By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 4, 1998; Page A13 GAZA CITY, Nov. 3Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said today that he has not finished with the wave of arrests he ordered last week to squash the militant Islamic group Hamas, which has vowed to press its terrorist campaign against Israel in the aftermath of last month's U.S.-brokered Middle East peace accord.
Asked in an interview if the roundup of scores, maybe hundreds, of Hamas activists had gone far enough, he replied evenly, in English: "Not yet."
For decades, Arafat has straddled Palestinian politics like a Colossus, staying on top through cunning and ruthlessness. In the days since he signed the interim peace plan last month at the White House, though, he has walked a perilous tightrope.
If Arafat is to gain the territorial and political concessions promised by Israel in the agreement, he must satisfy U.S. and Israeli demands that he wage war on extremist violence. Yet if he launches a really tough crackdown on Hamas, which has killed scores of Israelis, he runs the risk that Hamas may turn its weapons on him.
The question now is whether Arafat, 69 and in uncertain health, is strong and deft enough to meet the challenge of disabling Hamas without provoking a backlash. U.S. officials generally say they believe he is. Some Palestinian analysts are more cautious.
"Here you have a tradition of underground war," said Raji Sourani, a prominent human-rights advocate in Gaza.
Today, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu postponed a cabinet meeting scheduled to ratify the peace agreement. The Israelis were contending Arafat had failed to detail his plan for arresting 30 other alleged terrorists, including a dozen members of the Palestinian security forces, from a list supplied by Israel. Arafat, before flying to Spain for a brief visit, accused Netanyahu of "wasting time" but appeared unruffled by the Israeli delay.
This week and last, Arafat has ordered the detention of an estimated 250 to 450 Hamas activists. More daringly, he placed under house arrest Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the group's founder and spiritual father, disarmed his bodyguards, seized his files and cut off his phone lines. A dozen of Arafat's police officers and plainclothesmen, posted along the approaches to Yassin's house, block all visitors.
The response came Sunday when, for the first time, some faction or individuals in the armed wing of Hamas -- it is still not clear who -- threatened to retaliate against Arafat's forces for what they called the Palestinian leader's "betrayal." The warning, faxed to a news agency in Jerusalem, breaks with Hamas's official commitment to maintain Palestinian national unity, but no one in Gaza doubts its authenticity.
"A small cat, if you push her into a corner, can [become] a tiger," said Ismail Abu Shanab, a ranking Hamas civilian leader.
If Arafat continues his crackdown on terrorism, Shanab suggested, armed radicals in Hamas may disavow the civilian leadership's hands-off policy toward Arafat's forces. "The more pressure you put on people, the less they may be under control."
In carrying out his campaign against Hamas, Arafat also risks alienating a broader constituency sympathetic to Yassin, Hamas and their message of Islamic renewal. While Arafat has been tainted by the pervasive mismanagement and corruption of his Palestinian Authority, the frail, articulate Yassin, who is 62 and uses a wheelchair, is relatively clean in the eyes of many Palestinians.
Ramzi Daour, 48, who drives a taxi in Gaza, said he is troubled by Yassin's house arrest. Yassin, he said, is "serving the interests of Islam," while Arafat, by cracking down on Hamas, is doing Netanyahu's bidding.
Over lunch today in his office dining room, at the head of a long table adorned with seafood platters and lined with his inner circle of aides and advisers, Arafat shrugged off the threat from Hamas and the challenge posed by Yassin.
"We know how to deal with him," he said calmly.
Arafat sipped his cream of mushroom soup in small, precise spoonfuls, his lower lip quivering and his left hand shaking. He gave an impression of frailty, and his answers to reporters' questions were so concise as to be almost Delphic.
On one point, though, he was unyielding, and crystal clear: Palestinian independence will come about next year, one way or another, and he does not intend to permit Hamas to interfere with his vision.
A top Palestinian security official echoed Arafat's determination to cripple Hamas. "I can't say 'I've arrested 100, so now I'll stop,' " Rashid Abu Shbak, deputy chief of Arafat's preventive security force, said in an interview. "Interrogation will determine who will be released, who will stay in prison and who else will be arrested."
Shbak said the threats from Hamas's armed wing are inspired by hard-line Islamic opponents of Arafat in the Middle East, particularly in Iran and Lebanon.
Palestinian Police Chief Ghazi Jabali also blamed an Iranian-backed wing of Hamas for a suicide-bomb attack that narrowly missed a pair of Israeli school buses in the Gaza Strip last week. "A certain party in Iran funds wings in Hamas in order to sabotage any achievement by the Palestinian people," Jabali told the Reuters news service. He said Palestinian security forces had obtained information from Iran that Tehran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had provided a wing of Hamas with funding to carry out attacks aimed at wrecking the peace process.
On Monday, Arafat's security officials submitted an anti-terrorism "work plan" to the United States, as required under the terms of the Wye River Memorandum negotiated last month with President Clinton's personal mediation. Today, however, Israel postponed a cabinet meeting that was to consider ratification of the agreement, apparently because the Palestinian plan made no provision for arrest of a list of men wanted for murder by the Jewish state.
"The main thing is the arrest of the Palestinian murderers," said Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai. "That is the reason why, although it's not certain, the meeting will be postponed."
However, the United States appeared satisfied with the Palestinian security blueprint. "We continue to believe that Palestinians have met their obligations for the Wye agreement to come into effect," said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart. "The [Israeli] prime minister has raised other concerns. We are trying to work through those concerns."
In return for a Palestinian crackdown on violent extremists, under terms of the agreement signed by Arafat, Netanyahu and Clinton, Israel is to withdraw its troops from a further 13 percent of the West Bank.
It is also to allow the Palestinians to open an airport in Gaza and travel relatively freely through Israeli territory between Gaza and the West Bank, their two main population centers.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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