Sharon works to isolate Arafat

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon brings two messages to Washington this week. The first is that he is indeed a man of peace. The second is that Yasser Arafat isn't.

The Palestinian leader moved quickly this weekend to show himself indispensable by breaking a deadlock in negotiations to end the standoff at the Church of the Nativity (see page 6).

But Mr. Sharon will present President Bush and other US officials with material gleaned during Israel's recent invasion of Palestinian-ruled areas in the West Bank that purports to show Mr. Arafat's direct support for terrorism against Israel. Sharon will also unveil ideas for making peace with the Palestinians that he has not yet divulged.

Both gambits are attempts to shape American thinking about an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the European Union, Russia, the UN, and the US have said they will convene this summer – the weightiest foray into Middle East peacemaking of the Bush presidency.

Sharon will also have to account for how he has used his military forces against the Palestinians – and for his slow-motion fulfillment of Bush's public demands, first uttered in early April, that Israel withdraw from the West Bank "without delay."

"There's a certain uneasy feeling" in Washington, says Robert Pelletreau, a former assistant secretary of State with long experience in the Middle East, "that this tremendous use of force by Sharon is not getting us closer to peace."

At least on the surface, both Sharon and Arafat emerged victorious from a month of intensive Israeli operations in the West Bank. Having endured nearly a half-year of Israeli restrictions limiting his freedom, the Palestinian leader is enjoying restored popularity domestically and abroad.

Arafat, whom the Israeli government declared "irrelevant" and sought to "isolate," is demonstrating anew that he is the Palestinians' central figure.

Sharon, for his part, managed to defy Bush's demands and still win an invitation to the White House. He succeeded in rebuffing a United Nations inquiry into the worst of the fighting. His approval rating here today is double what it was before he embarked on what Israel calls Operation Defensive Shield.

Militarily, the operations have generated a lull in the conflict, although many analysts say it is only a matter of time until Palestinian militants resume their attacks against Israel. The Israelis are also detaining more than 1,000 Palestinians arrested during the operations, including several key political and militant leaders.

In the Jenin area, a stronghold of the Islamic Jihad movement, the Israel have unquestionably damaged what it calls the "infrastructure of terror." But groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Arafat's own Fatah movement, may have been left with most of their capabilities intact.

More profoundly, Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the physical infrastructure in the West Bank's cities and towns have been seriously damaged, and Palestinians are already disagreeing over how the PA should put itself back together. Nabil Amro, a minister in the PA Cabinet who has generally been considered close to Arafat, resigned on Friday, apparently because of differences over how a rebuilt PA should be structured.

But the revival of the PA can also be seen as a defeat for Sharon. "He hasn't succeeded in destroying the PA," observes a Western diplomat here who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He hasn't destroyed or made irrelevant Arafat. And he hasn't succeeded in turning the Palestinian question into a mere subset of the US 'war on terror.'"

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