A week that leaves the road map in tatters

MIDDLE EAST: Ahmed Korei has branded himself as the acceptable face of the unacceptable Yasser Arafat, writes David Horovitz…

MIDDLE EAST: Ahmed Korei has branded himself as the acceptable face of the unacceptable Yasser Arafat, writes David Horovitz  in Jerusalem, at the end of another tumultuous week

Palestinian television called, and the people came running.

No sooner had the Israeli government released its vaguely worded decision on Thursday night to remove Yasser Arafat from the region "in principle" than the Palestinian TV anchorman was urging ordinary Palestinians to take to the streets in a show of solidarity for their President and symbol.

And, in their thousands, they responded - a display of support that, by telling contrast, the station would never have mustered for Mr Arafat's longtime deputy, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), who was until just a week ago the Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister.

READ MORE

Mr Abbas's decision to resign last Saturday prefaced a week that was, even by the constantly grim standards of the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, bleak indeed. It featured two major suicide bombings, various Israeli missile strikes and other military responses and that decision in principle to oust Mr Arafat.

And it punched the final pockets of air out of the European and American-formulated "road map," which had been designed, however improbably, to lead to peace and Palestinian statehood by the year 2005 and now seems likely to lead precisely nowhere.

Mr Abbas was the great American and Israeli hope of a new departure from Mr Arafat's style of Palestinian leadership in which terrorism is one of a range of tools to be employed to advance the cause.

A taciturn, even gloomy figure, Mr Abbas took office in the spring promising, with few rhetorical flourishes but an impressively no-nonsense approach, to put an end to what he openly acknowledged was the deliberate "armed Intifada" against Israel.

Those with longer memories of Mr Abbas, who knew him as a man reluctant to put himself at centre-stage, a hesitant figure with little flair, charisma or will to buck the mainstream, had their doubts about his staying power. And that scepticism was vindicated quickly.

Nobody made life easy for Mr Abbas.

Not the Israelis, who released far fewer prisoners than he had sought, who dismantled fewer roadblocks, who withdrew the army from far too little of recaptured West Bank territory and - most importantly in terms of the Palestinian public's perception of their prime minister's ability to deliver concrete progress - who made some show of evacuating illegal West Bank settlement outposts but in practice allowed almost as many new ones to be erected.

Not the Americans who, despite Mr Abbas's plaintive requests, declined to press Israel hard on any of these issues, or to force Jerusalem to halt the construction of the Israeli "security barrier" which is designed to block suicide bombers from entering Israel from the West Bank, but is at least partially routed inside the West Bank itself.

Not Hamas, which declared a temporary ceasefire, but used the respite this garnered from Israel's relentless hounding to improve the range and accuracy of its Qassam rockets, train new bombers, assemble new explosive devices and smuggle in weaponry from Egypt - inevitably bringing new Israeli military action against its leaders and prompting the ceasefire's collapse.

And, finally, not Mr Arafat, who recognised that the US and Israel wanted Mr Abbas to usurp him, realised that Mr Abbas was himself not averse to the idea and consequently strove to make the prime minister's job impossible by denying him authority over the Palestinian security forces, challenging his appointments, wooing away potential allies and carping relentlessly about his incompetence.

Ahmed Korei (also known as Abu Ala) succeeded Mr Abbas just as Tuesday's twin Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv killed 15 Israelis, injured dozens more and made plain again how high the human stakes are here. He came into office espousing a very different approach.

Whereas Mr Abbas had been castigated by his President for failing to make the lifting of the siege around Mr Arafat's Ramallah headquarters the first priority in his dealings with the Americans and the Israelis, Mr Korei was battling for Mr Arafat from the start.

There was no pledge to end the armed Intifada. Instead, the first item of business for Mr Korei was Mr Arafat's wellbeing. Unless Israel changed its attitude to the Palestinians' elected leader, he declared, he would be unable to make any progress.

Such a position found favour, of course, with the PA President, but it conflicts essentially, as far as the US and Israel are concerned, with the very purpose of his prime ministership.

In a June 2002 landmark speech at the White House, President Bush had pledged American support for the Palestinian aspiration to independent statehood. But it would not be achieved, the President went on, until or unless the Palestinians chose an alternative leadership, one that was not "compromised" by terrorism.

