LOS ANGELES: How to deal with Yasser Arafat is a serious issue, one that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush once again discussed in their meeting at the White House last week.

Sharon has publicly declared that he wants the United States to boycott Arafat because of the Palestinian leader’s failure to halt suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel over the last 18 months.

All the initiatives tried up until now - sticks, carrots and a combination of the two - have failed because they lacked one key ingredient: the political influence of the Arab states that also have a stake in the Palestinian issue.

But these countries’ leaders appear too afraid of their own populations to step forward. In a recent meeting with a visiting dignitary, Arafat was unimpressed when the visitor presented a letter from Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, privately calling on Arafat to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Arafat said he will take such a letter seriously when Mubarak says the same things publicly to his own people.

Arafat has reason not to worry. Arab leaders have rarely - if ever - criticized him in public since the start of the Oslo process in 1993. He is confident that these Arab leaders need him for their legitimacy more than he needs them.

US officials say that Mubarak was furious with Arafat for inviting Iran to gain a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean by smuggling a boatload of weapons through the Suez Canal to the Gaza Strip and that the Egyptian has barely spoken with him since. There is no sign that Arafat is concerned. He apparently does not believe that Mubarak will do anything more than stew.

Autocratic Arab regimes have convinced themselves that public criticism of Arafat will hurt them domestically. So therefore, when President Clinton put forward a plan for Israel yielding 97 per cent of the West Bank, the Arabs would not nudge the Palestinians toward a compromise on the remaining three per cent.

Yet the Arabs bear responsibility. It was the Arab League - the group of 22 Arab states - that created the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and then crowned the PLO as the ”sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people 10 years later. Now, 27 years later, the Arab countries must come together, with Egypt and Saudi Arabia at the core.

They must publicly say that there will be no realization of Palestinian rights so long as the current Palestinian leadership stands idle as Hamas and Islamic Jihad explode any prospects for peace, or they forfeit their moral standing on this issue. —Dawn/LATS-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.