures to prevent Israel "from implementing its bloody plan against our people or destroying our national goals."
But few analysts expect Arafat to tackle Palestinian groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, the lethally efficient organization whose popularity now rivals or exceeds his own. Many said that the Palestinian leadership is more likely to take half-measures, designed not so much to crush terror as to assuage the West's outrage and stave off a potentially devastating Israeli attack.
"I don't think we'll see a comprehensive crackdown because the [Palestinian] street would fight back," said Khalil Shikaki, an independent Palestinian analyst and pollster. "The prospect of internal infighting is a distinct possibility."
Last month, when Arafat's agents arrested a single commander of the radical group Islamic Jihad in the West Bank city of Jenin, more than 2,500 Palestinians rioted against Arafat's police, burning cars and shooting in the air.
Now, a swelling chorus of Israeli and Western leaders, including President Bush, is demanding that the Palestinian leader go much further, and take greater risks. They want him to carry out a comprehensive crackdown against all militant Palestinian organizations, especially Hamas.
Arafat, 72, has had his back to the wall dozens of times, and his instinct for survival remains keen. Through coaxing and coercion, he has managed to modulate the intensity of the Palestinian armed uprising during the past 14 months to suit his political needs. But he has never been willing or able to quash the insurrection altogether, and that is precisely what is being asked of him now.
According to Shikaki, as well as many Western analysts, Arafat is reluctant to move aggressively against militant groups because he stands to gain so little from doing so.
The Palestinian leader is being offered none of his long-standing demands: an end to Israel's 34-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip; a sovereign Palestinian state with control of its own borders and East Jerusalem as its capital; and a recognition of a "right to return" for Palestinian refugees who fled their land or were driven out in Israel's War of Independence in 1948.
Although the Bush administration has just launched its first serious push for peace in the region in months, the Palestinians are still unsure how peace alone would advance those goals. Without such inducements, analysts say, Arafat is loath to risk the domestic turmoil a crackdown against militant groups would entail.
"The current American initiative is not specific enough to offer him that kind of incentive," said Shikaki. "Arafat just wants to avoid a situation in which Israel would . . . assassinate him or remove him completely from the West Bank and Gaza."
It is a popular notion in the West that everything changed on Sept. 11, but in the Middle East's longest-running conflict, very little has, in fact.
Nearly oblivious of the entreaties of Washington, Israelis and Palestinians have continued to kill each other in a conflict that has its own internal rhythm and logic, according to which every attack and death is regarded by one side as terrorism and provocation, and by the other as reprisal and revenge.
The newly appointed American peace envoy in the region, retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, has said that the past week's lethal attacks by Palestinians were designed to wreck his chances for prodding the two sides toward a cease-fire. That may be true in part; Palestinian militants are demonstrating that they, not only Arafat, determine events on the ground.
But the tit-for-tat nature of the conflict explains the recent attacks at least as much as Zinni's arrival a week ago. After a comparative lull in the fighting in mid-November, five Palestinian children were killed in the Gaza Strip when they somehow detonated an Israeli booby trap. A day later, Israeli helicopter gunships firing antitank missiles assassinated a top Hamas commander, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, who Israel said was responsible for a number of terrorist attacks. Hamas officials vowed revenge for those killings.
The wave of violence and death has done much to buttress Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's argument that Arafat is at the head of a coalition of terror, and that his Palestinian Authority coddles and protects terrorists.
Dan Meridor, a moderate minister in Sharon's cabinet, said that Arafat must move against terror, because the Israeli government cannot put up with it endlessly. "They're fighting us, and we have to fight."
But Sharon's diplomatic advantage may be momentary, and it does not necessarily improve his menu of options. He might launch a tough military strike, or even deploy American-made F-16 warplanes to bomb the Palestinian territories. But there are few attractive targets: The security agencies whose headquarters Israel might target are the very forces that Israel insists crack down on militant groups.
Sharon might also side with those who advocate eliminating Arafat, either in a military attack or by expelling him from the Palestinian territories. He might even try to crush the Palestinian Authority, which was established in 1994 as an outgrowth of the Oslo peace agreement with Israel.
But moving against Arafat could make a martyr of the Palestinian leader and result in a more intensive terrorist campaign against Israel. And there is also the danger that the successor to the Palestinian Authority could be chaos, or a regime led in part by the Islamic extremists who are most fervently committed to Israel's destruction.
Nonetheless, the mood in Israel is pushing Sharon toward harsh action. "Arafat has had more than enough chances," said Uzi Landau, the hard-line minister of public security in Sharon's government. "We have to destroy the infrastructure of terror -- we must dry up the swamp and not just kill the mosquitoes. We're in the middle of a war."
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