Word: arafats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...leaders on both sides, forced to look into the abyss of madness, retreated to sanity. Rabin phoned Arafat in Tunis and said, "I am ashamed as an Israeli that such a horrible incident took place here." That was an astonishing expression from the icily reserved Rabin, especially given his never concealed loathing for the P.L.O. chief. Politicians on the don't-give-the-Arabs-an-inch Israeli right also spoke in tones of sorrow and repentance. "It's a crime, a terrible crime, and I condemn it totally," said Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, which has said that...
Rabin accepted immediately. Arafat withheld a public reply, but Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher talked to him by phone and reportedly got an informal promise that P.L.O. negotiators would be there. U.S. officials hope the talks will start this week. American representatives will not sit in unless they are asked, but they will stand by, offer informal suggestions and talk to the two sides separately to clear up misinterpretations by one side of what the other's true position...
...signed an agreement settling most of the security issues but leaving some details undecided. Palestinians complain that the Israelis have been shying away from anything suggesting they were giving the Palestinians the appurtenances of statehood: they did not even want to let the Palestinians issue their own postage stamps. Arafat's aides say Rabin seemed to think time was on his side; the longer an agreement took, the more desperate the P.L.O. would become...
...Israelis say they realize that even before the Hebron massacre, Arafat was having growing trouble maintaining support for the peace process among his own people. The slaughter in the mosque only made things much worse: some of the subsequent rioting and demonstrations took a sharply anti-Arafat as well as anti-Israeli tone. When Faisal Husseini, the head of the West Bank division of Fatah, Arafat's own faction, visited the Dome of the Rock in East Jerusalem, Palestinian mobs stoned him until he was forced to leave. They chanted, "Arafat is a bastard!" or "Arafat...
More worrisome to Israelis as well as to Arafat is the prospect of growing support for Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that is the P.L.O.'s chief rival for the allegiance of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Hamas called the mosque massacre "a final message to Arafat and his group to either return to his people and abandon his surrender to the Jews or his people will consider him and his group part and parcel of Zionism." Freih Abu Middain thinks the massacre "crowns Hamas as the group that speaks the straightforward truth about the Israelis...