Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister, seems to have found in the announcement of Arafat’s inminent assassination a simple and infalible trick for misdirecting the attention and breaking the discourse of the media: Just pronounce a threat on the oldman’s life, as vague or clear as you like, and everyting else goes up in smoke: the building of the Wall, the purported evacuation plan from parts of Gaza, the manifold corruption charges Sharon himself is facing in Court... Sharon has said repeteadly that a living Arafat is a nuisance to him, whilst the Arab leaders keep saying (even yesterday) that a dead Arafat would be a much greater of a nuisance both for Sharon and for them. But the truth is that for Israel’s PM, no doubt, a half-alive half-dead Arafat, a life-threatened and agonizing Arafat, is worth gold.

This, of course, is not to say that one day Sharon won’t decide to anticipate himself to Biology and get Arafat killed. He did that with Sheikh Yasin, whom he summarily executed simply not to give the impression that the announced (and yet to be seen) military evacuation from Gaza was a Palestinian victory. So if, as many belive, Sharon is thinking of a “final solution” for the West Bank, it is possible that he would sacrifice Arafat, and it would be only to make his point of who is smarter. That would be pure Sharon.

And that is the question: Sharon’s odd moves of the last few weeks, are they the prelude of an end-game to the conflict? There are reasons to think they are. Pressed by the judges because of his corruption scandals, Sharon might not be residing a lot longer at Prime Ministerial house, and he knows from experience that once you move out from the stage you won’t be back anytime soon. He knows that the Palestinian Intifada is militarily bankrupt (no one could hold out eternaly in front of the Israeli war machine); but he also knows that the Global War against Terror, with its policy of diplomatic impunity for governments like his own, is approaching its end. With Kerry knocking on the White House door, Sharon might have realised that this is his last chance to break the back of the Palestinian cause for another decade with a new redrawing of the map, a down-scale version of the Naqba, which is how Arabs call the vast expropiation of land and expulsion of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 (nearly 90% of the population back then).

For starters, Sharon in now trumpeting the inminent deportation of dozens of thounsends of those whom he (and some press) refer to as “ilegal inmigrants”: That is, Palestinians who live in the land of their ancestors but just happen not to have a permit from the Israeli authorities. Sharon was explaning two days ago how “The Wall we’re building will make the process easier.” Those judges who discuss in The Hague on wether the Wall is built just to cope with terror attacks should get the Dutch translation of this sentece. And Dutch would also be a useful languaje to understand the projected “separation” plan envisaged for the West Bank. A tricky word, separation: In the South African Dutch dialect of Afrikaans is written “apartheid”. Sounds terrible? As Oscar Wilde put it in Lady Windermere’s Fan, when something sounds terrible it is usually because it is terrible.

Miguel Murado