Daschle Favors Arafat Ouster

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Sunday that the Palestinian movement should replace Yasser Arafat to increase the chances of bringing about peace in the Middle East.

Daschle, D-S.D., said Arab allies of the United States, although publicly supportive of Arafat, worry about the direction the Palestinian leadership is taking. "They'd like to see more constructive leadership," Daschle said on Fox News Sunday. "Our admonition to them is `Help us get it.'"

While Daschle said Arafat's departure is necessary, he said it must happen from within the Palestinian movement. "I don't think we can force it ourselves," Daschle said. "But I do think that it's necessary in order to reach some peaceful arrangement."

The Senate majority leader said that the United States should express its disappointment and concern to the Palestinians for the "lack of leadership shown by Arafat on so many occasions."

President Bush has said that Arafat was an unreliable peace partner. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone further, saying he will no longer deal with the Palestinian leader.

Israeli bulldozers flattened ground Sunday for an electronic fence envisioned to eventually stretch the length of the West Bank — a controversial project Israeli officials say is intended as protection from Palestinian suicide bombers. Palestinian and right-wing Israeli politicians strongly oppose the fence, meant to replace a hodgepodge of barriers and fences erected over the past year, which have proved ineffectual.

And Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected the idea of provisional Palestinian statehood that was floated by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Palestinians also are cool to the idea for different reasons.

The first stretch of fence will be built over eight months along 75 miles from Salem Junction in northern Israel south to a point northeast of Tel Aviv.

Palestinians maintain the fence will take West Bank land they want for a state. Right-wing Israelis fear that what is being billed as a temporary "security fence" will evolve into a permanent border with a future Palestinian state. If that happened, many of the 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank would be left on the Palestinian side.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said a consensus is building among Israeli politicians in support of the barrier, which he has called necessary and temporary. Ben-Eliezer, who visited the construction site at Salem Junction on Sunday, said the fence isn't intended to be a political barrier.

"It has one and only one clear aim — to defend the lives of Israeli citizens," Ben-Eliezer said. "Every extra day that passes without the fence being built could cost us more victims."

At a meeting of Sharon's Cabinet Sunday, several ministers raised objections.

Work on the fence, which is to be part of a system of defensive measures to stop or curb suicide bombers from launching attacks against Israelis from Palestinian areas, will go ahead for now, but the smaller security Cabinet was expected to take up the issue Wednesday.

Sharon, an ardent supporter of Israeli settlement expansion for decades, long opposed the barrier for ideological reasons. He reluctantly gave his approval this month.

Of the nearly 70 suicide bombings in Israel over the past 20 months, all have been launched from the West Bank, which has no barrier separating it from Israel.

Groups that have carried out many of the bombings, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are strongest in the Gaza Strip. But no suicide bombers have come from Gaza, which is fenced in.

Ben-Eliezer said the fence eventually will stretch 215 miles, which is the full length of the "Green Line" — the Israeli border before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

It largely is to follow that line, but parts of it will veer into the West Bank to bring some settlements close to the border onto the Israeli side. Ben-Eliezer said that in some areas the fence will run on the Israeli side of the Green Line.

Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, commander of Israeli troops in the West Bank, said surveillance outposts were part of the defensive plan and that the fence would be patrolled on both sides by soldiers and Israeli border police. Sensors on the fence would detect attempts to cut or climb it, according to Amos Yaron, director general of the Defense Ministry.

Yaron said the cost would be up to $1 million per kilometer.

Separately, Israel already is building a fence and trenches around the borders of east Jerusalem to control the flow of Palestinians into the city from the West Bank. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, while Palestinians seek the eastern sector for a future capital.

Bush, who is expected to address how to advance Mideast peace this week, has not announced whether provisional Palestinian statehood is an idea he intends to push. In Washington, a Bush administration official said Sunday on condition of anonymity that the president was still considering whether to do so.