Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s invitation to Washington for talks with US President George W. Bush is top news in Israel’s Hebrew daily Maariv. Sharon will leave for the US on Friday, and will meet with the president on Monday. The talks will follow a visit to the American capital by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Both Maariv and Yediot Ahronot also focus on the latest twist in the Ahmad Saadat affair ­ the decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) not to free the PFLP secretary-general jailed in Jericho, despite a Palestinian High Court ruling ordering his release.
Saadat is one of six Palestinians being held in a Jericho prison under British and US supervision as part of a deal that ended Israel’s five-week military siege of Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters.
Yediot Ahronot says: “Sharon threatened, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat took fright and Saadat, the man Israel says gave the orders for the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last October, is staying in jail.”
Maariv’s headline is more explicit and reads: “Saadat will not be released because of Israel’s threats to liquidate him.”
Yediot Ahronot claims the prime minister’s bureau chief told the US and Britain, whose jailers are guarding Saadat, that Israel would re-impose the siege on Arafat “if the man responsible for Zeevi’s murder is freed.” It adds that Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter hinted: “We will liquidate him (Arafat).”
Maariv has a related front-page “scoop:” pictures of pages from a Yemeni diplomatic passport belonging to Fouad Shobaki, one of the PA’s paymasters who is in jail with Saadat, showing visits to Iraq and Libya, where, the paper says, Shobaki went to purchase arms for terror attacks.
Both papers highlight the fact that Israeli soldiers who fought in the Jenin refugee camp during “Operation Rampart” in April are to get medals of valor. Yediot Ahronot says “a month and a half after the fighting, in which 23 soldiers were killed, the Central Command head will on Wednesday decorate five soldiers, two of them posthumously.”
Maariv notes on its front page that Yossi Beilin, a former Labor Cabinet minister and one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo peace process, has founded a new Israeli peace movement called Shahar (Dawn) ­ the Hebrew acronym for peace, education and welfare. Beilin declared Shahar would seek to unify the Israeli peace camp and pose the main challenge to the right in the next elections.
Opinion columns focus on the prospects for reform of the PA and whether it could start a new peace process. In Yediot Ahronot’s leader, Ofer Shelah writes that “Sharon and Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz’s Israel defines reform in a way that would have pleased Joseph Heller, the author of the immortal Catch-22: Arafat must carry it out, but any reform he carries out will be meaningless.”
Shelah says the present government didn’t invent this winding road. “In the 1970s, we used to say we wouldn’t negotiate with the PLO until it revoked the Palestinian Covenant and recognized Israel but, if it did, it wouldn’t be the PLO.”
Shelah says both Sharon and Arafat are using the notion of reform to maintain the bloody status quo. “Arafat sees reform as a game of musical chairs among a corrupt oligarchy, in which one close associate replaces another and he replaces both of them ­ and he sees this as legal tender on the American market. For every colonel he moves, he will demand payment; for every meaningless appointment, pressure on Israel.
“Like two seasoned poker players, where each knows the other has no cards and doesn’t really want to get into the game, Arafat and Sharon pass the reform joker from one side to the other. If they didn’t both exist, they would have to invent each other. Except that all this wasted time is measured in Israeli and Palestinian blood.
“Arafat’s people,” Shelah continues, “are beginning to stir. But when the Palestinians talk about reform, they mean something very different. They mean a regime that will work for the good of that impoverished and wretched people, in a democratic and accountable way. They don’t mean replacing Arafat ­ the only reform Israel is willing to entertain.”
In its leader, Maariv says that “the whole question of reform … started as a cover for removing Arafat from the center of power; then, somewhere along the line, people started taking it seriously, and Arafat, under internal pressure, started throwing out promises about elections and democratization. But anyone who knows him cannot be under any illusion that these promises will actually be kept.
“Reform in the PA,” the paper suggests, “is only possible under very different circumstances. It would have to be under extended international supervision, which would entail education, rooting out hatred, economic rehabilitation and slowly building democratic institutions. Only after such a process, would it be right and proper for the Palestinians to have a state of their own, because only then would it be a state that could live in peace with Israel.”
On Maariv’s op-ed pages, columnist Dan Margalit warns Sharon against forcing Arafat from power. “Sharon, the pragmatist, cannot ignore the following assumption: The ejection of Arafat from the arena, not as part of a natural Palestinian process, but as a result of an Israeli demand, would put in his place a successor unable to make real concessions, but who would enjoy broad Western support. This would lead to demands on Israel for a down payment in the form of significant concessions,” he writes.
The prime minister, Margalit asserts, “must warn the world against Arafat, but be careful not to force his departure. Like Sharon, I also believe Arafat is not a peace partner. I would support the prime minister warning the world and the Israeli public against Arafat, but not blocking the Europeans or Yossi Beilin in their efforts to get him onto a peace track. Something like ‘Run Beilin, run, but watch your flanks.’”
Margalit says Sharon has nothing to fear from this because the odds are that Arafat won’t agree to make peace and the efforts will fail. “The prime minister should have confidence in his description of Arafat’s evil.”
Also on the Maariv op-ed pages, London correspondent Dafna Vardi writes on an Irish-Israeli-Palestinian seminar organized by The Guardian newspaper, and concludes that Israel can learn from the Irish experience. “A few years ago, who would have thought that representatives of the warring factions in Northern Ireland would be seen together or that they could agree on anything besides the explosive power of Semtex? Now they are convinced they are very close to the final destination and are ready to give others the benefit of their experience.”
Vardi says David Irvine, the erstwhile Protestant militant, told her there is no choice but to speak to the men with the guns. “He says the most important turning point on the way from terror to peace was the realization that ‘neither side would win the war nor allow itself to be defeated.’ Still, he says, that to bring an end to violence, the parties will need the assistance of outside forces, ‘the Arab world, the Europeans, and most of all the Americans. If the parties could have stopped the violence unaided, they would have done so long ago’.”
In a Yediot Ahronot op-ed, the Likud’s Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to the US and an adviser to Sharon, rejects the notion that Israel can learn from the Irish experience. “The Guardian’s editor tried to defend the meeting on grounds that the Northern Ireland representatives could give practical advice to the Middle Eastern participants on how to make peace. But any resemblance between the (Ulster) situation and the Israeli-Arab conflict is purely coincidental, … because Northern Ireland is not surrounded by a hostile, powerful region, with a population at least 50 times its size, large parts of which have yet to accept its very existence.”

Copyright © The Daily Star