Internal dissent growing in both camps as Israeli leader faces challenge from the right, PA president fights to control security chiefs

Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star

Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have become prisoners of their own policies, or more accurately, their lack of clear strategies to end the bloodshed that is driving Israelis and Palestinians further and further apart. Both leaders are facing growing internal dissent, but seem unable to break out of their entrenched positions. There are many on both sides who question whether either man has a strategy at all.
Indeed, it might not be too simplistic to wonder whether these two lifelong adversaries are part of the problem rather than the source of a solution to the conflict. Both leaders are facing crises of confidence with their countrymen, as all prospect of compromise evaporates with every new shooting, bombing or air strike.
Sharon’s first year as prime minister has been the bloodiest in a generation for Israel. Some 250 Israelis and 600 Palestinians have perished in fighting that just keeps escalating, in what a dispirited Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations’ Middle East envoy, has described as a “dance of death at the edge of the abyss.”
Sharon, who some have seen as Israel’s Caesar, or the Jewish Napoleon, has failed signally to keep his election pledge of bringing security and peace, and his popular support is shrinking as the relentless carnage goes on.
This emerging groundswell was reflected in the refusal in late January of 52 reserve officers, all combat veterans of elite Israeli units, to serve in the West Bank or Gaza.
“We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line with the aim of ruling, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people,” they said in a statement that so unsettled the military hierarchy that Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz accused them of inciting rebellion.
The list of refusniks has now topped 300 ­ an uneasy echo of dissidence within the military during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Sharon’s last attempt to crush the Palestinians that ended in such a popular upsurge of opposition that the Israelis eventually withdrew.
The parallel cannot have escaped Sharon.
Following the recent spate of suicide attacks in Israeli cities, his popular support has fallen to 48 percent according to recent opinion polls, the first time since the election it has dipped below 50 percent. Sharon is also being pressured from Israel’s far-right, spearheaded by Benjamin Netanyahu, who had denounced the prime minister for doing “too little” to crush the Palestinian intifada.
To make matters worse for Sharon, Netanyahu said he would run for premier in the next general elections scheduled for November 2003. An opinion poll published by The Jerusalem Post on Feb. 11 showed Netanyahu with a lead of 9 percentage points over Sharon among supporters of his Likud bloc.
Maariv political analyst Chemi Shalev noted: “A decisive majority of the public feels that Sharon has no plan (beyond the use of force), that he’s groping in the dark and merely reacting to events.” There is little optimism that any cease-fire agreement that could emerge from the sporadic meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials would hold amid the mounting savagery.
“Sharon can always find a convenient pretext to sink the whole plan,” said Maariv ­ if Palestinian militants don ‘t provide him with one first, which in the current highly charged climate is probably a safe bet.
Yet for all this, according to Israeli commentators, the Israeli electorate sees little alternative to the government’s relentless hard-line policy of assassinating Palestinian militant leaders, destroying Palestinian homes, invading Palestinian-controlled enclaves with tanks, sending F-16 fighter-bombers to attack Arafat’s security apparatus and systematically destroying the Palestinian Authority and its credibility.
Arafat, beleaguered since mid-December in his Ramallah compound, seems to have lost all control over his own corrupt administration, accused by his own security chiefs of failing to provide any coherent direction or leadership. Arafat is reported to have clashed with his security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub, Mohammed Dahlan and Ahmed Al-Hindi, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s political commissioner for Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh, a moderate intellectual who heads the Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. He has drawn fire for suggesting that the Palestinians should re-examine their position on the stalled peace process and drop their insistence on the right of return by millions of refugees and their descendants, a cherished dream since 1948. He maintains that this has paralyzed negotiations with Israel.
Nusseibeh tendered his resignation in early February, but Arafat refused to accept it. Arafat’s lack of control, or inability to impose his will on the radicals, who now number even members of his own Fatah organization and his security apparatus, seems to have been underlined by the way he was flat-footed by the Karine A gun-running episode in early January. Sharon must have seen that as a gift from the gods, allowing him to point to Iran and Hizbullah as candidates for US military action in the war against terrorism.
Arafat’s discomfort and dithering, failing to spell out clearly defined policies and apparently incapable of doing anything but react to events ­ echoing Sharon’s Israeli critics ­ has caused a growing rift between the Palestinians’ old guard and the younger leaders thrown up by the intifada.
Mounting tension between Arafat and his security chiefs, who are inclined toward exploring the prospect of renewed negotiations, exploded at a late-night February meeting in Arafat’s compound.
The Palestinian leader flew into a rage at Rajoub, the head of the Preventive Security Service in the West Bank, demanding to know why his men had not prevented a mob from freeing 17 Islamic militants held in prison in a Hebron jail on Feb. 11. The mob apparently acted to save the men from harm in Israeli air strikes on Palestinian security installations, but it was one of several such instances in recent weeks in which Arafat’s efforts to round up militants as Israel wants has been thwarted by his own people.
Arafat reportedly slapped Rajoub and, according to some accounts, threatened him with a handgun while screaming “I’ll kill you.” Rajoub erupted, threatened to resign and accused Arafat of having no clear policies and shifting tack day by day. Palestinian officials denied that Arafat pulled a gun, but conceded that the exchange had been “unpleasant.”
Whatever really happened, it underlined the strain that Arafat has been under since he was put under virtual house arrest by Sharon 10 weeks ago, during which time he has seen his authority eroded by militant factions who shun his efforts to contain the violence and appease Sharon and the Bush administration ­ which seems to have given the Israeli leader his head.
Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who attended the meeting, said that Arafat and Rajoub, seen as a possible successor to the Palestinian leader, reconciled later. But the stormy gathering reflected deeper tensions building up among Palestinians about the intifada, their uncertain future and whether the Palestinian Authority will survive the tender mercies of Sharon. Dahlan, Rajoub’s counterpart in the Gaza Strip, threatened to quit a few weeks ago because of differences with Arafat.
Rajoub and Dahlan, who have worked in the past with Israeli security chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency on security issues, are viewed by the Israelis as relative moderates. Both speak Hebrew (they learned it in Israeli prisons) and enjoyed close relationships with their Israeli counterparts before the peace process collapsed in 2000. Dahlan still meets Israeli Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer.
The minister, who many suspect has his own political agenda, has even mentioned the pair as potential leaders who could replace Arafat and with whom he, and others, would be prepared to deal. So it may not be too surprising that some sources said Arafat repeatedly yelled during his stormy exchange with Rajoub: “He’s trying to replace me!”
Palestinian officials said that US mediator General Anthony Zinni had urged Arafat to make Rajoub head of preventive security in Gaza as well as the West Bank, but Arafat rejected that because it would give Rajoub too much power.
Rajoub dismissed the Ramallah outburst as a “tempest in a teapot” and pledged his loyalty to Arafat. But this cannot be viewed outside Sharon’s efforts to delegitimize Arafat and eventually marginalize him altogether.
While George W. Bush has rebuffed Sharon’s proposals that Washington cut off all contact with Arafat, pressure is growing on Sharon from his right wing to get rid of Arafat altogether. “We must destroy Arafat’s regime ­ and the sooner the better,” said Netanyahu.
The bottom line seems to be that neither Sharon nor Arafat is any longer capable of negotiating a way out of the impasse and that only US intervention, imposing a solution, will have any chance of breaking the deadlock. But so far the Bush administration seems reluctant to take such a critical step. It is difficult at this time to see what it will take to jolt them into action.

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