Arafat’s Bind: Choosing Frying Pan or the Fire

Squeezed between an Israeli government that is relentlessly assaulting the underpinnings of his power and a Palestinian public that wants him to fight until statehood is achieved, Yasser Arafat is running out of political options.

Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon insists that Arafat jail Islamic militants, the Palestinian public is pushing him to bring them into his government and abandon the Oslo peace accords he signed with Israel in 1993. As Sharon pressures Arafat to stop all attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, growing numbers of Palestinians are urging the Palestinian Authority president to unleash his security forces and fight the Israelis head-on, whatever the cost.

If Arafat heeds the calls of Palestinians who long for him to avenge the deaths of hundreds killed during 10 months of fighting with Israel and break the Israeli army’s stranglehold on their lives, he risks the destruction of his government and the devastation of his people. If he accedes to Sharon’s demands and turns against the Islamic movements, he risks civil war.

With his popularity and his resources dwindling, Arafat can do little more than issue calls for the United Nations, the Arab world, European governments or the Bush administration to intervene and send international observers to the region. Israel has said it will not accept an observer force.

Sharon’s latest challenge to Arafat came Friday, the day after an Islamic militant blew himself up and killed 15 people in a downtown Jerusalem restaurant.

“Every time there is an attack like this, the weight of the international community comes down hard on Arafat, and he’s in a bad situation,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political analyst. “He needs to act, and this time he tried, by condemning the action, calling for a cease-fire and arresting a few people. But these are all attempts to try and get through a few difficult days.”

Unimpressed by Arafat’s response to the bombing, Sharon sent security forces to close down Palestinian offices in East Jerusalem, including Orient House, the Palestinian Authority’s de facto Foreign Ministry there. He dispatched fighter jets to bomb a Palestinian police headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from Arafat’s offices.

Israel says it closed the East Jerusalem institutions, and the Palestinian governor’s offices in Abu Dis, a village on the outskirts of the city, because they symbolized the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after the June 1967 Middle East War, as the capital of a future state.

Before the closures, Jerusalem had remained largely on the sidelines of the current fighting, which erupted last September. Palestinians say Israel’s move now will make the city a focal point of their struggle.

Prominent Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a frequent spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority, led dozens of demonstrators Saturday to the police barricades in front of Orient House, vowing to break through and retake the building.

“This is our city,” she said. “It is an occupied city, I know . . . but it is Palestinian.”

In the ensuing fracas, a policeman and 11 Palestinians were injured and 12 Palestinians arrested.

Since he was elected prime minister, Sharon has been ratcheting up pressure on Arafat and has abandoned the efforts of his predecessor, Ehud Barak, to treat Arafat as a serious partner.

But lately, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and some media commentators have fretted that Sharon may be going too far--that his unceasing attacks on Arafat threaten to lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and a reign of chaos in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that might worsen Israel’s security situation.

Sharon refuses to meet with Arafat or to authorize any negotiations with him unless all attacks on Israelis halt. He has accused Arafat of leading a “gang of thugs” rather than a government and of being committed to terror rather than to peacemaking. He has stopped transferring tax funds to the Palestinian Authority, leaving it starved for cash, and has repeatedly targeted government offices in retaliation for bombings.

Perhaps most damaging for Arafat, Sharon has stepped up the hunting down and killing of militants inside Palestinian-controlled territory. Palestinians, many of whom regard these men as folk heroes, have been seething with anger at Arafat and his 40,000-strong security forces for being unable to protect them from Israeli army hit squads.

“We are being hunted down like rabbits,” said Hussam Khader, a Palestinian legislator who is one of Arafat’s harshest critics, in an interview near the Balata refugee camp, where he keeps an office. His neighbor, Hamas leader Jamal Mansour, was killed last month in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack on downtown Nablus that killed eight people, including two Hamas leaders and two children.

The Palestinian Authority’s response to the killings has been to arrest suspected collaborators who it says have tracked wanted men for Israel’s security forces. The trials of these suspects--and the death sentences handed down to many--are popular with Palestinians. But such moves do nothing, Khader said, to get at what he called the fundamental corruption of the authority, which he said is damaging Arafat’s credibility and shackling the Palestinians in their fight with Israel.

If the Palestinian revolt is to continue, Khader said, serious reforms must be made. The authority “was not prepared for this struggle,” he said, characterizing it as woefully inept at either providing civilian services or carrying out a military campaign against Israel.

In the Arab press and in interviews with Arab TV stations, Khader has called for Arafat to root out corrupt government ministers and include militants in the decision-making process. Those calls have been echoed by Marwan Barghouti, a senior official in Arafat’s Fatah movement who recently survived an Israeli missile attack on a convoy in which he was traveling. Barghouti has urged the creation of a Palestinian government of national unity that would bring the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements into a coalition with Fatah and opt for armed struggle instead of talks.

Last week, Arafat allowed the Palestine National Council to form a committee to discuss “national dialogue,” and he promised to meet with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders to see if the Palestinian Authority can find common ground with them. But the council also appointed a committee to investigate Khader’s statements criticizing Arafat and the authority.

Shikaki said Arafat’s exploration of national unity is not serious.

“He feels his legitimacy is being questioned,” he said. “So he is going through the motions of drumming up some support.”

Still, he said, Arafat will not comply with Israel’s demands that he jail militants. “He fears that if he cracks down, he will get nothing but shame,” Shikaki said. “The Israelis will spit in his face, and the Palestinians will call him a traitor.”

And so the long-surviving Arafat continues to try to buy time, Shikaki said, “until the Israelis offer him something tangible--anything that can materially change the lives of the Palestinians for the better, that would make it worth it to him to take the risk” of confronting the Islamic movement.