Israel Proposes Exile for Arafat
Tuesday, April 02, 2002
JERUSALEM — Yasser Arafat may be flown into exile soon if Israeli leaders have their way, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disclosed Tuesday.
Palestinian officials said in turn that their leader, who after months of siege by the Israeli military has seen his sphere of authority reduced to two rooms in his Ramallah compound, would never agree to return to exile.
As he toured Israeli Defense Forces bases in the West Bank Tuesday, Sharon was asked by European Union envoy Miguel Moratinos whether the military would ever let Arafat leave Ramallah.
"I told him [Moratinos], if they [European diplomats] would like, they will fly with a helicopter and will take him [Arafat] from here," Sharon told Israel Radio.
Sharon urged Arafat's expulsion at an Israeli Cabinet meeting last week, but backed down in the face of opposition from his coalition partners in the left-wing Labor Party, Labor officials told reporters.
Even if Sharon's plan for Arafat comes to fruition, there would be conditions.
"First, I would have to bring this to the Cabinet," Sharon told Israel Radio. "Second, he [Arafat] can't take anyone with him — the murderers who are located around him there — and the third thing is that it would have to be a one-way ticket. He [Arafat] will not be able to return."
Internet reports Monday said that American officials had quietly made arrangements for Arafat to go into exile in Morocco.
WorldTribune.com quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying that Secretary of State Colin Powell had sent feelers out over the past week to Arab and Islamic countries to find safe haven for Arafat, and that Morocco had agreed to give the Palestinian leader asylum.
"We have found a place for Arafat," a U.S. official told WorldTribune.com. "The problem is that Arafat doesn't want to leave just yet."
The anonymous sources said the main sticking point was Arafat's insistence that he take up to 70 aides and officials with him out of the country — including dozens of men who are accused by Israel of being behind suicide bombings.
Jibril Rajoub, another Palestinian leader who is often mentioned as a successor to Arafat, is also believed to be sheltering militants in his own besieged compound on the West Bank.
The American officials told WorldTribune.com that the European Union had also been involved in the effort to find Arafat asylum, and that the pro-Western Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, each of which Arafat has lived in in the past, had refused to take him in again.
The officials also said that the American and European involvement was spurred by Western fears of a "second front" opening up in southern Lebanon, from which the Hezbollah militia has begun firing on northern Israel again, which in turn could escalate the current crisis into a regional war.
The Israeli daily Haaretz said on Tuesday that Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres discussed possible arrangements for Arafat's exile with Egyptian officials who rejected the plan.
For their part, Palestinian officials insisted Arafat would rather die than return to exile.
"Arafat will stand there [in Ramallah] and live or get killed and be a martyr," Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said from Cairo.
Arafat has spent most of his 72 years in exile. Born in Cairo (although others claim he was born in Gaza or in Jerusalem) to a wealthy Palestinian family in 1929, he divided his childhood between Egypt and his mother's family in Jerusalem, and fought against the Jews forming the state of Israel in 1948.
Arafat returned to Egypt after the Arab defeat, and spent several years in Kuwait as a public-works engineer. He founded his Fatah organization there in 1958, and in 1965, after 17 years abroad, returned to the West Bank, then administered by Jordan, to carry out guerrilla and terrorist attacks on Israel.
After the June 1967 Six-Day War, during which the West Bank and Gaza Strip came under Israeli control, the Arab states which had formed the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 lost credibility.
Control of the umbrella group passed to indigenous Palestinian groups and Arafat, as head of the largest bloc, became head of the PLO's executive committee, a position he has held ever since.
The PLO became a state within a state in Jordan, with its own military and foreign policy. Within two years, it had become such a threat that King Hussein attacked it in September 1969, forcing the Palestinian militants out of his country after weeks of brutal fighting.
Arafat then moved with the Palestinian leadership to southern Lebanon, where again the PLO set up its own statelet as it carried out attacks on Israel, instituted a wave of airplane hijackings and destabilized the weak Lebanese government until it collapsed in 1975, sparking the sectarian civil war which was to last for 15 years.
In 1978, fed up with PLO attacks on his northern border, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin launched an assault on Lebanon, driving Arafat and the PLO leadership north to take up residence in the Muslim sector of Beirut.
In 1982, as PLO attacks continued, Israeli forces, led by then-General Ariel Sharon, moved up to the outskirts of Beirut itself, threatening to invade the city unless the PLO was forced out.
Arafat and the PLO leadership sailed to Tunisia, where another government-in-exile was set up. Sharon admitted in a 2001 interview that he regretted not having had Arafat killed in Beirut, and indeed Israeli warships tried to do just that, rocketing Arafat's seaside home outside Tunis.
The 1987 intifada against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip erupted without PLO leadership, but the global attention given to the conflict restored Arafat's influence.
The secret Oslo talks that began in the intifada's wake led to the 1993 peace accords, Arafat's legimization as a head-of-state-in-waiting and his triumphal return to the occupied territories in 1994 after 27 years in exile.
— Fox News' Paul Wagenseil and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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