Yasser Arafat's failing health gets prominent play on Germany's editorial pages on Friday. On Thursday, Israel cleared the way for the Palestinian leader, who's been under virtual house arrest for three years, to leave the country for treatment. Palestinian authorities said they were "preparing for all possibilities," implying Arafat could be dying. In their early political obits, a handful of papers accused Arafat of squandering chances for peace and gave him a large amount of blame for failed initiatives for peace. But a good number agreed that the power vacuum that would be created by his passing could be worse than his survival.

The Financial Times Deutschland describes Arafat as a "monument" with "symbolic importance" for all Palestinians. But he's also one with severely diminished political strength -- a process that began at Camp David in 2000 when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak presented the Palestinians with the best offer for peace any Israeli has yet given. Unfortunately, the paper concludes, Arafat will still be seen as a martyr by his people if he dies. And he's kept such a stranglehold on power that he will leave behind a "power vacuum" when he goes. "That Arafat's serious illness coincides with Sharon's preparations for withdrawal (of settlements from the Gaza Strip) creates further complications," the paper writes. Noting that Sharon is also in the midst of a power struggle over his pullout decision, the paper writes that it's unclear on both sides who, in the medium-term, will take over leadership. "Until now, the Middle East problem has been fixed to the arch-enemies Arafat and Sharon. But this formula won't hold for long."

Arafat's initial penchant for violence as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization isn't surprising -- after all, he was just following the example of Israeli terrorist Menachem Begin, writes the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. But on the road to creating an independent Palestinian state, Arafat made a wrong turn. "Arafat the revolutionary, the guerrilla fighter, missed every opportunity, especially the right moment in which he needed to lead his people away from violence." The second intifada might have been a success, the editors write, if the Palestinians had stuck with stone-throwing. Instead, they resorted to terrorist violence through Hamas and Arafat has failed to stop it. Now all of the areas that Israel transferred to the Palestinian Authority under the Olso Accords of 1993 have been reoccupied. "Even if Arafat survives from his illness, his political battle is lost ... And his longed-for (Palestinian) state will remain, for the time being, an unfulfillable dream for his people."

The Tageszeitung challenges those who say Arafat is the biggest hindrance to peace and that his death could open the door to progress. The paper argues the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would become unpredictable with Arafat's death -- his passage would only aggravate tendencies that already exist. "The Palestinian Authority is no longer capable of functioning," it writes. "The largest Palestinian group, Arafat's Fatah, is disintegrating, and the Islamic Hamas is getting stronger." Arafat's passing would increase the risk that these tendencies would be "expressed violently."

It will also be extremely difficult to fill his shoes. The business daily Handelsblatt suggests that with Arafat's possible imminent death, the "volcano Middle East" is bubbling once again. "He manages the Autonomous Authority like a one-man show and he never ceded control of the most important security forces," the paper opines. "To cement his position, he has also systematically quashed his successor" and has refused to let anyone near him in power. The paper predicts a power struggle between as many as five different groups to fill the vacuum left behind by Arafat.

Looking westward, a handful of German papers on Friday try to put out a fire between the German press and Fleet Street over Queen Elizabeth's visit to Germany next week. For the past two weeks, the papers have been squabbling over a fictitious request by German diplomats asking Her Majesty to apologize for the British bombing of Dresden in World War II -- an event an increasing number of historians agree was unnecessary and brutal. "No one in Germany demanded an apology," writes Berlin's Tagesspiegel. "Maybe we would like an apology for what happened, but we don't dare to openly demand it." The paper then goes on to speculate that the rants recently published by the Daily Mail and the Daily Express tabloids may be a sign of British guilt. "Perhaps the British have not yet forgiven themselves for Dresden?" the paper asks.