Word: arafats
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...monitoring the health reports out of Ramallah more avidly than Arafat's old foe Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For perhaps the final time, the two lions of the Middle East conflict find their destinies entwined. Sharon has promised that if Arafat is able to return, Israel won't block him. But just as a potentially seismic shake-up of the Palestinian leadership was developing, there were deep rumblings on the Israeli side as well. Sharon won approval last week in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, for a bill scheduling the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza to begin next...
...someone who has pledged to die a martyr, Yasser Arafat resists intimations of mortality. A year ago, his doctors told TIME that Arafat might have stomach cancer, but the Palestinian leader refused to leave his besieged compound in Ramallah to seek treatment; if he did, Arafat feared, the Israelis might block him from returning. In recent weeks, as his health deteriorated, Arafat's official spokesmen said it was nothing serious. By early last week, Arafat couldn't keep food down; even the cornflakes he ate on Thursday morning had to be pureed. He was unable to move his legs fully...
...after three years of squalid isolation in Ramallah, Arafat finally won his freedom last Friday morning, aboard a Jordanian military helicopter that ferried him to Amman. From there he boarded a French Embraer jet bound for Paris. Arafat's aides insisted he wouldn't die in exile, but never has his fate seemed more precarious. In Washington, where Middle East hands have long joked that Arafat would outlive them all, officials say privately that the Palestinians may be about to lose the only leader they have ever known. "It looks like it's very serious," says a senior State Department...
...Arafat's failing health poses a dilemma for Sharon. Since he unveiled his disengagement plan late last year, Sharon has successfully sold it to the Israeli public and to the Bush Administration as an alternative to the peace process, allowing him to put off indefinitely negotiations over a final two-state settlement. As Sharon sees it, Arafat is a terrorist, and Israel won't negotiate with him. Israel, the argument continues, should pull out of Gaza and set up a more defensible position in the West Bank while waiting for Arafat to die and be replaced by someone Sharon...
Hebah M. Ismail ’06 of the Palestine Solidarity Committee said last night that the group is not planning a vigil for Arafat...