MIDDLE EAST: The Palestinian president took pains to issue a defiant riposte to the Likud resolution, writes David Horovitz
The Palestinian Authority president, Mr Yasser Arafat, left Ramallah yesterday for the first time in almost six months, but received only a mixed reception, rather than the anticipated adulation, as he toured the three other West Bank cities hardest hit by Israel's April military offensive. More curiously he cancelled a planned appearance in Jenin's refugee camp, scene of the bloodiest fighting last month, after the stage from which he was supposed to speak mysteriously caught fire, and Hamas sources warned that he might face an attempt on his life there.
Transported in a borrowed Jordanian helicopter - Israel blew up his own helicopters last December - Mr Arafat visited Bethlehem, Jenin and Nablus. At each stop he took pains to issue a defiant riposte to a resolution approved on Sunday by members of the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon's Likud party, which opposes a Palestinian state west of the Jordan river. Jerusalem would become "the capital of our independent state of Palestine", he declared to cheering crowds in Nablus, "never mind who agrees or does not".
Schoolchildren lined the streets and Mr Arafat was jostled by substantial crowds as he made his first return to the major cities, but behind the scenes lay unusual evidence of dissent.
In Bethlehem, where he inspected the Church of the Nativity three days after a 38-day siege was finally ended, a leaflet distributed to coincide with his visit called for his ouster. In Jenin camp, where several thousand residents had gathered amid the rubble to hear him, Hamas officials gloated that he didn't dare enter what is largely an Islamic stronghold, and some locals complained that his security forces had abandoned them at the height of the fighting.
Several Palestinian factions have protested that Mr Arafat secured his release from Ramallah by allowing six of those holed-up with him, wanted by Israel, to be jailed under British and American supervision in Jericho, and that he endorsed a solution in Bethlehem that saw 13 men deported.
A Fatah member of the Palestinian parliament, Mr Hassan Hader, said Mr Arafat was also losing popularity because he had surrounded himself with "corrupt" people, "non-patriots". Calls for radical reform of the Palestinian Authority are being openly made by Mr Arafat's own most senior aides, including Mr Mohammad Dahlan and Mr Jibril Rajoub, the Gaza and West Bank security chiefs respectively.
More significantly, the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have evidently reached understandings with the United States to press Mr Arafat to take serious action against suicide bombings, and the Saudis are themselves now reported to be threatening to deny funds to Hamas if the bombings don't stop.
As his side of the bargain, President Bush is maintaining pressure on Mr Sharon to signal greater readiness for a return to the negotiating table. And in the wake of the Likud vote, the White House departed from its traditional position of not responding to other countries' internal political machinations by yesterday reiterating, in the words of its spokesman, that "the President continues to believe that the best route to peace is through the creation of the state of Palestine and side-by-side security with Israel".
While Mr Arafat dramatically characterised the Likud move as representing the "destruction of the Oslo agreement", and the former Palestinian peace negotiator Mr Saeb Erekat branded it "a real slap in the face" for Mr Bush, the administration did not lose its perspective. "Every nation has its share of internal domestic politics," the White House spokesman added.
Indeed, Mr Sharon himself seems determinedly unruffled by the vote, which was an undoubted personal humiliation given that he had pleaded with the party's central committee not even to table the resolution. The Prime Minister convened his Likud party Knesset colleagues yesterday to remind them that, while he had been defied by a few hundred party activists clearly more loyal to former prime minister Mr Benjamin Netanyahu than to himself, "I was elected by two-thirds of the Israeli public . . . and I will not be deflected."
The irony is that while Mr Sharon has indeed endorsed Palestinian statehood in principle, he envisions such a state being limited to barely half of the West Bank, and would want restrictions on its ability to acquire weaponry, sign military treaties and control its airspace. Yet his opposition to last night's vote leaves him perceived as having moved towards the centre of Israeli politics.