SHARON - King of Israel
"...an Israel that is
increasingly religious, walled off
from its neighbors, simultaneously
yearning after and
fearing a Western community of nations that sees it
as more and more foreign."
Mid-East
Realities - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - 7 August 2004:
After David Ben-Gurion, like him or hate him, the single man who has
had more of an influence on what has happened in Israel, and maybe in
the modern-day Middle East, is Ariel Sharon.
For the Palestinians and many around the world he is a ruthless,
bloodthirsty war criminal, a Jewish Hitler. For many Israelis he in
the epitome of the modern secular Zionist warrior, the tough-guy they
have turned to in war and more recently in politics.
But Ariel Sharon desires not only to be a modern-day King of Israel, he
aspires to be a King of the Jews relentless pushing for more 'aliyah'
to the Jewish State in tandem with policies and attitudes which in fact
create a kind of rolling low-grade anti-Semitism that he then uses to
pursue his hard-line Zionist visions.
Whether what Sharon has done to Israel, to the Palestinians, to the
Arab and Muslim worlds, and to the United States, will lead to a secure
and 'normal' 'Jewish State' in the future is increasingly doubtful.
Whether it is all leading to an internal Israeli civil war, and/or to
such unyielding hatreds within the Arab and Muslim worlds that Israel
may eventually find itself suffocated, isolated, and maybe destroyed;
this too is impossible to say with much certainty at this time.
There are so many contradictions surrounding Sharon.
He himself is secular but he has championed the settlers and the
observant overseeing an evolving Israel that is has become an
increasingly religious state in passion and motivation.
He is at heart a warrior but he has also mastered in ways few thought possible for him the art of politics.
He has in fact been involved in repeated acts that meet all the
criteria of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, but somehow he has always
managed to avoid being held accountable.
Few now remember that General Yitzhak Rabin -- miscast in assassination
as a 'peacenik' he was not -- and General Ariel Sharon were life-long
friends, and the same in fact goes for Shimon Peres. Indeed -- and
this says much about both of the Generals -- during Rabin's years as
Prime Minister he had a usually secret and private weekly Friday
afternoon pre-Shabbat meeting with Sharon as with no other.
This major New York Times
feature about Ariel Sharon could have, and should have, been far more
harsh. But Ariel Sharon is at the top of his game now. And though the
future he may have molded more than any other may be bleak and
potentially catastrophic, now is his time and few in the Jewish world
-- and in an oblique way that includes not only the New York Times but much of the contemporary American media -- dare to take him on directly.
Sharon's
Wars
By
JAMES
BENNET*
New
York Times Sunday Magazine - 15 August 2004:
t
the point where the twisting road from Jerusalem leaves the hills and
straightens out on Israel's coastal plain, you turn south at Latrun
junction for the drive to Ariel Sharon's ranch. On a rise to your left,
set in olive groves, is the red-roofed Trappist monastery of Latrun. It
has always been something of a surprise to me how lightly Israel's
landscape, if not its people, wears its heavy past. From a car rushing
along this modern highway, the only clue to the centuries of violence
that envelop the Latrun hill is a limestone ruin on the crest, above
the monastery. It is the remnant of a 12th-century Crusader fort. From
that height, Christian soldiers, like the Romans long before them and
the Arab Legion long after, controlled the routes from the
Mediterranean coast and from Egypt to Jerusalem.
Sharon nearly died here. As a 20-year-old platoon leader, he
joined in
an ill-planned assault to take the hill and open the road to Jerusalem
during the Arab-Israel war of 1948, the Israeli War of Independence. In
a wadi barely visible from the road, where rushes now separate bright
green vineyards from golden-brown fields of grain, he was pinned down
for hours with his men. He was shot in the stomach and thigh. His radio
was destroyed, and he did not hear the order to withdraw. It was only
when he saw Arab soldiers on the hills behind him that he realized he
and his remaining men had been left behind, alone.
Speaking with Sharon at his ranch one Sunday evening last
month, I
asked him if, when his motorcade passed by Latrun these days, he saw
the wheat fields or the battle. He thought about the battle, he
replied. ''It was not wheat, it was barley,'' he said. ''And it was a
very hot day. And all around, it was burning.'' The fields were on
fire. When he realized the predicament and gave the order to retreat --
to flee -- only 4 of 35 men were alive and unwounded. Sharon, bleeding
from his own wounds, felt too weak to make it out.
