Yasser Arafat

IT'S THE BIG ISSUES that matter in President Bush's brand of conservatism. So he's strong and principled on taxes, cloning, the Kyoto treaty, the war on terrorism, Iraq, missile defense, and federal judges. It's a different story with the smaller issues. Bush strays on them--education, trade, farm subsidies, ethnic profiling, campaign finance reform--for shamelessly pragmatic purposes. More often than not, his aim is to prove his conservatism really is compassionate or to broaden his political base. This arrangement satisfies most conservatives and a lot of moderates and independents.

THE BLOODY TERRORIST ATTACKS on Israel this week, one killing 20 people, the other 7, should be a signal to President Bush. The State Department recently persuaded him that Palestinian conduct would improve and terrorism would cease if only Palestinians had real hope of statehood. And Bush agreed to give a speech supporting a provisional Palestinian state, one without final borders or other details worked out with Israel, but a state nonetheless. The one condition: Palestinians must first clean up their act a bit, reforming Yasser Arafat's administration and cracking down on terrorists.

THE SAUDIS VS. ARAFAT?

The terrorism documents captured on the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces contain fascinating details about the friendly relations between Saudi Arabia and Hamas, and consequent tensions between the Saudis and the Palestinian Authority. The documents seem to confirm the long-circulating rumor in Arab and Muslim circles that the Saudis want to displace Arafat in favor of Hamas, and have used their financial and political resources to that end.

THE CURRENT NEWSWEEK has a long, cover-story retrospective on the siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. The piece is invaluable for its detail--but exasperating for the filter of "objectivity" through which correspondent Joshua Hammer apparently feels obliged to view his otherwise excellent work.

LAST WEEK'S STANDOFF at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity and the suicide bombing at Rishon le Zion's Sheffield Pool Hall both made for gripping television. But neither will change the dynamic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way the week's most significant development did.

The week's biggest Middle East story happened not in the region but in Washington.

AMONG THE MAIN Mideast developments at this writing, it now appears that a United Nations commission will not be traveling to Jenin, but Yasser Arafat will be. The purpose of Arafat's Jenin visit is to draw public sympathy for residents of the United Nations refugee camp there, where fierce fighting occurred several weeks ago. For Americans, perhaps our attention should focus more on underlying questions: Why is the United Nations running refugee camps for people who claim to be living in their own land? How could a refugee camp under U.N.

PALESTINIAN and other apologists for Yasser Arafat have propagated three myths about his failure to reach peace with Israel. And only now--two years after Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed because of Arafat's intransigence--is the truth becoming known.

WHY WERE WE WORRIED about Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East? After all, for one crucial week, Powell ended up providing diplomatic cover for an ongoing Israeli military operation that has made significant strides against the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories.

GAZA
IN THE COMING DAYS, President Bush will send CIA director George Tenet to Gaza and the West Bank to assess the capacity of the ravaged Palestinian security services to prevent the suicide bombings that have made everyday life perilous for Israelis. Tenet and other CIA men on the ground in the area have tried to persuade a cadre of Yasser Arafat's top security chiefs to sit down with their Israeli counterparts and resume the security cooperation envisioned under a cease-fire plan Tenet helped author last June.

RIGHT NOW the Bush administration seems to be lost in the wilderness without a moral or strategic compass. This is a stunning development, for less than three months ago the president set forth a grand and clear vision for American foreign policy. We would fight terrorism and the regimes that support and harbor terrorists. We would press for freedom and democracy around the world, but especially in the Muslim world. Above all, when we saw evil, we would call it by its name. Now look how far we have moved away from those noble aspirations.

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RIGHT NOW the Bush administration seems to be lost in the wilderness without a moral or strategic compass. This is a stunning development, for less than three months ago the president set forth a grand and clear vision for American foreign policy. We would fight terrorism and the regimes that support and harbor terrorists. We would press for freedom and democracy around the world, but especially in the Muslim world. Above all, when we saw evil, we would call it by its name. Now look how far we have moved away from those noble aspirations.

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TODAY, at a bus station near Jerusalem's Mehane Yehuda market, a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing six and wounding scores more. The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a military wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, have claimed responsibility. Secretary of State Colin Powell is scheduled to meet with Arafat tomorrow.