The news pages of the Tel Aviv press focus on reports that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is considering expelling Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and on the Israeli Army attack on the Palestinian leader’s Ramallah headquarters in response to Wednesday’s bus bombing, in which 17 Israelis were killed, 13 of them soldiers.
Maariv says Sharon will tell US President George W. Bush in Washington next Monday that the moment Israel throws Arafat out of the Palestinian territories is drawing near. It quotes sources close to Sharon as saying: “The prime minister has already decided to expel Arafat and is just waiting for the right time.”
But Yediot Ahronot says the Americans are warning Israel against expelling the Palestinian leader, and it quotes Bush as having told Sharon: “Arafat is a pain in the ass, but it is impossible to make progress without him.”
On American plans for the future, Maariv quotes Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as saying: “The US is initiating a plan for uprooting all Jewish settlements in return for a Palestinian waiver of the right of return.”
Yediot Ahronot highlights the Israeli Army’s destruction of buildings in Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters and says: “Half the Mukataa disappeared.” The paper has a front-page picture of Arafat examining his bedroom, which was hit by a shell, over the caption: “They wanted to kill me.”
Both Yediot Ahronot and Maariv also highlight the establishment of a new fact-finding committee to look into the fate of Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad, missing since his plane went down in Lebanon in 1986. Yediot Ahronot says a $10 million reward will be offered to anyone providing useful information.
Contemplating Sharon’s scheduled visit to Washington, Maariv argues that before any progress can be made in the Middle East, Arafat has to be ousted.
“The proposed formula of Israel giving up all the settlements in exchange for a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return might have been acceptable before the intifada, but is totally inapplicable now,” Maariv’s leader asserts.
“After the campaign of terror, any trust Israelis may have had in the Palestinians has been lost, particularly as regards Arafat. The tragedy is that though there’s an urgent need to end the horrendous bloodshed, we cannot rush into a solution in a climate of total mistrust. The common factor that makes any formula unworkable is Arafat. He is responsible for both the terror campaign and for the credibility gap, and it becomes ever clearer that in order to break the logjam, he must be removed.”
Maariv diplomatic analyst Ben Caspit focuses on the role of the Egyptians. “Sharon,” he writes, “has no plan. After terror attacks, he vents his anger on Arafat and fights a holding battle. The current enemy is Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, whose ideas, as presented to Bush are, according to Sharon, ‘dangerous.’ Sharon is going to Washington to shoot down Mubarak’s balloon. He wants the last word because he thinks Bush is swayed by the last person he speaks to.”
But Caspit believes it is doubtful that the Americans will be persuaded by Sharon’s pitch that Arafat is the root of all evil, “although some of them dislike the Palestinian leader almost as much as Sharon does.”
“Mubarak,” Caspit continues, “with a not inconsiderable amount of cunning, has come up with a tempting package that even Sharon will have difficulty taking apart. The most interesting part of the Egyptian plan is their own role in supervising the reforms in the Palestinian Authority, together with the Americans, the Europeans and the Saudis. Sharon listens to all this and chuckles. He likes Mubarak only slightly more than Arafat, and he is not about to allow Egyptian agents into his own backyard.”
Yediot Ahronot diplomatic analyst Shimon Schiffer suggests that Sharon will try to convince Bush that he has a better solution than Mubarak’s ­ “first expelling Arafat and then a long-term interim agreement in which Israel will be magnanimous on the territorial issue.”
Schiffer argues that the time frame for Arafat’s continued presence in the territories is getting shorter, as is the time line for Israel’s continued presence there. “Israel is fast approaching the moment when it will have to decide on an issue it has been putting off for decades: when and in what conditions it will pull out and whether it should fix the permanent borders of the state with or without agreement with the Palestinians. The main achievement of the 20 months of the Palestinian uprising is in putting the question of ending the occupation on the international agenda with greater urgency.”
Yaakov Erez, Maariv’s military affairs columnist, says Wednesday’s Megiddo bus bombing has demonstrated that “nothing significant has been done to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorists. It’s too late to talk about building fences and barriers along the ‘seam’ ­ something that should have been done long ago ­ but why is nothing being done to stop Palestinians from crossing the Green Line at places where everyone can see them doing so, in their hundreds, on foot and in vehicles, every day?” Erez asks.
In contrast to Maariv’s editorial policy, Erez finds that “not everything is connected to Arafat. It is wrong to blame him for every attack, just as it is a mistake to trust him to do anything to stop them.”
Yediot Ahronot Arab affairs commentator Roni Shaked agrees that the problem is not only Arafat. The Palestinian leader, he argues, “has tied himself to a policy of terror and lost the capacity to rule. Expelling him, as the political echelon proposes, is no solution. Even after he is expelled, he will remain the Palestinian leader and there won’t be anyone ready to step into his shoes while he is alive.”
Reporting on Maariv’s biweekly public opinion poll, political analyst Chemi Shalev points out that while previous prime ministers have been dislodged by terrorist campaigns, “Sharon is terror-proof, as far as the public is concerned. Under his leadership terrorism is more rampant than ever, but he is still king of the opinion polls.”
Shalev finds that “the secret of Sharon’s magic lies not in his policy, and not in his performance, but in the public’s perception of him as a man of character and a strong leader.”

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