''I was dead thirsty,'' he said. He was speaking English, a
language
in which he is not perfect but makes himself pungently clear. ''I was
so thirsty that I felt I'll not have power to, let's say, make this
effort. Let's say it was the major effort that I've ever done.''
Sharon dragged himself to the bottom of the gully, where the
blood
of the wounded mingled with the green scum on the muck. ''I hesitated
for one minute,'' he said. ''Then I put my mouth into this mud there,
and I drank -- I don't know -- I would say a very big quantity of this
red-green mud.''
He began to chuckle, not bitterly but warmly, with real mirth,
as he
did at other points in our conversation when speaking of something
particularly dire. He was leaning back in a cushioned yellow armchair,
dressed casually in sandals with Velcro straps, slacks and a blue shirt
with the top two buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. ''When I pass
there, first of all, when I say I look at that, I remember what
happened there -- this small story. I know it's a terrible thing.
Because people will read it and they will say, 'Look, he drinks also
blood.''' He began to laugh outright, shaking in his chair. ''But I
felt that I'll not be able to overcome that if I'll not drink this
water there -- if I may call it water.''
I was struck again by an impression I had when I first passed
through the layers of security and rounded the door into Sharon's
living room. After all the anxious guards with guns, I found him
sitting there quietly by himself, an overstuffed man in an overstuffed
chair, an old man alone with his many memories.
So he might have been. It was not so long ago that Sharon and
his
memories of blood were the stuff of history and hysterical opposition
to everything that seemed hopeful -- to the Oslo peace process, to the
negotiations that brought Palestinians to the verge of statehood and
Israelis to the verge of the safe, welcomed society they dreamed of.
When the Palestinian uprising brought his view of reality back
into
fashion, Sharon was ready. It was his chance to further, if not finish,
the job he began after Latrun: defining Israel's boundaries and its
very identity.
It may be that nations need illusions to make peace. It may
be,
indeed, that illusions are among the most precious things we have. But
Sharon does not believe a Jewish state can afford them. Today, his
story has become Israel's story, and today's Israel -- with its
won't-be-fooled-again attitude about any warm peace with Arabs -- is
Sharon's Israel.
ow
76, Sharon can plausibly lay claim to having shaped his state's
geographic and moral terrain and international image -- for better or
for worse -- more than any other Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion.
There is no single American figure to compare him with. He is Andrew
Jackson, George Patton, Robert Moses.
In the 1950's, Sharon trained and led the commandos who
established
Israel's reputation for ruthless reprisals; in 1967, he won one of the
most sensational battles of the Six-Day War; and in 1973, he envisioned
and led the crossing of the Suez Canal that helped end the Yom Kippur
War. He created, in 1973, the rightist Likud Party he now leads, which
broke Labor's grip on Israel's governments; he led Israel's 1982
invasion of Lebanon, which formed and scarred a generation; he
masterminded Israel's settlement movement, systematically planting
enclaves of Jews among the Palestinians of the occupied territories,
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Now, as prime minister, he is building a barrier against West
Bank
Palestinians that is the single biggest change in the land since the
Six-Day War. And he is trying to tear down some of the Israeli
settlements he built in Gaza and the West Bank -- something no Israeli
prime minister has ever done. He is not doing this because he sees a
path to imminent peace. Capitalizing on a White House that has chosen
to view the world much as he does, he is trying to gird Israel for a
conflict -- not merely with the Palestinians -- whose end he cannot
foresee.
I asked him if he thought Israel's war of independence had
ever ended.
After all, I said, the world's attitude toward terrorism had changed
after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the American Army was now parked on the
other side of Jordan in Iraq. More than half a century after Latrun,
Israel, now a nuclear power, did not seem in danger of being driven
into the sea.
Sharon noted that unlike in 1948, Israel now has peace
agreements with
two of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. ''But these are agreements
between leaders,'' he said. ''There is no peace between nations or
peoples. And the main problem is that the Arabs are not ready yet -- I
don't know if it will be in the future, I don't know -- but they are
not ready to recognize the birthright of the Jewish people to have an
independent Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people.'' His
voice rose as he delivered that last thought.
''On this issue,'' he said, ''I don't see yet any change
whatsoever.''
As much or more than his predecessors, Sharon shucked the
traditions of
the Jewish Diaspora to develop a new Jewish warrior culture. In place
of fear and the ghettos of Europe, he worked to substitute military
power and an almost mythic territorial ambition. In place of religion
and the prayerful dream of Jerusalem, he posited ethnic pride and
possession of the land.
