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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Sharon, Arafat dueling possibly
for one last time
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Both 73, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have been adversaries for decades, ever since one was a soldier in the young state of Israel and the other a guerrilla leader of the Palestinians it left homeless.
Now, in the twilight of their lives, these two old men have embarked on what may be their final confrontation.
Both call each other "terrorist" and both are accused of war crimes.
Sharon earned a bloody reputation in the 1950s when he led retaliatory attacks against Palestinians who had mounted cross-border raids on Israel from Jordan. After the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem, Sharon earned the nickname of "Bulldozer" in a ruthless hunt for guerrillas that destroyed hundreds of Palestinian homes.
And when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Sharon was held indirectly responsible for a massacre of 800 Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen in Beirut. That cost him the job of Israel's defense minister and is now the basis of war crimes charges filed by 29 survivors in a Belgian court.
Arafat too has a bloodstained past as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which launched a worldwide campaign of terrorism in the misguided hope of destroying international support for Israel and creating sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
For two decades, between 1968 and 1988, Palestinian "freedom fighters" hijacked airliners, bombed Jewish and non-Jewish targets and staged other atrocities such as the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. By Israel's count, factions operating under the PLO umbrella were responsible for more than 8,000 terrorist attacks before Arafat discarded his terrorist garb and assumed the mantle of statesman.
He too stands accused of murder, genocide and crimes against humanity in the same Belgian court investigating Sharon's war crimes. The charges were filed by 30 Israelis who lost relatives to Palestinian terrorism and now want Arafat tried for the "deaths of thousands of terror victims."
But Arafat's ability to survive in a very tough neighborhood has proved to be as enduring as his olive-green fatigues, checkered keffiyeh headdress and the pistol he wears on his belt even when visiting the United Nations.
By his count, Arafat has escaped 13 assassination attempts by Israel's Mossad and many more by Palestinian rivals from groups that splintered away from the PLO and by Arab rulers who tried to eliminate him when they found they couldn't control him. Among those who tried were Jordan's King Hussein, Syria's Hafez Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.
In 1967 Arafat fled the West Bank, newly conquered by Israel, disguised as a woman. In the "Black September" of 1970 he lost his guerrilla base in Jordan and in 1982 the invading Israelis kicked him out of Lebanon. Exiled to Tunisia -- and a decade after Sharon made his transition from soldier to politician -- Arafat finally decided to transform himself.
In November 1988 he overrode massive opposition within the PLO to advocate peace talks with the Jewish state. A month later, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Arafat declared "null and void" the article in the PLO charter that called for the "elimination of Zionism in Palestine."
A skeptical Israel waited five years to respond to this overture. It was not until 1993 that the Israeli parliament removed its legal prohibition on contact with the PLO, which led to the Oslo accords and Nobel peace prizes for those who signed them: Arafat, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his successor, Shimon Peres.
The peace process begun by Rabin and Peres survived suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a massacre of Palestinians by a Jewish-American settler and Rabin's assassination by an ultra-Orthodox Jew. Such a level of trust was established that in 1996 the Palestine National Council voted to scrap all clauses in the PLO charter calling for Israel's destruction and the then-ruling Labor Party responded by dropping its long-standing opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state.
But negotiations faltered under hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and died at Camp David when Arafat refused the most generous offer ever made by an Israeli prime minister. Ehud Barak offered to return 90 percent of the occupied territories but Arafat held out for East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital and the "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees who would have swamped Israel and threatened its very existence as a Jewish state. No Israeli leader could accept that.
So Arafat was left with 40 percent of the West Bank and most of the Gaza Strip, ostensibly controlled by his Palestinian Authority but split by Jewish settlements, bypass roads and Israeli checkpoints that control all access, egress and economic activity.
The Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000. Palestinians accuse Sharon of provoking it by visiting Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest shrine. Sharon insists the uprising was pre-planned and won election as prime minister in February this year on a promise to "restore security."
Since then Israel has been anything but secure.
The intifada has progressed from stone-throwing and shooting attacks in the occupied territories to suicide bombings in Israel. Israeli reprisals have escalated from tank and helicopter gunship attacks on civilian neighborhoods to economic blockades, home demolitions and "targeted killings" -- assassination by another name -- of Palestinian militants.
Sharon accuses Arafat of directing the intifada, calling him a "thug" and a "terrorist." Arafat protests that he cannot control the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- even his authority over Fatah and other Palestinian security organs has become questionable -- while maintaining that Israel invites terrorism by continuing its occupation of Palestinian land and engaging in "state terrorism" against the Palestinian people.
Whoever is right, the death toll is nearing 1,000, with Palestinian casualties outnumbering Israeli 3-to-1.
The violence reached a crescendo over the weekend when Islamic suicide bombers killed 26 people and wounded 200 in Haifa and Jerusalem. Sharon responded with air strikes close to Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, destroying his two helicopters and damaging the offices of his personal bodyguard, Force 17. Israeli bulldozers also ripped up the runway at Gaza International Airport, a cherished symbol of Palestinian nationhood.
The message from the Bulldozer was clear: I choose not to kill you, for that would make you a martyr, but I can get you any time. You are now grounded and the land you hope to make a Palestinian state is shrinking by the day.
