MIDEAST: Sleepless Nights for Arafat

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Oct 17 2003 (IPS) - It was the nightmare scenario for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The last thing he needed was a bomb attack on an official convoy in an area under Palestinian control, like the one that that killed three U..S. security men in the Gaza Strip Wednesday.

That the convoy contained embassy staff on their way to interview Palestinian students for scholarships to study in the U.S. only sharpened his predicament.

The Palestinian leader condemned the attack as an "ugly crime", ordered an immediate probe, and on Thursday his security forces rounded up eight suspects. "We sent our security groups (to investigate) and from yesterday we did not sleep," he told reporters in Ramallah.

Judging by the international tirade sparked by the attack, Arafat will be having a few more sleepless nights. President George W. Bush blamed him and his Palestinian Authority for the bombing, saying it would not have happened had the Palestinian leaders "acted long ago to fight terror." European leaders called for the perpetrators to be captured and tried.

But the demands by world leaders after the first lethal attack on a U.S. target since the start of the Intifadah uprising three years ago went far beyond a call for justice. The attack, they said, was further evidence of the vital need to restructure Palestinian security forces – which means prying them away from Arafat û and for the Palestinian Authority to crush armed groups.

United Nations Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said the attack, in which a powerful roadside bomb ripped apart a jeep carrying the three security men, "underscores the vital need for the Palestinian Authority to revamp and strengthen its security forces so such terror attacks do not occur."

Bush was less diplomatic: "There must be an empowered prime minister who controls all Palestinian forces û reforms that continue to be blocked by Yasser Arafat."

For months, Arafat has stubbornly refused to relinquish control over a significant portion of the Palestinian security forces, fearing it will erode his power. The U.S. and the European Union (EU) want these forces unified under a single command of the prime minister and not Arafat, so that the Palestinian Authority can effectively confront militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Despite their public refusal to use force in dealing with these groups, both Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Korei and his predecessor Mahmoud Abbas have wrestled with Arafat over control of security forces. This was one of the reasons Abbas resigned early September. And it is the reason Korei says he plans to resign within a few weeks.

But the attack on the U.S. convoy could shift the balance of power in favour of Korei, who has been demanding the appointment of an interior minister with full control over all Palestinian security forces.

The Palestinian public has digested the attack with mixed feelings. While many comprehend the damage done to their cause, there is strong anti-U.S. sentiment on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza, where the Bush administration is perceived as unabashedly pro-Israel.

This sentiment has been fed by recent U.S. decisions. When Israeli planes bombed a base near Damascus earlier this month that Israel said was being used to train militants, Bush said the United States would have responded in similar fashion.

Last week, U.S. officials defended Israel’s right to self-defence after it sent troops into the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah to search for tunnels used to smuggle weapons into the Strip from Egypt under the border. Eight Palestinians, including two children, were killed in the raid; more than 1,200 people were made homeless.

Finally, on Tuesday the U.S. used its veto in the UN Security Council to block a resolution against Israel’s construction of a fence in the West Bank meant to keep suicide bombers out of its cities. The erection of the fence is gobbling up large chunks of the land on which Palestinians hope to build a future state..

"The atmosphere among the Palestinian public is very antagonistic toward the U.S., which is seen as giving almost absolute support to Israel while ignoring Palestinian suffering," Yohanan Tzoreff, a senior scholar at the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya just outside Tel Aviv told IPS.

Those who carried out the attack, adds Tzoreff, were sending a very clear message to the U.S.: "Change your one-sided approach."

Palestinian leaders immediately sensed the destructive potential of the attack. Minister Saeb Erekat called it a "devastating act" that would harm a key Palestinian demand that international observers be sent to the region to monitor the conflict.

"The attack was a big shock for Palestinian leaders," says Tzoreff. "It is yet another crisis in a long chain of crises they are confronting. Not only are they dealing with an ongoing leadership crisis but now another front has been opened up with the U.S. None of them want this."

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. Fearing a backlash, Hamas and Islamic Jihad rushed to deny any connection with the bombing.

The working assumption in Israel and the Palestinian Authority is that the Popular Resistance Committees is behind the attack. The group came into existence shortly after the Intifadah erupted in September 2000 and is made up of former Palestinian security men and breakaway members of Arafat’s ruling Fatah party.

Israeli officials heaped blame on the Palestinian leadership for not fighting terror. "The Palestinian Authority is doing nothing to dismantle the terror infrastructure, and continues to give refuge to extremist organisations," said Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.

But quietly, they were hoping the attack would strengthen their long-touted contention that a connection can, and must, be made between the Sep. 11 attacks in the U.S., the almost daily attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, and the suicide bombings in Israeli cities. That the enemy in New York is the enemy in Baghdad is the enemy in Jerusalem.

That is an equation that sits well with Bush and the neo-conservatives who surround him. But it does not mean the attack in Gaza is about to fundamentally alter U.S. policy in the region. Since the resignation of Abbas in early September, the U.S. has conspicuously withdrawn from the conflict, offering little more than lip service to the road map peace plan.

That is not about to change, especially as Bush finds himself increasingly mired in Iraq, and as he gears up for a re-election campaign that once seemed a walk in the park, but the outcome of which has become increasingly unpredictable.