Sharon is not a religious man. Outside of his own experiences,
his
points of reference tend to be biblical, but their applications are
territorial and tribal rather than spiritual. When I asked what it
meant to him to live as a Jew, he spoke not about God but about history
and place names: Jerusalem, Hebron, Mount Tabor -- names from the Bible
still used for the same places today.
''It's an unbelievable story,'' he said. ''Because I think all
of those
old nations that were then, disappeared. Don't exist anymore. The Jews
exist.''
Then he gave me an idea of what he sees in the landscape
beyond his
own battles. Referring to one of the ancient tribes of Israel, he said,
''When I travel in, let's say, the mountains of the tribe Binyamin --
say the area of Ramallah or west of Ramallah -- you know, I used to
close my eyes a little bit, so you don't see the electrical grids and
all these things.'' He chuckled, this time at an obviously pleasant
thought. ''In my imagination, I always felt that I see those warriors
of the tribe of Binyamin, you know, with spears, running there on those
terraces.''
He added: ''And you know, those terraces that you see there --
terraces were not built by Arabs. These terraces are old Jewish
terraces.''
Sometimes it feels as if this conflict eludes capture by
journalism, which must, more or less, grapple with reality as it finds
it and enter earnestly into the logic of its subjects. There are days
and places in Israel and the occupied territories that seem to warrant
a more arch sensibility, an eyebrow cocked at the premises: satire
could do it, maybe, or a Broadway musical. The thought -- maybe the
rationalization -- occurred to me over lunch on a warm, sunny day in
February. I was eating pizza at a plastic table on the brick patio of
the Home Pizza Express restaurant. Home Pizza is in Ariel, a town of
nearly 18,000 that would not look out of place in Southern California.
It is a giant settlement smack in the center of the northern West Bank.
(It was not named after Sharon; their common name means ''lion of
God.'')
The restaurant had a mural of bygone American celebrities:
Bogart,
Elvis, Laurel and Hardy. The woman at the next table had a purse
embroidered with roses and the message ''Things grow with love.'' On
the patio beneath my table glinted a stray, shiny bullet. Pinned to a
nearby bulletin board was an advertisement that used a likeness of
Abraham Lincoln to flog a 2,700-square-foot home. Sharon may have been
planning to dismantle settlements in Gaza, but up the hill the cranes
were working away, building new houses. The new development was called
Ariel Heights.
Beyond Ariel's fence, just a couple of hundred yards and a
galaxy
away, was the Palestinian town of Salfit. I once cowered behind a
gravestone there when Israeli soldiers at a post beside Ariel opened
fire over the heads of mourners at a funeral.
''Can you imagine Israel without fear?'' my lunch companion,
Dror
Etkes, asked. He wondered why a country with nuclear weapons could see
its morale collapse ''every time a bus explodes.'' He marveled that
Israel could feel so powerful and so vulnerable at the same time, but
he knew the reasons, the history of pogroms and genocide, well enough.
That was the key to understanding Sharon's appeal, Etkes said.
''He
recognized the deepest pathology of the Israeli people,'' he went on to
say. ''He understands the fears.''
Etkes, who is 36 and wears a small gold loop through one ear,
may be
Ariel Sharon's worst nightmare. He is an Israeli, a Jew and a former
paratrooper, and he knows the hills and wadis of the West Bank maybe as
well as Sharon. But he concluded from his military service that the
occupation was destroying Zionism and Israel, and now he bird-dogs the
growth of settlements for the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now.
Sulfurous redoubts like the tiny Jewish settlement in Hebron
and the
ragged hilltop outposts are the soul of the settlement movement. But
its body and brain are in sunny Ariel. The zealots get most of the
media attention, and they draw far more of the Palestinian attacks.
They distract the world, in other words. Meanwhile, Ariel, with its
college and its emerald soccer field, its police headquarters and its
commuters to Tel Aviv, expands steadily, with little notice paid. It is
Ariel and the other giant settlements like it that Sharon is bidding to
retain forever by giving up Gaza. The big blocks protect the strategic
heights and the priceless aquifers beneath them that he most cares
about, and they wall off Jerusalem. They also would break up any
Palestinian state into pieces that could be easily monitored, and if
necessary controlled, by Israel. From Ariel Heights, you can look to
the east and see the pattern. Outposts are growing on each hilltop to
link a zigzagging chain of Israeli settlement across the West Bank to
the Jordan Valley. Sharon would like to hold onto half the West Bank,
one of his top aides said, but does not expect to be able to keep that
much in the end.
