Obituaries for Yasser Arafat's leadership come thick and fast. One thing is clear, though, he won't go quietly, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem Two weeks after George Bush's speech on US Middle East policy, and a week after the Israeli army completed the re-conquest of most of the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas in the West Bank -- the Israeli consensus is clear: Yasser Arafat is a "dead man walking". In the view of army analysts the Palestinian leader's fortunes have now sunk so low there is no longer even a need to expel him unless a "particularly large attack" occurs in Israel's cities. On the contrary, "chances are increasing that within six months Arafat's standing will have declined so much that he won't be able to prevent a new, pragmatic leadership from emerging, which will lead to a compromise with Israel," declared a senior military source in Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 8 July. Arafat has been pronounced dead before. And his response this time, as before, is to retrench his leadership against all alternatives, real or imagined, external or domestic. In the wake of Israel's reoccupation, the PA forbade all contact between Israeli army officers and Palestinian mayors, for fear they might be groomed as the "new, pragmatic leadership". Palestinian negotiators like Saeb Ereikat, Mohamed Dahlan, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qrei have made it clear they won't be party to any meetings with Israelis unless authorised by their leader. The meetings this week between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and the PA's new Finance and Interior Ministers -- Salam Fayad and Abdul-Razek Yahya -- occurred, it was made pointedly clear, only with Arafat's express approval. Peres said the meetings were "good." The Palestinians said Peres had again arrived without a mandate from his prime minister to take decisions, whether on Israel's withdrawal from the Palestinian territories or about the transfer of the $500 million Israel owes the PA in tax dues. On the domestic front, too, Arafat appears to be readying the ground less for the emergence of a future leadership than for a continuation of the old, with himself as the incontestable head. This, at least, is how several Palestinian and Israeli analysts construed his dismissal last week of Jibril Rajoub as head of the PA's West Bank Preventive Security Force. According to PA security forces, no "outside force" demanded Rajoub's ousting as part of the "reform" of the PA security forces, now nominally under the "unified" control of Yahya's Interior Ministry. It is not hard to fathom why. During the seven years of the Oslo process Rajoub enjoyed good working relations with several foreign intelligence services, including the CIA and the Israeli Shin Bet. For the 22 months of the Intifada, his forces have been conspicuous largely by their absence from the fighting on the West Bank, a clear sign of Rajoub's skepticism as to worth of armed struggle as a means to combat the occupation. Rather, say Palestinian sources, the true motive for Arafat's removal of Rajoub lie in the fact that he had built a relatively independent force, manned by young Fatah activists in the West Bank, that could -- if not today then tomorrow -- coalesce as an alternative power centre to Arafat's leadership. There had been signs of this independence in the past. In 1997 Arafat fired Rajoub for refusing to arrest political leaders from Hamas. PSF officers refused the order and, eventually, Arafat rescinded it. In February a very public spat erupted between the two over Arafat's policy -- or, in Rajoub's view, non-policy -- toward Fatah-linked Palestinian militias like the Al-Aqsa Brigades. And in April Rajoub publicly accused "three or four people" (Mohamed Dahlan, PA minister Hassan Asfour and economic adviser Mohamed Rashid) of conniving with Israel in the bombardment of his headquarters in Ramallah. To save his men Rajoub was forced to transfer to Israeli custody six wanted Hamas fugitives, at a massive cost to nationalist creditability. Arafat's response to the quarrel was silence. Has Arafat rid himself of a potential rival? Rajoub's sacking was met with street protests by PSF men in Hebron and Ramallah, but with indifference and cynicism by most Palestinians. "Arafat could certainly move against Rajoub in Nablus," said one Palestinian from the city. "The PSF no longer exists here." Whatever Arafat's motives, it is clear they have little to do with reform or strategy and everything to do with survival. His sole goal now appears to be to cling to the support of his people and those international powers that still recognise him as their "legitimate representative" in the hope that these will somehow reverse the verdict cast on him by Bush and Peres. It is his oldest tactic of all: "When I only have two options, I cannot sleep because I want a third," he was once quoted as saying, on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. It remains to be seen whether this time round there is a third, or even a second.
