Yasser Arafat 'very, very sick'

Jasser Arafat´s death would be extremely bad thing. If purely emotional reasons are not counted, there are several very good reasons to hope that he would survive. The open question of succession is only one, but very important one. Marwan Barghouti seems to be the only man thought to be able to fill Arafat´s shoes, but that´s the reason why he is in a Israeli jail. Mohammed Dahlan seems to thought himself to be a man with enough strength to carry the burden, but the populace doesn´t seem to share his view. Members of PLO´s old guard, like Qurei, don´t have much backing and they have shown themselves to be ineffective. So the Palestinians would become more divided and the next president could be quite weak and lacking the same kind of support that Arafat enjoys. Weak president and weak prime minister could then be locked in the same kind of match of wills that Arafat won agaist Qurei.

Among the other reasons is the undiplomatic response from leaders of Israel and the US. Knowing them, they would not hide their joy and would be quite open about it. Israel has decided that it won´t allow Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem and this would be seen, as it is, as an attempt to humiliate the Palestinians. Simply, Israel would use Arafat´s death to make the possiblity of negotiations even remote than they are now. Violence would ensue.

And the Americans. They would be quite happy with Arafat´s death, wouldn´t hide it and would say every possible nasty thing of him and would also use the occasion to sing the glories of Israel and it´s virtuous leader (after all, they have to show their allegiance to Israel whenever the possibility to do so arises.) Then they would smile and claim that they are eager to work with the new Palestinian leadership and that they believe that new leadership won´t make the same mistakes as Arafat.

They don´t understand diplomacy, the Americans. They can insult you and the next moment ask you to co-operate with them. But by insulting Arafat after his death, they would be insulting the Palestinians (which the Americans probably wouldn´t understand, they would claim that the insults and glee about Arafat´s death would be directed to their home audience and Israel, not to the Palestinians, and that the Palestinians should disregard of it etc), whatever the Palestinians think of Arafat, they could hardly come to any other kind of conclusion, and the new leadership hardly could accept this. If they would, they would be seen as cowardly collaborators.

Only bad things will come if Jasser Arafat dies.