Etkes maintains that Israel is creating apartheid in the West
Bank.
Jews and Arabs live in parallel communities there now, with separate
and unequal road networks, legal systems, opportunities and rights and
with little contact with each other. ''Ariel is the most Israeli town
in Israel,'' he said with considerable asperity. When I asked what he
meant, he leaned back in his chair and spread his arms to point in each
direction. ''The ignorance of people -- the full ignorance of what's
going on 150 or 200 meters away on either side, living in a mental,
cultural ghetto in the Middle East, not knowing who your neighbors
are.''
But for most Israelis now -- as always for Sharon -- Etkes has
it
backward. It is not that they do not know their neighbors; it is that
they know them all too well. Now the typical Israeli response to any
suggestion of a negotiated solution is a verbal roll of the eyes: you
don't understand, they say; this is the Middle East.
For Palestinians, Oslo failed because Israel dragged its feet
in
ceding authority in the West Bank, while settlements there doubled in
population to more than 200,000. For them, the Israeli offer in the
Camp David talks of the summer of 2000 was a ploy, a stinting proposal
to make the Palestinians look rejectionist. (The Palestinian
leadership, of course, obliged.) For Palestinians, Sharon detonated
this uprising with the provocative visit he made on Sept. 28, 2000, in
the company of hundreds of policemen and soldiers, to the man-made
plateau in Jerusalem that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the
Temple Mount.
The Israeli version is, if anything, engraved more deeply: the
Palestinians -- the Arabs -- never wanted peace. The conflict is not
about Oslo, not about settlements, not even about the occupation that
began in 1967. It is about any Jewish state in the region. To Israelis,
Yasir Arafat walked away from Camp David because he wanted, and wants,
to destroy Israel, not build a state beside it. Not only the suicide
bombers but also the enduring chill of the quarter-century peace with
Egypt undermined the premises of Israel's left, enabling Sharon to
seize the political center and, through constant maneuvering, to hold
it. Even a dove like Etkes has doubts that a full Israeli withdrawal
from the West Bank would necessarily mean peace. ''If it turns out to
be a zero-sum game,'' he said after we left Home Pizza for Jerusalem,
''I prefer war from two sides of a wall to intensive occupation.''
The last Labor politician to take on Sharon and his vision of
the
conflict was Amram Mitzna, a former general and successful mayor of
Haifa. A week before Sharon dealt Labor its most humbling defeat ever
in national elections, in January of last year, I heard Mitzna outline
his program in Haifa to a crowd of thousands of soldiers preparing to
muster out of the army. Mitzna's agenda was quite close to the one
Sharon is pursuing now, with two crucial differences: he favored
immediate negotiations with the Palestinian leadership -- meaning
Arafat -- along with an immediate withdrawal from Gaza. The second
crucial difference was that Mitzna is not Sharon. As the Israeli
political theorist Yaron Ezrahi once told me, one reason Israelis
elected Sharon initially was their faith that he would make concessions
out of only absolute necessity, not out of ideology. ''When Sharon
budges, that means no one can stand against it,'' Ezrahi said.
That night in Haifa when Mitzna made his case, the soldiers
were not
impressed. In Sharon's Israel, the young accuse the old of being
dreamers. ''He has a vision,'' a soldier named Asaf Mentzer, then 22,
told me, ''but it's not realistic in the Middle East. The political
history of Israel shows that everyone who wants to take a step toward
peace -- like Mitzna -- fails.''
The failure of Oslo sent shock waves through the army, which
is
Israel's most politically and socially important institution, and
prompted it to overhaul its own approach to the Palestinians. Like the
rest of the society, the Israel Defense Forces are changing anyway,
drawing their leadership less from the evaporating pool of secular
kibbutz members and more from the rightist national religious
community. But the army had bought into Oslo, and some generals later
concluded that they had failed in their most basic mission, protecting
Israel. It is a mistake they will not make again.
''I was one of those stupid guys,'' Brig. Gen. Eival Gilady
said
with a wry grin over dinner in May in Tel Aviv. Gilady, until recently
the head of the Israel Defense Forces' strategic planning division, now
advises the government on security and international matters. He still
lives on his kibbutz, Cabri, in the Galilee. He has a boyish face and
an easy smile beneath iron gray hair. The army considered him one of
its most visionary thinkers. He is the intellectual father of the
details of Sharon's disengagement plan.
