Is Arafat's death good for Israel?

TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The triple handshake among U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the While House in 1993 suggested a new beginning, hope that at last Arafat would drop his gun and think about feeding and caring for the 1.4 million people soon to come under his authority.

But Arafat was not up to it. He was not the type that would settle down to running a state and building a nation.

He was "one of the last classical anarchists," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's special Advisor Dov Weissglas recently commented.

His death, on Nov. 11, was therefore greeted in Israel with a sense of relief: The decades-old enemy is gone.

In one of the few good words said about him in Israel, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres noted Arafat "did something that no other person in the Arab world did." He dropped the demand for a return to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan and accepted the pre-1967 war lines under which Israel would keep 76 percent of historical Palestine.

Without that acceptance, "We would never have peace," Peres said.

Arafat was "a great tactician, not a great strategist...who plans years ahead," countered Shmuel Bar, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy and a former member of the Mossad.

"Arafat was a person with a very, very good sense of what the traffic would bear, a very good sense of where the dangerous elements of the Palestinian society were, and a desire to be smack in the middle of the consensus,"

he said in an interview.

The Oslo process saved him, Bar continued. The Palestine Liberation Organization was running out of money and closing offices abroad. Arafat and his people, who were in Tunisia, feared the rise of a younger generation of Palestinians, in the occupied territories, who might make him another Ahmed Shukeiri, Arafat's ineffective and usually forgotten predecessor as head of the PLO.

The Oslo agreement led to the Palestinian Authority's establishment but corruption, incompetence, lawlessness and economic deterioration angered the Palestinians. That, too, contributed to the intifada.

"In many ways, the second intifada was no less a rebellion against the historic leadership than it was an outbreak of frustration against Israel and the deadlock(ed) ...peace process," Bar argued.

Over the years the Palestinian society was fragmented. Arafat deliberately caused the "atomization," Bar alleged.

That affected Israeli security. If the Palestinians think in local terms, it becomes more difficult to deter them, he said.

One cannot deter a Gazan who plans to fire a Qassam rocket at the Israeli town of Sderot by threatening to strike in the West Bank town of Ramallah, he explained.

Israelis have blamed Arafat for resorting to terror and inciting to violence. How else can one interpret his chant that a million "martyrs" are marching on Jerusalem?

He had 15 security services, sometimes rivaling one another. Even when he wanted ties with Israel, they were a security hazard. Who is responsible? Who can deliver?

On the eve of Ariel Sharon's September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, which is also the site of al-Aksa Mosque, the confusion became crucial.

According to a recently published book, "The Seventh War," Arafat authorized the head of the General Intelligence in the West Bank Tawfik Tirawi and the head of the Preventive Security there, Jibril Rajoub, to maintain ties with Israel. Tirawi and Rajoub were rivals, acted separately, and each gave Israel different assessments of what would happen if Sharon -- now the Prime Minister -- went there. Tirawi warned of a confrontation. Rajoub said the visit may pass quietly if Sharon does not enter the mosques.

Bar told UPI that he and others poured with Rajoub over aerial photographs and planned the route Sharon eventually took.

Then the intifada erupted.

In the summer of 2003 Mahmoud Abbas became prime minister but Arafat "did not give him any real authority to act on security matters," Weissglas said. Abbas eventually resigned, and his successor Ahmad Qurei did not even try.

Arafat's legacy could be difficult to discard, warned the head of the National Security Council, Giora Eiland.

One was that under Arafat there was neither desire nor readiness to solve problems. "When there were problems (and) ... there was one option of solving them and another of complicating the situation, Arafat's policy was always to complicate it," Eiland said.

The Palestinians' claim of a right of return for refugees was alive under him. Israel is dead set against it and it is not clear whether the Palestinians can now shirk off that legacy, Eiland continued.

Moreover, Arafat supported terror "as a legitimate means to reach political goals." He trumpeted the issue of Palestinian victims "as a means to create the right emotions around the world and through that attain political achievements," according to Eiland.

With Arafat out of the way, Israelis hope for a better future.