Stardate 20020330.1721

(On Screen): Arafat is surrounded and cut off in his office in Ramallah, with no running water and no electricity. The Israelis are sending in food and bottled water, but will probably tire of the standoff soon. They are giving Arafat a chance to come out peacefully, which is unlikely. It's still difficult to see what the result will be; Arafat may live through this but it is by no means certain.

The Europeans are reacting. Considering the quality of their reaction to Zimbabwe recently, their reactions to this situation are hardly surprising: a great deal of disapproval, calls for action, and nothing, not a single thing, which actually makes the slightest bit of difference.

But the rhetoric is, sadly, still full of platitudes and fictions. This one is typical:

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whose country holds the temporary presidency of the European Union, said the Israeli siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah "will exacerbate a situation which is already causing great instability and most of all a huge number of mortal victims."

"Nothing will be gained" by the destruction of the Palestine National Authority, Aznar told reporters while vacationing in the southern Spanish town of Sanlucar de Barrameda.

Actually, destruction of the Palestinian Authority will gain a great deal. What it will do is to remove the fiction that there actually is a single voice representing the Palestinian people.

The biggest problem with the idea that this problem must be settled with negotiation is that it assumes that there is someone on the Palestinian side who can actually make a deal and guarantee that his people will stick to it. That is false. It has always been false. And if the Palestinians collectively will not do what their negotiators say they will do, then there's no point in negotiating with them.

But for people who believe that negotiations can solve all problems, they need some Palestinian they can pretend is capable of doing that, because otherwise when they say, "Negotiate!" they will get asked, "With who?"

Once Arafat and the PA are gone, the divisions and lack of unity of the Palestinian people will become evident to all, and it will become possible to begin to deal with the situation as it really is. But as long as all solutions are based on the falsehood of a unified Palestinian voice,  none of them can work.

The real problem is that there are several independent Palestinian groups who do not truly cooperate and do not follow the orders of anyone centralized. Some of those probably can be dealt with in negotiations. Some can only be dealt with at the point of a sword.

The biggest reason for destroying the Palestinian Authority is to make it so that the Europeans can no longer talk about it except in the past tense. Then they will be forced to deal with a new situation, and to actually try something different: to really attempt to deal with the real, fundamental problem.

And, of course, that is what they don't want to have happen, which is why they don't want the Palestinian Authority destroyed. It's not that they think that the conflict can be solved as long as it exists, but rather that the conflict can be bottled up away from Europe and not really become a European problem.

In Britain, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw appealed to both sides to show restraint.

"It can only be through negotiation that there will ever be a peaceful future for the citizens of Israel, for the Palestinians and for everyone in the region," Straw said.

Negotiate with who?