OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 9 February — Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said US Vice President Dick Cheney told him that Israel could "hang" Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as far as he was concerned, Yedioth Aharonot reported yesterday. "The vice president told me: ‘As far as I am concerned, you can even hang him’," Ben Eliezer told the mass circulation paper, adding that he heard similar comments from advisers of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"On this subject (of Arafat), Cheney is more extreme than Revaham Zeevi," he said, referring to Israel’s far-right tourism minister who was assassinated by Palestinian radicals in October. Ben Eliezer said Thursday after talks in Washington with Cheney, Rumsfeld and US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he had called upon Washington to boycott Arafat and to open a dialogue with other Palestinian leaders.
Rice and Cheney told him that talking to Arafat is "a waste of time" and the vice president was the most extreme on this point, he told a press conference in the US capital. The White House, however, firmly denied Ben Eliezer’s remarks attributed to Cheney. "There is no difference between what the vice president has said in public or private and what the president said yesterday in the Oval Office concerning our policy on Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority," said White House national security spokesman Sean McCormack in Washington.
President George W. Bush, speaking to reporters after meeting here with the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, "made very clear what he expects of Chairman Arafat, and that is to make a 100-percent effort to end the violence," said McCormack. "The Middle East is too important a region not to stay engaged, and we will remain engaged," the spokesman told reporters. Ben Eliezer urged Washington to focus on a circle of Palestinian officials around Arafat and said he himself had met the head of the main Palestinian security service in Gaza, Col. Muhammad Dahlan.
