Israeli 'help' curse to US

By ROBERT FISK

JALALABAD - When Ariel Sharon declared his own "war on terror" he provided one bright moment in the darkness for Osama bin Laden.

George Bush sen managed to keep Israel out of the 1991 Gulf War and preserve his Islamic alliance.

But George Bush jun must be cursing Israel's arrival on the American crusade against "terrorism".

The United States President - angry enough when Sharon first compared Israel's losses at the hands of Palestinian suicide bombers with America's murdered thousands on September 11 - has no reason to thank the Israeli Prime Minister for his latest rhetoric.

Yasser Arafat is not Osama bin Laden; he is much less efficient, infinitely more corrupt and very definitely no threat to civilisation.

So will Arafat "crack down on terror" or are the Palestinians now doomed to lose even the hope of statehood in Israel's latest retaliation?

The fact that the suicide bombings were the revenge of Hamas for Israel's latest murder of a Hamas leader - in its turn revenge for other Hamas bombings which were themselves revenge for Israeli attacks - makes no difference.

Israel is lining up Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and its various security mafia as the centre of all evil.

Arafat is now under orders to arrest his own people, not only from the Sharon Government but from the European Union as well as the US.

And, as usual, we are forgetting history.

Hamas, the principal target of the Sharon "war on terror", was originally sponsored by Israel.

Back in the 1980s, when Arafat was the "super-terrorist" and Hamas was a pleasant little Muslim charity - albeit venomous in its opposition to Israel - the Israeli Government encouraged its members to build mosques in Gaza.

Some genius in the Israeli Army decided that there was no better way of undermining the PLO's nationalist ambitions in the occupied territories than by promoting Islam.

The Israelis are now re-preaching the lesson that Yitzhak Rabin once tried to teach Arafat: That true statesmanship might entail the risk of civil war; that just as the Israeli Government once had to shoot down the wild men of Irgun, so Arafat may have to liquidate the men who want to destroy Israel.

But this is not 1948.

A Palestinian civil war may be to Israel's advantage - it could perhaps choose a new Palestinian leader - but it will be no gain to Arafat and certainly not to the Palestinians.

In any case, if Israel really wanted to sting Arafat to vanquish his internal opposition, it would not be bombing and destroying his police stations and security posts - the very instruments he needs to "crack down" on Israel's Palestinian enemies.

Arafat knows this all too well. Even when he ran his repulsive little statelet in Lebanon he killed only those Palestinian militants who personally threatened him.

He is a patient man, a guerrilla leader who knows that a little more delay, another promise, will buy time in which his enemies can make mistakes.

How soon before Sharon's latest "war on terror" bathes Israel's hands in Palestinian blood? How soon before the Americans realise that their adventure in Afghanistan may unravel because of Israel's unrequested support for Washington's "war on terror"?

In Pakistan, the front-page headlines have been of Israeli missiles on Gaza rather than the fate of Osama bin Laden.

Besides, Arafat knows, even if too many journalists buy the Israeli line, that Israel's "war on terror" has always failed.

Sharon waged a "war on terror" in Lebanon in 1982 which ended in a war crime - the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

Since 1970, Israel has used F-16s and tanks and missiles on thousands of occasions to attack the Palestinians in Lebanon - all for its "war on terror".

It's been doing the same for months in Gaza and the West Bank. It doesn't work. The Arabs have lost their fear of the Israelis and - once fear is lost - it can never be re-injected.

Sharon's "war on terror" was lost the moment it began, as the next suicide bombings will prove yet again.

So Arafat will sit it out.

He will gamble on a simple equation: that America's anger with him will eventually be outweighed by America's embarrassment with Sharon, that the very "war on terror" in Afghanistan will be endangered by Sharon's "war on terror" in Palestine.

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