Will he land at the Arafat Airport or not? Will he treat Arafat as a head of state? Will he demonstrate even-handedness between Israel and Palestine?

All of this is unimportant. What is important is that President Clinton is even coming to Gaza, thus granting the Palestinian Authority a state-in-the-making status.

For Netanyahu's government this is a heavy blow. For the past fifty years, Israel's entire concept of national security has been based on the alliance between the U.S. and Israel. This alliance has provided Israel with exclusive American support against the entire Arab world, so much so that at times it has been hard to determine whether it is the dog that is wagging its tail or the tail wagging the dog.

Now this is all changing. Even though the American-Israeli alliance continues to exist, it no longer is exclusive. It has to coexist now with an American-Palestinian alliance, and although there is no real parity, nevertheless the balance has been altered.

Two men are responsible for this change: Arafat and Netanyahu.

Long ago Arafat set in motion ago a political strategy whose sole objective was to achieve this change. He has adhered to it with astounding patience, in the face of failures and humiliation, despite daily invectives from a large portion of the Palestinian intelligentsia. Clinton's day in Gaza will also be Arafat's personal victory.

Netanyahu has helped Arafat along by making a series of mistakes. He has made Clinton dislike him personally, by attempting to use the American extreme right wing to force the president's hand. Netanyahu is also directly responsible for Clinton's visit to Gaza.

It happened in this manner: Netanyahu and his people invented the story that "The Palestinian Charter has not been changed." This is a lie, intended for the sole purpose of justifying Netanyahu's continuing violations of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu has learned from his mentors that if one repeats a lie enough times, it becomes the truth, and the bigger the lie, the more convincing it is.

However, there is also another rule: The propagandist always becomes a prisoner of his own propaganda. He may not always convince someone else, but he always, always convinces himself.

Since he vowed not to retreat from Palestinian territories "as long as they refuse to change their charter," Netanyahu was forced to insist on that at the Wye Conference. So Clinton came up with a brilliant idea: He would go to Gaza himself, in order to take part in a conference to which members of the Palestinian National Committee would be invited, and he would get them to express their support for the abolition of the already-abolished charter paragraphs.

Netanyahu did not dare object. After all, it was he who had invented this idea. Plain and simple, he dug himself a hole.

A similar thing is happening to him regarding the matter of Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu has repeated ad nauseaum his catch-phrase "blood on their hands." He vowed never to release the owners of these hands. And now he is trapped by these four dumb words like a bird in a cage.

In every war, both sides have "blood on their hands." Ariel Sharon has blood on his hands. Every combat soldier has blood on his hands. Over the century of war between Israel and Palestine, tens of thousands have been killed, and only the draft-dodgers and the Yeshiva-scholars have no blood-stained hands. From the point of view of current international law, there is no difference between soldiers in uniform and guerrilla fighters. There is no difference between a pilot who rains bombs on civilians from the air and an underground fighter who plants the bomb on the ground. Each side claims that its man is a "hero" and the other one is "a murderer."

When war is over, prisoners are released. Even Nazi soldiers, who had destroyed Russia and had been taken prisoner, were released after the war. There are no differences between Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian prisoners of war.

But Israel has always insisted on regarding the Palesininian fighters as simply criminals. Words such as "murderers" and "blood on their hands," which served as a propaganda tool during the war, became obstacles as soon as Israel embarked on the road to peace. Yitzhak Rabin, too, did not dare release all of the Palestinian prisoners the day after signing the Oslo Accords (as Gush Shalom advised him), thus missing a historic opportunity to jumpstart the peace process. Now Netanyahu is entangled in the coils of his own propaganda.

An Arab story: In a certain city, riots broke out because of the scarcity of flour. The mob started to march on the Sultan's palace. In order to save his master, the vizier spread a rumor that there is a flour give-away at the city gates. The mob turned around, rushing toward the gates, soon followed by the vizier himself. "Why are you running? You know very well that it is just a lie!" the Sultan asked. But the vizier, in his rush, responded: "And what if it is true?"