Posted on 04/28/2004 10:46:11 AM PDT by yonif
This is not the first time in the history of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians that the question of whether to kill Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been on the agenda. It has come up before, during periods when Arafat was considered a prominent figure possessing national and international status. In one way or another, all the cases in question involved Ariel Sharon, who was defense minister at the time. So the present state of affairs is not new for him.
The first case is well known: In 1982, during the Lebanon War, Israeli intelligence and the Air Force made an effort to dispose of Arafat, who was in besieged Beirut. They failed, though there were close strikes from the air.
After the fighting ended, the prime minister, Menachem Begin, decided not to pursue the direct efforts to eliminate Arafat, apparently because he thought Arafat should be treated as a national leader even though he considered him to be a terrorist. Accordingly, he withheld authorization to assassinate Arafat by means of a sniper, when the Palestinian leader boarded the evacuation vessel that the Americans organized to remove him and his forces from Beirut. A close-up photograph of Arafat taken on that occasion shows that shooting him would not have been difficult. However, Arafat was spared and went on his way.
What the general public doesn't know is that there were two more instances, after the Lebanon War, in which steps were taken to liquidate Arafat. In one case the plan was to attack his plane over the Mediterranean, a plan that came very close to being executed. For some reason, the senior officer who was supposed to give the order to open fire backed off at the last moment. He later told friends that he became suspicious that the operation had not been cleared with prime minister Begin. Sharon was angry, of course, but the explanation he was given was that an operation opportunity had not presented itself.
The second case involved a case of mistaken identity which could have resulted in a very serious situation. Israel intelligence learned that a civilian aircraft carrying 20 Palestinians who had fought in Beirut and had gone to Greece for medical treatment was about to take off for Egypt, and that Arafat was going to be on the plane as well. Here, too, the Air Force was ordered to be ready to down the plane. The chief of staff at the time was Raphael Eitan. However the commander of the Air Force, Major General David Ivri, had doubts about the quality of the intelligence information. Repeatedly he asked that the information be checked and rechecked.
In the end, Ivri was right. When the plane was already airborne it turned out that there was an Arafat on it, but that it was Dr. Fathi Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Organization and the brother of Yasser Arafat. Dr. Arafat had decided to accompany the wounded men on the flight. This time the life of Fathi Arafat was spared.
Yasser Arafat is not the only example of an extremist Arab leader who poses a threat to Israel, and who has been the target of an assassination attempt. The best-known episode is the one in which training was undertaken to kill the Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. Had it not been for the accident in which five members of Sayeret Matkal - the ultra-elite commando unit - were killed, it is likely that then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have authorized the operation.
In the 1950s, there were those who toyed with the possibility of assassinating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser by a singular method, but that idea was scrapped even before it was submitted for authorization.
With the exception of the case of Saddam Hussein, the tendency was - and rightly so - to avoid attacking political leaders. Still, Israel engaged in brinksmanship in this matter. The question was: If a political leader authorizes terrorist actions, should he have immunity? What about a leader like Osama bin Laden?
Abu Jihad was the Palestinian chief of staff and defense minister, and was personally involved in planning and approving terrorist operations, but he was also a prominent political leader. It was the events of the first intifada that prompted his liquidation. In special circumstances, in wartime, Israel did not hesitate when it came to deciding whether to assassinate leaders who were involved in terrorism. Two examples are Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - in the wake of his liquidation, the Palestinians assassinated Israel's minister of tourism, Rehavam Ze'evi - and the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
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