I don’t wish Sylvan Shalom or Shaul Mofaz ill, but laryngitis might be a good thing for Israel’s foreign and defense ministers and other Israelis demanding the removal of Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat.
Not that it’s a bad idea, far from it. But they’re the wrong people to be saying or doing anything about the problem.
Instead, they should heed 28th U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s advice: “Never murder a man who is committing suicide.”
If Israeli leaders really want to get rid of Arafat, they should shut up and let him do the job himself. The more they talk about expelling or killing him, the more the Palestinians whom he has so ill-served rally around him.
That view is shared by a prominent Palestinian-American leader, Ziad J. Asali, president and founder of the Washington-based American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP).
Speaking recently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he predicted a Palestinian civil war unless there is “a drastic change in direction and leadership.”
What makes that unusual is that he said it publicly and mentioned Arafat by name. Many Arab-American leaders feel the same way, as do some Arab and European leaders, but most won’t say so openly.
Those Palestinians who do go public incur great risk. Shootings, abductions, arson and threats are common answers to Arafat’s critics.
Yet the “most striking change” Asali found on a recent trip to the West Bank and Gaza was “the outspoken criticism of Arafat by name, by members of the political establishment, in public.”
Demands are growing among Palestinians for Arafat to carry out reforms, end the corruption and deliver on his promises for peace and prosperity. But they’re getting little help from the outside.
Amb. Dennis Ross, the former top American Mideast negotiator, said there can be no progress toward peace until there are new American, Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Arab and European leaders privately say they’d like to see Arafat go. They even claim to talk tough with him in private. But their refusal to do so in public is counter-productive, says Ross, because Arafat ignores what they tell him in private and only notices their public pronouncements.
The Europeans have considerable financial and political leverage. If they used that power to publicly demand changes from Arafat, the Palestinian street would pay attention and Arafat would find it harder to ignore them, Ross said. Instead, Europeans visit Arafat and emerge to castigate Israel.
Arafat, meanwhile, is working overtime to block the rise of alternative leaders, encouraging conflict and exploiting the differences among rival factions and players. Corruption is endemic and spreading, and so is public dissatisfaction.
But despite all his faults, Arafat is still revered as the icon of the Palestinian national movement. That’s why Israeli efforts to undermine him are counterproductive.
Yet while opposition grows among Palestinians, Arafat’s greatest protector may be Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Asali said that Sharon “keeps propping (Arafat) up whenever his fortunes sag.”
Maybe that’s intentional. Sharon owes his job to Arafat. After the Palestinian leader walked out of Camp David four years ago and chose to make war instead of peace, the Israeli peace camp was demoralized and decimated, and Sharon was elected, and reelected, by landslides.
Unless Israel wants further chaos and war, it must leave removing Arafat to the Palestinians.
Douglas M. Bloomfield is a Washington, D.C.-based syndicated columnist and a former chief lobbyist for AIPAC.
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