- Frank Viviano Writes
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- Checkered pasts, current extremism
trap Arafat, Sharon
- Jerusalem -- For three decades, Yasser Arafat has
been synonymous with the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
Throughout that time, Ariel Sharon has been his most relentless
foe. The future of that struggle -- unavoidably bound up with
America's war on terrorism -- may now rest on a single momentous
question: Can both men escape the violent, erratic legacy of
their own pasts to negotiate and implement a peace agreement?
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- Jewish and Arab extremists are betting they cannot. In the
wake of a murderous escalation of assassination and counter-assassination,
both Arafat, who is president of the Palestinian Authority, and
Sharon, Israel's prime minister, find themselves caught between
the extremists' growing power and intransigence -- and the possibility
of all-out war if no concessions are made.
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- The question took on explosive proportions last week after
the killing Wednesday of the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam
Ze'evi, by a militant Palestinian faction.
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- In response, Israeli Defense Force tanks have roared into
Palestinian cities, including Bethlehem, in one of the biggest
military incursions in the past year. By yesterday, at least
17 Palestinians and one Israeli had been killed in ferocious
gunbattles, including two officers of Arafat's security force
and an 11-year-old girl whose elementary school was hit by tank
shelling.
- Eight Palestinians, three of them bystanders, were killed
by Israeli fire, the largest single-day toll in two months.
- Earlier in the week a car bombing, believed to be the work
of Israeli agents, killed a militant implicated in several fatal
attacks on Israelis and two of his associates.
- Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority reportedly arrested
20 members of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, which has acknowledged responsibility for Ze'evi's
slaying. But that is unlikely to satisfy Israel, which earlier
in the week presented Palestinian officials with a list of suspects
in the Ze'evi murder, demanding they be hunted down and handed
over for prosecution -- a demand that the Palestinian Authority's
minister for information, Yasser Abbed Rabbo, rebuffed as "blackmail."
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- Whatever the outcome of the current round of bloodletting,
a major crossroads in the conflict appears to have been reached,
although no one can predict with any certainty where it will
lead. "We are utterly on the highway to hell," said
a demoralized leader of Peace Now, the main Israeli anti-war
lobby.
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- 'ERA OF ARAFAT IS OVER'
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- Deaf to U.S. pleas for restraint, some Israeli political
figures are now calling for the destruction of Arafat's political
organization. "We will act against them in the way currently
accepted by the international community," Israeli Cabinet
Secretary Gideon Saar said, in a clear allusion to the U.S. attack
on Afghanistan's Taliban regime.
- The Yediot Ahronot daily, a Hebrew-language newspaper with
ties to Sharon's conservative Likud party, reported that the
prime minister told his Cabinet on Thursday, "As far as
I'm concerned, the era of Arafat is over." Nabil Abu Rdainah,
a close aide to the Palestinian leader, charged that Israel has
a "complete plan" to assassinate Arafat and other Palestinian
officials.
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- The United States, anxious to shore up Arab support for its
war against Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda network and the Taliban
government, has strongly protested Israel's targeted assassination
policy. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher specifically
said the logic for eliminating bin Laden through force does not
apply to Arafat, whose effort to establish an independent Palestinian
state has been publicly endorsed by the Bush administration.
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- But many Israelis believe Arafat personally oversaw the suicide
attacks and shootings that have racked Israeli cities and Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories since the second Palestinian
intifada was set off by Sharon's controversial intrusion on the
grounds of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque in September 2000. His
reluctance to crack down on militant organizations such as Hamas
has fueled those suspicions.
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- "The full responsibility (for Ze'evi's murder) falls
squarely on Arafat, as someone who has controlled, and continues
to control, terrorism, and as one who has not -- to this day
-- taken even one serious step to prevent terrorism, " Sharon
told the Knesset, Israel's parliament, on Thursday.
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- But some Israeli experts doubt Arafat exerts such control.
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- Palestinian extremists "all have a common enemy, Israel,
and a common aim --
- to embarrass Arafat," said Gabriel Ben-Dor, director
of the University of Haifa's National Security Studies Center.
- Israeli doves also have become highly critical of Arafat.
"He has betrayed the Israeli left -- which had been talking
with him about peace for 25 years --
- by suddenly invoking the 'right for return' for 700,000 Palestinians
who left Israel after the 1948 war," said Gilad Ben-Nun,
research director of Peace Now.
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- Even Arafat's diplomatic representative in Jerusalem, Sari
Nusseibeh, recently said that this demand will have to be dropped
if peace is ever to be achieved.
- As a result, Arafat finds himself painted into a seemingly
impossible corner.
- If he hands over suspects in the Ze'evi killing to Israel,
as Sharon demands, he will lose what support he maintains in
the Arab streets. If he refuses, calls from those Israeli officials
to remove Arafat from the scene -- through assassination or exile
from the occupied territories -- may become more persuasive.
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- Ariel Sharon, no less than Arafat, has been marginalized
by the rising power of Israeli extremists, and by a reputation
for complicity in violence.
- "For us, he will always be the man who opened the doors
of Sabra and Shatila to sadistic murderers," said a member
of the Palestinian National Council, referring to the refugee
camps where hundreds of Palestinian women and children were massacred
in 1982 by Christian militiamen allied to Israel during its invasion
of Lebanon.
- Sharon, who was Israel's defense minister at the time, was
found by an Israeli commission to have "indirect responsibility"
in the massacres for giving the militia a green light to enter
the camps in search of PLO guerrillas.
- Like Arafat, he is also widely viewed by both Palestinians
and many Israelis as a man whose promises are empty. He faced
an angry mutiny of conservative politicians on Monday, when --
under U.S. pressure to ease military controls in the West Bank
-- he agreed to withdraw troops guarding Jewish settlements in
the Palestinian territories. Three days later, after the assassination
of Ze'evi, Sharon reversed position, asserting that he would
never yield Jewish-occupied land to Palestinians, and ordering
an end to all contacts between his government and the Palestinian
Authority.
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- "This leader, when all is said and done, does not want
to come to an agreement with the Palestinians," Israeli
political analyst Gideon Same wrote of Sharon in the Jerusalem
Post.
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- The essential tragedy of the Middle East, said Peace Now's
Ben-Nun, "is the absence from the scene of leaders with
the courage and steadfastness to go forward, toward peace, because
of what they believe in."
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