Details of the meetings held on February 8th between US President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are emerging.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration will not protest too vehemently if Israel’s isolation of Arafat will lead to the downfall of the PLO leader.

After a week in which Arafat delivered tirades almost every night in Ramallah to excoriate “hundreds of suicide bombers to die in the liberation of Jerusalem”, and after a week in which fatal PLO attacks claimed the lives of Israeli women almost every day, it would seem that few Israelis would shed a tear when Arafat leaves the scene.

The US and Israel have been quoted as seeking a successor to Arafat among the PLO’s “war lords”. The short term American and Israeli criteria for recognizing a successor to Arafat is simple: someone who would can maintain law and order and “prevent further terror”.

Indeed, as Ariel Sharon stepped off the plane from the US, he was “greeted” with yet another Arab terror attack in the Israeli city of Beersheva, which Arafat’s Palestinian Authority maps describe as an illegal Israeli settlement that replaced the Arab town of Bir A Sibi in 1948.

The official PBC radio of the Palestinian Authority has justified attacks in Israeli cities of Beer Sheva, Hadera, Netanya and Naharia, since these towns all replaced Arab villages in 1948, after which the residents of these and hundreds of other Arab towns were dumped into Arab refugee camps which are operated to this day by the UN, under the premise and promise of the “right of return” to the 531 Arab villages that were wiped out in 1948.

Under Arafat’s leadership, the Palestinian Authority mandated that the suffering in the refugee camps must continue.

Arafat has declared time and time again that the “right of return” must be the prime agenda item for his people. Therefore, the Intifada al Awhda, the “rebellion for the right of return” has become the slogan for the current state of unrest.

If Arafat is replaced by yet another Palestinian leader who believes in continuing to confine more than a million 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents from 1948 to refugee camps under the “right of return”, the middle east will see more unrest, not less.

While at least one Palestinian Authority leader has declared that the time has come to abandon the idea of the right of return, he is not allowed to say so on any media outlet of Arafat’s regime.

That is because the “right of return” dominates all policy proclamations in the Arabic language radio, TV or newspapers of the Palestinian Authority since the emergence of the PA in 1994.

While many Israelis may be ready for a two state solution, such an idea is foreign to the ethos of the Palestinian Arab entity that Arafat has forged.

At this point in time, every candidate the US and Israel have examined to succeed Arafat has sworn allegiance to the Intifada al Awhda, the “rebellion for the right of return”.

Only if a Palestinian Arab leader emerges who will communicate to his people in their own language that he is ready to remove Arab refugee camps and live with Israel without advocating the “right of return”, will peace in the middle east be at all forseeable.

Bush and Sharon should keep that in mind and not look for short term solutions for “preventing terror”.

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David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.