Word: yasser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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President Bush twice saluted Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas's "strong leadership" earlier this week, but by Friday there were reasons to doubt the extent of his following among Palestinians. First, Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat ripped into Wednesday's meeting at Aqaba, saying Abbas had gotten precious little by way of concrete undertakings from Ariel Sharon. Then on Friday the militant Islamist group Hamas announced that it would hold no further talks with Abbas on a proposed cease-fire, accusing him of having sold out the Palestinian cause by agreeing at Aqaba to end the intifadah without securing Palestinian...
...Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, however, kept open the possibility of a cease-fire. But only if Israel agrees to end the policy of assassinating terror suspects, release the approximately 6,000 Palestinian militants it currently holds in prison and restore Yasser Arafat's freedom of movement on the West Bank. And it's far from clear Abbas could wrest such concessions from Sharon right...
...beneficiary of Abbas's troubles, of course, is Yasser Arafat. He reportedly fumed at having to watch the Aqaba summit on TV from Ramallah, the White House having done its best to use President Bush's first-ever Middle East trip to crown Abbas as the new national leader of the Palestinians and consign Arafat to the dustbin of history. Bush pulled no punches during his stay in Egypt, telling a local TV network that "it's impossible to achieve peace with Chairman Arafat." Arafat's objective, by contrast, is to prove that peace is impossible without him. Washington...
...even in meeting the security requirements of the first phase of the "roadmap," he will depend on coaxing a cease-fire agreement out of the Palestinian radical groups waging the armed intifada. The combination of persuasion and enforcement necessary to halt terrorism will almost certainly require the support of Yasser Arafat, who remains more powerful than Abbas both inside the Palestinian Authority and on the street...
...those organizations are popular on the Palestinian street, and their elimination would require nothing short of a Palestinian civil war - an eventuality Mahmoud Abbas and his government are desperate to avoid. It's far from clear that Abbas could win such a war, with or without the support of Yasser Arafat. And if at the end the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza remained surrounded by Israeli settlements and soldiers, Abbas and his team risk being seen by ordinary Palestinians as nothing more than enforcers for Israel. So Abbas's approach to the security requirements of the roadmap...