There has been, for months, an American and Israeli effort to separate the Palestinian people from Yasser Arafat, their long-time leader. With the resignation of the more moderate Abu Mazen, that hope has been dashed for now. And at the moment, Arafat seems more firmly in control of the Palestinians and their various militias than in a long time. The Palestinian street, too, cheered Arafat and cried their hatred and defiance at the Israeli government?s recent declaration of intention to expel him.



Arafat is in the saddle and the Palestinians can comfortably proceed along the historical path he has been leading them for the past thirty- five years.



All this suggests that the connection between the Palestinians and their greatest leader is not at all artificial, but rather deep and inherent.



Beyond this, it seems to some that Arafat and the Palestinian people are truly identical in many ways, that they share an ethic and a way of life, a perception of the world, an identity and a destiny.



Arafat, for all the years of his political life, has been a terrorist. He has always advocated violent struggle to destroy the Zionist entity. He has been a ruthless murderer of innocent civilians, and thousands of Israelis are dead and injured at his order. The Palestinians, too, as a political entity, have lived the most significant moments of their lives engaged in terror. They have committed tens of thousands of the most cruel kinds of crime. Their ruthlessness and cruelty have been illustrated time and again. They are a people who murder and cheer at the sight of the bodies of those they have murdered.



Arafat could not be the leader he is did he not have a people that shares his ethic. The citizens of the supposedly most enlightened Palestinian population, Ramallah, en masse engaged in an orgy of excited screaming at the sight of two Israeli soldiers lynched in the City Square. The Palestinians have not only murdered Jews, but have also killed hundreds of their own people in the most brutal ways imaginable. Arafat, who for years has ruled the Palestinian roost by playing one violent group against the other, is responsible for the killing of many of his own people. Murder is the most important of all Palestinian political tools.



In the broader political game, as well, the Palestinians echo their leader Arafat. They, too, have refused, more than once, opportunities for statehood (as for instance with the recent Road Map). They, too, would rather have Israel destroyed than see their own people prospering. They, too, did not want the Peel Commission or the Partition Plan or the Ehud Barak offer of 2001 or the Road Map of today.



The Palestinians seem to thrive on chaos and disorder, to keep going no matter how difficult the situation. They seem to be very much like Arafat in knowing how to promote an image of themselves as ?victims? and ?unfortunates?, even when their attacks on others is the reason they have arrived at such a situation. The Palestinians, like Arafat, love to hit and cry, murder - or try to murder - and then cry that they are the ones who are suffering. Arafat has been lying and murdering and getting sympathy for it for more than three decades and the Palestinians, the same.



All this suggests that the United States, and especially Israel, should not be under the delusion that by ridding themselves of Arafat they will change anything. The Palestinians will continue to be the Palestinians, the world?s greatest living practitioners of international airplane hijacking and of suicide- bombing. They will continue with their anti-Semitic education in their schools, and their incitement against Israel everywhere in the world. Hatred will be their platform now and in the future.



They will continue to prove themselves as a people unworthy of statehood, irresponsible and terroristic, and to choose for themselves an Arafat-like character as their new leader.