As Oslo fell apart, Gilady was studying the essence of the
conflict in
a search for a way out. He came to the conclusion that there might not
be one. ''This is an inconclusive conflict,'' he said. ''It's a totally
different phenomenon. And it's not just an Israeli problem.'' Looking
at the second half of the 20th century, Gilady counted 160 wars. Fully
131 of them, he said, were not classic wars between states but
conflagrations like those that consumed Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya.
''Is it religious?'' he asked. ''Economic? Ethnic? I don't know. But
there is a strong element of ideology, and you cannot bring them to an
end quickly like a war you end with an army. It's a conflict you have
to manage for a long time.'' To do that, he said, ''you need
legitimacy.'' First and foremost, the public must see the army as
acting in a legitimate way, but the world must also back it up. The
question was how to preserve that legitimacy while protecting Israel.
A negotiated peace with Arafat had come to seem impossible to
Gilady,
but leaving things as they were seemed untenable. ''I didn't think time
was on our side,'' he said. The Palestinian population was growing at
more than 5 percent a year, meaning Arabs would be the majority in
Israel and the occupied territories within a few years. Israel might
have to choose between its Jewish identity or its democracy. Further,
the army's tactics -- forced upon it, in Gilady's view -- were only
exacerbating the conflict. ''The more we fight, the worse it is,'' he
said. ''The anger, the frustration, increases.''
Gilady saw disengagement without an agreement as a way out of
the trap
for both peoples. As he helped map the route of the Israeli barrier, he
found a way to keep around 75 percent of the settlers on the Israeli
side while holding on to what he estimates to be about 11 percent of
the West Bank. He insisted that the barrier was a reversible security
measure, but he sees it as sending political messages: one, to the
Palestinians, that there is a price in land to continuing the conflict;
two, to the settlers, that there is less of a future for them on the
Palestinian side of the line.
The army has mapped out Jewish and Arab enclaves on the West
Bank,
and the map is starting to come into focus on the ground. Israel has
begun digging tunnels beneath Israeli-controlled zones to connect
Palestinian areas with one another. The West Bank is shaping up as a
Habitrail landscape of flyovers, underpasses and fenced enclosures
teasing apart knotted populations in a cage slightly smaller than
Delaware. Yet Gilady says he hopes that as Israeli checkpoints
disappear from between the Palestinian areas, the anger will begin to
ease and, eventually, peace will become possible. He calls this
approach ''transportation contiguity'' or, in a koan for a region that
generates very few of them, ''everything flows.''
There is a deeper game. Resolving the basic asymmetry between
Israelis and Palestinians -- one side has a state; the other does not
-- may be a goal of Middle East peacemakers, but it is also one of the
greatest obstacles to achieving it. The Israelis have a government
capable of enforcing an agreement, but the Palestinian Authority,
created by Oslo to do that job, has not proved strong enough. Israel is
trying to draw in Egypt and Jordan to serve as proxy states and, in
effect, as guardians for the Palestinians. The plan drawn up by the
security men -- though not endorsed by Sharon or his government -- even
calls for Egypt eventually to cede land in the Sinai to the
Palestinians in exchange for the territory Israel would gain in the
West Bank. Egypt would gain a tunnel linking it by land to Jordan. That
is a sign of how advanced, or maybe how wistful and abstract, the
military establishment's thinking has become.
At its core, what the plan reveals is how utterly the army has
come
to reject the logic of Oslo. Oslo posited a peace agreement as the
surest route to Israeli security. Peace would encourage joint ventures
between the two peoples; it would give the Palestinians a path to a
state and turn them against the militants who jeopardized it.
Palestinians say that that proposition was never really tested. But
Gilady does not see it that way. ''It turned out to be the other way
around,'' he said. ''Not that peace will bring security but that
security will bring peace.''
With that, the army had come to the same conclusion that one
of its
most storied generals reached many years ago.
y
interview with Sharon was initially scheduled for a Thursday afternoon
in Jerusalem at his official residence. As I arrived, Sharon was still
at his office half a mile away. But the security men in blue smocks
were dashing about with their compact submachine guns. There was
something suspicious about the motor scooter parked across the street.
The bomb squad had been called in.
I did not think much of it. False alarms happen all the time
in
Jerusalem. The previous Sunday night, outside my own home, the bomb
squad had pulled up and used a remote-controlled robot to fire several
shotgun blasts into what proved an innocent object.
