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Why negotiating with Arafat is no longer the only game in town
Posted on 2001-12-04 21:54:50 by gato |
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 The latest Israeli military operations have focused on Mr Arafat's apparatus of power: his helicopters, security force and offices. Meanwhile Israeli officials have sought direct talks on local issues with local Palestinian leaders, cutting the Palestinian Authority out of the equation.
Together, these policies make it harder for Mr Arafat to subdue Islamic extremists in the occupied territories - the very action the US and Israel are demanding he take.
This could be a case of emotion and the need to satisfy a national thirst for vengeance trumping political strategy. But some believe that undermining Mr Arafat is the strategy.
Edward Abington, the former US consul general in Jerusalem who is now a political consultant to the Palestinian leadership, said: "I personally think that Sharon is out to destroy Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as a long-range objective."
One possibility is that Israel would simply overturn the Oslo process and invade the autonomous areas, imposing direct rule. But such a move would be unpopular in Israel as it would expose the nation's troops to a permanent low-intensity conflict.
Instead, Mr Abington suggested, Israel would ring Gaza and the main West Bank towns with barbed-wire and seal them off. "Gaza will just become a huge prison camp," he said.
The fall of Mr Arafat would doubtless trigger a power struggle between the older generation of leaders, the younger street leaders and the radicals in Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
If the territories imploded in chaos, the likely Israeli response would be to keep them sealed. Ultimately, brutalised volatile and weakened Palestinian enclaves would emerge.
It is a vision portrayed by Israel's ex-counter-terrorist supremo, Meir Dagan, a few years ago. Israel would never be safe from terrorism, he argued, and territorial concessions would only embolden the terrorists. All Israel could do was to whittle down and control the areas from which terrorists operated.
When the US forced Mr Sharon to come up with a ceasefire negotiator last month, he chose General Dagan. The choice left little doubt about the Israeli leader's vision of the future.
See full text of the article from the Guardian.
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