The Israeli cabinet voted today in favour of the principle of expelling Yasser Arafat from Israel:
“Recent days’ events have proven again that Yasser Arafat is a complete obstacle to any process of reconciliation … ” the Cabinet’s communique stated Thursday. “Israel will act to remove this obstacle in the manner, at the time, and in the ways that will be decided on separately …”
While Arafat is the worst kind of two-faced terrorist, I happen to think that expelling him is the worst possible move Israel could make right now. I agree with Shimon Peres in this case:
[Peres] warned that expelling Arafat would be a “historic mistake” that would “deepen the hostilities between the Palestinians and ourselves” and told CNN, “Arafat outside will be more effective and more negative than he is today.”
See, the thing is, Arafat has been a thorn in Israel’s side for decades. But there’s no easy solution to the problem. Basically, Israel has three choices: take him out, expel him, or leave him where he is.
Assassinating Arafat would be a pretty stupid move on Israel’s part, since it would turn him into an instant martyr. And that, of course, is exactly what he wants. Arafat’s worst nightmare is to die of old age, of natural causes. It’s been argued that he started the whole intifada because he wanted to go down in history as a martyr, and not as the person who shook hands with an Israeli prime minister. Arafat’s death caused by the IDF would play right into his hands. Not to mention pissing off the few places left in the world with sympathy for Israel.
But expelling him isn’t much better. Right now, he’s confined to his Ramallah compound, essentially under siege, restricted from travel and surrounded by IDF troops. He’s still calling the shots in the PA, which is why Israel is so keen on getting rid of him, but internationally he’s been largely sidelined.
Just look at the propaganda that he manages to create from his compound in Ramallah. Now imagine what would happen if he had the entire world as his base of operations? If he could travel to Syria to arrange weapons imports, and then fly to London or Paris to get his picture on the front page with some opposition politician trying to score far-left brownie points. If he could set up a base of operations wherever he wanted, and whip the Middle East into a frenzy by addressing large crowds or holding court at his whim?
Which is why it’s probably best if Israel just leaves him where he is. The cabinet may think that by removing him from power, it would clear the way for a more moderate Palestinian politician to take the reins. But in all likelihood, it would just strengthen the extremist groups.
So while it’s understandable that Israel would want to kick out Arafat, whose corrupt terorrist-sponsoring leadership has been responsible for the loss of so much innocent life on all sides, strategically it’s not a very smart move.
I agree that he should be left to moulder away where he is. When he dies, his burial site will become a shrine that as time goes on will seem to acquire mystical properties. His followers will try to bury him in some symbolic place as close to Jerusalem as possible, even in the Arab portion. Then retaining Jerusalem becomes a fighting matter. Thire is no satisfactory disposal for this bit toxic waste.
Dying of old age at the nadir of his accomplishments is the least worst solution.
Facts excluded:
1) That expelling or killing (as the Jerusalem Post, part of the press of a vibrant democracy, has called for) the chosen leader of another people is a violation of international law.
2) That an attack on the chosen leader of a people is an attack on the self-determination of that people.
3) That Israel has more than three choices: the government could, for example, stop the settlement-building, stop the collective punishment, stop the military occupation — in short, stop its violations of the human rights of Palestinian civilians — and allow Palestinian civilian support for Arafats brand of politics to dwindle on its own. Any foreign attack on a people will rally them around their leader, regardless of the illegal nature of that leaders policies, as the Israeli and American contexts, among others, have shown.
4) That the current Israeli government is mired in its own corruption and commission of terrorist acts.
Peres comments remind me of a joke:
Two jews are lined up against the wall facing a firing squad.
One jew says to the other “We’re supposed to get a final cigarette, I want my final cigarette”.
The other jew looks at him and says “Shut up, or you’ll get us in trouble”.
Me,
Hitler was a leader chosen by his people. So was Saddam (with 99%!)
And just how long ago was he elected? When is the next election? Are there any laws stipulating when elections must occur?
Well there aren’t. So by definition, Mr. Arafat is a dictator. Hiding behind ‘elected president’ rhetoric won’t change the facts.
Okay, “me”, let’s ignore for the moment that you’re again using legal technicalities to draw false moral equivalents, or that your strategy of constantly calling on Israel to take unilateral action in order to solve the mideast conflict is really lame.
In the spirit of being realistic and cynical, like this original post, what do you think would happen if Israel followed your advice?
Stop the settlement-building – No argument from me there. It should be met with a step on the Palestinian side too . . . but the expansion of settlements is far from my favourite Israeli government policy. (In no way is it morally equivalent to terrorism, mind you, which so many people try to make it out to be.)
