Bush Must Answer Sharon

Top Israeli officials are now playing down the threats by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to assassinate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The backtracking was hardly enough to raise the pall on Monday over Israel’s 56th anniversary of independence. Until Sharon himself retracts the threat or President Bush rejects the idea publicly and resoundingly, the U.S. ability to act as an honest broker in the Middle East will also remain dimmed.

Sharon, who became prime minister in February 2001, has hinted before that he would dispose of Arafat, now trapped by Israeli troops in his West Bank headquarters. Last Friday, Sharon announced outright that he was no longer tied to his 2002 promise to Bush that he would not evict or kill Arafat. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice responded quickly that the White House opposed killing Arafat. But Bush himself must deliver this message to Sharon.

Bush had already largely acceded, during Sharon’s visit to Washington last week, to Israel’s latest tactics. Bush praised Sharon’s plan to pull Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and accepted rejection of Palestinians’ “right of return” to Israel. But the most startling U.S. move was to bless Sharon’s plan to let large settlements remain on the West Bank, altering the terms of negotiations for a Palestinian state.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the closest U.S. ally among Israel’s neighbors, declared Sunday that Bush’s stand “tramples on the rights” of the Palestinians to settle such issues in negotiations. If Sharon were to kill or try to kill Arafat, Mubarak and other leaders would be hard put to keep a lid on recruitment for jihad against the U.S.

Sharon may, as some officials speculated, be floating the assassination idea to win support from his right-wing Likud followers, who will decide whether to approve Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan in a referendum Sunday. But Sharon’s visceral hatred for Arafat is well known, and the threat has done its damage.

Israel’s assassinations of Hamas leaders Sheik Ahmed Yassin on March 22 and his successor, Abdulaziz Rantisi, on April 17 have helped boost Sharon’s domestic popularity, but the U.S. timorousness on those assassinations makes a stronger reaction to the Arafat threat imperative. The tenacity with which Sharon has pursued the idea since he first isolated the aging, ailing Arafat in his headquarters in March 2002 indicates that his words can’t be dismissed as bluff and bombast.

Killing Arafat would be militarily counterproductive, inflaming Palestinian resistance. With speculation rife that Sharon may strike if he believes Bush won’t be reelected, the president has every incentive to put the U.S. more firmly on record.