What Arafat is Up To
Bar-Illan, David
What Arafat Is Up To by David Bar-Illan Jerusalem When Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law returned to Baghdad from their haven in Amman only to be murdered promptly by the grandfather of their...
...He has referred only to Hamas's military wing, and even then the censure is vague...
...They want Israel to withdraw more quickly from all the territories, and ultimately from the region...
...Soldiers were ambushed, kidnapped, stabbed, and shot...
...On first glance, these were indisputable assertions...
...The facts, known not only to Peres but to anyone who bothered to study the news, pointed in a different direction...
...The largest Arab gathering in the country's history, some 300,000, accompanied his casket...
...But the fundamental facts will stay the same...
...He has lionized the "martyrs" of the Palestinian revolution, glorifying not only those who died in the struggle before he signed the Oslo agreement but all those who have died or been imprisoned since...
...To the contrary: In all public addresses, Arafat sends his blessings to Hamas chief Sheik Ahmad Yassin and vows to have the organization's prisoners released from Israeli jails...
...For more than a year he topped Israel's wanted list...
...When a booby-trapped cellular phone killed the Engineer, the mourning among Palestinians recalled the grief in Iran at the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...The Palestinian Authority's ''Police"-a euphemism for the Palestinian army-fired a 21-gun salute at his grave...
...But above all, the terrorists want the credit for this withdrawal, and they have good reason to believe they can achieve their aim...
...The economy was flourishing...
...What Arafat Is Up To by David Bar-Illan Jerusalem When Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law returned to Baghdad from their haven in Amman only to be murdered promptly by the grandfather of their children, Israelis were flabbergasted...
...With the number of terrorism fatalities since the Oslo agreement at over 200 (a larger number than in any 30-month period since the establishment of the state), the backlash against the recent bombings may be stronger than Hamas and the PLO expected...
...And, above all, there had been no terrorist activity for seven months...
...Now, however, it is entirely possible that things have gotten out of hand...
...The Israeli government, too, will now display hawkish activism, taking some truly tough measures against the Hamas operatives it can lay its hands on...
...Nor did it signal a real change...
...In a speech on Jordanian television that day, he mentioned neither Israel nor peace...
...David Bar-Illan is the editor of the Jerusalem Post...
...The first major warning signal came after the killing of Yihye Ayyash-the notorious terrorist known as the Engineer...
...The reports of such condemnations are false...
...Over and over again, they have been assured by the Israeli government, the Clinton administration, and the European Union that no matter what they do, no matter how many Israelis they slaughter, Israel will continue the process and its withdrawal...
...But the number of fatalities was relatively small, and the stories hardly made the news...
...And in a rally on the West Bank near Hebron a few days later, Arafat called the Engineer a shaheed-a martyr of Islam and the Palestinian revolution...
...Arafat himself paid a condolence call to Hamas leaders...
...It was wholly consistent with Palestinian conduct in the past two years...
...Nor has he condemned Hamas after the recent spate of suicide bombings...
...And Israel will sooner or later have to reach the conclusion that the new Middle East bears a striking resemblance to the old, and act accordingly...
...But he also understands that there is a limit to what Israel will take before a backlash sets in...
...Three high-ranking PLO officers joined in the ritual...
...Arafat remains a terrorist who wants to destroy Israel...
...Yet only a man committed to self-deception could make them...
...Only a combination of sheer luck and quick thinking by the soldiers who were escorting the buses led to the happy result: Both car bombs exploded without causing deaths...
...Suddenly, they realized that utopia-the happy, prosperous, and peaceful era Prime Minister Shimon Peres has dubbed "The New Middle East"- may not be around the corner...
...What they could not fathom was not the routine Iraqi atrocity, but how men born and bred in the Middle East could be gullible enough to trust the blandishments of a murderous dictator like Saddam...
...At a gathering on the very day Peres gave his ecstatic interview, an effigy of a bus marked "Dizengoff Number 5" was set on fire...
...Arafat was curbing the Islamic and radical movements in his own unique way and doing a wonderful job of it...
...The bus bombers and their dispatchers are not out to undermine Arafat and his regime, nor are they opposed to a process that includes Israeli withdrawal...
...This is not the way it appeared only two days before the first of the recent bus bombings...
