Arafat: Don't Fence Us In
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat Monday condemned a security fence Israel has started building along its frontier with the West Bank, saying it was racist. Later, Israeli troops gunned down a Palestinian militant linked to a group responsible for numerous suicide bombings.
"(The fence) is a sinful assault on our land, an act of racism and apartheid which we totally reject," Arafat told reporters during a tour of schools in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israeli soldiers shot the Palestinian militant dead as he drove his car through a village near Bethlehem, Palestinian witnesses said.
They identified him as Walid Sbeich, 30, a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group affiliated with Arafat's Fatah faction and responsible for dozens of Israeli deaths in suicide bombings.
Israel Radio reported that he was involved in organizing suicide bomb attacks in Israel.
The witnesses said it appeared Sbeich was targeted for attack and shot by soldiers positioned some 200 yards from El Khader village in the West Bank as he was driving down its main street.
Earlier Arafat also blasted U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for comments condemning his Palestinian Authority.
Rice, in an interview with The Mercury News, a San Jose, California, newspaper, said a Palestinian state should not be based on Arafat's Palestinian Authority, which she said is "corrupt and cavorts with terror."
Asked about the Rice comment, Arafat said Monday that "she does not have the right to put or impose orders on us about what to do or not to do."
"We are doing what we see as good for our people and we do not accept any orders from anyone," Arafat said while touring West Bank schools.
Israeli bulldozers flattened ground at part of the frontier on Sunday to start building the fence which, along with Israeli military checkpoints, carves up the West Bank and isolates Palestinian cities and towns.
Israel says the fence is to prevent Palestinian militants attacking Israelis as part of an uprising against Israeli occupation.
The $220 million network of barriers is expected to cover a total of 210 miles, roughly along the line of Israel's eastern border before it seized the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel says the project is a matter of defense, not demarcation, but the Palestinians fear Israel will take large areas of Palestinian land when building it.
But it's not just Palestinians who are alarmed by the fence.
Israeli ultra-nationalists, concerned that some 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank may be stranded by the project, have also been vocal in their criticism. One Israeli cabinet minister called the division "the canonization of the land of Israel."
"This is a fascist, apartheid measure being done, and we do not accept it," Arafat said Monday of the fence. "We will continue rejecting it by all means."
Arafat spoke shortly after a Palestinian blew himself up in Israeli territory near the West Bank, killing only himself.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said he believed the bomber was one of five assailants Israeli security forces have been searching for in recent days. Ben-Eliezer has said Israel had intelligence information that five Palestinian suicide bombers were trying to infiltrate into Israel.
Arafat has been under U.S. and Israeli pressure to curb attacks on Israel, and both nations have begun urging reforms in the Palestinian Authority and new elections. Israel wants Arafat sidelined. The United States has been openly critical of the Palestinian leader, but has stopped short of demanding he be replaced.
This week, President Bush is expected to announce his vision for how to proceed in Middle East peace efforts. One idea being considered — despite Israeli rejection and Palestinian wariness — is to form a provisional Palestinian state with temporary borders and limited sovereignty.
Media reports have said the idea would be to declare a provisional state on about 40 percent of Palestinian-controlled land. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon informed his Cabinet on Sunday that he told Mr. Bush in their meeting at the White House last week that he opposes any form of statehood now.
"I clarified that this is not the time for any type of Palestinian state," Sharon said, according to Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar.
Monday's aborted attack took place near the Israeli Arab village of Marja, in Israeli territory close to the West Bank, said police spokesman Gil Kleiman. As border police approached a Palestinian man to check him, he set off the explosives he was carrying, damaging the police patrol vehicle but causing no injuries to the police.
Dissatisfaction with Arafat's ability to rein in militants has bolstered calls in Israel for fencing off the West Bank — an idea opposed by right-wing Israelis and Palestinians. Construction began Sunday along one-third of the so-called Green Line, Israel's frontier before it captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.