Word: arafats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, he has reason to be cautious. So does the P.L.O. In subscribing to a deal that for now offers only limited gains, Yasser Arafat has incurred assassination threats from Palestinian hard-liners in exile. Conflict for these warriors has become a way of life, rejection their religion. It will take all Arafat's reputed wizardry to keep them in check...
...tougher challenge lies among Palestinians inside the occupied territories. Fed up with the P.L.O.'s failures, young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank have been radicalized, many of them embracing militant fundamentalist Islam. Conversely, Arafat was compelled toward moderation after the Soviet Union's demise deprived him of a superpower patron, and even more when his mistaken allegiance to Iraq over Kuwait cost him his bankroll from the gulf states. Without money, without visible progress in the two-year-old peace talks he had endorsed, fundamentalism's rise threatened to make him irrelevant...
...wanted; certainly not Israelis, whose policing of the turbulent slums has become a shame and burden to them. So many protesters have been killed, wounded and thrown into jail that Jews had come to see the suppression as a moral cancer they had to excise. To save himself, Arafat is gambling with his life that the departure of Israeli soldiers, combined with infusions of outside aid, will win back power from the fundamentalists...
...biggest decisions still lie ahead: what happens ultimately to Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, what happens to Jerusalem, can Palestinians be trusted with a truly independent state? Offsetting these perils has been the Israeli government's remarkable change of heart in reaching out to the P.L.O., and Arafat's unexpected change of mind in starting with less than everything. For too long both sides have assumed they operated in a matrix of power they could not control: the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, the cold war. They are now free to live with each other, separate but equal...
...Bankers have embraced violence, even against Israeli soldiers, as part of theirprotests. "We are reacting with violence," said Aaron Domb, spokesmanfor the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, "because thegovernment has acted with violence by forcing this agreement on the nation." Former Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren asserted, "Arafat is responsible for thousands of murders. Therefore, everyone in Israel who meets him in the streets has the right to kill...