The actions taken by President Yasser Arafat against Palestinian militant groups in recent days should, in fairness, put to rest questions about his seriousness in reining in militants, and swing attention to Ariel Sharon to see what the Israeli prime minister is prepared to do. "Fairness" is the keyword; and therein lies the rub.
In fairness again, it is Sharon who carries much greater responsibility for the continuation of the violence. It is he who has the sole agenda of suppressing the intifada by the use of brute force. If, as a result, he can bring down Arafat and thereby eliminate the only party he could negotiate with, he would escape any obligation to pursue the peace process he abhors. Israel’s indiscriminate use of force leads to Palestinian retaliation which, in turn, allows Sharon to marshal a consensus that Arafat is solely to blame for the conflict, thus giving him the green light to finish off Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
By requiring Arafat to round up, arrest and put Hamas activists on trial, Sharon is forcing Arafat to alienate his constituency and is deliberately undermining the Authority’s prestige and credibility. He is radicalizing the Palestinian masses not against Israel alone, but against the Palestinian leadership as well.
Sharon is delighted to allow the weight of international pressure to quarantine Arafat until and unless he does Israel’s bidding. For even as Sharon is called upon to lift the siege on Palestinian areas, freeze settlement construction, withdraw his army from reoccupied Palestinian towns and stop extrajudicial killings, no one doubts that Arafat will be put under much greater pressure to dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The pressure will come from Washington as much as from Tel Aviv, making the situation doubly unfair. US President Bush has not asked Sharon to exercise restraint in his latest onslaughts on Palestinian lives and lands, leaving the Israeli prime minister to deal with Arafat the way he sees fit. Despite the closure of over two dozen Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices and the arrest of militants in the hundreds, neither Sharon nor Bush is appeased. They keep referring to the arrested men as small fry. In addition, on Saturday, the US veto at the UN effectively shot down the efforts to get the Security Council to send an international observer force to the region. And by all practical measures, the American stance on who is responsible for instigating and for ending the violence is the same as Sharon’s.
This myth that Sharon has perpetuated about Arafat has made many vent their anger solely on the Palestinian leader who is now being called upon to carry out the collaborator’s role to impossible lengths. If he does or does not, he risks his political future.
For Arafat to move against activists he must get something in return from Israel other than the daily suffering and killing of his people. Failure to do so exposes him and the Authority to further world denunciations of Palestinian violence and military onslaughts from a vengeful Sharon, who does not want Arafat to succeed — for, that would rob him of the pretext to get rid of him altogether.
This is Catch-22, if ever there was one.
