Arafat Won’t Go to Summit, Blames Sharon

Yasser Arafat announced Tuesday that he would not attend a key Arab summit, after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ignored U.S. pleas and set severe conditions on the Palestinian Authority president’s travel.

Arafat’s absence is a blow to the Arab League gathering, which starts today in Beirut and will discuss a potentially far-reaching Saudi-sponsored Middle East peace initiative. In addition, Palestinian anger over Sharon’s restrictions on Arafat could derail U.S.-mediated talks here aimed at securing a cease-fire in vicious Israeli-Palestinian fighting that has killed about 1,500 people in 18 months.

Sharon, appearing on Israeli television’s Arabic-language service, said the “conditions are not yet ripe” to lift Israel’s travel ban on Arafat. The prime minister said he might agree to release Arafat if he could then veto the Palestinian leader’s return home in the event of a new attack on Israelis--and if Washington signed off on his de facto banishment.

Palestinian officials said such conditions amounted to blackmail and were a “dangerous provocation.” Arafat issued a statement saying he had decided to remain with his “steadfast people” and deny Israel the chance to prevent his return to the West Bank. He has been trapped by Israeli forces in his Ramallah headquarters since December.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the leader of one of only two Arab countries to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, also bowed out of the summit Tuesday, citing “domestic commitments.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher rejected Sharon’s new conditions, saying Israel had to issue a “round trip” for Arafat.

Sharon made the decision despite calls late Monday from Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urging him to let Arafat travel to the summit. Even after Sharon’s announcement, U.S. Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer went to see him to try again to convince him to let Arafat go.

“The message has been very strong. Sharon understands the gravity and the importance we attach to his decision,” a State Department official said in Washington.

Tuesday’s denouement ended a weeklong test of wills between Sharon and Arafat over whether the former would allow the latter to travel and who would gain the most from the confrontation. Even before Tuesday’s decisions, however, there was a growing consensus that Arafat’s goals might be better served by sitting out the Beirut meeting rather than accepting what Palestinians saw as humiliating Israeli prerequisites.

It is a matter of unmistakable irony that these two longtime arch-nemeses are engaged again in a showdown involving Beirut. Two decades ago, Sharon launched Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, marching all the way to Beirut in a bloody bid to dislodge Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was staging cross-border attacks on Israel.

The animosity was on display Tuesday in interviews that Sharon gave to Israeli newspapers. He said he regretted promising the United States that he wouldn’t harm the Palestinian leader and now realizes that he should have enlisted U.S. help in expelling him.

In an interview with the top-selling Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot, Sharon said President Bush had repeatedly demanded that he agree not to harm or expel Arafat, and Sharon had relented. That commitment, Sharon said, was a mistake.

“My consent may have been correct at first,” he said. “But from a certain stage in the conflict, it was a mistake. I should have told them [the Americans], ‘I can’t keep that commitment.’ ”

Sharon’s remorse over sparing Arafat echoed a statement he made in a newspaper interview earlier this year. He said then that he regretted not killing Arafat when he had a chance--during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The volatility of this moment in the region’s tortured history was evident Tuesday morning when two Palestinians blew themselves up in a car en route to Jerusalem’s huge Malka shopping mall. Israeli authorities said the men, reported to be members of a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, may have been planning to attack the mall but were intercepted by police. The bomb they were carrying detonated a short distance from the police, killing the pair.

A senior Israeli security official said Israel had learned of the planned attack two days ago and relayed the information to the Palestinian Authority. But Palestinian security forces failed to take action to stop the potentially disastrous attack, the official said.

Sharon, in his television appearance Tuesday night, demanded that Arafat meet additional terms in order to travel. Arafat must declare a cease-fire and show that he is serious about it by announcing it in Arabic to the Palestinian people, Sharon said. Arafat did this in December, and violence dropped off for a while.

But the prospects of a cease-fire remained elusive Tuesday.

U.S. special envoy Anthony C. Zinni continued with another round of teeth-pulling negotiations with security officials from the two sides. He met for hours with the Palestinian delegation, with no results announced, and heard from the Israelis that they would accept Zinni’s latest compromise proposal “with reservations.”

No breakthrough appeared imminent. “It’s tough slogging,” a U.S. official said.

Neither side is talking formally about the differences that continue to forestall agreement. But generally, the Palestinians want to move into discussions of political concessions within two weeks, while Israel wants to put that off for at least a month.

And the Palestinians continue to balk at Israel’s demand that the Palestinian Authority arrest militants.

“When you shell, blockade and close us down, there is nothing we can do,” the Palestinian security chief for the West Bank, Col. Jibril Rajoub, told Israeli radio. “When you bomb our jails, no one remains there. There are no longer any police stations or police commands in the majority of the West Bank and Gaza Strip cities.”

Rajoub also warned of unimaginable violence if Arafat isn’t allowed to leave Ramallah. Thousands of Palestinians marched through Gaza City on Tuesday to protest Sharon’s demands on Arafat and insist their leader not relent.

But Arafat could actually gain politically by skipping the summit in Beirut.

Not going focuses the spotlight on Arafat--cast as a martyr and hero at home for resisting Sharon’s terms--and on Israel’s defiance of the international community. If Sharon bowed to U.S. pressure and agreed to let Arafat leave, the prime minister would lose face among his hard-line constituency. And he would risk Arafat’s use of the Beirut venue as a platform for Israel-bashing. Either way, in the view of analysts here, Arafat wins, Sharon loses.

Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian security chief for the Gaza Strip, said he and other aides advised Arafat not to travel to Beirut after receiving clear signals that Sharon was seriously considering blocking the Palestinian leader’s return.

Hard-liners in Sharon’s government insist that ridding the land of Arafat and keeping up military pressure on the Palestinian Authority are the only ways to stop the Palestinian uprising.

Late into Tuesday, the Bush administration said it didn’t accept the statements by the Middle East leaders as final.

“We may not have seen the final act to this play. It’s not at all clear that final decisions . . . have been made,” a senior Bush administration official said Tuesday night.

Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.