Has the Israeli government lost all grip on reality? That question is being asked all over the world. The decision to oust Yasser Arafat seems crazy. It is going to make peace impossible. Even Washington opposes it — albeit for the wrong reasons. It wants to sideline Arafat, but it knows that every time the Israelis target him, his popularity soars among the Palestinians. Exiling him is not going to remove him from the political process, it is going to put him firmly at the center of it. In exile he will be able to morally claim the political leadership that has been ebbing away from him over the past year.

But look a little deeper. Dangerous the plan may be, yes, but it is not without thought. It is yet another of Sharon’ stunts to dupe Israelis into thinking that he has answers to the suicide bombers. He has persistently peddled the lie that he can stop the violence, that hammering the Palestinians is going to produce peace. In the two-and-a-half years since he became Israel’s prime minister, it has not. The violence has increased under him, not decreased — and it is going to get a lot worse if Arafat is exiled; there will be more suicide bombs. The tragedy is that the Israeli public, in the face of all the evidence, will once again swallow the deception because it is desperate to believe the impossible — that it can have both security and land. Israelis are terrified of the truth, that that the two cannot go together, that the only route to peace and security is through an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Their belief in the impossible is Sharon’s salvation.

An expulsion would throw the peace process into total confusion. Getting Arafat back home would become the prime objective of international mediators, not getting a Palestinian state up and running. That is precisely what Sharon wants. He has no intention of giving up an inch of the occupied territories, no intention of dismantling a single Jewish settlement. His tactics are delay and obfuscation. Every time negotiations get vaguely near the possibility of Palestinian independence, he sabotages them by reoccupying Palestinians towns or attacking Palestinian targets, knowing full well that they will result in revenge attacks — and then, when those attacks occur, by insisting that there will be no further talks while the violence continues. Afterward he seemingly relents, withdraws his forces and pretends that progress has been made, as if withdrawal from an occupied Palestinian town is an end in itself. But the peace process is no further along the road than it was before — precisely what he wanted. Appallingly, the rest of the world goes along with this deception.

So do not say that the decision to exile Arafat does not make sense. From Sharon’s devious standpoint, it makes perfect sense.