I think Yasser's trying to amuse himself by confusing any Byzantines still around...
Jibril Rajoub, picked by Yasser Arafat as a top security adviser, said in an interview Wednesday he has a mandate to help reform the Palestinian security services, but stopped short of pledging to clamp down on militants.
| "If it's Thursday, it must be reform day..." |
Arafat named Rajoub, a former West Bank security chief, to the vacant post of national security adviser this week, 18 months after the two had a bitter dispute over a campaign Arafat had repeatedly promised against suspected militants. In an interview at his home in Ramallah, Rajoub said he had warned Arafat at the start of the latest, three-year uprising of the dangers of allowing Palestinian factions to add guns and bombs to the stones they threw during the first intefadeh, from 1987-1993. "From the beginning it was my view that militarizing the intefadeh will hurt the Palestinian people and their cause," he said, though he never issued the warning publicly.
| Assuming he told Yasser — and since Yasser went for his rosco, I'm assuming it's true — it shows Jibril's got a 3-digit IQ... |
Rajoub, 50, withdrew from public life after that quarrel and after Israeli forces trashed his marble-and-glass compound in a military offensive in April 2002. The gruff-voiced Rajoub, once perhaps the most feared man in the West Bank, has spent the break battling prostate cancer and working out.
"Yasser tries to shoot me, the Israelis wreck my palace office complex, I catch prostate cancer — and now this! |
Arafat's surprise decision to bring him back, particularly after such a bitter falling out, has prompted speculation about the Palestinian leader's motives. Is he planning to give Rajoub real authority? Or is the appointment part of Arafat's struggle with Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas over control of the security forces? Abbas' security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, is a bitter Rajoub rival.
| If Jibril and Mohammed are butting heads as they in-fight over who's in charge of what, that means nothing gets done. I think Jibril's a counterweight... |
It remains unclear just how much influence Rajoub will wield as the Palestinian leadership scrambles to respond to the latest outburst of violence. His appointment comes with Arafat under growing U.S. pressure to hand control over security forces to Abbas; at the moment, Abbas commands some of the security branches, but not all. Arafat has balked at the demand, and has refused to back a clampdown on armed groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
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