...He has never criticized Hamas...
...Israel, he said, was enjoying unprecedented popularity in the world...
...In an outright violation of the Oslo agreements, neither he nor any of the other dozen top terrorists living in Gaza and Jericho was extradited to Israel...
...The graduating classes of his police force in Jericho no longer make the Nazi salute, and he now routinely condemns acts of terrorism in unequivocal terms...
...To claim, then, that Hamas is opposed to the Oslo process while the PLO is in favor of it is to misunderstand the dynamics of the Middle East...
...Emerging from these negotiations, Hamas representative Khaled Mashaal said that Hamas views its military activities as "a factor designed to help the Palestinian negotiator-the PLO...
...The plan envisions acquiring as much land as possible from Israel by peaceful means, establishing a Palestinian state on it, then using it as a springboard for an armed struggle that would draw in the Arab world for the final war against the Jewish state...
...Nor did the Israeli army's evacuation of several West Bank Arab towns in December proceed as smoothly as advertised...
...It took the sight of 60 funerals in nine days here to make Israelis wonder if they too were not behaving like the hapless Iraqis...
...Nor was this conduct an expression of rage triggered by the Engineer's killing...
...In an interview, Peres viewed the future with heady optimism bordering on arrogance...
...Hamas and other Islamic groups will continue their jihad with his tacit approval...
...Only a year ago, following the Beit Lid massacre in which 22 West Bank civilians died, he flippantly dismissed questions about condemnation with a derisive chuckle...
...Even in Israel, these incidents-and the almost daily acts of terror, like tossing gas bombs and sporadically firing on Israeli vehicles-were considered the sputterings of a dying radical fringe opposed to the peace craved by the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians...
...Four months ago, immediately before the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there had been a coordinated attack on buses in the Gush Katif area near the Gaza strip by two suicide bombers driving explosives-laden cars...
...Instead, he referred to the 1974 "PLO plan of stages" for Israel's destruction...
...That is why he negotiated an agreement with Hamas in Cairo, which stipulated that terrorist activity would be confined to areas not under the control of the Palestinian Authority under Arafat's command...
...Peres chose to ignore it, even though the incident could have been as lethal as the recent attacks...
...But the lull was neither as extensive nor as complete as Peres described it...
...Otherwise, as it well knows, Labor may lose the May election...
...From the very day he signed the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn in September 1993, Arafat has been consistently selling war, not peace, to his people...
...In the polls he was 10 to 15 points ahead of his rival, Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu...
...Ever since, Arafat has consistently called for holy war, jihad, against Israel, and reminded his listeners that Muhammad, too, had to make treaties with enemies at times of weakness only to break them when he became stronger...
...Arafat has been forced to moderate some of his more offensive behavior, mostly due to American pressure...
...Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, commemorations for Ayyash were held under the sponsorship of the Palestinian Authority, attended by tens of thousands...
...that trusting Yasser Arafat to be a partner in peace and a collaborator in the fight against terrorism may be a sucker's gamble...
...Had they really wanted to end the process, they would have blown themselves up near Arafat and his entourage, not in downtown Tel Aviv...
...What Arafat has come to realize is that terrorism is a useful weapon if he uses it cunningly and retains "deniability" Like most Palestinians, he believes, not unreasonably, that Israel's willingness to recognize the PLO and sign a document that would inevitably lead to the creation of a Palestinian state was not an expression of noble generosity but a retreat before terrorism...
...It is a terrorist's dream come true...
...Like all dictators, Arafat believes in shooting while negotiating...
...It was an awesome triumph of wishful thinking over the most basic of all instincts: the will to survive...
...Yet he lived freely and openly in Gaza, under the rule of the Palestinian Authority...
...True, there had been a lull in terrorist activities...
...In each, Israeli flags were burned in full sight of Palestinian officers, if not with their active participation...
...He had caused the death of at least 50 Israelis in suicide bombings he had planned and supervised...
...But there is little doubt that the Clinton administration, out to save the ''process" and its reputation as peacemaker, will do whatever it can to counter this backlash, whether by calling pious and useless international conferences on terrorism or pressing Arafat to keep a few Hamas operatives in prison longer than a week...
...What the terrorists want is painfully obvious...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 26
