From around the world, protests have poured in to Israel about any plans it might have to send Palestinian President Yasser Arafat into exile. From Washington to the EU to the UN to the Arab League, the message is the same: Should Arafat be deported, the event would have extremely serious repercussions, not just in the occupied territories but all over the Middle East.

News that Israel was contemplating removing Arafat from the scene did not come as a surprise. The resignation last week of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, followed by the deaths on Tuesday of 15 Israelis in two separate bomb attacks strengthened demands from inside the Israeli Cabinet for Arafat’s forcible removal. One extremist minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for the army to bomb his Ramallah headquarters. The Israeli defense minister and other hard-liners want him out or dead as soon as possible. The defense minister was quoted as saying on Friday that Israel’s failure to get rid of Arafat earlier was a historic mistake.

But banishing Arafat is not the answer. There was an assumption that progress in achieving the road map’s goals would be made. But the road map collapsed — a result not of Arafat’s doing but of Ariel Sharon’s blanket refusal to accept even the slightest possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.

Sharon’s decision to remove Arafat may be connected to polls showing that Israelis think their leader is not doing enough to prevent bomb attacks. A survey published on Friday found that 66 percent of Israelis thought Sharon’s administration was doing a bad job against “Palestinian terror.” Sharon indeed has failed to deliver peace. Israel has not relaxed the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. It has not frozen the building of Jewish settlements nor has it freed thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Abbas was able to provide seven weeks of relative quiet — but there was no end to occupation, settlement construction, assassinations of leading Palestinians or a halt to building the wall of separation. The natural result was that the cease-fire announced in June collapsed.

Israel has, under the present government, become increasingly reckless in the last few months in its quest to obliterate the Palestinian leadership. Now it wants Arafat, the democratically elected leader and symbol of the Palestinians’ 55-year-old struggle for independence.

Israel claims that getting rid of Arafat would remove a big obstacle to peace. But Arafat is not the obstacle. He himself has said his being sent into exile was not the real danger and has urged Israel to return to negotiations. The real obstacle remains an Israeli adversary that believes it can cow the Palestinians into surrender. If it succeeds in doing anything, Arafat’s removal will only blow up in Israel’s face.