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It isn't an official house arrest, but in practice Yasir Arafat is stuck. For two weeks now the Palestinian leader hasn't left his Ramallah headquarters, a sprawling compound that until a few years ago served as an Israeli military base. He works there by day, holds his meetings in a refurbished office, issues orders to his field commanders, then sleeps in an adjacent room. Arafat has little choice. Israel has smashed his helicopters and now rings the compound with tanks. Though Prime Minister Ariel Sharon insists the measures are meant to sideline the Palestinian leader, not to punish him, Israel's decision last week to break ties with Arafat and pummel his administration after yet another grisly Palestinian attack has raised the region's stress meter to new heights. "It's a dangerous game for Israel, and I'm not sure he [Sharon] understands that," says one government official who sits in on Sharon's cabinet meetings but doesn't share his hawkish views.
It's also dangerous for the United States. Sharon had good reason to lash out at the Palestinian leader after a group identified with Arafat's Fatah faction claimed responsibility for a bus attack that killed 10 Israelis last week. Even the Europeans, usually Arafat devotees, were urging him to "crush the terrorists." Israel responded with airstrikes and ground operations in the widest offensive yet against the West Bank and Gaza. But by eschewing Arafat, Sharon is effectively turning back the clock on relations between Israelis and Palestinians--really between Israel and the Arab world--to a bygone era of political boycotts and chronic antagonism. The slide backward is frustrating in itself, considering how close the two sides were to a final peace accord just 17 months ago. But in the shifting global-political equation that has followed September 11, it's also a source of danger to Washington: the United States wants to make progress in the Israeli-Palestinian arena in its ongoing effort to take the edge off Islamic extremism.
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In many ways the last two weeks have shown just how retro the Middle East has become. The Palestinian attack on a bus in the West Bank last week was a vintage tactic from the bad old days of Israel's occupation of Lebanon--a roadside bomb detonated underneath the vehicle, followed by a torrent of grenades and gunfire directed at fleeing passengers. In the bloody aftermath some Israeli officials were talking about resurrecting the Jordanian option--a 1980s proposal to let the West Bank revert to Jordanian control. The idea today is even less realistic than it was 15 years ago. One cabinet minister even suggested having Israel appoint "amenable" Palestinian governors in each West Bank town, a program that failed miserably in the 1970s.
But while Israel trumpeted the severance of ties with Arafat, it hasn't cut all contacts. Officials in Foreign Minister Shimon Peres's office are still quietly talking to top Arafat lieutenants, NEWSWEEK has learned, and security officers relayed to Palestinians late last week another list of fugitives Israel wants arrested. If Arafat is receptive, it might give U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni enough of a reason to return to the region after a frustrating three-week mission that ended over the weekend. "There are military actions that Sharon is taking that make me shudder," said Peres, Sharon's uneasy political partner, in a newspaper interview. For some people in Washington, he couldn't have summed it up better.
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