Stop the collective punishment, stop the military occupation – in other words, Israel should lay down its weapons and surrender.
You seem to think this will lead to the Palestinian population “naturally” turning away from Arafat’s kind of politics. Maybe you’re ignoring the fact that over 80% of Palestinians don’t believe there can ever be peace as long as Israel exists on one single square inch of what they consider to be “historic Palestine” – a lie fed to the population to make them refuse to negotiate a settled 2-state solution.
In short, your idea for peace would be to have Israel give up, pack up, and disappear. Then there would be peace because Israel wouldn’t exist.
Think I’m exaggerating? Fine, let’s take your imaginary scenario. Israel makes a series of concessions for peace that are unconditional and not matched by the Palestinians. The Palestinians are still launching terror attacks, but Israel has eliminated security checkpoints, perimeter defences, and any other means of defence or retaliation.
The Palestinians keep launching attacks and Israelis keep dying, but they don’t strike back.
Statehood is declared in part of the territories, but the Palestinians have now seen how well terrorism works in achieving poltiical goals, and they start a worldwide campaign to “end the occupation of Tel Aviv”.
You see where this is going?
Israel is in a war for its very survival. Surrender is not an option.
Jonny, I don’t agree with a lot of what Peres says. But I think his point that expelling Arafat would be a historic mistake is a well-taken strategic one. It’s possible to say that someone has a good point without necessarily saying they’re right about everything. Even “me” makes good points once in a blue moon.
Realist,
All of what you say notwithstanding (although, by your definition, L. Paul Bremmer in Iraq also qualifies as a dictator), Arafat was still elected and much of the Palestinian population, not to mention the international community, is supporting him against the Israeli threats.
As well, the Israeli governments decision that Arafat is to be discarded of — whether or not he was fairly elected — is still a violation of international law and is still a violation of the human rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people.
Im glad I found you again on this board because I wanted to pass on to you some more information regarding the road map discussion we were having earlier.
From the human rights group Gush Shalom:
pursuant to an Israeli cabinet vote on 25 May 2003, [the Israeli government] has accepted…the steps outlined in the Road Map.
For an analysis of the Israeli violations of its accepted obligations vis-avis the road map, see: [http://www.gush-shalom.org/roadmap/start.html]
More pertinent to the discussion at hand, also from Gush Shalom:
“They have decided upon cold-blooded murder” Press Release, Gush Shalom, 12 September 2003
“The government of Israel has tonight resolved to commit a cold-blooded murder, with the implementation deferred — the cold blooded murder of the elected president of the Palestinians. Let there be no mistake about it. Let no one be fooled by the talk of ‘deportation’. There is no intention that Arafat will survive the encounter with Sharon’s soldiers. I know Sharon, I have followed his career for decades, ever since he was a young commando officer carrying out brutal cross-border raids. He has not changed in any essential, only in the amount of power held in his hands. He means to do it, he means to kill Arafat. He will watch for his chance, wait for a moment when the Americans look elsewhere – and then he will pounce.”
That was the immediate response by Uri Avnery, former member of the Israeli Parliament and veteran activist of Gush Shalom (The Israeli Peace Bloc). “The cabinet ministers of the Government of Israel have tonight adopted an ominous, criminal decision, whose implementation would entail rivers of shed blood – far beyond all the horrors we have already seen in the past three years. The effects will spread far beyond the confines of this country – throughout the region and the world. The ministers who raised their hands for this infamous resolution will never be able to shirk of responsibility for what they have done”.
[electronicIntifada.net/v2/article1911.shtml]
You’re not going to score too many brownie points around here by quoting Uri Avnery. He’s an Israeli extremist and terror apologist who seems to have no concept of the fact that Israel is at war. He’s like the Americans who are blaming the US for September 11th.
There are plenty of groups in Israel doing good, legitimate peace activism work and I have a lot of respect for them. But Gush Shalom is out there on the fringes.
Sari,
I actually agreed with everything you said in your post about arafish, and I think Peres makes some good points.
segacs,
One doesn’t put much value on what you consider credible or less-than-credible sources, since your criticism usually ends there, without ever dealing with the information that the source provides.
Recall, for example, that you brushed off a source which opined that a small group of pro-Likud neocons were engineering the war on Iraq — a fact which is widely reported and accepted today. Wolfowitz, Perle et al. had shopped their ‘attack Iraq’ plan to B. Netanyahu long before 911, while he was still PM.
Recall that you laid great faith in Colin Powell’s infomercial at the UN, which for you proved the then-existence of illegal WMD in Iraq, which it is now accepted don’t actually exist.
