For Arafat, the Hard Part Is Still to Come

In the last four months, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed a key peace agreement with Israel, mourned the slaying of his Israeli partner, Yitzhak Rabin, assumed control of Arab towns in the West Bank and became the first freely elected president of his people.

Arafat won Saturday’s election with 88% of the vote, exposing the weakness of opposition groups such as the extremist Hamas organization and effectively carving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in stone.

Now comes the hard part.

Arafat must use his new legitimacy to tackle the tough issues still on the negotiating table with Israel--Jerusalem, the city both sides claim as their capital; the Palestinians’ demand for statehood; Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Clearly the 65-year-old Arafat has won more in his short life as a peacemaker than in all his decades of making war on Israel. The relatively clean election suddenly makes him the Arab world’s most democratic leader and strengthens his hand for the final stage of peace negotiations that is to begin in May.

But it does not guarantee him any happy solutions.

Before the final negotiations can even begin, Arafat must make good on his promise to amend articles of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s charter calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. In the interim accord Arafat signed with Rabin in September, he committed the Palestine National Council--the PLO’s legislature--to eliminating the hostile articles within two months after Palestinian elections.

Many members of the PNC, however, are leftist hard-liners, exiled for years, who oppose the changes and view Arafat’s step-by-step peace deal as bowing to Israel. In the past, Arafat has used delays to finesse the issue, but now Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who faces his own election bid this year, says he will halt any further Israeli troop redeployment and the rest of the peace process if Arafat does not keep his word.

“There is a very big question mark here,” said Mark Heller, a fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. “If they don’t jump over that hurdle, it is going to be very difficult to move forward.”

Arafat may try to increase the size of the approximately 450-member PLO council to garner the yea votes he needs.

From afar, it might appear as if the best thing for Arafat to do would be to use his newfound status to consolidate his territorial gains--the Gaza Strip and about 30% of the West Bank--and focus his energies on developing the infrastructure of his nascent country.

But the vast majority of Arafat voters were casting their ballots in favor of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is what Arafat pledged in his campaign, and the Palestinian people saw Arafat as the leader most able to lead them to this goal.

The point was driven home again Monday, when senior PLO official Mahmoud Abbas was quoted in Israeli newspapers as saying that the new, 88-member legislative council elected along with Arafat will declare Palestinian independence during its three-year term.

“The council that was elected has brought us five minutes from independence, and the council will declare independence during its three-year term,” Abbas said.

Israeli officials say that independence is something only Israel can grant to the Palestinians and that the size and authority of the Palestinian autonomous area will be determined through negotiations.

Israel also says there is no room for compromise on Jerusalem. The eastern half of Jerusalem and the Old City were captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and will never again be separated from the western half, Israel says.

Palestinian leaders allege that it was with an eye toward final negotiations that Israel put thousands of police officers on the streets of East Jerusalem on election day. They charge that the police frightened away potential voters in order to reduce the Palestinian profile in, and claim on, the city.

When the voter turnout in East Jerusalem proved to be about half that of anywhere else but Hebron--the only West Bank city where Israeli troops remain--Israel’s minister of internal security, Moshe Shahal, leaped on the results: “The Arab residents of Jerusalem voted for the unity of Jerusalem and for the status quo in the city.”

In his view, that means those who abstained do not want to be citizens of a future Palestinian state. Many Palestinian residents of Jerusalem respond that they did not want to vote “under occupation.”