From Occupied Palestine

Beware the martyr
If assassinated, Yasser Arafat really would be an 'enemy' to be reckoned with
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 30 March 2002

Ever since he was confined to his Ramallah headquarters, Yasser Arafat - the world's most exalted political prisoner - has been making it clear that he is prepared to die for his cause. Several weeks ago he reportedly ordered his guards to resist Israeli assault "up to and including the death of the president". And now, from the windowless basement where he has taken refuge from Israeli troops already within his compound, a pistol on his desk and a mobile phone to his ear, he proclaims to the world that "the Palestinians will never kneel" and that the only form in which his historic adversary, General Ariel Sharon, will ever lay hands on him is "as the corpse of a martyr".

After Kuwait, they faltered. Now they must sort it out
Bush and Blair acknowledge the centrality of the Mid East crisis
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 15 October 2001

Tony Blair says that both he and George Bush are "completely seized of the need to push forward" the Middle East peace process, because the Arab-Israeli conflict helps "terrorists who seek to utilise prevailing feelings of frustration and despair in the Arab and Islamic world to justify terrorist activities". Meanwhile, the Bush administration is reportedly preparing to pressure Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to accept a viable Palestinian state including a shared Jerusalem. Officials describe President Bush as "incensed", "really steamed", over Sharon's outburst likening Israel to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and warning him not to "appease the Arabs".

Camp David exposes 'final status' fallacy
DAVID HIRST
Daily Star, 28 July 2000

At one fraught moment during Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly warned Yasser Arafat: "If we don't finish the job now, at the next meeting I will no longer be prime minister." To which the Palestinian leader retorted: "If I give in on Jerusalem, I will be killed and then you will have to negotiate with Ahmad Yassin," leader of Hamas, his militant, Islamist opposition. There was only one way that Camp David II was ever going to succeed, and it was the same way that Camp David I did: through the virtual surrender of the Arab participant. That is what President Sadat did in 1978 -- and he fell to an Islamist bullet three years later. There had clearly been Israeli and US expectations that, like Sadat, Arafat would "rescue" the marathon parley in extremis: hence the blame which Clinton reserved primarily for him after it was over. But the "rescue" required of him would have dwarfed what Sadat had done, and, as his retort made clear, this one-time "liberator" of his people had no desire to go down in history as their great betrayer.