-Caveat Lector-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Checkered pasts, current extremism trap Arafat, Sharon
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, October 21, 2001
Jerusalem -- For three decades, Yasser Arafat has been
synonymous with the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
Throughout that time, Ariel Sharon has been his most relentless
foe. The future of that struggle -- unavoidably bound up with
America's war on terrorism -- may now rest on a single
momentous question: Can both men escape the violent, erratic
legacy of their own pasts to negotiate and implement a peace
agreement?
Jewish and Arab extremists are betting they cannot. In the wake
of a murderous escalation of assassination and
counter-assassination, both Arafat, who is president of the
Palestinian Authority, and Sharon, Israel's prime minister, find
themselves caught between the extremists' growing power and
intransigence -- and the possibility of all-out war if no
concessions are made.
The question took on explosive proportions last week after the
killing Wednesday of the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam
Ze'evi, by a militant Palestinian faction.
In response, Israeli Defense Force tanks have roared into
Palestinian cities, including Bethlehem, in one of the biggest
military incursions in the past year. By yesterday, at least 17
Palestinians and one Israeli had been killed in ferocious
gunbattles, including two officers of Arafat's security force and an
11-year-old girl whose elementary school was hit by tank
shelling.
Eight Palestinians, three of them bystanders, were killed by
Israeli fire, the largest single-day toll in two months.
Earlier in the week a car bombing, believed to be the work of
Israeli agents, killed a militant implicated in several fatal attacks
on Israelis and two of his associates.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority reportedly arrested 20
members of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, which has acknowledged responsibility for Ze'evi's
slaying. But that is unlikely to satisfy Israel, which earlier in the
week presented Palestinian officials with a list of suspects in the
Ze'evi murder, demanding they be hunted down and handed
over for prosecution -- a demand that the Palestinian Authority's
minister for information, Yasser Abbed Rabbo, rebuffed as
"blackmail."
Whatever the outcome of the current round of bloodletting, a
major crossroads in the conflict appears to have been reached,
although no one can predict with any certainty where it will lead.
"We are utterly on the highway to hell," said a demoralized leader
of Peace Now, the main Israeli anti-war lobby.
'ERA OF ARAFAT IS OVER'
Deaf to U.S. pleas for restraint, some Israeli political figures are
now calling for the destruction of Arafat's political organization.
"We will act against them in the way currently accepted by the
international community," Israeli Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar
said, in a clear allusion to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan's
Taliban regime.
The Yediot Ahronot daily, a Hebrew-language newspaper with
ties to Sharon's conservative Likud party, reported that the prime
minister told his Cabinet on Thursday, "As far as I'm concerned,
the era of Arafat is over." Nabil Abu Rdainah, a close aide to the
Palestinian leader, charged that Israel has a "complete plan" to
assassinate Arafat and other Palestinian officials.
The United States, anxious to shore up Arab support for its war
against Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda network and the Taliban
government, has strongly protested Israel's targeted
assassination policy. U.S. State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher specifically said the logic for eliminating bin
Laden through force does not apply to Arafat, whose effort to
establish an independent Palestinian state has been publicly
endorsed by the Bush administration.
But many Israelis believe Arafat personally oversaw the suicide
attacks and shootings that have racked Israeli cities and Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories since the second
Palestinian intifada was set off by Sharon's controversial
intrusion on the grounds of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque in
September 2000. His reluctance to crack down on militant
organizations such as Hamas has fueled those suspicions.
"The full responsibility (for Ze'evi's murder) falls squarely on
Arafat, as someone who has controlled, and continues to
control, terrorism, and as one who has not -- to this day -- taken
even one serious step to prevent terrorism, " Sharon told the
Knesset, Israel's parliament, on Thursday.
But some Israeli experts doubt Arafat exerts such control.
Palestinian extremists "all have a common enemy, Israel, and a
common aim --
to embarrass Arafat," said Gabriel Ben-Dor, director of the
University of Haifa's National Security Studies Center.
Israeli doves also have become highly critical of Arafat. "He has
betrayed the Israeli left -- which had been talking with him about
peace for 25 years --
by suddenly invoking the 'right for return' for 700,000 Palestinians
who left Israel after the 1948 war," said Gilad Ben-Nun, research
director of Peace Now.
Even Arafat's diplomatic representative in Jerusalem, Sari
Nusseibeh, recently said that this demand will have to be
dropped if peace is ever to be achieved.
As a result, Arafat finds himself painted into a seemingly
impossible corner.
If he hands over suspects in the Ze'evi killing to Israel, as Sharon
demands, he will lose what support he maintains in the Arab
streets. If he refuses, calls from those Israeli officials to remove
Arafat from the scene -- through assassination or exile from the
occupied territories -- may become more persuasive.
Ariel Sharon, no less than Arafat, has been marginalized by the
rising power of Israeli extremists, and by a reputation for
complicity in violence.
"For us, he will always be the man who opened the doors of
Sabra and Shatila to sadistic murderers," said a member of the
Palestinian National Council, referring to the refugee camps
where hundreds of Palestinian women and children were
massacred in 1982 by Christian militiamen allied to Israel
during its invasion of Lebanon.
Sharon, who was Israel's defense minister at the time, was
found by an Israeli commission to have "indirect responsibility"
in the massacres for giving the militia a green light to enter the
camps in search of PLO guerrillas.
Like Arafat, he is also widely viewed by both Palestinians and
many Israelis as a man whose promises are empty. He faced
an angry mutiny of conservative politicians on Monday, when --
under U.S. pressure to ease military controls in the West Bank --
he agreed to withdraw troops guarding Jewish settlements in
the Palestinian territories. Three days later, after the
assassination of Ze'evi, Sharon reversed position, asserting that
he would never yield Jewish-occupied land to Palestinians, and
ordering an end to all contacts between his government and the
Palestinian Authority.
"This leader, when all is said and done, does not want to come
to an agreement with the Palestinians," Israeli political analyst
Gideon Same wrote of Sharon in the Jerusalem Post.
The essential tragedy of the Middle East, said Peace Now's
Ben-Nun, "is the absence from the scene of leaders with the
courage and steadfastness to go forward, toward peace,
because of what they believe in."
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/10/21/MN
205341.DTL
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
