Stardate 20020328.2208

(Captain's Log): I'm now virtually certain Arafat is going to die very soon. The officially announced policy is for Arafat to be "isolated", because there is no way the Israeli government can officially try to kill him. What will happen is that he will be so forcibly isolated that he'll die in the resulting combat.

In the mean time, Israel is calling up its reserves. This is not something they do lightly, because their economy cannot operate for long without those men and women. Israel only does this when it expects major fighting, because it has to get them back out of uniform and into their civilian jobs before their economy self-destructs.

The reason they're needed is that after Arafat accidentally dies, the occupied territories are going to go up in flames. There will be riots, dozens of spontaneous attacks on the settlements, and general mayhem for a while. It will eventually burn itself out, but in the short term Israel is going to need all the muscle it has to defend itself against the resulting uprising. Also, they will need to reinforce the border with Syria as a deterrent.

What will bring it to an end will be a Palestinian civil war. As is often the case with third world despots, Arafat has made sure that there is no obvious successor as a way of preventing assassination and coup, but the downside of this is that when he dies for other reasons it will leave a power vacuum. The jockeying between various Palestinian strong men will begin to occupy more and more of Palestinian attention.

I think that no single person will appear to replace him. What I think you'll see is the "Palestinians" fractionate into several independent areas governed by local strongmen; likely one or two in Gaza and maybe as many as four in the West Bank.

As to Arafat himself, the ideal outcome for Israel is for him to die in some spectacular fashion which leaves no body. Fire would be best; artillery or bombing not as good. The point is that there must be no remains which can be interred to produce a Palestinian shrine. He will live on as a symbol in the minds of Palestinians, but a physical shrine will have symbolic power for Palestinians and Israel will want to try to avoid that. So don't be surprised if no body is ever found.