AnalysisExperts: If Arafat was poisoned, it was not by polonium-210
In a report last week, Al Jazeera claimed that the cause of Yasser Arafat death in 2004 was poisoning by the radioactive substance polonium-210, and that Swiss scientists found high concentrations of polonium in the cloths Arafat wore in his last days; experts say that the laws of physics make this theory impossible: Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, meaning that half of the substance decays roughly every four-and-a-half months; since only miniscule amounts of the substance would suffice to kill someone, it is not possible that eight years after Arafat’s death, such high levels of the material would still be found in his belongings; put another way: for polonium-210 to be discovered today in Arafat’s clothing at such high levels would mean that such large quantities of the material had to be used – unnecessarily — eight years ago, that not only Arafat, but his entourage and many of the doctors, nurses, and patients at the Hôpital d’instruction des armées Percy where he was treated would be dead as well of radiation poisoning
The Middle East is a region rife with conspiracy theories, which usually conform to a predictable pattern: Arab politicians or opinion makers accuse Israeli agencies (typically, the Mossad) of the most fantastic – and bizarre — feats. Thus, a year and half ago, after several European tourists vacationing in Sharm al-Shiek were attacked by sharks, an Egyptian government minister accused the Mossad of having a secret program to train sharks to attack European tourists in order to damage the Egyptian economy. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, there were voices in the Arab press arguing that there were no Jews among the 3,000 killed in the Twin Towers because the Mossad, which orchestrated the attack, called all the Jews who worked in offices in the towers the night before the attack to tell them not to show up for work.
We may see the birth of another conspiracy theory, this one involving the charge that Yasser Arafat was poisoned by the radioactive substance polonium-210. Last week, Al-Jazzeera aired a program based on an investigation into the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004. Suha Arafat, Yasser’s widow, gave the program researchers a few items of clothing Arafat wore in his last days, and also personal items such a toothbrush and a hair brush. The items were examined by a reputable radiation lab in Switzerland, and the Swiss scientists reported that they found unusually high concentration of polonium-210 in those items.
The widow, who in 2004 refused to give a permission to have an autopsy performed on her husband’s body, now calls for the exhumation of his body so it could be tested. Palestinian leaders have joined her call (a few years ago the Palestinian Authority established a commission to investigate Arafat’s death, but it is yet to issue its findings).
Now, suspecting that Israel had something to do with Arafat’s death is not as far-fetched as saying that the Mossad trains shark to attack tourists in Egypt. For more than three decades now, Israel has been engaged in a systematic, covert campaign to take out Palestinian leaders. In most cases, those killed were at the operational level of various Palestinian organizations, but Israel also showed its readiness to kill political leaders: it killed Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March 2004, and Hamas’s political leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a month later, after Hamas crossed what Israel considered to be a “red line”: earlier that
