Word: intifadas
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...high. And the leaders - Sharon is under pressure. The rightists are saying 'we're burying our people every day and you're doing nothing.' Arafat is also under pressure, because there are voices within Palestinian society calling for no end to this intifada. So it's not easy for either of them...
...fact that the "confidence building" mechanisms of the current truce include a freeze on Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza, which Sharon and his supporters reject, the cease-fire is supposed to result in a revival of the political negotiations eclipsed by the ten-month intifada. But the political talks broke down at Camp David when Yasser Arafat was unable to embrace the deal offered by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak - and Sharon plans to offer the Palestinians considerably less than Barak did. In other words, when it comes to political negotiations, Sharon and Arafat...
...Arafat's authority by sending their kamikazes into Israel when he's trying to return to peace talks. And it's not only the radical Islamists who have no interest in the cease fire: A growing faction of Arafat's own Fatah organization see no value in ending their intifada in order to send Arafat back to negotiate with the Israelis and Americans. Instead, they're more inclined to believe that Hezbollah's tactic of protracted guerrilla warfare will ultimately drive Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza...
...Nonetheless, Israel is still essentially demanding that the Palestinian Authority defend the Jewish State from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The PA has been targeted in retaliation for terror strikes precisely because it released prisoners from those organizations when the intifada began. And Sharon is making the cease-fire conditional on Arafat re-arresting them...
...That's a major problem for Arafat, since any cease-fire would ultimately require the Palestinian Authority to begin re-arresting the Hamas and Islamic Jihad members released when the current intifada began. Arafat will have to convince his own security forces, who have been on the frontline of confrontation with Israel, that they need to once again round up some of the Islamist militants alongside whom they've fought these past nine months, in order to ensure Israel's security - and in exchange for no political gains beyond, perhaps, the easing of some of the collective punishments imposed...