The Israeli talk of killing Arafat shows grim mood

By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff, 9/16/2003

TEL AVIV -- The way Roni Shatzki sees it, all this talk about killing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is a mistake. The former San Francisco flower child, who owns a pet shop in central Tel Aviv, thinks that the Israeli government should have assassinated Arafat first and let the world talk about it later.

Just killing Arafat, he says, is not enough. "It's a time of war," says Shatzki, 53. "I'd wipe out Arafat and a town, Ramallah or Gaza, and give them a total shock. Let them watch in horror on the news channel the way we watched in horror when the twin towers came down and when all those children were blown up on that bus.

"It shocks me to hear myself say this, but the sentiment is widespread," he said. "I believe in talking, in finding solutions, but now I am willing to hear myself say things I could never have imagined myself saying."

Along the half-deserted streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where windblown trash collects in the grates of shuttered storefronts and patrons of the surviving restaurants speculate in whispers about when and where the next terrorist bombings will occur, many say they no longer see a chance for peace, and in the absence of peace they talk like Shatzki.

This is the public environment in which Israel's Security Cabinet voted to remove Arafat from the scene and in which the politically ambitious defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, and the equally ambitious deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, now are speaking openly and repeatedly of killing the man who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994 for making a peace deal with Israel: The politicians are telling people what the people want to hear.

So, too, are some less self-interested voices.

"The world will not help us; we must help ourselves," asserted the Jerusalem Post on Sept. 10, in an editorial calling for the killing of Arafat. It likened the current situation to the 1967 Six Day War and to the 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor, as a time of mortal peril requiring decisive action.

"When the breaking point arrives," the Post held, "there is no point in taking half measures. If we are going to be condemned in any case, we might as well do it right."

Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens said yesterday: "It's a core tenet of the Bush doctrine that if you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. . . .. Saying [Arafat] is the biggest obstacle to a peace accord and then doing nothing about it is like saying Saddam Hussein is the biggest threat to peace in the Middle East and we sure hope those Iraqis are going to do something about it."

Gershon Baskin, codirector of an Israeli-Palestinian center that sponsors talks and cooperation between the sides, said the talk of killing Arafat comes both from genuine public belief that Arafat is a master terrorist and from government efforts to divert attention from its own failures.

"Because of what America did in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is greater legitimacy here for this," Baskin said. "The Israeli government and a good percentage of people feel Arafat is the equivalent of Saddam and bin Laden and killing him is just as legitimate."

But a more significant cause of the political drumbeat against Arafat, he said, is that "the government's policy and strategy vis-a-vis the Palestinians is bankrupt."

"No one knows where we are going, and the Israeli war against terrorism is a huge failure," Baskin said. "Rather than have that come under public scrutiny and debate, the government takes up this ridiculous proposition to expel Arafat and says if he gets killed, so be it."

A Foreign Ministry official, who spoke on condition that his name not be published, said that there is abundant proof of Arafat's involvement in terrorism, including recent payments to armed groups that continue attacking Israelis despite Palestinian Authority efforts to call a cease-fire. But the official insisted that there is no serious discussion in government circles of killing him.

The calls for Arafat's blood, he said, "are absolute demagoguery, a lot of talk for internal consumption."

"These politicians are playing to the public anger and frustration showing up in opinion polls that register broad support for continuing targeted killings" of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and at the same time "a widely held conviction that these killings won't help," the official said.

The principal purpose of the Security Cabinet vote to remove Arafat from a position of influence over Israeli-Palestinian relations, another Foreign Ministry official said, was to "put the international community on notice."

"If they don't do something to persuade Arafat to dismantle the terrorist groups, to unify the security organizations and empower a prime minister," then Arafat will be deported, said the second official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Palestinian leader would probably not be expelled in reaction to relatively small attacks, the official said. "But if you have 25 or 30 people blown up in a major bombing, this would be a turning point. And then we could say to the international community: `We told you we would do it. You did nothing to stop Arafat from engineering violence, so don't come to us with your complaints.' "

Many hard-nosed Israelis who have been inclined to favor a tough government line toward the Palestinians during the past three years of bloodletting are contemptuous of the much-ballyhooed threats against Arafat.

Either exiling or killing Arafat "would be a stupid move," said Shalom Harari, a blunt-spoken colonel who formerly advised the Defense Ministry on Palestinian affairs and is a fellow at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, in Herzliya. "The damage he can do on the outside is much greater than the damage he can cause from within."

And, Harari said, "the declaring of the government decision was idiotic, an act resulting from loss of internal control [by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over his ministers]. You don't make waves when you're sailing in a sea of [excrement]."

Globe correspondent Dan Ephron contributed to this report. Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.