Arafat Is Undaunted by Israeli Threat on His Life

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat scoffed Saturday at the latest threats on his life by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying he and other Palestinians consider themselves “martyrs in waiting.”

As usual, warnings by Israel that it might move against Arafat brought an emphatic show of popular support for the Palestinian leader.

Several thousand Palestinians rallied at Arafat’s half-ruined headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, shouting slogans of support.

“We will sacrifice our blood, our souls, for you!” the crowd chanted.

Arafat -- pale from his long confinement in his compound and tottering slightly as he raised his hands to make V-for-victory signs -- invoked a much-used Arab proverb to express determination not to be intimidated.

“The wind cannot move the mountain,” he said to shouts and cheers.

Sharon has explicitly threatened Arafat many times, but in his latest warning, delivered Friday night in an Israeli television interview, he spoke of having told President Bush this month that he did not feel bound by an earlier pledge to refrain from physically harming the Palestinian leader.

The Bush administration swiftly noted that it believed assassinating Arafat would be a bad idea.

The Israeli leader is facing a May 2 vote in his conservative Likud Party on his proposal to withdraw from Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip while retaining large settlement blocs in the West Bank.

Hard-liners in Sharon’s party, however, oppose giving up the Gaza settlements, and it is thought that the vote will be close.

Threats against Arafat are popular among the far-right constituency Sharon is trying to woo before the vote. Hard-line elements in Likud also heartily approved of the Israeli assassination a month ago of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the radical group Hamas, and the subsequent killing of his successor, Abdulaziz Rantisi.

Israel, meanwhile, pressed ahead Saturday with raids in the West Bank that it said were aimed at killing or capturing Palestinian militants bent on carrying out attacks against Israelis.

One of three Palestinians killed Saturday in the West Bank town of Jenin was a 16-year-old boy on his way home from school, Palestinian witnesses said. The Israeli army disputed that account, saying all three slain were fugitive militants.

Sharon’s threats against Arafat also had the effect of forging unity, at least temporarily, between Arafat and his beleaguered prime minister, Ahmed Korei, who has been telling associates he wants to quit.

The Palestinian Authority prime minister, who has been in office for six months but has had no significant policy achievements, issued a statement saying Sharon thought he could threaten Arafat only because of the “flagrant” show of U.S. favoritism toward Israel during Sharon’s April 14 visit to Washington.

At the White House meeting, Bush -- in a departure from long-standing U.S. policy -- endorsed Sharon’s plan to retain sovereignty over thickly settled swaths of the West Bank and also essentially ruled out the notion that Palestinians would be able to return in any significant numbers to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.