So if you’re going to comment on the information itself, I’m listening. But if you’re just telling me who you think is credible and not, your own not-credibility doesn’t earn you any brownie points there.
Recall, for example, that you brushed off a source which opined that a small group of pro-Likud neocons were engineering the war on Iraq — a fact which is widely reported and accepted today.
Widely reported and accepted? Excuse me? Maybe among antisemitic wackos . . . but your Jewish-control-of-the-world conspiracy theories just expose you for what you really are around here.
As for Avnery’s claim, the “information itself” was nothing concrete, just a bunch of verbal bashing of Israeli government policy with no backup whatsoever. Avnery gave his opinion that Sharon was planning to execute Arafat, and based it on the extremely compelling evidence of “I know him”. I don’t see any information worth commenting on myself here.
Me,
First of all, by my definition of a dictator, Jean Chretien is a quazi one. (the Canadian prime-minister is given way too much power, and we still don’t even have democratic senate)
But that still doesn’t change the fact that Arafat is a posterboy for dicatorship.
Countries have been going after dictators for years. If its a violaiton of International law than I say the law is flawed (I’ve never actually read a law that stated that)
“Accepting the steps” of the roadmap is not legally binding. Again, I know you have a list of Israeli violaitons. There’s an equal long list of Palestinian violations. What’s your point?
The people from Gush Shalom that you quote must be very smart. They’re writing like they can predict the future. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens
Both,
Cheers; guess we’ll just wait and see how this plays out to see if Avnery’s right or wrong.
segacs,
Not only ‘antisemitic wackos,’ but credible press (NY Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation, etc.) have noted that the US Office of Special Plans cherry-picked intelligence reports to support the idea of Iraq’s ‘imminent threat’ to the US due to its possession of illegal WMD. On the OSP team are savoury characters such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, etc. — all with deep connections to Likud.
An example of the press reports:
It is true that some people in the Pentagon, as well as influential organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, have close relations with the Likud Party, and especially with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is much more in tune with American neoconservatism than Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is. Douglas Feith and Richard Perle advised Netanyahu, who was prime minister in 1996, to make ”a clean break” from the Oslo accords with the Palestinians. They also argued that Israeli security would be served best by regime change in surrounding countries. Despite the current mess in Iraq, this is still a commonplace in Washington. In Paul Wolfowitz’s words, ”The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.” It has indeed become an article of faith (literally in some cases) in Washington that American and Israeli interests are identical, but this was not always so, and ”Jewish interests” are not the main reason for it now.
[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D14FE3A5D0C728FDDA10894DB404482]
–
A tight-knit group of Pentagon officials and defense experts outside government is working to mobilize support for a military operation to oust President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as the next phase of the war against terrorism, senior administration officials and defense experts said.
The group, which some in the State Department and on Capitol Hill refer to as the ”Wolfowitz cabal,” after Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, is laying the groundwork for a strategy that envisions the use of air support and the occupation of southern Iraq with American ground troops to install a Iraqi opposition group based in London at the helm of a new government, the officials and experts said.
[http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/archive/2001/nyt101201.htm] by way of the New York Times
–
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The OSP was an open a
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel’s Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle – now an influential Pentagon figure – served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a “product”, a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html]
–
According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky’s–and which has not previously been reported–prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon’s office, not inside Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad–which prides itself on extreme professionalism–had views closer to the CIA’s, not the Pentagon’s, on Iraq.
[http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&s=dreyfuss]
–
An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith’s domain, was originally created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
[http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0807-02.htm] (by way of Inter Press Service)
You can find all of the information above, and more, at:
[http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/wot/iraq/office_of_special_p
You can find all of the information above, and more, at:
[http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/wot/iraq/office_of_special_plans.html]
I live about 25km from Arafat and personally can’t stand that the clouds in my sky are also those in his.
I disaggree with Segac about not making Arafat a martyr because that’s his dream. Frankly, who cares what he wants and why should you? Not killing Arafat means sacrificing many more Jews so that he can die an old man. Have we not learned anything from the past three years of the Oslo war and media manipulation? Whether he dies an old man tomorrow, or is made a martyr by Sayeret Matkal is not relevant. The message that will be portrayed by AP, ABC, Haaretz and the Globe and Mail will be the same. You’ll have the same – death of a statesman – photospreads, and a nice tribute in the end of year issues of Time and Newsweek to those who’ve ‘died’.
It doesn’t matter if Arafat is dead or alive. What matters most is if the Jewish people are united and love each other. If we really ignored Arafat from today on and concentrated more on our problems instead of looking for scapegoats, we would win this war and not use it as a crutch to show our victimization (the world does not care).