Who’d have dreamed that Ariel Sharon would turn Yasser Arafat into an Arab hero?

I’m sure that wasn’t Sharon’s intention. After a brutal string of attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers, the Israeli leader says he wants to “isolate” Arafat, and, if he can, deport him.

But, holed up in two rooms of his Ramallah compound, back to the wall, a flashlight illuminating his face like a halo, the Palestinian leader is in his element.

He’s relieved from having to make any hard decisions. As his words beam out on CNN and al-Jazeera, the man who’d been marginalized in the Arab world is being reborn as a martyr.

“He is everybody’s hero!” says Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, a level-headed Palestinian think-tank director who has criticized Arafat’s misgovernance in the past. Moderate Arab leaders are terrified that if Arafat is killed or deported, their angry publics will explode against them.

The Bush administration says it doesn’t want Arafat dead, but President Bush’s green light for Sharon’s West Bank moves could lead to Israeli miscalculations. With Israeli tanks parked in Arafat’s compound, a stray bullet could hit him. The consequences of Arafat’s death would be dire.

Spontaneous demonstrations have already broken out around the Arab world in reaction to the Israeli siege of West Bank cities.

In moderate Jordan, the demos exceed anything seen since the 1950s. If the siege goes on another week, Jordan and Egypt will probably expel their Israeli ambassadors, not because they want to, but because their people are at the boiling point.

As for exiling Arafat, the man has said he won’t go, and any effort to eject him violently could end in disaster. But even if he left, his exile would solve nothing.

The Tel Aviv press is filled with reports that Israeli security and intelligence agencies have warned Sharon things will get worse if Arafat is deported.

They say that moderate Palestinians who supported the peace process will be finished, and a forced Arafat exit would usher in younger militants who have neither the desire nor the legitimacy to sign a cease-fire, let alone a peace treaty.

And Arafat abroad would not go into obscure exile as he did in 1983 in Tunis, after Sharon drove him and his Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Beirut. Back then, Lebanon was happy to see Arafat go. But as a Palestinian president exiled from his homeland, Arafat’s hero status would make him impossible to silence.

Some Israeli hawks contend that Arafat would be replaced by top Palestinian security officials, like Jibril Rajoub, who have long cooperated with the CIA and Israeli intelligence agencies. But, should Arafat be ousted, Rajoub would be forced to take a hard line lest he be branded a collaborator, a potentially lethal charge already being hurled at him.

Terrorism against Israel would continue as long as Palestinians saw no hope of getting a viable state.

And here we come to the heart of the matter. Arafat is a maddening leader who has blown key chances to negotiate a solution. But the only way to neutralize him is to work around him, not destroy him.

Back in the mid-1990s, ordinary Palestinians pressed Arafat to crack down on terrorists because Palestinians thought Hamas bombers were harming the peace process. But now with Israeli tanks reoccupying Palestinian cities and dismantling Arafat’s government they believe the peace process is over. They are geared for a war of attrition, of which continued terrorism will be a part.

Those like Rajoub who want two states along amended 1967 lines will be silenced. And terrorism won’t stop. Some military response to terrorism is necessary; but only the hope of ending the occupation will motivate Palestinians to turn against bombs and those who send the bombers to kill.

Sharon, with the backing of the White House, is unwilling to clarify the linkage between an end to violence and the road to a Palestinian state. (His peace proposals for the Palestinians add up to little more than the status quo.) The Bush administration’s mantra of “Tenet, Mitchell” refuses to specify how these two plans would link a cease-fire to meaningful and immediate peace talks.

Together with moderate Arab leaders, the White House could still squeeze Arafat to perform if U.S. officials convinced his people there was something in it for them. Making Arafat into a martyr only achieves the opposite, officially burying the peace process.

This is extremely dangerous for Israel and for American policy. Apres Arafat, le deluge.