Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat arrived in Washington Thursday for talks with President Bill Clinton amid a new explosion of Middle East violence and growing US concern over the clashes and a new Arab snub of Israel.
Just hours after Arafat landed in Washington shortly after midnight, Israel wiped out a leader of his Fateh PLO faction in a revenge attack that prompted vows of Palestinian retaliation and set the stage for a hardening of their demands for an international protection force.
US officials say they will hear Arafat out on the protection force idea but are publicly discouraging the idea, noting vehement Israeli opposition, and will not support the Palestinian demand for UN involvement in any such scheme.
Arafat is due in New York on Friday to see UN chief Kofi Annan where he will again press the issue. Like Clinton, Annan has said that without Israeli agreement a UN force is not an option.
"It's not the time for UN resolutions," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"The focus remains to implement Sharm (el-Sheikh)," he said, referring to agreements made at last month's emergency summit in Egypt aimed at ending what has now become six weeks of violence in the region that has killed 196 people.
Clinton's focus in the meeting with Arafat, to be followed by similar talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday, will be almost exclusively on Sharm el-Sheikh.
"Ending the violence, restoring calm to the region is our immediate priority," Boucher said Wednesday, maintaining that the creation this week of a fact-finding panel to look into the violence was a positive step in that direction.
That commission was agreed to by Israel and the Palestinians at Sharm el-Sheikh but measures included those understandings to be taken by the two parties have not yet been completed to US satisfaction, officials say.
In London, en route to Washington, Arafat accused Israel of not abiding by the latest agreement he reached last week with former Israeli premier Shimon Peres to implement the Sharm el-Sheikh understandings and begin to move toward resuming the peace process, on ice since the Camp David summit failed in July.
Barak has made similar accusations against Arafat and the Palestinians.
As the violence flared in the West Bank and Gaza, the United States expressed concern over what it termed another ominous development -- Qatar's decision to close Israel's trade office there.
"We would like people to hold fast with their relationships while we try to calm the violence and get back to the peace process," a senior State Department official told AFP.
Earlier Thursday, Qatar, under intense pressure to close the office from Saudi Arabia ahead of this weekend's Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) summit in Doha, announced the decision.
A Qatari spokesman said the move would allow the success of OIC summit by reinforcing Arab solidarity against Israeli "repression" of the Palestinians.
But the State Department official said the move could only hurt efforts to restore stability in the region.
"We don't think this is the occasion to be severing the ties which are needed to re-establish a sense of direction for the region," the official said.
The summit of the 56-member OIC was thrown into doubt Wednesday when Muslim powerhouse Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to the OIC, announced a boycott over Qatar ties to Israel.
Unlike fellow Arab states Oman, Tunisia and Morocco, which also had commercial relations with Israel before the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising at the end of September, Qatar had previously ignored calls to close down the trade office, which opened in 1996 -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
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