Debka is sharply diverging from the analysis of the Israeli papers here. Do you believe them? Debka's slant has always been a) to believe the worst of Arafat (they've been consistently right on this), and b) to believe that Arafat remains almost all-powerful, pulling all the strings.
I have always doubted the b) part, now more than ever. Arafat generally foments a sort of violent semi-chaos, and surfs the wave, so to speak, manipulating, intimidating, playing groups off against one another. At its best, this was power, but not the command-and-control power of a Stalin. Now, it seems to be slipping away from him as his forces get pounded and his strategy (if you can call the intifada a strategy) is revealed to be a failure.
I suspect that anybody but Arabs would have chucked Arafat by now (as Abdel Khader said recently of the Palestinians, "We are like Bedouins. We follow our sheikhs."), but the discontent seems to be breaking into the open at last. Of course Arafat's epitaph has been written prematurely a million times before, but I wonder if he may not really be losing it this time. After all, on top of everything else, Bush has called him a "complete failure" and Arafat is clearly getting old and frail and probably senile to boot. |
