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"What Zahar said is true," Gissin told The Associated Press. Israeli "intelligence knew that Arafat wanted to initiate violence because talks failed over Jerusalem," he said. "Everything was in place for Arafat (and even) if Sharon wouldn't have gone there, something else would have triggered it." Veteran Arafat aide and peace negotiator Nabil Shaath rejected Zahar's assertions. "Arafat refused to surrender to the Israeli and American positions, but only supported nonviolent resistance," he said. "I witnessed many instances in which he tried to stop military confrontations." Others say reality was not clear-cut, and use careful, oblique terms. In a 2007 memoir, Arafat aide Marwan Kanafani wrote: "After the start of the intifada, (Arafat) provided assistance for all the organizations that participated in the uprising, including Hamas." Within days of the start of fighting, Arafat's Fatah formed a violent offshoot, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, whose gunmen carried out scores of shooting attacks on Israelis, mainly in the West Bank. Militants later said they were indirectly bankrolled by Arafat, but did not receive orders from him.
Hamas, Arafat's main political rival, launched the first of what would be scores of intifada suicide bombings on the first day of 2001. Arafat and his aides usually distanced themselves from attacks in public, occasionally issuing condemnations which were received with increasing skepticism by Israelis. Some suspect Zahar may be exaggerating, perhaps trying to suggest there was consensus about a strategy that many Palestinians now believe to have backfired. "From what I knew of Yasser Arafat, he was basically a terrorist, but he was careful not to give direct orders, because he knew we were on his tail," said Uzi Dayan, a former general and national security adviser to two Israeli premiers during the uprising. Avi Issacharov, an Israeli journalist who co-authored a book about the uprising, went further: "Arafat wasn't in favor of suicide attacks. He didn't demand, he didn't order, he didn't recommend" them. Either way, by the end of 2006, more than 4,200 Palestinians and more than 1,100 Israelis, most victims of suicide attacks, were dead. The intifada waned after Arafat's death in November 2004, and the election of Mahmoud Abbas, an outspoken opponent of violence, as his successor.
[Associated
Press;
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