U.S., Israel Fault Arafat On HamasU.S., Israel Fault Arafat On Hamas

Clinton, CIA Reportedly Warned Against Lenience
With Faction

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24 1997; Page A01
The Washington Post

JERUSALEM, March 23 -- Friday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, which
broke a year-long silence from the Hamas military wing, followed
months of private warnings by Israel and the Clinton administration
that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had loosed the chains on the
Islamic extremist group.

In diplomatic contacts with Arafat since January, including a
face-to-face admonition by President Clinton at the White House
this month and a meeting later with CIA Director-designate George
J. Tenet, the United States complained that he had softened the
once-ruthless crackdown that left Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad
nearly broken, U.S. and Israeli sources said.

American and Israeli officials objected particularly to the release
from Palestinian prison cells of guerrilla operatives they believed
responsible for terror bombings that killed scores of Israelis in
February and March 1996.

The three-way diplomatic argument, which took on angry tones in
contacts between Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs, today
became part of the escalating public crisis between Arafat and
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli cabinet,
repeating Netanyahu's recent charge that Arafat gave "a green light
for attacks," voted in effect to freeze political talks with the
Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu meanwhile launched a renewed
public relations campaign to discredit Arafat and divert
international criticism of Israel.

Netanyahu now suggests, and senior aides charge explicitly, that
the Palestinian leader deliberately caused a resumption of
terrorist attacks. American officials conversant with shared
intelligence said again today that the evidence does not support
that charge. They strongly criticized Arafat, however, saying he
has manipulated the threat of violence and taken unacceptable risks
with the release of hard-core operatives of Islamic Jihad and the
Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas.

Palestinian officials strongly denied all accusations of complicity
in Friday's attack. They argued in interviews and diplomatic
contacts that Arafat has sought -- at times with Israeli and
American approval -- to divide and co-opt Islamic extremists by
freeing those who submit to his authority and pledge to halt armed
attacks on Israel.

The Palestinians blame the renewal of violence on Netanyahu's
government, which has used its superior power in recent days to
impose decisions -- on construction of a new Jewish neighborhood
for 30,000 people in East Jerusalem and on the amount of West Bank
land to be transferred next to Palestinian self-rule -- that
Palestinians regard as central to their continuing negotiations.

Those decisions, they said, have enraged the Palestinian public,
undercut support for Arafat and given a crucial measure of public
acquiescence to Hamas terrorist attacks. Hamas, a mass political
movement that is highly sensitive to Palestinian opinion, has noted
the near-doubling of public support for "armed attacks on Israeli
targets." According to a study by the Center for Palestinian
Research and Studies, the percentage of respondents who support
such attacks increased from 21 percent a year ago to 38 percent
this week.

"They have stopped negotiations and speak to us with bulldozers,"
Palestinian Cabinet Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman said in an
interview tonight.

The Palestinians' attempts to press their case against Israel
diplomatically were rebuffed, with the United States, for example,
using its veto in the U.N. Security Council to block a resolution
backed by all other Security Council members calling on Israel to
halt its East Jerusalem housing project.

After four suicide bombings killed 59 people in eight days last
year, Arafat ordered the arrest of hundreds of Islamic extremists,
imposed censorship on mosque sermons, seized weapons stores and
financial resources and for the first time jailed nearly all the
known military operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

"These blows to Issadin Kassam [the Hamas military wing] by the
Palestinian Authority were the reason resistance halted for a
period of time, not because the program has changed at all,"
Ibrahim Ghosheh, the Amman-based Hamas spokesman, said in a recent
interview there.

Arafat maintained his historical pattern, nonetheless, of
attempting to divide and conquer his Islamic rivals. Mahmoud Zohar,
a Gaza-based Hamas political leader and spokesman, received
bone-breaking beatings in Arafat's jail and the humiliation of
having his head and beard forcibly shaved. But Arafat paid a
courtesy call after releasing Zohar last year, and he brought
another former Hamas spokesman, Emad Falouji, into his cabinet.

Beginning last August, as initial tensions flared with the new
Netanyahu government, Arafat gradually released 120 of the roughly
200 arrested activists that Israel specifically asked him to keep
in jail. Among those freed were 16 men identified in a confidential
Israeli document -- contents of which were made available to The
Washington Post in an effort to bolster Israel's public charges --
as "directly involved in killing Israelis."

