Yasser Arafat

JERUSALEM -- Cranking up the pressure on the Israeli government, Yasser Arafat repeated warnings yesterday that Palestinians might have to revert to violence if the peace with Israel broke down.In meetings in the West Bank city of Nablus, Arafat invoked the intifada, the Palestinian uprising waged largely by stone-throwing youths that flared in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank for seven years before peace was made in 1993."One of our options is to return to the intifada," Arafat told high school students on the first day of school.

Legacy of terror will long survive Yasser Arafat G. Jefferson Price III continues his tradition of Israel-bashing and fawning on the Palestinians in his latest column, "Palestinians pay tribute not just to Arafat, but to an idea" (Opinion Commentary, Nov. 14), in which he has trouble stating the obvious about one of the world's most horrific and prolific mass murderers. While Mr. Price concedes the existence of Palestinian terrorists (excluding Mr. Arafat and the PLO) and that "terrorism remained a tool of the battle for liberation," he fails to explain what was supposed to be "liberated."

Washington. -- Outside the White House, on the day of the signing, we pass a group of teen-age girls, Orthodox Jews, dressed in green plaid skirts and white blouses. They are from the Beth Rivkah school in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, up since 3 a.m., to travel five hours, to demonstrate against the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.I ask: ''Why are you against it?'' The answers come: ''Arafat is a terrorist,'' ''there is blood on his hands,'' ''now Arafat and the Arabs can exterminate the Jews.

Here's a question: If Yasser Arafat is as irrelevant as the governments of Israel and the United States say he is, why all the commotion about him? If the Palestinian leader were irrelevant, the best way to treat him would be to ignore him. Let him stew in his wrecked compound in Ramallah where one assumes the intelligence services of Israel and the United States are capable of monitoring every word he utters, of knowing who his visitors are and what...

WASHINGTON - It is a sad but fitting coda to Yasser Arafat's career that the prospect of his death seemed to unlock more hope and possibilities than the reality of his life. His corrupt, self-interested rule had created a situation whereby Palestinian aspirations seemed to have gotten locked away with him, under house arrest in Ramallah, well beyond the reach of creative diplomacy. Only human biology could liberate them again - and so it has. In the early 1990s, I sided with those Israelis who, though no fans of Mr. Arafat, were ready to deal with him at Oslo in the name of normalcy for both Israelis and Palestinians.

JERUSALEM - Hopeful times have been here before. It was just 18 months ago when Mahmoud Abbas, then the Palestinian prime minister, stood with his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon, and talked of a new day in which political dialogue would supplant violence. Two months later, in September 2003, Abbas resigned, saying Israel, the United States and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had undermined his authority. An Israeli-Palestinian cease-fired dissolved, Sharon refused to meet with Abbas' successor and hope quickly turned into despair.

NATIONAL Summit seen as risk for Blair British Prime Minister Tony Blair's two-day summit with President Bush carries enormous political risk for him if he returns to London empty-handed, analysts say. Blair wants Bush to commit to finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in the wake of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death and to taking a gentler approach to European allies like France and Germany, which opposed the Iraq war. [Page 3a]...

Paris. -- The fear of most conservative Israelis, and of those American Jews who are hostile to the agreement signed Monday in Washington, is that the agreement will produce ''a PLO state.'' They say that autonomy for Gaza and Jericho will provide a military and political salient from which a new assault will be mounted on Israel.jTC They do not understand that the real danger will come if there is no PLO state. Israel needs the PLO to make this agreement succeed. If Gaza and Jericho are not effectively governed, chaotic conditions persist, the PLO's authority is lost, and Hamas, Fatah and the other fundamentalist and radical factions flourish, then Israel will well and truly be threatened.

WASHINGTON - The day after Yasser Arafat died, USA Today carried a big, bold headline that caught my eye. It said: "Arafat Dies, Leaves Void." All I could think of when reading that headline was its double meaning. Yasser Arafat left a void of leadership, with no formal successor. But he also left a void of achievement. And it is that second void that really matters, considering that he led the Palestinian movement for some 40 years. You will pardon me if I don't join in the insipid chorus about how Mr. Arafat's great achievement was the way he represented the "aspirations" for statehood of the Palestinian people and, through terrorism and resistance, put the Palestinian cause on the world map. Excuse me, but Mr. Arafat put the Palestinian cause on the world map in 1974, when he was invited to address the U.N. General Assembly.

WASHINGTON - And now for a clichM-i. After filming a documentary on both sides of the fence Israel is building in the West Bank, I can report the following: Israelis and Palestinians really don't understand each other. Yes, they actually pay me for such observations. Alas, it's not quite as trite as it seems. You see, there has always been a certain lack of understanding between the two sides, but they have often overcome that to strike mini-deals and even Oslo. But the last three years of the Palestinian uprising, suicide bombs and Israeli settlement expansion have blown away any remnants of that.