Dossier on Arafat Is Sharon’s Ammunition

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will make the rounds in Washington today, embarking on another quest to eliminate Yasser Arafat from the Israeli-Palestinian equation.

Armed with a 103-page dossier that Israel says links Arafat to terrorism, Sharon will argue in meetings today with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Tuesday with President Bush that Arafat cannot be a partner to any peace agreement.

Sharon also plans to outline to Bush his own peace plan. Details that have leaked out indicate that it repeats positions that the Palestinians--and, in some cases, the Americans--have already rejected as nonstarters, including Sharon’s desire to keep intact most, if not all, Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But the focus of Sharon’s fifth meeting with Bush will be Arafat.

Having failed to oust the Palestinian Authority president with a massive military offensive and 34-day siege of his West Bank headquarters, Sharon is now mounting a political campaign that he hopes will galvanize world opinion, or at least Washington opinion, against Arafat. Sharon may no longer be able to deport Arafat, as he had hoped, but he still wants to completely sideline the Palestinian leader.

To that end, Israeli officials, with great fanfare, on Sunday publicized the report compiled by Sharon’s government and intelligence services. It contains numerous invoices, memos and other documents that Israeli officials say the army seized in raids on Arafat’s offices and those of his top aides.

Most of the documents, whose authenticity has not been independently verified, have already been reported on widely. The difference now is that they’ve been gathered together in a single dossier--with a red-lettered cover page and pictures of a defiant Arafat. Israeli officials assert that the booklet is damning evidence of Arafat’s complicity in fatal attacks on Israeli civilians.

“I really hope we will be able to convince the United States of America and the European countries that the main problem, the main stumbling block on the way to peace, is Yasser Arafat,” Cabinet Minister Danny Naveh said in presenting the report to a room full of Israeli and foreign journalists.

Translations from Arabic to English provided by Israeli officials appeared generally accurate, even if the authenticity of the documents could not be verified. There has been no way to follow the chain of custody of the material, which Naveh said came primarily from computer disks and hard drives.

Palestinian officials dismissed the Israeli campaign as pure propaganda and charged that much, if not all, of the material was fabricated.

The documents appear to show payments authorized by Arafat to activists in his Fatah movement and to militants in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Fatah. One document dated Sept. 19, 2001, appears to indicate that Arafat authorized a $600 payment to Raed Karmi, who boasted of killing Israelis, including two Tel Aviv restaurateurs, before Israel killed him in January, and a payment in the same amount to Ziad Mohammed Daas, a lieutenant to Karmi whom Israel accuses of orchestrating a shooting attack on a bat mitzvah a few days after Karmi’s death.

Another paper allegedly shows the authorization of $350 payments to each of 12 Fatah activists who Israel said were involved in lethal attacks on Israelis in the Tulkarm area of the West Bank.

In each of the documents, Arafat appears to be responding to a request for money from top Fatah officials, including Marwan Barghouti, a key aide captured by Israel on April 15; the Palestinian leader usually allotted a sum considerably smaller than the request.

The Israeli report acknowledges that Arafat paid money to hundreds of Fatah members, only some of them implicated in terrorism. Further, no document links Arafat to a specific act of terrorism.

The dossier also includes inventories of weapons purportedly in the Palestinian Authority’s possession in violation of peace accords. These include rocket-propelled antitank missiles and heavy-caliber machine guns.

Naveh, a minister without portfolio, said the Palestinian Authority used money from European donor states to finance its budget and “indirectly” pay for terrorist acts. He said two of Arafat’s closest associates, general intelligence chief Tawfiq Tirawi and top financial officer Fuad Shubaki, were involved in arming Palestinian militias.

Naveh accused Iraq, Iran and Syria of supplying money to militias and facilitating the smuggling of weapons. He noted that Saudi Arabia has paid large amounts of money to the families of Palestinian fighters killed by Israel, as well as to families of suicide bombers.

The material, Naveh said, constitutes “clear-cut, hard evidence that the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat is supporting, encouraging and is an actively operating body of terror.”

Palestinian Cabinet member Saeb Erekat responded angrily to the Israeli allegations, saying the documents were forged.

“This is part of a series of forgeries and lies to discredit Arafat and the Palestinian Authority,” Erekat said. “It seems that the [Israeli] endgame is to destroy the Palestinian Authority and Arafat and the peace process, and then say they don’t have a partner.”

U.S. officials said they had not yet examined Sharon’s material. A Western diplomat said it was to be expected that Israel would step up the campaign to discredit Arafat in connection with Sharon’s Washington trip.

But there is no guarantee that Sharon’s strategy will work.

There is no love lost for Arafat in the Bush administration--the president has yet to invite the Palestinian Authority leader to the White House--but U.S. officials have concluded that, at least for now, Arafat is the chosen leader of the Palestinian people, the “address” for Palestinian negotiations.

Furthermore, he is riding an especially high wave of popularity, having survived Sharon’s siege and emerged like an aged phoenix from the ruins of his Ramallah compound. Far from Arafat being made irrelevant, as Sharon said was his goal, the Palestinian leader became a cause celebre, and, for now, an important symbol of defiance for both Palestinians and the Arab world.

In addition to being told that he has to deal with Arafat, Sharon might come under U.S. pressure to entertain political discussions with the Palestinians, something the prime minister has adamantly opposed while violence continues.

The Americans want to revive the recommendations of a blue-ribbon panel headed by former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine). The panel’s report last year proposed a series of confidence-building measures, such as a freeze on Jewish settlements, as important steps to reduce violence and move toward a permanent resolution.

Such issues are problematic for Sharon at home. He faces a central committee meeting of his right-wing Likud Party about a week after he returns from Washington. The committee is expected to vote against the establishment of a Palestinian state, thereby tying Sharon’s hands.

Still, Sharon’s get-rid-of-Arafat viewpoint appeared to get a boost Sunday from Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor.

“We are going to be very clear that the Palestinian leadership that is there now, the Authority, is not the kind of leadership that can lead to the kind of Palestinian state that we need,” Rice said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The Palestinian leadership “has got to reform, it has got to make changes in the security apparatus, in the constitution, in the way that it leads,” she said.