But this alarm was very different. Sharon was delayed. Then
the
interview was canceled. Raanan Gissin, Sharon's spokesman, told me that
a bomb had been found in the scooter, primed to be detonated remotely
when Sharon's convoy passed. Later, I learned that the streets around
the residence had been blocked off and that the Shin Bet security
service, in a highly unusual move, had also thrown a security cordon
around the prime minister's office. Sharon was spirited away in a
helicopter to a secret refuge.
Yet there was not a word about the incident later in the
Israeli media,
which would normally cover such a disruptive alarm even if it was
false. Four days later, as we drove together to the rescheduled
interview, Gissin insisted that it was a false alarm after all, caused
by a bicycle and not the scooter I saw the security men examining
through binoculars.
The head of Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, says that Sharon now faces
a very
real threat from extremist Jews. Shin Bet has tightened security around
him. Like the army, Shin Bet is trying to learn the lessons of what it
sees as a terrible institutional failure: the 1995 assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally by an Israeli Jew.
I was thoroughly searched before our car was permitted to pass
the
first steel gate into Sharon's Sycamore ranch, named for a thick stand
of the trees, dark green in the dusk. The entrance is like an air lock:
the first gate must close behind you before a second inner steel gate
rises. ''They've made him more a prisoner than ever,'' Gissin murmured
as we pulled forward. Just ahead of us was a large pen holding hundreds
of sheep, maybe the safest sheep in the world. A few geese wandered
across our path.
The ranch is said to be the largest in Israel, but the house
itself is
a simple, homey affair. To be in Sharon's home is to be reminded -- not
unintentionally -- that this most polarizing of world figures, this
cartoon of Jewish strength or Jewish cruelty, is, after all, a person,
a work of depth and complexity, satisfactions and sorrows, maybe more
than his share. Sharon's first wife, Gali, died in a car crash in 1962.
Five years later, just after the Six-Day War, their 10-year-old son,
Gur, was accidentally killed. He was playing with an antique shotgun
that a friend had brought Sharon from the newly occupied West Bank. No
one knew it was loaded. Sharon heard the shot and found the boy, who
died in his arms.
By then, Sharon had married his first wife's sister, Lily, and
had two
more sons. Lily Sharon died of cancer in March 2000, before Sharon was
elected prime minister. Her influence lingers at the ranch. In the
hallway, bridles for horses are arranged along the banister. In the
living room, a bronze statue of a bull stands on one table and two
bronze dancers pivot on another. The only nod to martial life that I
noticed was a charcoal drawing on one wall of a line of weary-looking
soldiers on patrol. ''What a mensch'' read an embroidered pillow on one
couch. In another room, one of Sharon's grandchildren wailed while he
spoke. An armed Shin Bet guard stood just out of Sharon's line of sight
in the hallway, watching me through the interview.
''All my life, I defended Jews, and suddenly I find myself,
you know,
being defended against Jews,'' Sharon said. ''I have been under the
security organizations', I would say, protection, but that was against
Arabs.''
Sharon was preparing to meet the next day with his old ally
Shimon
Peres, the inevitable, indefatigable Labor Party leader, for talks
about forming a new coalition government. His rightist coalition was
cracking under the strain of his disengagement plan. Far-right
ministers who hoped Sharon was bluffing or who thought they could
restrain him were realizing he would not be stopped, and they were
starting to bolt.
Sharon was looking to form at least a temporary coalition
government
anchored by Likud, Labor and Shinui, the centrist, antireligious party
led by the 72-year-old Tommy Lapid. It would be a government of old
lions -- Peres turns 81 today -- members of the generation that founded
the state making a last attempt to secure it. But Sharon does not
expect that coalition to last. A bloc of Likud, a party that officially
opposes any Palestinian state, is in growing revolt. His aides say he
expects to have to go to elections in the next year, before he can
embark on his plan and begin uprooting the Israeli settlements in Gaza.
Even if he fails in his plan or falls from office, Sharon has already
taken a sledgehammer to a cornerstone rationale of the settlement
movement. The father of the settlements has declared that remaining in
Gaza weakens Israel. Now he is contemplating nothing less than an
Israeli political realignment, one that would give political expression
to the chastening of both the left and the right: it would accept the
possibility of some limited form of Palestinian state but also the
improbability of any peace with the Palestinians. This might mean a
redefinition of Likud or the creation of a new centrist party. It does
not matter to Sharon. He does not confuse means with ends. Armies,
political parties and even settlements are merely tools.
