Bush joins Israel in ostracizing Arafat

Peter Beaumont, Guardian News Service, Ramallah

Yasser Arafat was facing the threat of U.S. punitive sanctions on Friday, including the loss of diplomatic relations, as the government considered ways of further isolating the veteran Palestinian leader, already in effect confined to his West Bank headquarters by the Israeli forces.

As President Bush and his national security team met to discuss options which officials said included closing the Palestinian Authority offices in Washington and placing Arafat's personal security force on the state department's list of terrorist groups, the violence of the intifada erupted at Arafat's front door.

Several supporters tried to march on the Israeli troops and tanks positions within 50 metres of his Ramallah office, but Israeli soldiers drove them back with a barrage of teargas, plastic-coated bullets and live ammunition.

Washington has renewed its allegation that Arafat's officials were behind the attempt to smuggle a shipload of Iranian arms into Palestinian-controlled areas earlier this month for use against Israeli targets: An allegation Arafat strenuously denies.

Bush said: "I am disappointed in Yasser Arafat. He must make a full effort to rout out terror in the Middle East.

"Ordering up weapons that were intercepted on a boat headed for that part of the world is not part of fighting terror, that's enhancing terror. And obviously we're very disappointed in him."

Bush is considering ordering his Middle East envoy, Anthony Zinni, to suspend his peace efforts in the region.

Bush met his advisers after sending a letter to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt detailing the alleged proof that the Palestinian Authority was behind the arms smuggling plot.

Separately, William Burns, the assistant secretary of state, called in ambassadors from more than 20 Arab countries to receive the same message.

The latest moves will come as a new blow to an already badly weakened Arafat, whose plight has been increasingly ignored by his former allies in the Arab world, themselves under pressure from the U.S. to dissociate themselves from "terrorist" organizations.

His increasing emasculation is nowhere more in evidence than in his own compound in Ramallah's El Birreh district.

Yesterday the Israeli army moved more troops into residential buildings within 100 metres of the compound walls. At 12 o'clock a demonstration of his supporters marched past the walled headquarters, towards where the Israelis have drawn their line in the heart of the Palestinian Authority.

As the demonstrators moved towards the Israeli positions chanting "no security, no security", the inevitable crack of live Israeli fire was audible, followed by the answering call of the ambulance sirens.

The latest U.S. action seems to be part of a carefully coordinated strategy by Bush and his officials which threatens to neutralize Arafat in office if he refuses to crack down on Palestinian violence, as demanded by Israel and the U.S.

It is a high-risk strategy for Bush, who is said by analysts to be in danger of further alienating Arab support for his "war on terror", which his officials sday may be extended to other terrorist-sponsoring states, such as Somalia and Iraq.

The first sign of the growing new hostility towards Arafat and his regime in Washington came on Thursday with a statement by a White House spokesman that the administration could "now understand" Israel's policy of blockading Arafat in his headquarters.

Other diplomats are divided about the Israeli and U.S.-led policy to isolate and weaken Arafat.

Some warn that it will embolden radical groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas, who are behind much of the Palestinian violence and suicide attacks.

The aggressive U.S. stance towards Arafat is a stark contrast to Washington's policy in the autumn, when Bush and his officials were making conciliatory noises towards the Palestinians in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks as they tried to build an international coalition for a war on Afghanistan.

But with that war almost won, America appears to have reverted to a policy of unconditional support for Israel's hawkish prime minister, Ariel Sharon, whom it had earlier blamed for exacerbating tensions in the region.

U.S. hopes to persuade Arab governments traditionally sympathetic to Arafat to fall in line behind it took a blow when Islam's main world body urged the international community yesterday to help end Israel's "arbitrary and violent acts" against the Palestinians.

For the first time since the Islamic Conference Organization's Jerusalem Committee was set up in 1979, Arafat is unable to attend its meeting.

"Israel's aggressive acts do not allow any more the silence of the international community," the committee chairman, King Mohammed of Morocco, said in his opening speech at the emergency meeting in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh.