Shutting out the light

For months Yasser Arafat has been focusing on the diplomatic front at the expense of the home. This week the costs became clear, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem
For the first time since the Tel Aviv bombing on 1 June Yasser Arafat received a ray of diplomatic light. Taking their cue from an earlier decision by the European Union's Foreign Ministers, on 21 July the Genoa G8 summit of major industrialised nations averred "the situation in the Middle East presents a grave danger". They further believed "third-party monitoring, accepted by both parties, would serve their interests in implementing the Mitchell report."
The Palestinian leadership welcomed the call, with Arafat urging the G8 countries to "pressure Israel into ending its aggression against the Palestinian people." He then sped off on a tour of Jordan and the Gulf, drumming up support from another Arab summit where, he hopes, the ray can be widened into clear daylight.
Israel of course was swift to close the light. The G8 statement "said the monitors will be sent if both sides agree, and we do not and will not, agree," was the terse rebuttal of one Israeli government official.
But ever the soft-cop, and mindful it would not be wise for Israel to collide with the US and EU over the monitors, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres backtracked a little. "We have no problem with [greater] American involvement," he said on Sunday. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made similar noises the next day.
This was not the Palestinians' reading of the G8's statement. "There will be international supervision," insisted PLO negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo on Monday, "and not simply more US persons as Israel is trying to promote".
In fact, there is already a quiet consensus between the EU, Egypt and Palestinians that the core dispute is not over the "nationality" of the monitors on the ground but over the body to which they are accountable. Israel wants them locked into the CIA-led "trilateral security committees" established initially within the 1998 Wye agreement and resurrected, so far vainly, in the cease-fire document brokered by CIA chief George Tenet on 13 June.
The Palestinians want a supervisory body consisting of those countries who sat on the Mitchell Committee's enquiry into the causes of the present violence and whose recommendations all agree is now the only exit from it. In Abed Rabbo's opinion, "this means the UN, EU, US, Egypt, Jordan, Norway and Turkey".
It is easy to understand the Palestinian thrust. Ever since the Intifada erupted last September a strategic Palestinian goal has been to internationalise the conflict.
"Yasser Arafat is not renouncing the Oslo agreements," comments veteran Fatah leader and aide Hani Al-Hassan. "But he understands he must insert new partners and new terms of reference. He sees the Mitchell process as a way of doing this."
Having lost the case for internationalisation in the Mitchell recommendations (which predicated any "international protection force" on Israeli approval), Arafat has grasped the G8's call as a means to re- introduce the concept through the back door, courtesy of a supervisory mechanism for Tenet's cease- fire. The question is whether he any longer commands the authority to impose a cease-fire on his fractious militias.
On Saturday, the PA's National Security Council (NSC) called on all Palestinian factions to adhere to the cease-fire, end all firing from Palestinian areas, mortar attacks on Jewish settlements and operations inside Israel proper. So far the call has been observed only in the breach.
On Sunday an atrocity of near Tel Aviv proportions was narrowly averted when Israeli police intercepted a young Palestinian about to prime several bombs in downtown Haifa. The capture led to the arrest of another Palestinian and the assassination of a third, Mustafa Yassin, near Jenin by an Israeli undercover squad. The army said the three were an Islamic Jihad cell about to blaze a trail of bombings inside Israel. Confidants of Yassin said he belonged to Fatah.
But the real fracture opened in Gaza. On Saturday the PA's Military Intelligence force arrested four members of Fatah and ordered the dissolution of the Popular Resistance Committees, a grassroots militia made up of armed cadre from Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Stirring fuel to the fire that night Palestinian border police shot and wounded three Hamas fighters returning from a mission against the Netzarim settlement in Gaza. The PA says the three men were mistaken for an Israeli undercover squad. Hamas insists they were targeted. "This is a very dangerous act," said Hamas political leader in Gaza, Aziz Rantisi.
How dangerous was confirmed the next night when several hundred PRC supporters marched on the Military Intelligence HQ in Gaza City, headed by Arafat's nephew, Musa Arafat. In a four hour street battle stones were thrown and shots fired between Palestinians from all factions and the Authority that claims to represent them. Yasser Arafat cut short his Gulf tour to shake some order into his house.
But Arafat can now only exert order "with the consent of his people," says Hassan. And according to a poll conducted in early July, 92 per cent of his people support "armed confrontations" against the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza and 70 per cent believe "armed confrontations have so far achieved Palestinian rights in ways that negotiations could not."
This is precisely the mood and constituency out of which the PRC was born and which it loosely represents. For Arafat to contain that mood he must have tangible political achievements that further "Palestinian rights". For now the only realisable achievement is some form of international intervention and protection, a settlement freeze and, through these, the end of Ariel Sharon's government. But the road to these is a cease-fire and the "seven days of quiet" that Sharon has no interest in allowing and that Arafat, so far, has been unable to deliver.
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