Some Arab papers are predicting the fall of Yasser Arafat. Dina Ezzat reads what might befall the prisoner of Ramallah Readers following Palestinian affairs, beware: the forecast of several articles in the Arab press this week of an around-the-corner political demise of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat may prove false. However, the well-informed reader would not fail to understand that the inter- Palestinian clashes in the Palestinian territories that are theoretically controlled by the Palestinian Authority are far from ordinary. The destinies of the Palestinian cause and that of Arafat, one of the most intriguing of Arab leaders, have long been intertwined. But has the time come for Arafat to ready himself to exit the political scene and disassociate the destiny of the Palestinian people from his own fate? Many commentators this week argued that it has. "Arafat should worry. He is obliged to start looking at his clock; it's ticking. There is not much room left to play for time," wrote Ghassan Charbale in the London-based daily Al-Hayat on Monday. According to Charbale's column and to Sami Nazih's news analysis published in the prestigious Kuwaiti daily Ar-Ra'i Al-Aam also on Monday, the Palestinian leader has lived a long political life that is based on cunning political manoeuvring that always helped him rise from certain doom to new heights of power. But this time, Charbale, Nazih and many other commentators and observers agree that things are different. This time, they say, a wide scale collapse of law and order in the Palestinian territories may be inevitable due to Arafat's mismanagement of Palestinian affairs since his return from exile in the mid-1990s. This time, wrote Charbale, Arafat, "the prisoner of Ramallah, is looking around but finding nothing left to bid on and actually nobody left to bid on". And as Nazih said, all Arafat has to do to realise that he now stands all alone is to carefully examine the statement that was made by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abu El- Gheit on the recent developments in Gaza. "The Egyptian reaction voiced by the foreign minister was void of any support of Arafat -- even when it stressed the need for Palestinian unity." So what does Arafat do now? Commentators suggested a separation of futures between the Palestinian people and the Palestinian leader who for decades has been the symbol of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. "This is the time for painful decisions. Arafat's old ways are not going to work any more. They are simply not good enough. Arafat the symbol is no longer able to rescue Arafat the president," wrote Charbale. The need for an immediate separation between the destinies of Arafat and the Palestinian people, especially those under occupation, was the crux of both an article and a column in the Saudi-financed, London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat. Prominent Saudi columnist Abdul-Rahman Al-Rachid and pro-American commentator Maamoun Fendi both agreed that much of the misery endured by the Palestinian people was to be blamed on Arafat and his aides who insist on sacrificing the interests of the Palestinian people to serve theirs and who, according to Fendi, are more obsessed with freeing Arafat from Ramallah rather than freeing the Palestinian people from occupation. Fendi used the official angry Palestinian reaction to criticism made by UN envoy to the Middle East Tereje Rod Larsen concerning the poor performance of the Palestinian Authority as an example of Arafat's continuous confusion -- deliberate or not -- between himself and the Palestinian people. Those who were angered by Larsen's comments about the near collapse of the Palestinian Authority and its chairman argued that they should look around them to see that he was not being unfair to the Palestinian cause but was simply describing the poor performance of the Palestinian leadership. If the unprecedented poverty and unemployment rates being suffered by the Palestinian people are not a good enough reason for them to read Larsen's statements in a realistic light, Fendi added, then they need to look closer at the events of the past few days when French aid workers were briefly kidnapped by Palestinian activists and when inter-Palestinian fighting -- including inter-PA squabbling -- was taking an alarming turn. But for Fendi, neither Arafat nor his clan "want to acknowledge these facts because they accept no [criticism]. As for the [millions] of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere under occupation, they care very little. This is a situation in which Arafat's interests are taking priority over the interests of the Palestinian people," wrote Fendi. This approach, argued Rachid, would also bring about the demise of the entire Palestinian Authority. "The Israelis could have simply got rid of the symbols of the Palestinian Authority as they did with the symbols of Hamas. That would have cost them nothing more than the screaming of Palestinian women and the condemnation of the [international community] for a week. But they do not have to do this job themselves. They can leave it to the Palestinian leadership whose lack of vision, and their corruption and squabbling is serving [Israeli interests with excellence]," he wrote. A clear sign which many saw as the real end of Arafat this time was the almost total Arab absence of intervention. On Saturday, the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal reported an Egyptian decision to totally freeze the recent Egyptian initiative to orchestrate an orderly Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. On Monday, the same paper reported Egyptian- Israeli consultations to arrange for a visit by Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to Cairo for talks with his new Egyptian counterpart Abu El- Gheit over a new approach towards the situation in the Palestinian territories. On Sunday, the Jordanian daily Ad- Doustour quoted the official spokeswoman of the Jordanian government Asma Khodr as saying that Amman was closely monitoring the situation in the Palestinian territories, but added no more. On Tuesday, the Arab press quoted a statement issued by the Arab League that Secretary-General Amr Moussa was closely monitoring the situation and that the League was calling for Palestinian unity. Nazih, Fendi and other commentators with diverse political leanings agree: there is hardly anyone who still trusts Arafat in the Arab world, not to mention elsewhere. According to Lebanese commentator Talal Salman's article in As- Safir on Monday: "This is the most miserable part. The Palestinian Authority has nobody to turn to for help, not in the Arab world and not elsewhere." Meanwhile, some Arab commentators found it necessary to write that getting engrossed in the current developments in the Palestinian territories should not be made at the expense of following up on other crucial elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In an opinion piece in Al-Ra'i Al- Aam on Monday, Ahmed Al-Hague warned of Israeli and American plans to force Arab countries into offering permanent residence for Palestinian refugees. And in two articles on Saturday in the Saudi daily Ar-Riyadh and the UAE daily Al-Ittihad, Lebanese Minister of Culture Ghazi Al- Oradi warned of the consequences of the statements made by Mohamed El- Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, during a recent visit to Israel where he expressed understanding over Israeli security concerns and willingness to cooperate with the Israeli government on nuclear programmes in goodwill, gestures that he did not offer any Arab state with legitimate security concerns, including Syria whose Golan Heights are occupied by Israel. Indeed, in its editorial on Monday, Al-Bayan, a UAE daily, called on Palestinians and Arabs to get their act together and warned that the current situation was only playing in the hands of the Israeli prime minister who is now "dancing with joy".