The freed operatives, according to officials with access to Israeli
and U.S. intelligence, included Abdel Fatah Sutri, Kamal Khalifa,
Salam Maruf, Ataf Hamdan and Emad Akel, all of whom had taken part
directly in planning or executing Hamas attacks in which Israelis
died. All were then recruited to the Preventive Security Service in
Gaza, one of nine or more competing security agencies reporting to
Arafat.

Another of Israel's most-wanted Hamas activists was Adnan Ghol, who
according to U.S. intelligence built the bomb used in one of last
year's lethal bus attacks. Ghol turned himself over to the General
Intelligence Service in Gaza, another of Arafat's agencies, and
became an agent there.

In January, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, Ghol blew off
his fingers in the accidental detonation of explosives in his Gaza
apartment. "You can make the argument that if you bring them in [to
the Palestinian Authority] it gets them away from terror, but the
Ghol case shows that is not always true," said an Israeli official
who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Clinton administration, which became increasingly alarmed by
the release of what one official called "really bad guys," sent a
series of sharp messages through Edward G. Abington, the U.S.
consul general in Jerusalem. Clinton and Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright both raised the matter prominently in their
separate March 3 meetings with Arafat, and Tenet, according to
sources, made name-by-name demands that Arafat rearrest the worst
of the operatives.

Fresh from those meetings, Arafat held two fence-mending sessions
with Hamas upon returning from Washington. On March 9, he spoke
angrily to Hamas political leaders, including Sayed Abu Musameh,
Mohammed Shama and Ismail Abu Shanab, about Israeli violations of
signed agreements. Zohar, who was present, said Arafat called for
national unity and agreed to release the most senior remaining
military leader from jail.

The next day Arafat freed Ibrahim Maqadmeh, as promised. According
to authoritative sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, both
of Arafat's senior internal security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub and
Mohammed Dahlan, opposed the move. The same day, Arafat met again
with Hamas leaders.

"The aim of Israel from the beginning was to create an internal
Palestinian division," Zohar said in an interview. "Now it is
forcing him to come back to his opponents and strengthen himself
within Palestinian society against the cancerous [Israeli]
settlements."

Based on electronic intercepts of conversations among Hamas
leaders, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, the Islamic
extremists came away from the Arafat meetings with the impression
-- more from what he had not said than what he had -- that Arafat
would not object to the resumption of suicide bombing attacks.

That is the basis for Netanyahu's statement on ABC's "This Week"
today, one of many interviews he solicited with foreign
journalists, that "every time there is an impasse or a grievance
against us they send terrorists." He added, "In this case they were
sent a green light from the Palestinian Authority. On this we have
absolute information."

Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Israel's chief of military intelligence,
charged in an interview after a briefing for foreign reporters this
evening that Arafat "wanted terror, there is no doubt."

Publicly and privately, the Clinton administration says it
disagrees. Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that
Arafat sought to protect his political flanks and raise Israeli
anxieties about terrorism but was well aware of what one called the
"devastating" consequences for Israeli-Palestinian relations of an
actual attack.

Albright, interviewed on CBS's "Face the Nation," said of Hamas
that "there is clearly perception of the green light but no
concrete evidence" that Arafat intended to send it. She said that
"there needs to be some improvement" in the Palestinian Authority's
efforts against terror.

Abdel Rahman, one of Arafat's senior lieutenants, noted that Israel
assisted at various times in the self-rule authority's efforts to
build bridges to Hamas moderates. For example, he said, Israel
granted travel permits enabling Hamas political leaders from Gaza
to attend a recent "national dialogue" sponsored by Arafat in the
West Bank city of Nablus.

"Slowly, slowly we released them," he said, speaking of the jailed
Hamas leaders. "We want them to be with us, to bring them to the
camp of peace, not to leave them outside." Israeli accusations to
the contrary, he said, presume "that we are still enemies to each
other."

As for Maqadmeh, the Palestinians said they issued a warrant for
his arrest after Friday's suicide attack on a Tel Aviv cafe.
Maqadmeh was telling a Gaza rally, as the bomb went off, that Hamas
would make Netanyahu "curse the day his mother bore him." Late
tonight, Maqadmeh remained at large.

Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company