TEL AVIV — Regardless of whether Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon believes Yasser Arafat to be “irrelevant,” or whether he severs communications with the Palestinian leader or calls for new talks, Sharon may merely be posturing, masking a so-called “secret plan.”
Israeli analysts and politicians say Sharon and Arafat — and those they represent — are likely to remain mired in the painful status quo despite Arafat’s pledge Sunday to crack down on terror and his shutdown of Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices.
The Israeli daily Yediot Achronot predicted last week that Arafat’s regime will soon collapse and claimed every move Sharon has taken recently was part of a “secret plan” developed by his counterterrorism adviser, Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan.
The theory stipulates that Sharon’s unchanging worldview informed his decision last week to sever ties with Arafat: The prime minister never believed Arafat was anything but a murderer with whom negotiations should never be conducted, and the Oslo accords were the biggest disaster to befall Israel in recent history.
However, Sharon’s ultimate goal — eliminating Arafat and transforming the Palestinian Authority into a “moderate entity” — required the acquiescence of the United States, Egypt and Jordan.
According to the theory, when President Bush voiced tacit approval for Israeli retaliatory measures — and when the United States, Egypt and Jordan failed to issue the usual condemnations of Israeli missiles blasting Palestinian installations — Sharon believed the time was ripe to implement his grand plan.
Sharon adviser Dore Gold justified the decision to dismiss Arafat as “irrelevant,” saying that Israel “has two choices — to defend ourselves or to do nothing. We’ve obviously chosen the former.”
Israel and the Palestinian Authority “have gone through eight cease-fires under U.S. auspices. Should we try for nine, or 10 or 22 cease-fires, the number of cease-fires brokered between Arafat and former King Hussein of Jordan in 1970?” Gold asked. “The question is how many Israelis have to die.”
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority closed six Hamas offices in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday. These included a planning office, a printing press and food storehouses, Israel Radio reported.
Since Arafat’s address on Sunday calling for an end to attacks on Israel, 33 Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices have been closed in the Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
In addition, Palestinian officials said Wednesday they had arrested 15 members of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces on suspicion of taking part in attacks on Israel.
In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres announced that Israel was willing to withdraw from regions where the Palestinians have taken strong action against suspected terrorists.
While Sharon may not be talking with Arafat, earlier this week he did call for Israeli-Palestinian security talks to prevent terrorist attacks. As part of the anti-terror initiative, Israel offered to loosen its military grip on either Nablus or Jenin to give Arafat an incentive to crack down in areas that Israel describes as hotbeds of terrorist activity.
The Palestinians “are complaining all the time that we are hindering their efforts to take action,” an Israeli official told Reuters. Ahmed Abed-Rahman, an Arafat aide, said the Israeli offer did not go far enough and called for Israel to lift its closure of all West Bank cities.
Most Israelis, including Sharon and Gold, remain unconvinced by Arafat’s latest pledge to clamp down on terror groups.
In a phone conversation Wednesday, Sharon told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Arafat still has not “made a strategic decision to abandon the path of terror,” Sharon’s office said in a statement. He also told Blair that several recent attacks on Israelis were carried out by groups linked to Arafat.
Gold maintained that Arafat has done nothing substantive to stop the terror paralyzing Israeli’s cities and economy. Gold said, in fact, half those attacks are carried out by Arafat-affiliated groups like Fatah and Force 17. As a result, Arafat makes himself technically and operationally irrelevant.
According to Gold, Israel will continue to eliminate terrorists in operations like the one in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza over the weekend, where five Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded or detained.
In addition, on Wednesday, Israeli troops moved briefly into Palestinian Authority territory near Jenin, detonating a bomb that the Israeli army said was slated for an attack on Israeli civilians, according to the Associated Press.
In such scenarios, Gold said, Israel has been sidestepping Arafat and “clearing out the terrorists” on its own, while simultaneously punishing Arafat for his failure to act.
However, for the second time in Sharon’s long military and political career, international pressure precludes him from eliminating Arafat. The first opportunity came in 1982 when an Israeli sniper was said to have had Arafat in his sights as the PLO leader boarded a boat to Tunis.
The sniper did not receive the green light then, and neither will the Israeli tanks now parked outside Arafat’s Ramallah offices, their turrets trained on an impossible target.
The problem for Sharon is that “as long as Arafat is alive, he is relevant. We have tried to write him off but we cannot, because he is the symbol of the Palestinian struggle for independence and he is here to stay, whether we like it or not,” said Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on terrorism and dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.
“This declaration of Arafat as ‘irrelevant’ is just another way to pressure him to return to relevancy by acting against terror,” Sprinzak noted.
Sprinzak also cautioned against underestimating Sharon, whom he calls a master strategist.
No one really knows Sharon’s long-term goals, Sprinzak said, but it is clear that underlying his policy is a fear of demonstrating weakness and a wish to convey the message that “Israel can damage” the Palestinians “much more than they can damage us.”
Rather than a watershed event ushering in a new era, shunning Arafat is just another phase in the cycle of violence, as is the Palestinian leader’s pledge to stop terror, according to Sprinzak.
Eventually, he predicted, the violence will subside and Sharon will attempt to implement a slower, phased peace process with a more pragmatic generation of Palestinian leaders. But since Sharon cannot groom a new Palestinian leader — and since he doesn’t dare dispose of the current one — he must make do with Arafat.
The prevailing feeling in Knesset offices and among the Cabinet ministers is that by destroying the symbols of Palestinian sovereignty — including airports, Arafat’s rickety helicopters and security and police installations — Israel can force the Palestinians to give up the violent intifada.
In the meantime, Secretary of State Colin Powell recently reiterated the U.S. position that it still considers Arafat the legitimate, elected leader of the Palestinian people. And the current EU president, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, said the attempts to discredit Arafat “are initiatives contrary to peace that also undermine his ability to fight terrorism.”
While praising Arafat’s renunciation of violence Sunday, American officials said the test would be Arafat’s actions, not his words.
With 37 Israeli civilians killed in terror attacks since December 1 — more than twice the annual average of soldiers killed during Israel’s extended occupation of southern Lebanon — Israelis were beginning to wonder how much more the situation can deteriorate.
“Violence breeds more violence, and this round will drive us deeper into the mud than we have ever been,” said Israel’s former chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak.
But if Arafat’s most recent pledge to stop violence is serious — similar to a crackdown he launched in 1996 after a series of suicide bombings rocked Israel — the Sharon administration would be forced to recognize it, which might ultimately lead the sides back to the negotiating table.
For now, though, the chances of that “look grim indeed,” Lipkin-Shahak said.