Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

38 • ARENAFollowing the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit betweenPresident Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Arafat andthe outbreak of the second intifada on 28 September 2000 followingLikud Party leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, Arafatassumed a more intransigent stand toward Israel. In turn this swungIsraeli public opinion toward the more hard-line Likud position, leadingto the Likud victory in the February 2001 election. In April 2001Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli Defense Forces to besiegeArafat in his Moqataa compound in Ramallah in order to humiliateand undermine him. Arafat remained a virtual prisoner in this compoundfor most of the next three and a half years.On 6 May 2002 the Israeli government released documents purportedlyseized by Israeli Defense Forces in Arafat’s compound provingthat he had funded the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which had engagedin suicide bombings against Israelis despite al Fatah’s alleged cessationof support of terrorism. Throughout the administration of GeorgeW. Bush, the U.S. government avoided contact with Arafat and on 18July 2004 President Bush declared publicly that he regarded Arafatand al Fatah as obstacles to peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict.On 24 October 2004 Arafat fell ill with what was first thought tobe influenza. On 29 October 2004 he was flown to France and admittedto the Percy military hospital outside Paris, where physiciansdiagnosed his condition as idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura,a rare blood disorder. Later Arafat fell into a coma and died on 11November 2004. Israeli authorities did not permit his burial in EastJerusalem, as his will had requested, so he was interred just outsidehis compound in Ramallah on 12 November 2004. Israeli mediaalleged Arafat had died of AIDS, while Palestinian and other Arabmedia asserted that he had been poisoned somehow by Israel.Upon Arafat’s death the PA presidency passed to the PalestineCouncil speaker, Rawhi Fattuh. In PA presidential elections in January2005, the former PA prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was electedpresident. In the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, however,Hamas beat the al Fatah party, leading to a cessation of U.S.and Israeli aid to the Palestinian Authority and also to what amountedto civil war between Hamas and al Fatah.ARENA. The Alianza Republicana Nacional (Republican National Alliance)is a Salvadoran right-wing political party that formerly sponsored,or directly engaged in, repressive violence against Salvadoran