Brain Fertilizer

Dead Or Alive? I don't know. If he's not dead, he soon will be.

But the important point is that he is no longer the power in Palestine. His power is in the process of being transferred to others. There is no way his power concentration could be transferred to a single individual, and so power in Palestine will be diffused and divided among a number of individuals. This is a very good thing. Having power divided among several people means that one person cannot stop progress or obstruct peace on a whim or plain stubbornness, as I feel Arafat often did. And none of these people will have the name or stature among the Palestinians as Arafat did. That means there are a variety of pressures that can be brought to bear upon whoever the turn out to be that could not have been brought to bear on Arafat.

As I said before off-line, the prospects of peace between Palestine and Israel seem to go up in direct correlation to the decline of Arafat's health.