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CNN Live Saturday

Is Arafat Willing to Make Peace With Israel?

Aired April 13, 2002 - 13:25   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: And rejoining us once again is our Senior Analyst Jeff Greenfield, who's got some thoughts about Yasser Arafat. I want to pick up, Jeff, on that final thought that Garrick Utley just made about Yasser Arafat being a survivor. I covered that historic speech he gave at the General Assembly in the '70s. I was there at the U.N. that day.

I was also in Beirut on that day in September of 1982, when he was expelled by the Israelis and wound up in Tunis. One thing I've learned about Yasser Arafat over all of these years, don't write him off. This man knows how to survive. The question to you, Jeff, can he survive this current ordeal he now faces?

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: Well, he can certainly survive it politically because, as you pointed out, as Garrick pointed out, as we talked about in the last hour, his popularity among Palestinians and among the hard line Arab states has never been higher. I guess the question is, could he survive an authentic, genuine (UNINTELLIGIBLE) shift toward peace?

I mean, for my money, Wolf, the most dramatic thing that's happened in the Middle East in the last 30 years is when Egyptian President Sadat traveled to Israel. He and the Israelis reached an agreement, no more war. There hasn't been an Egyptian-Israeli war since then. They have diplomatic relations. That was a clear dramatic shift, and several years later, Sadat was assassinated.

So the question, I mean there are two questions on the table. Can you believe that Arafat means to make peace with Israel and accept the reality of a Jewish State in that region? If you believe that, the second question is, can he pull that off and change the reality of the Middle East? Wolf, I mean I think those are the two great questions.

BLITZER: You know and I can't help but forget, and I'm sure you can't either, Jeff, that after the signing of that Oslo agreement on the South Lawn of the White House in September, 1993 when the president, then Bill Clinton, brought Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin together.

Remember Rabin, Arafat, and Shimon Peres, who was then Israel's foreign minister, all of them shared a Nobel Peace Prize. A lot of people don't remember that Yasser Arafat did get the Nobel Peace Prize for that signing of that agreement. GREENFIELD: That's right, Wolf, and you know there are -- you can take two elements here and put them in opposition to each other and there's the conundrum. On the one hand, the late Prime Minister Rabin is the man who I believe said, "look you don't make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies." And that's, you know, that's an obvious point.

But then you look at the documents that the Israelis picked up in the West Bank, in Arafat's compound, in which the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is asking for money to build bombs, and Arafat's signature, unless you assume it's a fabrication, is on that and you have to ask well, if you're a man of peace and you mean to renounce all forms of terrorism, what are you doing signing off on the request for bomb materials?

And yet, we also know that throughout history, people who have been defined as terrorists sooner or later when peace comes make an agreement with the people they were fighting. You know, it happened in Africa, many of those colonial countries throughout the '50s and '60s. You can get an argument pretty much every day, well was there terrorism when the Jews were fighting to establish the State of Israel?

But I keep coming back to this point that if you assume, and it's a remarkably generous assumption, that Arafat really wants to make peace with the Jewish state of Israel, can that happen?

One more quick last point, Wolf, I think there is always a desire, and this goes back I think throughout history, people want to believe that peace is at hand. You don't want to believe that you're in a situation where a great many more people are going to have to die before a situation resolves.

It's counter to human nature, and I just make the observation that more -- that an awful lot of times in the past, people have misread the intentions of people on the world stage because they wanted to believe that peace was possible, when the reality was, it wasn't possible -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Jeff Greenfield, as always, having some good thoughts on what's going on in this part of the world. Thanks so much. We'll have you back later as well.

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