Mideast Experts Hope for, but Don’t Expect, Easy Transition

By Laura King

Seeing any potential heir as a threat, Arafat never groomed a successor. Now observers fear a violent power struggle.

Jerusalem - Whenever someone close to Yasser Arafat has dared to try to persuade him to do something he didn’t want to do, the famously temperamental Palestinian leader has had a favorite reply.

"Mish waatu," he would say in Arabic. "It is not the time."

Sometimes he would utter it lightly and dismissively; other times he would scream it in fury. Either way, his courtiers rarely failed to get the message.

Even as decades passed and Arafat turned 75, it was never the time to consider a critical question: who might one day replace him. In his mind, any heir apparent would be a threat and a rival, and he could abide neither.

Now, as the Palestinian Authority president is buffeted by his worst health crisis, the matter of succession has taken on a perilous urgency. With no real mechanism in place for an orderly transfer of long-term authority, Israeli and Palestinian officials alike are worried that a violent power struggle could erupt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Arafat has no successor - he has carefully seen to that," said Shalom Harari, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserves and a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center in the town of Herzliya. "There is no one who can step into his shoes as a symbol or leader."

In the event Arafat dies, Palestinian law provides for the parliament speaker to take over for 60 days, with elections to be scheduled as soon as possible. But the speaker, Rouhi Fatouh, has almost no popular support base, and many observers doubt he can exercise any real authority even during a temporary stint at the helm - and certainly not retain it long-term.

Many longtime observers of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority believe some form of collective leadership will emerge, at least initially. A three-member panel, including the current and former Palestinian prime ministers, has already been named to handle day-to-day affairs if Arafat becomes incapacitated.

"There is no one obvious heir, but there is a clear group from which leadership will emerge or be formed," said Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, an Israeli lawmaker and former army chief of staff. "But part of the problem is that there are personal rivalries among this group as well, and people who will not cooperate so readily with one another."

Palestinian political analyst Ali Jarbawi concurred. "One could assume, and one should assume, that some level of internal violence is going to take place," he said.

In recent months, rivalries within the Palestinian Authority, particularly in Gaza, have boiled over into public brawls, gun battles, abductions and assaults.

Even in the midst of violent conflict with Israel, Palestinians have achieved a greater degree of democracy than most of their Arab neighbors. Nonetheless, Arafat has conformed to the regional pattern of reluctance to designate a political heir, analysts said.

"It’s just not part of Arab political culture," said Barry Rubin of the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya. "Traditionally, when positions like the caliphate and sultanate changed hands, it wasn’t a clear line, and that does seem to have carried over into the present day."

Despite the sense that Arafat’s death will usher in a free-for-all for influence, most analysts see a half-dozen Palestinian figures as likely to emerge with at least some share of his power.

They include Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, who served as the first Palestinian prime minister last year before quitting in frustration in less than four months, and his successor, Ahmed Korei, known as Abu Alaa. Both men are considered political moderates, Abbas more so.

Abbas and Korei have been named to the three-member emergency ruling panel, along with Salim Zanoun, a hard-line senior official in Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Rubin and others predicted, however, that the committee would be plagued by tensions.

"In Roman times, a triumvirate never lasted too long - someone would always decide to get rid of the other two," Rubin said.

Korei and Abbas are both in their 60s. At least two other potentially influential figures, however, are a generation younger: Mohammed Dahlan, a onetime Arafat protege who was security chief in Gaza and retains a powerful constituency there, and Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic militia leader serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli jail for masterminding terrorist attacks.

Abbas, Korei, Dahlan and Barghouti are all products of Arafat’s Fatah group. His demise, however, could prompt Palestinian militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have a devoted following, particularly in the Gaza Strip, to try to seize a share of the political spoils.

Although Hamas has been hit hard by Israeli military operations, with many of its top figures slain or driven underground, analysts believe it has a support base nearly as large as that of Arafat’s PLO.

"These groups argue that they, too, are representatives of the Palestinian people," said Israeli analyst Harari. "And when Arafat, the masthead, is gone, the PLO’s position as exclusive representative of the Palestinian people might disappear along with him."

Some Israeli commentators left room for the unthinkable: that in the short term at least, Arafat - reviled by most Israelis as a mass murderer - might actually be missed.

"Arafat will leave scorched earth behind him ... on which wars could rage," said Roni Shaked, a respected military affairs analyst for Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper.

"But who will replace him? Who will take control of this mess?"

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