Mona Ziade
Daily Star staff

Attention shifts to the United States this weekend in anticipation of President George W. Bush’s crucial talks with Arab and Israeli leaders making separate and opposing arguments about Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s political future.
On the ground, however, the Israeli military pressed ahead with more incursions into the West Bank, despite mounting outrage over its tactics, which have hindered the creation of a Palestinian security entity capable of clamping down on human bombs. Some 20 Israeli tanks stormed into the town of Jenin early Friday with machine guns blazing, only hours after retreating from the town in a raid the day before.
Israeli forces also punched into Bethlehem and Tulkarem, where they arrested three people, and patrolled Hebron, to the south, in a show of force that kept residents on edge.
The latest military operations followed a stern message to the Palestinian president on Thursday to act against extremists or risk the consequences. Tanks and troops charged to his doorstep at the presidential complex in Ramallah, destroying much of his living quarters in a six-hour reprisal attack for a car bombing on Wednesday in which 17 people perished.
Israel has blamed Arafat for every suicide attack, and Sharon, who flies to Washington on Saturday, will be seeking to convince an increasingly receptive Bush of the need to sideline the Palestinian president.
Israeli and Palestinian analysts agreed the latest bombing gave Sharon new ammunition in his drive to sideline Arafat from the peace process, an option Washington had resisted.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, heading into back-to-back talks Friday and Saturday with Bush at Camp David, defended Arafat, saying he should not be held responsible for suicide bombings.
“He has no control,” Mubarak said in an interview on CNN. “He has no police, no intelligence. How do you ask him to control that?” Mubarak expressed frustration with Israel’s insistence on blaming such incidents on Arafat.
Bush said he will soon present a plan for moving the struggling peace process forward. He said he was optimistic that the weekend talks with Mubarak and Monday’s session with Sharon would be fruitful.
“After my meetings … I’ll talk to our country about how I believe we should move forward,” the US president said.
Bush did not offer specifics, but advisers have said they are preparing a series of options for Bush to consider, including offering a timetable for peace talks and perhaps some solutions to the thorniest political issues.
Hewing his tough line against Arafat, Bush said: “I still am disappointed by Mr. Arafat” and said he must curb terrorism.
Mubarak is bringing Bush an urgent appeal to set a schedule for ending Israel’s hold on the West Bank and Gaza and for establishing a Palestinian state.
He will propose the creation of a Palestinian state by 2003 with the status of Jerusalem, the fate Palestinian refugees and withdrawal from Golan to be negotiated over the following three to four years.
Mubarak scheduled meetings with Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the president’s assistant for national security, before seeing Bush.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said it was essential to pick up the pace of peacemaking. But he told reporters: “I don’t know of an American initiative.”
Sharon travels to Washington with the knowledge that his popularity among Israelis
remains strong, despite a widely held view that he is not the man to bring peace or deal with terrorism.
A public opinion poll published on Friday put the hard-line former general’s approval rating at 69 percent, but 70 percent of respondents doubted that he will lead Israel to peace and 59 percent though he had no plan for dealing with Palestinian violence.
The Palestinian leader, facing an uncertain future, urged the United States and Egypt to make “immediate” plans for a Middle East peace conference.
“I hope President Mubarak will discuss with President Bush how to immediately decide on a plan for an international peace conference,” Arafat told reporters after Friday prayers.
He said the peace conference should be based on the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference which started the peace process, various UN resolutions and “all the agreements (the Palestinians) have signed with Israel.”
“They must act very fast to rescue the peace because the peace in the Middle East has been damaged,” he said.
“It’s part of the terrible war which has been declared against the peace I signed with (assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin),” Arafat said, accusing the Israelis of declaring the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords “dead.”
“I am putting that issue (of the raids) to the Quartet (the US, the EU, the UN, and Russia) committee which will meet in the next few days. I am asking them why they have kept silent until now and if they agree with what Israel is doing,” he said. “These fascists (Israel) are trying to change the Arab region into an Israeli land from (Egypt’s) Nile River to the Euphrates River” in Iraq. “The whole world must know we are ready to die to defend the Holy Land.”
Also on Friday, the European Commission said Israel had failed to provide concrete proof to support its accusations that EU aid was being used by the Palestinian Authority to fund “terrorism.” But a spokesman said Brussels had asked the Palestinian Finance Ministry “a number of very concrete questions” about the charges.
The European Parliament’s Budget Committee this week blocked the release of 18.7 million euros ($17.6 million) in budgetary aid to the Palestinians in  light of the accusations, pending an explanation from the EU executive of how the money would be spent, officials said.
Commission spokesman Gunnar Wiegand said EU and International Monetary Fund officials had a much-postponed meeting with Israeli military intelligence officials on Tuesday to seek evidence behind the allegations first made by Israeli Cabinet Minister Danny Naveh last month. ­ With agencies

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