Arafat’s aides targeted for arrest
The Washington Post, April 2, 2002
Arafat’s aides targeted for arrest
Until now, Israel extended de facto immunity to his inner circle
Israeli troops in an armored vehicle enter the outskirts of the Palestinian
town of Tulkarem on Monday.
By Lee Hockstader
THE WASHINGTON POST
JERUSALEM, April 2 — With its military sweep of Palestinian cities and camps, Israel has set out to hunt down hundreds of suspected militants and terrorists, among them some of Yasser Arafat’s political and security lieutenants, a senior Israeli security official said today.
THE DETERMINATION to take in ranking officials from Arafat’s Palestinian
Authority represents a shift in Israeli policy, which until now has granted
what amounts to immunity from arrest or assassination to Arafat’s inner
circle, the official said.
The official’s remarks, coupled with similar comments
in the Israeli media, constituted the most detailed attempt Israel has
made to lay out the goals and scope of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s five-day-old
military thrust into Palestinian-administered territory in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said some of the suspects sought by Israel have taken refuge with Arafat,
the Palestinian leader, in his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Others, he said, are among at least 200 Palestinians in the sprawling hilltop
headquarters of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service, a powerful
agency that is one of Arafat’s main points of contact with the CIA and
is Israel’s negotiating counterpart in attempts to coordinate security
agreements.
The Preventive Security headquarters, near Ramallah,
has been surrounded by Israeli forces determined to arrest all the wanted
men inside. A spokesman for the Palestinian security force, Samir Rantisi,
said Israeli troops launched an attack on the headquarters complex early
this morning, using heavy machine guns and other weapons.
IN SEARCH OF BARGHOUTI
“Most of the important activists of Ramallah are
now in these compounds,” a senior Israeli security source said. “They are
not going to get away. We are going to arrest all of them.”
Among the most pronounced changes in its policy,
Israel has also decided to track down and arrest Arafat’s top political
lieutenant in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, the Israeli security source
said. Barghouti, 42, an electrifying speaker and charismatic street leader,
is often mentioned as a possible successor to Arafat. Despite identifying
him as a key figure in terrorist and other attacks, Israeli until now has
exempted Barghouti from arrest on the grounds that he is too popular, too
influential and too close to Arafat.
“We’re going to arrest him, of course,” said the
source. “Our big mistake is we used to respect the [Palestinian] VIPs too
much.”
He also said Israel is studying the possibility
of arresting a number of top Palestinian security officials, most of whom
have been in close contact with the CIA since Arafat established the Palestinian
Authority in 1994.
With the goal of building Palestinian agencies strong
enough to rein in militant Islamic and other groups, the CIA provided extensive
advice, equipment and training to Arafat’s security chiefs, with Israel’s
knowledge and approval. Over the years, U.S. officials based in Tel Aviv
developed reasonably close relations with their Palestinian colleagues.
These include Tawfiq Tirawi, Arafat’s intelligence
chief in the West Bank, and Rashid Abu Shbak, the No. 2 man in the Preventive
Security force in the Gaza Strip. According to Israel, Tirawi has been
involved in planning attacks on Israeli targets since the outset of the
current Palestinian uprising in September 2000, and Abu Shbak is the key
figure in the manufacture of Palestinian rockets and mortars in Gaza.
In widening its list of wanted men to include some
of Arafat’s top aides, Israel faces a dilemma. Israeli officials have often
said they would like to somehow exile or remove Arafat in the hopes that
the next generation of Palestinian leaders would be more “moderate” and
“pragmatic.” But it is precisely that group of Palestinian leaders - men
in their forties with growing power bases — whose arrests Israel is now
contemplating.
Israeli officials acknowledge that the dilemma goes
deeper, and includes the question of whether to expel Arafat. Sharon, who
calls Arafat a “bitter enemy” and has publicly wished him dead, has favored
expulsion, despite opposition from the United States and its Western allies.
A THREAT ABROAD
Israel’s security and intelligence agencies appear
to agree with only part of this assessment. On the one hand, the agencies
contend Arafat would represent a greater threat to Israeli interests if
he were overseas, with free access to the world’s leaders and television
cameras, than he does caged up in his Ramallah headquarters surrounded
by Israeli tanks, Israeli newspapers have reported.
On the other hand, the agencies have warned that
Arafat’s likely successors include militants who made their names organizing
attacks on Israel, but lack the prestige and power to exert near-term control
over Palestinian areas, rein in radical groups or make political compromises
with Israel.
Staying “with [Arafat] is a very hard alternative,
and without him is also a very bad alternative,” said the security source.
For the time being, Israel is keeping its hands
off some of Arafat’s most senior security chiefs, apparently hoping to
preserve some infrastructure that might corral militant groups and would-be
terrorists in the future.
Chief among them is Jibril Rajoub, chief of Preventive
Security in the West Bank, who Israeli officials believe has not joined
the 200 or more Palestinian militants and others who have taken refuge
inside the Security Service headquarters. They also include Mohammed Dahlan,
Arafat’s security chief in the Gaza Strip, who has close ties with the
CIA and is regarded as a pragmatist by Israelis and Americans.
As Israeli officials describe it, the current military
campaign, in scale and ambition, goes well beyond any previous offensive
in the conflict. Israeli forces have already entered four of the eight
largest Palestinian population centers in the West Bank — Ramallah, Tulkarm,
Qalqilyah and Bethlehem — and are preparing to enter more. About 20,000
military reservists have been called up for duty in what the army has dubbed
Operation Defensive Shield.
Speaking Sunday evening, Sharon defined the operation’s
goal as to “wipe out terrorist infrastructures from their foundations,”
suggesting a long and arduous campaign. For the time being, there is substantial
support for the Israeli policy from the Bush administration, Israel’s main
strategic ally.
But there is a growing tension between the ambition
of Sharon’s goals — which many Israelis say are virtually unattainable
— and the constraints of a world worried about instability in the Middle
East, especially the Arab world. Some Israeli officials are mindful of
international criticism and suspect Israel will be forced to curtail operations
within a few weeks.
“Every additional day of occupation [of Palestinian
territory], every additional day of pictures of tanks opposite women and
children increases the international pressure on the government,” wrote
Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth.
“Sharon knows he is living on borrowed time.”
Shimon Peres, the foreign minister, played down
the idea that Israel might have set too broad a goal for itself or was
in effect planning to reoccupy the territories it ceded to the Palestinians
in the mid-1990s under the Oslo agreements. “We will be staying weeks at
the most, not months,” he said. “We are not fighting a war of prestige
here, we are fighting a war of existence. Our first concern is not our
image but our lives.”
Correspondent Daniel Williams in Ramallah contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company