The PA prime minister - be he Mr Abbas, Mr Korei or any other individual - was intended to represent that alternative leadership. While Mr Abbas plainly recognised this, Mr Korei, by effectively branding himself from the start as the acceptable face of the unacceptable Mr Arafat, emptied his office of any diplomatic significance.

That perception was strongly reinforced on Thursday, a day of long and fateful meetings among, on one side of the roadblock, Israel's most senior ministers headed by the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, and, on the other, Mr Arafat, Mr Korei and their colleagues.

Mr Korei went into his talks with Mr Arafat and others in Ramallah announcing that he would be quickly setting up a seven- or eight-member crisis cabinet and unifying the myriad networks of security forces. He did not specify that he would use this newly concentrated power to combat Hamas, but he certainly tried to create a perception of robust determination.

Inside the battered presidential compound, however, tempers flared, tables were pounded and doors slammed. Certain ministers in the outgoing, larger cabinet resisted the indignity of being denied the luxuries of ministerial office.

Mr Arafat, typically, battled for some of his loyalists. The idea of a rapidly formed slimmed-down government was dropped.

And dropped, too, was the notion of Mr Korei inheriting control over all the security personnel. A new national security council was indeed formally established as a unified command over the thousands of uniformed men. But it was Mr Arafat, not Mr Korei, who was named at its head.

For Mr Sharon and his ministers, weighing various possible responses to Mr Abbas's resignation, the appointment of what several ministers called an Arafat "stooge" as his replacement, the Tuesday suicide bombings and the ongoing alerts about more bombers en route, this may have been the last straw.

Mr Arafat repeatedly denies Israeli and American claims that he directly encourages acts of terrorism, but for the majority of Israelis, and the overwhelming majority of Mr Sharon's ministers, those denials ring hollow. Day after day for much of this "second Intifada," he was filmed for Palestinian television telling supporters in his office that "a million martyrs" needed to march on Jerusalem - with "martyrs" a paper-thin euphemism for suicide bombers. (The bombings are routinely called "martyrdom operations" in the Palestinian media.)

During its reinvasion of much of the West Bank in April 2002, following the killing of 120 Israelis in bombings and shooting attacks that March, Israel captured documents showing Mr Arafat's signing-off on payments to known killers.

The massive Karine A shipment of arms from Iran, intercepted by Israel en route to Gaza, could not conceivably have been arranged without Mr Arafat's sanction, the Israelis and the Americans have concluded.

In short, even leaving aside the issue of whether Mr Arafat was offered viable terms for Palestinian statehood at the Camp David talks three years ago, the Israeli and American consensus isthat Mr Arafat clear-headedly resorted to terrorism when those talks collapsed.

One of the more bitter ironies, for Mr Arafat and his supporters, is that in the three years of Intifada violence that have followed, his Fatah grouping has been much weakened - notwithstanding the latest displays of public solidarity for him - and Hamas much boosted.

As ordinary Palestinians have suffered from the Israeli roadblocks, closures, curfews and bans on workers entering Israel, Hamas has both provided financial assistance, using funds channeled from Iran and Saudi Arabia, and has been perceived as the group most willing and able to stand up to the loathed Israelis, via bombings and shootings and incendiary rhetoric. In opinion polls, Hamas now equals Fatah as the grouping of preference.

Another of those ironies, this time for Israel, is that if Mr Arafat is indeed now expelled, his absence will almost certainly be exploited by Hamas, filling the leadership vacuum and stirring its growing body of adherents into ever greater hostility to the Jewish state.

Still, it is not clear, at the end of this tumultuous week, when or even whether Israel does actually intend to expel Mr Arafat, nor that it would be physically able to do. Mr Arafat, after all, is vowing that he will not go quietly; that he would rather die than submit to deportation.

Much now will depend on two factors: the Bush administration's determination to prevent his expulsion (the US fears greater consequent instability in Iraq and may believe, too, that it is saving Israel from damaging itself); and what happens next on the ground.

If Hamas, or Mr Arafat's own self-declared loyalists in the Fatah-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades, carry out further major attacks on Israeli targets, no amount of US pressure may be sufficient to stay the Israeli government's hand.