With some Israeli officials privately suggesting that Yasser Arafat must be dead and buried before any real progress toward peace can be made, senior defense, intelligence and operational officers are reportedly gearing up for the aftermath of the chairman's funeral.
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But if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has drawn a cautiously optimistic link between the "removal" of Arafat and fresh chances for peace in the region, the dramatic changes forecast by army planners are anything but hopeful.
In fact, if any one of a range of nightmare scenarios turns out to be true, post-Arafat Israel could be in for a surge of violence dwarfing anything it has seen in three years of relentless bloodletting.
It could be that the only thing worse for Israel than a Yasser Arafat continuing to live and breathe and rule, is if he were to stop.
The post-Arafat forecasts were said to have been mooted last week in simulation war games held with the participation of officials from the IDF's Military Intelligence, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and army units operating in the West Bank.
The scenarios were contained within contingency plans bearing the unpromising code name "Yom Sagrir" - a term describing a day of gloomy, inclement weather.
Among the scenarios, outlined in frightening detail on state-owned Israel Radio and in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily newspaper, were the following:
-- A funeral march by tens of thousands of Palestinians sweeps in a human tidal wave over and past IDF checkpoints and barriers, heading for Jerusalem with a furious determination to bury Arafat where the intifada began, the Temple Mount - sacred to Muslims as the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, and to Jews as site of the ancient Temple.
Israel would prohibit the burial of Arafat on the site, but would be hard-pressed to stop the multitude without a huge price in Palestinian casualties.
-- The Palestinian Authority could dissolve and the territories could be plunged into wholesale anarchy on a scale heretofore unimaginable, driven by unstoppable rioting and unrestrained violence by rogue militias.
-- Palestinians could mount a campaign to take over settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This could trigger violent responses from threatened settlers, who could form militias of their own.
Chillingly, the overall result of any of the scenarios could be the same: A massive IDF operation to reconquer the whole of the territories and re-establish formal military rule.
Currently, Arafat - even in poor health and with a governing apparatus that runs on high-octane graft - retains the hearts and the minds of the Palestinian public. Recent polls show him far ahead of any other Palestinian figure in grass-roots popularity, a factor that cements his continued hold on PA policymaking.
Arafat has thus successfully, if not easily, defied three years of exhaustive, unprecedented efforts by the Sharon government to render him, in its oft-repeated mantra, "irrelevant."
Sharon has meanwhile staked his entire political and diplomatic reputation on the principle that Arafat is the primary obstacle to any peace - a stance that, in practice, has ruled out any diplomatic progress because all PA decisions must be still ultimately brought to Arafat for final review and approval.
As a result, Arafat might be expected to claim credit for any movement toward peace, a thought that would be anathema to his arch-foes in the right-dominated Israeli government.
"Political thought in Israel today revolves around the hope that Yasser Arafat will die, or that his illness will incapacitate him," says Haaretz commentator Aluf Benn.
"The government believes that the chance for a renewal of the peace process depends on this."
The past weeks have been rife with speculation over the fragile health of the aging Arafat, who has been variously reported to have suffered a heart attack, been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and come down with a liver infection.
Appearing Tuesday before Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Military Intelligence chief Major General Aharon Ze'evi said that "There are preparations in the Palestinian Authority for the war for Chairman Arafat's job as a result of Yasser Arafat's ailment, and part of those preparations include the stockpiling of weapons by their various security services ahead of an armed clash between them."
"Arafat's condition is not clear right now and it's not clear where it is going," Ze'evi said, adding that Military Intelligence believed that Arafat is "seriously ill."
Arafat, invoking the mantle of intifada martyr, has repeatedly declared that he will not be taken alive out of his Muqata headquarters.
The rumor mill over Arafat's health hummed at full speed in recent weeks, when what was acknowledged to be a severe inflammation of the stomach spurred Egypt, Russia, and Jordan to dispatch physicians to the side of 74-year-old leader, whom Israel has kept in military and political quarantine in his Ramallah headquarters since December, 2001.
Fresh speculation was prompted Tuesday, when senior aides to Arafat said the chairman, acknowledged to have been weakened by recurrent vomiting and diarrhea, would need to undergo surgery to remove gall stones in the near future.
Still, if past experience is a guide, Arafat may rally indefinitely, rendering the scenarios theoretical for years to come - perhaps long enough to realize his dream of watching a discredited Sharon leave office
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