Arafat's shrinking dominion

Yasser Arafat's authority -- personal and institutional -- has rarely been so frail nor the forces arrayed against it so strong. Graham Usher reports from Ramallah
The three top floors of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation building in Ramallah provide eloquent witness to the present state of the Palestinian Authority and its president. Drooping from the lip of one blasted window hangs a blackened Palestinian flag. From another sways by a thread a portrait of Yasser Arafat.
The PBC was dynamited by Israeli sappers early Saturday, one of several army revenge operations for a Palestinian shooting attack on a crowded banquet hall in the Israeli town of Hadera on 17 January, leaving six Israelis dead.
It was unclear whether the Arafat picture had survived the explosion by chance, been left as an act of defiance by a PBC guard or kept there as one more humiliation by soldiers. "Probably the last," said one Palestinian.
The man at the end of the rope was a kilometre or so away, interned inside his presidential headquarters, within a 100-metre range of four Israeli tanks and four Israeli armoured personnel cars. They had been rolled to near spitting distance of the leader Israel holds "directly responsible" for the Hadera carnage.
And there he will stay, say Israeli sources. Over the weekend Arafat prayed, chaired meetings of the "leadership" and received foreign delegations all within the realm of his shrinking dominion. He did not even surface to address the thousand or so Palestinians who converged on the compound to protest Israel's third "reoccupation" of Ramallah in as many months.
This was probably wise. "The [Palestinian] factions did not call the demonstration in defense of Arafat," snapped one protestor. "But in defense of the Palestinian land and people." And among the various slogans chanted by the crowd one must have struck the President like a bullet through his steel reinforced windows. "Palestinian Authority, traitors, release the political prisoners."
And especially free Ahmed Saadat, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He had been arrested at a meeting of the PA's Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah on 15 January.
PA General Intelligence Service (GIS) chief, Tawfik Tirawi, asked Saadat to give himself up in line with "Palestinian national commitments." Saadat refused. He was then detained, persuaded to passive resistance by the dozens of armed GIS men, some wearing masks, who had surrounded the hotel where the PLC was held.
"Saadat will be our guest for a few days," Arafat told PFLP leaders who arrived at his office to protest the arrest. They refused the invite, as did their followers, who took to the streets of Gaza, Bethlehem and Ramallah to denounce Arafat and the PA for "caving in" to Israeli and US pressure. The charge was accurate, "national commitments" aside.
Israel accuses Saadat of being behind the PFLP-claimed assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister, Rehavam Zeevi, in East Jerusalem on 17 October. Since December, Ariel Sharon has conditioned any furlough Arafat receives from his town and house arrests on Saadat's capture. US, European, Russian and UN diplomats have made the same demand.
Until 17 January, Arafat hedged, and for two reasons. One was that in the Palestinian mind the killing of Zeevi was an entirely legitimate and popular response to Israel's assassination of then PFLP leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, on 27 August.
But a second brake was that Saadat is the elected leader of the second largest faction in the PLO and endowed with the same nationalist legitimacy as Arafat draws from his leadership of Fatah. To arrest him under Israeli pressure is thus to breach the reddest lines in the Palestinian "national consensus." It was condemned as such by every Palestinian faction, nationalist and Islamist, home and abroad, including Fatah.
Nor is it clear why Arafat -- usually a stickler for all things consensual -- chose to break the bond. The safest explanation is that with his cease-fire scorned by the Fatah militias and under the heat from the US for the PA's alleged role in the "Karine-A" arms shipment imbroglio some gesture was required to assuage the pressure.
It didn't. Israel said its " position would not change" on Arafat's confinement in Ramallah until "all" of Zeevi's killers were picked up, together with PA officials "connected" to the arms affair. The Americans gave the Palestinian leader some praise but exerted no pressure on Sharon to lift the siege.
The only tangible consequence was Palestinian outrage, especially in a week during which 70 Palestinian homes had been demolished, the Gaza airport again destroyed and a Fatah leader assassinated.
Out of this temper, the PFLP's military arm threatened to kill PA security chiefs (singling out Tirawi for particular retribution) if Saadat and the PA's other political prisoners were not immediately released. "Our hand will reach them," vowed a statement from the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades on 17 January, "no matter how many guards they place around themselves."
This was not the line of the PFLP's political leadership. "I believe we should pressure the PA to release Ahmed Saadat through political and popular protest and by increasing the armed resistance to the occupation," said one in Gaza, distancing himself from his military arm. But he and every other Palestinian are aware of the significance of the threat.
For all their opposition to the PA's policies the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have never threatened the lives of PA officials or raised the spectre of political assassination. If some in the PFLP feel compelled to do so now, it is a sign not only of the vacuum of leadership created by Sharon's assault, the PA's collapse and Arafat's powerlessness to forestall either, says one PFLP leader. It is a measure of just " how far Arafat now is from the mood of the people".
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