Arafat's speaking podium in Jenin blown up by Palestinians
So reports Samir Ragab, editor of the Egyptian-government-owned paper, Al-Gumhuriya ("The Republic"). Ragab is a close confidant of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Here are some things Ragab wrote after Yasser Arafat’s May 15 speech to the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, in which he promised to reform the Palestinian Authority, courtesy of World Press Review. Ragab's words are in boldface, my commentary is in italics.

Everyone knows that America insists on applying a policy of double standards in its unconditional support for Israel.

No, America has one standard: true democracy, not the sham kind practiced by your close confidant, Mubarak, also practiced by Arafat. When will you learn that "one man one vote - once" is not democracy?

In Israel, if the people decide that Sharon has to go, he goes. Arafat promised an election, then took the promise back. The Palestinian people have no more choice than Cubans do.

So it's clear that there is no alternative to yielding to the will of the world's only superpower, to whose whims and desires we are all subject.

Well, duh! America is a country at war. As Clausewitz explained, the object of war is to compel the enemy to do your will, whether he likes it or not. Giving our enemies "no alternative" is exactly our objective.

When he went on his first tour after having been released from confinement, Arafat found that his people, who had sympathized with him deeply during his ordeal, gave him a cool reception. He scrapped a visit to the devastated refugee camp of Jenin when someone attempted to blow up the podium where he was supposed to sit.

That's the first I heard of blowing up the podium. Does anyone know whether this was reported in the American press? Is it significant that it wasn't (if it wasn't)? I think it is significant - that it happened at all, and that it wasn't reported in the US.

Arafat . . . must have concluded that the majority of the Palestinians resented the deal to end the 38-day standoff at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.

Gee, ya think? And they resented a lot more than that, such as their basic impotence when the Israeli army mounted its offensive. One thing the Arab world does not forgive is losing, and Arafat has lost once too often.

The deal involved the banishment of 13 Palestinians from their homeland.

. . . which does not strike the average Palestinian as a good deal at all.

And the deal did trigger an important question: How can Palestinians struggle for their homeland when their legal representative comes along and approves of exiling those fighters who did everything to return [to Palestinians] their land and their honor?

Or in other words, the Palestinians are starting to realize that Arafat is either incompetent or impotent or both.

Arafat's statements [urging reform of the PA] have spawned many predictions. Some see them as tantamount to Arafat quitting, while others predict that he will eliminate his opponents inside the PA. A third group, mostly loyal to Sharon and the United States, say that Arafat's statements were meant to pull the wool over their eyes. They add that he has made similar promises in the past to fight corruption, but didn't keep them.

Regardless of how things will end up, I think that the United States and Israel have managed to create an inter-Palestinian rift. Should the promised overhaul of the PA come to pass, it would not be to everyone's satisfaction. If the promises go unfulfilled, then the Palestinians will descend into squabbles among themselves, and devote less energy to their fateful conflict with Israel.

It was neither the US nor Israel that has created an intra-Palestinian rift (not inter-Palestinian rift). What has created that rift is the fact that Palestinians, including many of the most important ones after Arafat, are beginning to de-link their future from Arafat because Arafat is a political and military loser. He is becoming personally ever more irelevant.

In his address, Arafat said that peace would remain the Palestinians' strategic option.

Isn't it astonishing that a would-be national leader sees peace as merely an option rather than the primary imperative of a nation's welfare?

But who will fulfill this peace? In my personal view, it will be neither Arafat nor Sharon.

He is probably right.