The NY Times reports on the Palestinian political situation, including new poll figures from Khalil Shikaki that show Arafat's popularity has dropped back to 36%. Why, I wonder, is Palestinian politics still unable to say, drop this guy, he's been a disaster?
As Arafat Critics Close In, Deputies Vie in the Wings
By JOHN KIFNER
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 20 — Yasir Arafat, for decades the very personification of Palestinian aspirations, is now in deep trouble with his own people, according to Palestinian political analysts and Israeli intelligence officials who see his authority challenged by a younger generation of street leaders who grew up fighting Israeli occupation.
For now, the analysts say, Mr. Arafat is likely to remain at the helm, however weakened, because there is no alternative in sight.
But a potentially violent power struggle is building, pitting different generations of Palestinian fighters against each other and also setting at odds rival security chiefs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Both of the security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank and Muhammad Dahlan in Gaza, had extensive dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israelis after the Oslo accords led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
Yet the consequence to Israel of either of them emerging triumphant is unclear. They, and other leaders gaining strength, like Marwan Barghouti, who is jailed in the West Bank, are adamant that Israel must withdraw from the Palestinian territories. At the same time, their outlook has been affected by Israel's democracy rather than the authoritarian Arab governments familiar to Mr. Arafat and cohorts who shared exile with him in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American professor at the University of Chicago who has known Mr. Arafat since the 1970's, said he visited Mr. Arafat recently and found him battered not only by the Israeli siege that confined him to his headquarters here but also by the recent calls for reform.
"He's in trouble, there's no question about it," Mr. Khalidi said. "It's twilight. People are really angry and fed up."
Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster, said his surveys show a steady erosion of support for Mr. Arafat.
"He's never been under such pressure to change his ways," Mr. Shikaki said. "But nobody is putting forth an alternative, even the young guard. Essentially by default, he remains the leader."
Mr. Arafat has long played factions and subordinates off against one another while retaining sole control. In recent days, Palestinian officials said, he has had stormy meetings with top aides.
His promises of pending reform are being greeted with cynicism not only by Israelis but by many Palestinians.
The director of Israeli military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi, told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, "In recent weeks, the Palestinian population's feeling of revenge are directed at him.
"This is new and deep. They tell him, `The policy you led has destroyed our future state,' " the Israeli intelligence officer said.
Israel's incursion into the West Bank, in which whole cities were shut down and much property destroyed, further hardened Palestinians toward Israel, but it also showed them the weakness of the Palestinian Authority.
During the operation, Mr. Arafat was trapped by Israeli soldiers in his compound as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel tried to isolate and perhaps exile him. But Mr. Sharon's strategy backfired, Palestinian and Israeli officials said, as sympathy for Mr. Arafat soared among Palestinians who identified with his plight.
But Mr. Arafat's liberation and the deals that made it possible have prompted Palestinians to start questioning his leadership again.
In the arrangement that freed Mr. Arafat, six Palestinian militants who had been tried under siege in Ramallah were sent to jail in Jericho under British and American supervision. Thirteen of the men who were under siege in Bethlehem have been sent abroad into effective exile.
Palestinian political analysts said the Bethlehem deal is proving especially costly for Mr. Arafat, who had been riding a surge of support during his own siege by the Israelis.
"The tanks were on his doorstep," said Hisham Ahmed, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Bethlehem. "His popularity was enhanced to a degree that we had almost not witnessed in the past. And then came this event that took it from the top level and threw it to the floor."
What Mr. Arafat had envisioned as triumphal appearances after his release from the siege drew only paltry, perfunctory crowds, and he canceled a planned speech at the Jenin refugee camp, scene of the fiercest fighting, apparently for fear of an angry crowd.
The strongest single emerging Palestinian figure appears to be Mr. Barghouti, the West Bank leader of Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction and its Tanzim militia, who was arrested here during the incursion and is held in an Israeli jail. Mr. Barghouti was a student leader at nearby Bir Zeit University during the first intifada, was jailed and exiled and returned after the Oslo agreements to take up a leadership role.
In Mr. Shikaki's just completed poll of Palestinians, Mr. Barghouti registered as their second most popular figure, with a 19 percent approval rate. Last December, he had jumped to 11 percent from zero before.
A few days ago, a large portrait of Mr. Barghouti was hung on a building in Manara Square in the center of this city, the effective Palestinian political and intellectual capital. A police force directly answering to Mr. Arafat promptly tore it to pieces. Fatah supporters of Mr. Barghouti gathered angrily and another portrait went back up.
Mr. Arafat's standing in the poll was a 36 percent approval rating, back to roughly where he was before the Ramallah siege. In 1996, when Mr. Arafat was basking in the aftermath of the establishment of the Palestinian authority, his rating was over 70 percent.
In Mr. Shikaki's view, the current intifada is as much about dissatisfaction with Mr. Arafat as about Israel.
"The young guard has turned to violence to get Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip unilaterally (as it withdrew from South Lebanon in May 2000) and simultaneously to weaken the Palestinian old guard and eventually displace it," Mr. Shikaki wrote in Foreign Affairs in January.
The young guard is not, however, unified. There are splits between nationalists and more out-and-out Islamic militants, and between Gaza and the more prosperous West Bank.
A central part of this competition is between Mr. Rajoub and Mr. Dahlan, both heads of branches of the powerful Preventive Security Service, whose task under the Oslo accords was to keep Palestinian militants from attacking Israel.
Both men rose from obscurity to be street-fighting leaders in the first intifada, and both endured years in Israeli jails, where they learned Hebrew.
Both have also been living large: Mr. Dahlan built a mansion in Gaza so huge that Mr. Arafat had to tell him it was ostentatious. When an outraged Mr. Rajoub led a press tour of his damaged house after an Israeli rocket attack, journalists were fascinated by his marble whirlpool bath.
Mr. Dahlan, widely believed to be an American favorite, expanded his role in the West Bank after the Israeli incursion. Mr. Rajoub lost ground in public opinion when he turned over several hundred people, including a half-dozen prisoners, to the Israelis after they attacked his palatial headquarters.
Mr. Dahlan is seen as being allied with several members of Mr. Arafat's old guard, including Muhammad Rashid, Mr. Arafat's financial adviser.
Mr. Rashid, who last week met top officials in Washington, is regarded by many Palestinians as the bagman for the most notoriously corrupt elements of Mr. Arafat's regime. Palestinian reformers were outraged over an interview Mr. Rashid gave to the London-based Arabic paper Al Hayat in which he said the moves for reform were being coordinated with William J. Burns, the State Department's assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. .
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