Arafat’s Folly: Is It Over at Last? : Maybe now he will stop trying to appease zealots

Does Yasser Arafat at last understand that the Palestinian religious zealots who have sworn to destroy the peace process with Israel are unappeasable, that it is impossible to accommodate their absolutist views and folly to try? Since last Sunday, when the latest terrorist outrages occurred, he seems to have stiffened his resolve to bring the extremists under control, perhaps finally accepting the hard truth that it is his survival rather than Israel’s that is really at stake.

The day after the two attacks, which killed seven Israelis and an American in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian court sentenced a member of the radical Islamic Jihad to 15 years in prison for training youths to attack Israelis. The next day the same court handed down a life sentence for a Muslim cleric convicted of inciting others to carry out suicide attacks. Subsequently a member of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority suggested that seizures of unlicensed weapons in Gaza might begin soon.

GRAND TEMPORIZER: All of this, to be sure, falls well short of announcing an implacable determination to face down the extremists once and for all. Jailing a few sympathizers won’t deter armed militants. Announcing a plan to confiscate weapons simply gives the holders of those weapons plenty of time to hide them. Still, these may be the surest signs yet that Arafat and his advisers have concluded the extremists must be dealt with.

But unavoidable doubts remain. Arafat is a born equivocator and temporizer. That was the secret of his tenure as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, where the postponement of hard decisions and messy showdowns became the measure of his success. Now, carrying a responsibility he often seems unsure how to use, this same talent for indecisiveness could prove his undoing.

The rejectionists who are out to sabotage the peace process are undeniably making gains, not just among the impoverished youth of the Gaza Strip but even more significantly in turning Israeli public opinion away from the peace process. More urgently than ever, the imperative for Arafat is to control Gaza’s extremists or face the prospect that the Israeli-Palestinian status quo will be frozen, far short of the emergence of a viable Palestinian entity, far short of real peace.

ISRAEL’S BURDEN: The Israeli government also has hard decisions to make. About 5,000 Israelis live in the Gaza Strip, some in isolated settlements that depend on full-time army protection. These settlements, in a territory destined to come under full Palestinian control, are not an asset for Israel but a heavy security burden. Last Sunday’s terrorist explosions killed seven soldiers, two of them women, who were in Gaza primarily to protect the area’s Israeli settlers. It is never easy to ask 18- and 19- year-olds to be ready to die for their country; it’s especially hard to ask them to die in defense of someone else’s ideological claims. Arafat must corral his crazies. Israel, meanwhile, must decide whether the Gaza settlements in any way continue to serve its national interests.