Conflict Is Personal for Two Old Mideast Enemies

Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, two of the Middle East’s most steadfast enemies, are locked in what may be their final showdown, the denouement of a decades-old struggle whose outcome could reshape the region.

Coiled by barbed wire and trapped nose-to-turret with Israeli tanks, Arafat on Saturday was fighting for his life--political, at the very least, if not physical.

His archnemesis, Sharon, appeared more determined than ever to put an end to Arafat’s regime. For Sharon, the destruction this weekend at Arafat’s headquarters is part of a career-long mission to eliminate the Palestinian leader and cripple Palestinian nationalism.

Reviled by many Israelis as an unreconstructed terrorist mastermind, lionized by many Palestinians as the ultimate symbol of their independence and aspirations to nationhood, Arafat is undoubtedly nearing the end of a long line of conflicts and political upheavals. Ever the survivor, he cannot be counted out completely; he’s been here before. Each time tanks surrounded him in recent months, he cited 1982 Beirut, where then-Defense Minister Sharon lay siege to Arafat’s headquarters for 88 days, until the Palestinian was allowed to escape to Tunisia.

But unlike during previous attempts by Israel (and specifically by Sharon) to be rid of him, Arafat, 73, is in poor health, bereft of most international support, at the helm of a fatigued public and wobbling on an increasingly shaky political base whose members rose up just this month to challenge him as never before.

Sharon’s goal now is to take advantage of that weakness--weakness that he would no doubt take credit for causing--and push Arafat as far to the edge as possible so that he falls, or jumps.

Sharon for now has decided not to expel Arafat from the Palestinian territories, his aides said, in a concession to warnings from his top intelligence advisors that to do so would restore legitimacy to the aging guerrilla (“pump air into a flat tire,” as one Israeli commentator put it) while unleashing further chaos on the ground.

The Israeli prime minister also has promised President Bush not to kill or physically harm Arafat, a promise he later said he regretted making. The army insisted again Saturday that Arafat is not the target of the dynamite-and-bulldozer assault on his offices.

However, Sharon apparently wants to make life so untenable for Arafat, who is confined to one trembling floor of a British mandate-era building amid the dusty, smoking ruins of his once elaborate headquarters, that the Palestinian leader will turn himself in or seek exile of his own accord.

“We are attempting to encourage an alternative leadership,” said Sharon’s spokesman, Raanan Gissin.

Saeb Erekat, a senior member of Arafat’s government, dismissed as bogus Israel’s claims that the raid on Arafat’s headquarters was aimed at flushing out about 20 Palestinians holed up there who allegedly are implicated in attacks on Israel.

“This is not about [retaliation]. This is not about wanted men,” he said. “This is about destroying the Palestinian Authority.”

Even Sharon’s aides acknowledged that the bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Thursday that ostensibly triggered the assault on Arafat’s compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah was but a pretext. As tragic as the deaths of five Israelis and a Scot were, the toll was by no means unusually large. And the attack, along with one the previous day, came after a remarkable six-week period without suicide bombings inside Israel and at a time when Palestinians were engaged in a significant process of reform demanded by both Israel and Washington.

“The [army] would have carried out the operation in Ramallah even if Thursday’s bombing didn’t take place,” Sharon’s Cabinet secretary, Gideon Saar, was quoted as saying Saturday. “The weakening of Arafat is a clear Israeli interest, but also a Palestinian one.”

The Tel Aviv bombing was the work of the radical Islamic organization Hamas, which Arafat does not control. In fact, Palestinians have long contended--and some Israelis concur--that Arafat has lost control of most of the militias attacking Israelis. His ability to operate in a West Bank that has been taken over almost completely by the Israeli military is questionable at best, Palestinians say.

How, then, would eliminating him resolve the problem? It wouldn’t, according to Israeli and Palestinian analysts. The idea, they say, is for Israel to flex its considerable muscle to destroy Arafat regardless of whether he had anything to do with a specific terrorist attack.

Going after Arafat reflects the personal, visceral nature of the fight between Sharon and the Palestinian Authority president, two war horses for whom conflict is normal and peace problematic.

But Sharon’s strategy risks backfiring on a number of levels. If any harm comes to Arafat, the anger in the Arab world would complicate U.S. efforts to conduct a war on Iraq. It would probably fuel more, not less, terrorism. And the voices of reform and moderation that have been emerging in Palestinian society would be silenced once again.

In the last few weeks, some Palestinian factions have indicated a willingness to halt attacks against Israelis, while the Palestinian Authority has begun a training program with American and Egyptian advisors for security officers whose stated task was to have been reining in gunmen. And the Palestinian Legislative Council showed rare independence by refusing to ratify Arafat’s new Cabinet this month, demanding that he do better to control corruption.

Israel’s actions could derail the reforms and stifle this crucial challenge from within, analysts and diplomats say.

Ironically, one of the men trapped inside Arafat’s compound this weekend is his new finance minister, Salam Fayyad, a respected former official with the International Monetary Fund who was spearheading genuine change and had won the praise of Washington, and even of Sharon.

“I think Israel was impressed with the reforms and wanted to stop them,” Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib said Saturday. He suggested that Sharon was afraid Arafat would use the reforms, along with elections scheduled for January, to gain a new lease on life. Arafat is widely expected to win the upcoming vote.

An attack on Arafat could also be counterproductive, analysts say, because it could bolster extremists such as Hamas, whose spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, has not been targeted by Israel in the last two years.

Arafat “is in a coma, oxygen tubes and fluids keep him alive,” noted Roni Shaked, Palestinian affairs reporter for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot. “He has no influence on what happens on the ground. Even if he wanted to stop terror attacks, he no longer can.... If Israel decides to remove him or to hurt him physically, this will be the greatest gift Sharon could give to Sheik Yassin.”

Because he still enjoys considerable public support, Sharon’s hands are tied by only two things: American reaction and fears that his coalition government will fall apart.

The Bush administration has only rarely criticized Sharon, giving him a green light for a wide range of aggressive tactics. But with Washington planning a new war, it can ill afford explosions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

As for domestic politics, Sharon’s main coalition partner, the center-left Labor Party, has threatened to quit if Arafat is thrown out of the country. Sharon’s government could survive, but the prime minister also faces a challenge from the right, where disgruntled constituents don’t think that he has acted with sufficient force against the Palestinians.

A new billboard campaign in Israel illustrates the threat.

“With this kind of Sharon, Bibi would be better,” says the message promoting former Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Sharon’s principal rival on the right. “No peace. No security. No economy.”

Sharon has steadily ratcheted up pressure on the Palestinians during the last two years and especially since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In the corridors of a receptive Washington, he has been able to tar Arafat with the same brush as Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network.

As the Palestinians’ armed uprising wore on, as suicide bombings increased at an alarming rate and as Arafat embraced violence, Sharon repeatedly pushed the boundaries of what the world would accept in his military response. Sharon, and the horror of the bombings, lulled the world into accepting actions once unthinkable. Few would have predicted, for example, that Israel would reoccupy the West Bank, as it did this year, and place hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under virtual house arrest.

If he succeeds in finally toppling Arafat and destroying the Palestinian Authority, established by the landmark 1993 Oslo peace accords, Sharon will have rewritten history. With Arafat his accomplice, the two will have reversed a process--Oslo--that most observers believed was irreversible.

The question remains, what would replace Oslo and Arafat? Sharon has always favored a compliant, malleable Palestinian leadership that Israel could in effect control. But if Arafat meets a violent end, the chaos that would follow would more likely pro- duce further intransigence, not cooperation.