Netanyahu turns screws on a beleaguered Arafat

Benjamin Netanyahu has never made any secret of his dislike for Yasser Arafat. As leader of the Israeli opposition, he addressed a protest rally against the Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin partnership from a Jerusalem balcony festooned with a huge banner that screamed "Death to Arafat". Even in the run-up to his successful election campaign last year, when desperate to attract floating voters from the political centre, he acknowledged that he had little faith in Mr Arafat's professed desire for peaceful co-existence, and indicated that he would meet the Palestinian leader only if it were absolutely vital to Israel's security interests.

And quite apart from his scepticism over Mr Arafat's commitment to peace, his aides suggest that the Prime Minister holds the Palestinian Authority President ultimately responsible for the death of his beloved elder brother, Yonni, who was killed leading the elite Israeli commando unit that rescued a planeload of hostages from Entebbe airport in 1976. The group that hijacked the Air France plane, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - a splinter group in Mr Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Twenty-one years on, in the wake of last Wednesday's twin suicide bombing in Jerusalem's Mahaneh Yehuda vegetable market, Mr Netanyahu is exerting unprecedented pressure on Mr Arafat in an attempt, he says, to force the Palestinian leader to jail Islamic extremist leaders, confiscate the Islamists' weapons, and halt incitement to violence against Israel inside the Palestinian self-rule areas.

To that end, Mr Netanyahu has introduced a series of measures which, if maintained, could well bring about the complete collapse of Mr Arafat's regime: he has halted the monthly transfer to Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority of some $40 million worth of VAT, customs duties and other tax revenues - essential if Mr Arafat is to pay his officials and keep the Authority functioning; he has urged the US, Europe and other donor nations to suspend their funding of it as well. He has ordered the jamming of Voice of Palestine Radio and TV broadcasts - Mr Arafat's link to his own people. He is maintaining a closure order on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and a blockade around Arafat-controlled West Bank cities - keeping Palestinians from their jobs in Israel and from free movement even within the West Bank. And whereas, a year ago, ordinary Palestinians might have blamed the Hamas bombers for having prompted Israel to introduce such collective punishment, the mood among the Palestinian public is different now. Months of stalemated peace talks, during which Israel has been building Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Authority has been swamped by corruption allegations, have meant that many Palestinians are prone to blame Mr Arafat and the Israelis for their ills, rather than the Islamic extremists.

IN interview after interview in the days since the Jerusalem blast, Mr Netanyahu has castigated Mr Arafat for not honouring his obligations, under the Oslo peace accords, to combat terrorism. To the BBC, he said the Palestinian leader had done "damn-all" to break Hamas and Islamic Jihad. To the Associated Press, he asserted that Mr Arafat "made it possible for all these groups to use his territory to launch attacks against us".

But, typically, it was in a Hebrew language conversation that the Israeli Prime Minister gave the full explanation for the squeeze he is now putting on Mr Arafat: "If Arafat is incapable of acting [against the Islamists]," he told the daily Yediot Ahronot in an interview published last Friday, "then who did we do a deal with? If he can't fight terrorism, then what was the point of this whole thing, the Oslo accord? The whole logic of Oslo was that he would get his area, and deal with terrorism in that area . . . If Arafat isn't able even to do that, then what remains of the accord?"

Mr Netanyahu left those questions unanswered in the interview, but the thrust of his message appeared to be that, if Mr Arafat was unwilling or unable to counter the Islamists, then there was no further justification for the Israeli partnership with him.

Mr Netanyahu's own security chiefs have been quoted as saying that, under the kind of economic and political pressure Mr Netanyahu is presently exerting, the Palestinian Authority could collapse within two months. In all of his numerous interviews, the Prime Minister hasn't been drawn on whether he hopes this will happen, but he has defended robustly the measures he's introduced, and repeated his threat to send Israeli forces into Mr Arafat's West Bank and Gaza territory if necessary - a move that would be utterly humiliating for Mr Arafat, and could well trigger all-out Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

AS the Israeli cabinet gathered for a crisis meeting hours after Wednesday's blast, the Minister for Defence, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, was heard to mutter to one of his aides: "We mustn't throw out the baby with the bathwater." Despite the absence of any other prominent, credible, professedly moderate Palestinian leader, and the growing popularity in the West Bank and Gaza of a Hamas movement openly dedicated to Israel's elimination, it is by no means clear that the Israeli Prime Minister agrees with his own defence minister - agrees that it is in Israel's vital interest to ensure that Mr Arafat survives. Mr Arafat, at the weekend, said he regarded Mr Netanyahu's policies in the wake of the blast as akin to a "declaration of war" on the Palestinian people. They are hardly that. But are they a declaration of war on Mr Arafat himself?

David Horovitz is the managing editor of The Jerusalem Report.