Benjamin Netanyahu may be one of the best things that ever happened to Yasser Arafat.
Strange as the idea may seem, some view the hawkish Israeli prime minister and his handling of the peace process as pennies from heaven for the Palestinian cause. Even the Palestinian Authority leader himself has made comments to that effect, veteran Israeli political commentator Ehud Ya’ari said here last week.
Ya’ari, director of the Middle East Department at Israel Television and associate Middle East editor of the magazine Jerusalem Report, gave a pointed summation of Arafat’s view of Netanyahu.
“He gave us Clinton,” Ya’ari said Arafat told him.
The Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation brought Ya’ari to the Bay Area to offer his trademark razor-sharp observations on the Middle East. Sipping brandy in the lobby of his San Francisco hotel during an interview, Ya’ari held little back in assessing Israeli domestic politics and the shifting Middle East political landscape.
Netanyahu, he said, committed a “major blunder” in October 1996 by insisting the United States join bilateral negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
As with the Oslo accords, negotiations should have remained bilateral, Ya’ari asserted. In Oslo, he pointed out, the U.S. role primarily consisted of eyeballing the final agreement and overseeing the triumphant signing ceremony.
“By now we have what I once termed the beginning of the American stewardship of the emerging Palestinian state,” Ya’ari said. “The last place we want the United States to be is in the middle ground, the mine fields, the no man’s land of disagreement between us and the Palestinians.”
Ya’ari sees that arrangement as detrimental to all parties involved, especially Israel.
The Palestinians’ “growing confidence that the U.S. may ultimately end up on their side is contributing to a degree of obstinacy and toughness in their negotiating posture, which is not helpful.”
Arafat, Ya’ari maintains, is enjoying a relationship with the American administration he could not have cultivated under the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“If Rabin was alive, Arafat would never be invited twice in one month to the White House.” Arafat is slated to visit Washington, D.C., later this month.
Ya’ari, who penned a biography of Arafat in the early 1970s, knows the Palestinian leader well. He will not say how the pair first met, however.
Netanyahu may have boded well for Arafat’s relationship with the United States, but Ya’ari is unclear whether the Palestinian leader wants to sit across the table from the Likudnik again. On the topic of the upcoming elections, Arafat has been evasive.
“I tried my best to get what his feel was and I’m absolutely confident he doesn’t level with me on this,” Ya’ari said. “He doesn’t confide in this own aides. I’m sure he doesn’t tell his wife what he thinks about the Israeli elections.”
Still, Ya’ari has his suspicions.
“I’m not at all sure, having invested a lifetime in this guy, that he really wants what many people think he wants to see as an outcome of the Israeli elections,” the journalist said.
Though more than conversant on Israeli politics, Ya’ari’s true focus is Middle East affairs. He has authored or co-authored seven books on Middle East politics and won awards for his coverage of the Persian Gulf War and Lebanon War.
The death of Jordan’s King Hussein and the aging and illness of other inveterate regional leaders signal a new era of uncertainty in the region, he said.
“The era of luxury is over. We’re going to see a whole lot of new faces. Everything will probably look different.”