The New York Times prints an article on the 'state' of Arafat. The article mentions that the Arafat-signed bomb-belt invoices that the IDF found in the spring helped turn Bush against Arafat. I don't remember the NY Times mentioning these invoices before; as I recall, they were still keeping up State's Arafat-is-a-moderate stance last spring. Does anybody else here remember?
_______________________________________________________
A Political Limbo Tests Arafat's Fortitude
By DEXTER FILKINS
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jan. 10 — Around and around, hour after hour, Yasir Arafat circles the desk in his office, waiting for the world to come back to him.
Confined to his compound, ignored by the Americans, Mr. Arafat has grown so frustrated, aides say, that he has taken to long bouts of indoor exercise, beginning with laps around his desk.
"He walks around his table for hours, long into the night," said Nabil Shaath, a longtime confidant and the Palestinian Authority's minister for planning. "He goes around and around and around."
So it goes for Mr. Arafat, 73, once the father of an emerging nation and now an aging pariah waiting for others to decide his fate. With the Americans preparing for a possible war with Iraq and the Israelis engaged in a nationwide election campaign, Mr. Arafat has entered an unusual holding pattern. For the first time in his long career, he finds himself not only ignored by the region's most powerful players but pushed from the center of the action.
The omens for Mr. Arafat do not appear good. Although his popularity among Palestinians surged when he came under siege by the Israelis, recent polls show that the support has plummeted to its lowest level since he took control of the Palestinian Authority. The Bush administration says it is determined to help build a Palestinian leadership without him, and Israeli leaders are preventing him from carrying out the very reforms they are insisting on.
Indeed, more and more, certain Israeli leaders appear to be imagining a future without Mr. Arafat at all.
"You know what we should be doing with Arafat?" Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli foreign minister, called out to a crowd of supporters in Jerusalem last week. "We should be doing to him what they're doing to Saddam Hussein — getting rid of him."
The Israeli crowd whooped and clapped.
With such torrents swirling about him, Mr. Arafat has decided to lie low and wait for the political landscape to change, his aides here say. With time, the aides say, Mr. Arafat believes that his confinement to the ruins of his compound here will end and other players will again decide that they need him, as they have done so often in the past.
"He is waiting for the storms to pass," said Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian Authority's minister for labor, standing in Mr. Arafat's sandbagged office a few days ago. "For now, he is not making any big fusses, but that is temporary. Ultimately he will regain his role," Mr. Khatib said.
The result is a kind of political purgatory, where the images border on the surreal: Mr. Arafat presiding over a meeting that his own delegates have been prevented by the Israelis from attending; American diplomats meeting Mr. Arafat's deputies, but not the man himself; Mr. Arafat issuing statements denouncing suicide bombings, without his name attached. Mostly deprived of sunlight, Mr. Arafat's visage has turned a sickly white.
"It's hard, but I'm used to it," Mr. Arafat said of his confinement during a brief interview on the steps of his compound. "I'm just working."
Indeed, these days, Mr. Arafat spends much of his time meeting minor dignitaries and foreign officials, most of whom are unlikely to have a say over his future. One night last week, he appeared outside his office, surrounded by a retinue of aides, and pointed out the ruins of the compound to a Japanese member of Parliament.
"This was destroyed, but we rebuilt it," Mr. Arafat said, standing with his visitor, Tara Kono. "This was destroyed, too." With that, Mr. Arafat and his aides turned and strode back inside.
The immediate source of Mr. Arafat's decline is President Bush's speech in June, when he announced that the United States government would not support an independent Palestinian state until the Palestinians got rid of Mr. Arafat. That speech had followed waves of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, some of which, American officials said, could be laid at Mr. Arafat's feet. Mr. Bush called for a process of reform to overhaul the Palestinian Authority, the very organization that is Mr. Arafat's life work.
But Palestinian experts here say that Mr. Arafat's current predicament goes far deeper than the events of the past year and has as much to do with his failings as a leader.
Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, said the popular uprising that began here 28 months ago was aimed as much at the Palestinian Authority for its failure to deliver good government or to block expanding Jewish settlements as it was against the immediate effects of the Israeli occupation. After the Camp David peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed in 2000, Mr. Shikaki said, many Palestinians concluded that Mr. Arafat could no longer guarantee peace, either.
"Arafat failed to deliver what most Palestinians expected," Mr. Shikaki said. "As far as the Palestinian public is concerned, Arafat is no longer the unchallenged leader of the Palestinian people."
For now, Mr. Shikaki and others say, much of Mr. Arafat's energy is engaged in holding off challengers within his own organization. While many of Mr. Arafat's rivals share his views toward Israel, others have aligned themselves with militant Islamists who have conducted suicide bombings against Israelis.
"We are continuously fighting an ideological battle within the organization," said Mr. Shaath, Mr. Arafat's confidant. "If Arafat were gone, there would be no restraint."
Just how much control Mr. Arafat has over attacks directed against Israelis cuts to the heart of his credibility as a leader. Late today, Mr. Arafat's cabinet issued a statement denouncing attacks against Israeli civilians, saying they had damaged the Palestinian cause. In recent weeks, Palestinian leaders have been debating whether to call a cease-fire, in part to strengthen the opponents of Israel's hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
To much of the current Israeli leadership, the debate ended last spring, when, they said, in the course of the incursion into Ramallah, they found stacks of documents detailing payments to suicide bombers that bore Mr. Arafat's signature. It was that evidence, Israeli officials say, that helped persuade President Bush to make his final break with Mr. Arafat.
The same belief underlies the current Israeli policy of giving Mr. Arafat no room to maneuver. Following the suicide attacks in Tel Aviv last Sunday, which killed 22 people, the Israelis blamed a faction linked to Mr. Arafat. In response, they blocked Mr. Arafat from sending a delegation to a conference, sponsored by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, that was intended to encourage the Palestinian Authority to reform itself. Israel also prevented dozens of Palestinian representatives from attending a meeting to review a draft of the new Palestinian Constitution, forcing the meeting's cancellation.
While those moves struck some people here as self-defeating, there were hints that they might be only the beginning.
Raanan Gissen, a senior adviser to Mr. Sharon, said that the Israeli government had given assurances to Mr. Bush that Mr. Arafat would not be physically harmed. But he left open the possibility that Israel might move to deport him.
"If at any given moment, it would be the assessment of the security forces and our experts that it would be best for the Palestinian situation if Arafat were removed from the territory, then it would be considered," Mr. Gissen said.
Earlier in the week, at a meeting in his Ramallah headquarters, Mr. Arafat seemed like his old self. He railed against the Israelis for restricting the free movement of Palestinians in the territories, for prohibiting him from attending midnight Mass in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, for failing to turn over millions of dollars in tax revenue that he said the Palestinian Authority was rightfully owed.
"I am asking the whole world, with its Christians, Muslims and free people, can you accept this?" Mr. Arafat said, his followers warming to his tirade as in days gone by.
But there were hints that Mr. Arafat had not forgotten that times had changed. Several times during his speech came the crash and bang of workers outside, putting the finishing touches on the new bullet-proof shields for his office windows.
nytimes.com |
