Israelis shed no tears over Arafat's death

JERUSALEM - While Palestinians mourned Yasser Arafat as the symbol of their aspirations, Israeli Jews poured bitterness and scorn on the man they called the "master terrorist" and blamed for the deaths of hundreds of their kin.

"I don't even think hell would take him," said Moti Cohen, who holds Arafat personally responsible for a suicide bombing that killed his friend as he drove a bus in Jerusalem two years ago. "Every step he took was to destroy our people."

"Deep down, I feel happy," said Moshe, a Jerusalem shopkeeper. "He invented terrorism and thought that through violence he would get his way. He failed."

Cabinet members were just as hard on the Palestinian president, confined by the Israeli army to his battered West Bank headquarters during his final years and shunned by the United States.

"I hated him for the death of thousands of Israelis, I hated him for preventing peace agreements between us and the Palestinians," said Justice Minister Yosef Lapid.

"It's good he is gone, good he has left the world and the Middle East."

It was left to Labour Party leader and ex-premier Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for a 1993 peace deal, to take a slightly kinder view.

"Every time he turned to terrorism he made a mistake ... he should have taken action against it," Peres said. "He wanted to indulge the Palestinian people, he wanted to be popular.

"If he had taken the political route from the start, his achievements would have been quicker, more tangible and with fewer victims for his people and ours."

Once a feared guerrilla leader, Arafat turned peacemaker in the 1990s to negotiate for a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel accused him of fomenting the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 as the Oslo peace accords unravelled, an accusation he denied.

But many ordinary Israelis said they feared Arafat's death would only bring them more of the suicide bombings that have become the Palestinians' deadliest weapon in their uprising.

"If I thought it all began and ended with him I could be happy," said Hanna, a Jewish settler from the northern West Bank. "But we know there are millions waiting to take his place, and nothing will change."

- REUTERS