President Yasser Arafat has received much praise for his recent announcement that, for the first time, he will appoint a prime minister within the Palestinian Authority. “This is a first step,” Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN special envoy to the Middle East said in agreeing that Arafat’s nominee to the position “has to be credible and has to be empowered as a necessity in order to get the parties back to the table again.” The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan also welcomed the move, saying that he looked forward to working with a “credible and fully empowered Palestinian prime minister.”

To be sure, this is not Arafat’s “first step.” He has previously carried out political reforms outlined in the international peace plan, known as the road map. He has appointed a new Cabinet and a new interior minister, drafted a constitution, called for elections and has charged his finance minister, Salam Fayyad, with rooting out corruption in the Palestinian Authority. And in a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in January, just days before Blair’s meeting in Washington with President Bush, Arafat accepted the road map suggested by the United States and three other parties which make up the so-called quartet, as a way to revive peace talks and to create a Palestinian state in principle.

Arafat is doing what has been asked of him.

“We have done our part, now it’s up to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and also to the quartet and above all to the American side, to adopt, declare and begin the process of implementing the road map,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said.

Tomorrow, members of the quartet — the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — are expected to meet in London for further reforms. But efforts to resume negotiations have been floundering for months, with the upper levels of the Bush administration all but ignoring the intifada while focusing attention on gathering support for action against Iraq. In addition, US officials have accepted Israel’s view that the road map should be on hold until Sharon forms his new government.

The road map outlines the next steps toward a Mideast peace deal, including an end to violence and cessation of all settlement activity by the Israelis. In recent months, though, Israel has sharply escalated settlement activity in the West Bank and in an interview with The Washington Post, Sharon dismissed the quartet as “nothing — don’t take it seriously.”

The US, too, had words of support for Arafat’s announcement but only because it and Israel see it as a way to push Arafat out of the picture. A State Department spokesman verifies this theory by having stated the following: “We hope that the candidate named will have the legal, legislative, popular backing to implement the broad reforms called for by the quartet.”

The spokesman was speaking as if this new prime minister will be doing all the work and will have all the authority vested in him while Arafat, Washington hopes, will play second fiddle. Arafat, who was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, has been the leader of the Palestinians for more than three decades and is the revolutionary icon and symbol of their fight for statehood and independence. Arafat’s announcement provided no details of the powers or degree of independence a prime minister would have. Nor did he say who the prime minister might be. The quartet would ideally like Arafat to make an announcement by tomorrow when its members meet in London.

Whoever he will be, the United States and Israel feel the new prime minister will not carry enough weight; they want him to be more powerful than Arafat. Both countries refuse to deal with Arafat but a new premier will not take the president’s place. Arafat is the elected leader of the Palestinians and all roads must lead to him.