Pressure from the UN General Assembly may have persuaded Israel not to go ahead with its outrageous plans to deport Yasser Arafat or assassinate him. The assembly’s resolution on Friday, which called on Israel to back down from its threat to “remove” Arafat, should send a strong enough message to Israel to desist from what the Palestinians consider “an assault on the Palestinian national dignity and the democratic choice of our people.”
But Arafat is far from being out of the woods. The vote in the General Assembly is not legally binding. Moreover, nothing should be put beyond Israel, especially with Ariel Sharon at the helm. In addition, the US vetoed a similar resolution in the Security Council just three days earlier. All three elements spell the same thing: If Arafat is fairly safe, it is only for the moment.
To be fair, the United States did make moves to restrain Israel from carrying out its decision to expel Arafat or even kill him. But there is no love lost between Arafat and the present White House. Washington insists that its position toward Arafat is essentially unchanged — it refuses to deal with him because, it claims, he has proven to be an obstacle to peace.
The American administration fears that Arafat’s removal would escalate violence and cause huge anger in the Arab world. But Sharon and his ministers regularly, and often with impunity, turn a deaf ear to American remonstrations, an example being the settlements where, under the terms of the road map, all new building should be frozen. American reminders this week that money spent on settlement-building will be pared from loan guarantees had no effect on the building going on in many settlements.
So resolved is Israel not to play by the rules of peacemaking that it has rejected totally the Palestinians’ offer of a new cease-fire. Arafat’s newly appointed security adviser, Jibril Rajoub, offered a “comprehensive and unlimited Palestinian cease-fire”. The Palestinians would end all acts of violence in return for Israel ending its assassinations of Palestinian militants and lifting the blockades that cripple Palestinian life. Hamas is said to be on board, but Israel dismissed the suggestion out of hand.
Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, told European Union diplomats this week that Israel would not be taking immediate steps against Arafat and that calls by some ministers to kill him were not official government policy. But by his own admission, Sharon would have liked nothing better than to kill Arafat in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
As for the United States, its veto confirmed the Palestinians’ worst suspicions, that American opposition to Israeli policies is anything but permanent. They know from experience that what the US administration prohibits one day, it may permit the next.
