The Palestinian Authority on Friday welcomed U.S. President George W. Bush's refusal to boycott Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and accused Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon of trying to destroy any peace hopes.
Bush's position "constitutes a step in the right direction," said Arafat's media adviser Nabil Abu Rudeina, who nevertheless attacked "the absence of a serious US role, warning it would increase tension" in the area.
“In my view, the period Sharon was given to implement a security solution by military force has expired, and it has ended in utter failure,” PA Cabinet Secretary Ahmad Abderrahman told The Daily Star following the U.S.-Israeli summit.
He attributed Washington’s apparent change of heart both to Sharon’s failure to bring the Palestinians to their knees or achieve security for Israeli citizens, and to the alarm that his behavior triggered in the Arab world and Europe.
“The security solution failed for the simple reason that it caused a total breakdown of security for Israelis, who sustained increased losses daily as the Palestinians developed their methods of confronting the occupation,” and this confounded the Israeli security establishment, he said.
Such a changed situation on the ground “reflected on the Bush-Sharon meeting,” Abderrahman conveyed.
Ben Eliezer
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said US Vice President Dick Cheney told him that Israel could "hang" Arafat as far as he was concerned, the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot reported Friday.
"The vice president told me: ‘As far as I am concerned, you can even hang him’," Ben Eliezer told the newspaper, adding that he heard similar comments from advisers of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"On this subject (of Arafat), Cheney is more extreme than Revaham Zeevi," he said, referring to Israel’s far-right tourism minister who was assassinated by Palestinians in October. Ben Eliezer said Thursday after talks in Washington with Cheney, Rumsfeld and US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he had called upon Washington to boycott Arafat and to open a dialogue with other Palestinian leaders.
Rice and Cheney told him that talking to Arafat is "a waste of time" and the vice president was the most extreme on this point, he told a press conference in the US capital.
The White House, however, firmly denied Ben Eliezer’s remarks attributed to Cheney. "There is no difference between what the vice president has said in public or private and what the president said yesterday in the Oval Office concerning our policy on Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority," said White House national security spokesman Sean McCormack in Washington. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