Israeli officials said the intent was to humiliate Arafat and prevent him from leaving the country on one of his diplomatic forays abroad, as he so frequently does when things get too hot for him at home.
But Sharon's cabinet went further, declaring the Palestinian Authority to be a "terror-supporting entity" and thus drawing it into President Bush's war on terrorism. "A war has been forced upon us, a war of terror," Sharon told the nation in a televised address Monday. "Just as the United States is conducting its war against international terror, using all its might against terror, so will we too."
With U.S. warplanes daily pounding Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts, Washington could hardly object. Bush did not issue his customary call for restraint and his spokesman made a point of saying that Israel could defend itself as it saw fit.
Arafat, the wily survivor, is in a box.
Every time he cracks down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad he is branded "Israel's policeman." If he cracks down too hard, he risks being assassinated or overthrown. The Islamists are widely admired by Palestinians as "fighters" and "martyrs" while Arafat's Palestinian Authority is reviled as a bunch of corrupt collaborators.
Yet if Arafat does not crack down, he risks being swept aside by Sharon, perhaps killed or exiled, without any hope of support from the United States.
According to the Hebrew daily Maariv, Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, prepared an assessment last year titled "Arafat: Asset or Burden?" It concluded that he was a burden and Israel would be better off dealing with someone else.
The trouble is there is no discernible moderate waiting in the wings to take over.
Arafat has always run a one-man show and never groomed a successor, even though he now suffers from Parkinson's disease and looks visibly frail. Peres, now Sharon's foreign minister, concedes that Arafat may not be the best peace partner but says worse may follow.
"Get rid of Arafat," he warns, "and you'll be dealing with Hamas and Islamic Jihad."
That in itself may save Arafat from what he fears most: irrelevance.
December 5, 2001
Wherever Arafat jumps, ice is dangerously
thin
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Secretary of State Colin Powell says this is the "moment of truth" for Yasser Arafat, and it is.
Suicide bombings that killed 25 Israelis and Arabs in barely 12 hours have forced the Palestinian leader to choose between cracking down on Islamic terrorists widely admired by his people or losing any hope of U.S. support just as the Bush administration was adopting a more even-handed stance in the Middle East.
Either way he risks being toppled -- by Palestinians who don't want him to rein in their intifada or by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, under growing pressure from hard-liners in his coalition government to get rid of Arafat and dismantle his Palestinian Authority.
Arafat is "caught between two fires," in the words of Palestinian analyst Khalil Shikaki.
So far he has opted to invite the wrath of Palestinians who, according to recent opinion polls back the suicide bombers by a margin of 70 percent. Arafat has declared a state of emergency, outlawed Hamas and Islamic Jihad and arrested more than a hundred of their operatives.
"These attacks on Israeli civilians have pushed us into a corner," his planning minister, Nabil Shaath, told the Voice of Palestine radio. "We live in a world that is busy with the war against Afghanistan and international terror, and we have to keep trying to be part of the international community and not be isolated."
But Israeli officials remain skeptical, noting that Arafat has jailed terrorists before, only to release them through a "revolving door" in his prisons. And the question that keeps recurring is how much authority his Authority really wields.
Yoram Schweitzer, an Israeli counterterrorism expert currently visiting Denver, subscribes to Sharon's view that Arafat is still in control. "He was the one who added violence to the dialogue and he can stop it any time he wants to," he said.
But Palestinian analysts maintain that Arafat does not control Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is constantly defied by members of his own Fatah organization and is widely detested by many Palestinians for running a corrupt and authoritarian regime that does nothing to alleviate the economic hardships caused by the intifada.
One of his most vocal critics is his chief of security in Gaza. Last month, in tendering a resignation that Arafat refused to accept, Col. Muhammad Dahlan criticized his boss for surrounding himself with corrupt yes-men, saying they should be replaced with officials more responsive to the needs of the people. More tellingly, he attacked Arafat's incoherent "strategy" of professing cease-fire to the West while maintaining a hands-off attitude toward terrorism.
Dahlan spearheaded Arafat's last crackdown on Islamic militants in 1996 when his security forces arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives, some of whom died in custody. At the time, Arafat was roundly condemned by many Palestinians for becoming "Israel's policeman," but got away with it because he was then engaged in serious peace talks that promised Palestinian statehood.
Now the peace process is dead, Arafat's popularity is waning and he has no political gains to convince the Palestinians that a cease-fire is justified. Gazans are already protesting his latest arrests with signs saying: "The fighters are behind the walls of the Authority's prison while the collaborators with the Israelis are free."
So, is Arafat leading the intifada as Israel charges or is he the "collaborator" reviled in Gaza?
He certainly has nothing to gain from terrorism, which has stalled Palestinian statehood, devastated the Palestinian economy and led to ever harsher Israeli reprisals that goad more young men to join the ranks of the suicide bombers and further erode Arafat's authority.
Their latest attacks in Haifa and Jerusalem have undermined a new American peacemaking effort by retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and cost Arafat valuable international support. European governments sympathetic to the Palestinian cause are all sending him the message that no motive justifies killing innocent civilians.
Significantly, President Bush did not issue his customary call for restraint when he met with Sharon Sunday. "The Bulldozer," as he was once called, was given to understand that he can retaliate as he sees fit -- which means the gloves may come off.
December 4, 2001
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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