ARAFAT ILL

But how ill?

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is suffering from a blood platelet deficiency and is being moved to Paris for additional tests to determine its cause, one of his doctors said Thursday.

"There are certain investigations for this disease, which is not possible to do them here," said his physician, Ashraf al-Kurdi.

"This is why we advised him to go abroad for further investigations, because if we know exactly what is the cause of the platelet deficiency, then the treatment can be very easy."

Abbas Zaki, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, said Arafat will be taken Friday to Jordan by helicopter, where he will be placed aboard a French aircraft for the flight to Paris.

Further details about his condition were not immediately available.

First of all, those pictures of Yasser in PJ's and a Beastie Boysish cap aren't the most encouraging things in the world if you're looking for good news about his health.

So it looks like he's going to Paris for treatment, meaning Israel, which has essentially quarantined him in (what's left of) his Ramallah compound for a while, is now lifting their ban on his travel to let him. It wasn't an unexpected choice, since the last thing Israel wants is to be seen as culpable for killing an old man revered by many (but not all) of the Palestinians, and the Arab world for that matter.

The question on a lot of people's minds is whether or not Sharon will let him return, should he make a recovery. It's an interesting choice:

--Keep him out, and perhaps it would set off a shift in the Palestinian leadership that could yield people more palatable to Israel than Yasser is. However, the obvious risk is that Arafat becomes less marginalized, instead of more, by this; he'd be a living martyr, unfairly kept out of his home by those Israeli travel-ban flipfloppers. Yes, they'd use Bush campaign rhetoric, they would!

--Let him back in, and perhaps the above-described renaissance of relevance would occur anyway. And it would amount to a "he'll die soon" strategy; ask the last 10 US presidents about how that's worked in Cuba. On the other hand, it would be a decent gesture on Israel's part, and decency and moderation are precisely what the situation there needs.

Yasser Arafat is, in my view, the Ralph Nader of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. *Huh?* Meaning, whatever progress he made in bringing relevant issues to the attention of a broader audience has largely been wiped away by a calculated tactical misstep, namely his walking away from the table at Camp David. I don't think much of Sharon either, of course, but much as I don't think the "cold shower" of a Bush presidency was worth it, it hasn't been evident that being opposed by a Sharon/Likud government instead of a Barak/Labor government has helped the Palestinian cause.

I do, however, like that Arafat is going to Paris. It gives the right-wing of the blogosphere an opportunity to make a bunch of France jokes, and in their laughter they forget to cover the election. Sounds good to me!