As a young officer, Sharon was used by men like Moshe Dayan,
who wanted
to shield themselves politically and diplomatically from the
consequences of their own vague orders, orders of the
who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-archbishop variety. Sharon
understood and accepted his role, and he learned from it. He is an
instrumentalist, a user, and ruthless. He is accustomed, after all, to
the necessity of sending men to their deaths. He admired, but never
shared, the religious, totalizing zeal of the settlers he dispatched to
the West Bank and Gaza. He seized on these zealots because he saw that
the pioneering, secular Zionist tradition that had brought his own
parents to settle the land of Israel was fading. Now he is quite
willing to disappoint some of these religious settlers to hold onto the
land he really cares about. When I asked if it pained him to hear
himself condemned by Jewish settlers in Gaza, he said: ''Look, it's not
an easy thing. But I decided that is the right step that should be
taken. I thought about that solely. I evaluated the situation. I
believe that I found the right way, how to serve the interests of
Israel.''
The why of it -- the reason Sharon is taking these personal
and
political chances -- is a mystery only to those who have not bothered
to listen to him. He is quite clear about his reasons.
In the 1950's, when Sharon was training Israel's first
paratroopers, he
made a study of ambushes. What was the best way to react? The answer
was characteristic of Sharon: attack immediately -- regain, and retain,
the initiative. As the cruel stalemate with the Palestinians wore on,
Sharon feared that Israel risked losing the initiative. ''I worried
about the vacuum here,'' he said. Israeli and Palestinian doves were
drawing up plans for deep concessions on both sides to demonstrate that
there were pragmatists, potential partners, seeking a way out of the
conflict. Sharon says he does not believe any partner exists. But he
feared that if Israel was not moving on its own by pulling back from
Gaza, the world would impose its own solution. ''I saw that the
pressures will be hard pressures on Israel,'' he said. ''And I felt
that even the United States will not be able, I would say, not
to impose a plan on Israel if Israel is not making even the slightest
step forward.''
Sharon also feared the consequences of what had been, in fact,
one of
his own policies, Israel's attacks on the governing Palestinian
Authority. With the help of foreign governments, the Palestinian
Authority had taken over some tasks, like providing schooling, once
performed by the occupying power -- and Sharon does not want those
tasks back. ''I did not think Israel should take upon itself the health
and education and welfare and labor of three million Palestinians,'' he
said. There are about 3.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza.
Sharon also understood, but did not mention to me, the
political
reality: Israelis might not believe they could negotiate a peace, but
they also did not want their children to continue dying to protect a
few settlers in Gaza. Sharon initially opposed a West Bank barrier, but
he embraced it and turned it to his advantage when it became
politically unstoppable. Sharon has fixed goals, but he freely changes
tactics. ''You cannot defeat Jews,'' Sharon told me while speaking of
the settlers. ''You can maneuver them. You maneuver them; they maneuver
you. I would say it's endless maneuvers.''
There was no plan under which Gaza would remain part of
Israel,
Sharon said. ''I do not see a future for Jewish life there,'' he said.
Last, and crucially, Sharon glimpsed an opportunity: to
perpetuate
Israel's hold on the parts of the West Bank that mean the most to him.
As he told the newspaper Ha'aretz in early April, he saw a
chance to
''do the things I want and to get an American commitment.'' Sharon did
not want to negotiate concessions from the Palestinians. He wanted
concessions from the Americans, in the form of a reversal of decades of
policy in the Middle East. In exchange for Sharon's Gaza withdrawal
plan and evidence of some movement in the Middle East, President
Bush promised that in any eventual peace deal Israel would be able to
keep its large West Bank settlement blocks, like Ariel and its
satellites. He also said that the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war,
and their descendants, would never be able to live in what is now
Israel.
Whether arising from hubris, hard experience or superior
judgment,
Sharon's ferocious pursuit of his own visions for Israel and the region
previously brought him into collision with American administrations.
While struggling to negotiate an end to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in 1982, Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan's special envoy, concluded that
Sharon was ''the biggest liar this side of the Mediterranean'' and a
man whose ''word was worth nothing.'' For his part, Sharon saw the
Americans as pursuing an overly ambitious agenda, seeking to use
Lebanon to solve problems throughout the Middle East.
