An Isolated Peres Blasts the Army

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres lashed out at his nation’s military Monday, accusing a senior officer of wanting to assassinate Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, as violence threatened to torpedo the cease-fire announced last week.

Since Peres and Arafat agreed to the cease-fire Wednesday, at least 18 Palestinians have died and more than 200 have been wounded in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than a dozen Israelis have been wounded. Palestinians have fired mortar shells at Israeli settlements, held large-scale demonstrations and clashed with troops. Monday morning, a car bomb exploded in a busy Jerusalem neighborhood.

At a Cabinet meeting Sunday, the Israeli government decided to give Arafat just 48 more hours to enforce the cease-fire before reassessing its own commitment to the truce, which the Bush administration pushed both sides hard to accept. But in an interview with the mass-circulation newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Peres criticized the army, not the Palestinians, for the escalation.

The 78-year-old statesman, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat as co-architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, said the deaths of nine Palestinians in the Gaza Strip the day the cease-fire was signed had endangered the agreement. He also complained that Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the army deputy chief of staff, wants Arafat assassinated.

“Let’s say we assassinate him,” Peres told interviewer Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most respected political analysts. “What happens next? With all the criticism of Arafat, he is the Palestinian who recognizes the map on which Jordan and Israel exist. In his place will come Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.”

Peres noted that the international community views Israel’s occupation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza as unjust. “A large part of the world considers the Palestinians’ war against us a war against occupation,” he said. “In its view, Arafat is not one of the bad guys.”

Yaalon offered no public response to Peres’ criticisms as the Jewish weeklong holiday of Sukkot began Monday evening. But Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly was planning to bring Peres together with both Yaalon and Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the chief of staff, sometime this week for what one Israeli newspaper said would be a reconciliation meeting.

Peres also expressed sympathy for the man many Israelis now consider public enemy No. 1. At their meeting last week, Arafat was “very serious--worried,” Peres said. “He’s afraid that we want to get rid of him. We’re simplistic. Insensitive to his problems. We turn our back on the distress in the territories.”

Peres also took issue with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s demand that Arafat halt all attacks before political negotiations resume, saying it is the equivalent of ordering Israel’s transportation minister to stop all traffic accidents. He dismissed Sharon’s characterization of Arafat as “Israel’s Osama bin Laden,” a reference to the Saudi militant whom U.S. officials consider the prime suspect in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“Bin Laden has no people and no country. He balks at no means,” Peres said. “One can’t say that about Arafat.”

Peres’ comments are sure to further enrage ultranationalist Cabinet ministers who have vowed to harass the dovish Labor Party foreign minister out of the coalition government, which is led by Sharon’s conservative Likud Party. They assailed Peres at their meeting Sunday, bitterly criticizing him for the session last week with Arafat, accusing him of serving as Arafat’s defense lawyer to the world.

Although Peres has clashed publicly with Sharon of late over the need to restart negotiations with the Palestinians, the foreign minister said he still feels he is a moderating influence in the right-leaning government and is more effective inside the Cabinet than he would be in opposition.

Ultranationalists in the Cabinet believe Peres’ insistence on negotiating with Arafat undercuts Israel’s efforts to persuade the Bush administration to target Palestinian militant groups in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

But in the interview, Peres said there had been a “drastic drop in the violence” in the preceding five days.

He spoke before a car bomb exploded in a neighborhood of southern Jerusalem, the first such attack since the cease-fire. No one was injured, although police said the bomb was a large one that had been packed with bullets to increase its destructive force. The extremist group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility in a statement, saying it was avenging the deaths of Palestinians killed since the cease-fire was announced.

Peres’ criticism of the military reflects his increasingly isolated position in the Israeli leadership. Senior army officers and most of the Cabinet believe that Arafat must not achieve any political benefits from the uprising that began a year ago after then-opposition leader Sharon made a controversial visit to a site here holy to Muslims and Jews. Peres argues that it is in Israel’s interest to restart negotiations and achieve a settlement with the Palestinians, even if violence continues.

In Monday’s interview, Peres said Sharon must soon make the sort of decision that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, made when he accepted the partition of Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. To preserve Israel as a Jewish, democratic state, the foreign minister said, Sharon will have to give up the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and draw the nation’s borders at its pre-1967 boundary.