It is not that Sharon objects to complex plans; he just
prefers his
own. As a general, Sharon clashed constantly with his superiors, but he
drew up complicated battle plans that limited the flexibility of his
commanders in the field and centralized authority in himself. That
pattern reappeared in Lebanon, and it is playing out again today. In
Lebanon, Sharon set a vaulting plan in motion with an invasion he sold
to the Israeli public as limited, intended to clear the P.L.O. away
from Israel's northern border. Then as now, he had several aims in
mind. He wanted to crush the P.L.O, install a Christian-dominated
government that he believed would make peace with Israel and bring
forth what he envisioned as a tractable Palestinian leadership in the
West Bank that would accept Israeli rule. The plan blew up in his face
with the assassination of his chosen Lebanese president and then the
massacre by Christian militiamen of Palestinians in two refugee camps,
Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli commission of inquiry later assigned
Sharon indirect responsibility for the massacres.
In Bush, Sharon has occasionally feared he faced another
president
with an overambitious plan for the Middle East that might conflict with
his own agenda. Three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Sharon gave a
speech warning that the United States risked appeasing terrorists at
Israel's expense the way Europe appeased Hitler by sacrificing
Czechoslovakia in 1938. It was meant as a shot across Bush's bows.
''What worried me was what might be,'' Sharon said when he called me
two days later for a brief interview in which he expressed regret five
times. It was my first clue that for Sharon words are also tactics,
with regret deployed as easily as bluster.
A few months later, Sharon demonstrated to Bush that he did
mean
what he said when he declared he would never compromise what he
considered Israeli security. As a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings
reached a crest in March 2002, Sharon began Israel's largest offensive
since Lebanon, sending ground forces sweeping through the West Bank.
Bush demanded an immediate halt, but the army kept going. It was Bush,
not Sharon, who gave way.
To Bush's most ambitious attempt to solve the conflict, the
so-called
road map to peace, Sharon applied what Israelis know well as his ''yes,
but'' strategy. He did not rebuff the administration. He agreed to the
plan, but then interpreted it in his own way. He attached conditions
that changed it substantively. There was a lot that Sharon liked in the
plan, including its endorsement of his demands for thoroughgoing
Palestinian reform. But its timetable -- three years to a state of
Palestine and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace -- was nowhere near
Sharon's. Sharon's aides also did not think that the new Palestinian
prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, could succeed in curtailing Arafat's
power and stopping the intifada. Israel, it should be said, took no
real risks to help him. When Abbas failed and quit last fall, he blamed
both Sharon and Arafat for undermining him. Sharon still has not
removed the settlement outposts that he promised Bush more than a year
ago he would dismantle under the road map.
Sharon built settlements in the first place because he
rejected the
idea of any quick solution to the conflict and wanted to make one
impossible to achieve. ''I thought it had to become impossible to give
a fast, easy, clear-cut solution, because no solution of this sort
could accord with the reality,'' he wrote in his 1989 autobiography,
''Warrior.''
It is not that Sharon does not want peace. He often says he
wants
peace more than other politicians who have not seen so much suffering
and death. But Sharon does not put his trust in treaties. He still
likes to quote words of advice he received from his mother in the early
80's, when he was negotiating with the Egyptians: ''Do not trust them!
You cannot trust a piece of paper!'' When I asked him how he described
Arabs as a nation, he asked me how long I had lived in the region. I
replied three years. ''I tell you it will be hard for you to understand
that, and I must tell you that even for me -- and I was born here --
it's hard to understand,'' he said before pausing, evidently for
emphasis. His voice rose: ''This area here, it's an empire of lies.
It's an empire of lies. They look into your eyes and lie. It's very
hard for you to understand. It's very hard for us to understand. But
that is the situation here. Therefore, you have to be careful. Here, in
this region here, declarations, speeches, words, are worthless.''
Sharon does want a peace agreement. But he wants the agreement
that
he wants -- a so-called long-term interim agreement. It is a kind of
standstill arrangement. He wants the two sides to go to separate
corners, cool off over many years and only then begin talking about the
big issues, like Jerusalem. No credible Palestinian leader could agree
to such a deferral of the Palestinian national dream. But Sharon may
have picked his historical moment well enough, and maneuvered his
allies and enemies skillfully enough, to impose it.
n
the 50's and 60's, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister,
took a shine to the brash leader of Israel's commandos. Much to the
irritation of Sharon's superior officers, Ben-Gurion would invite him
for private chats in his office or even his home. Ben-Gurion's papers
reflect a fatherly interest in Sharon, whom he referred to as Arik and
whose roguishness both charmed and worried him. During this period,
Ben-Gurion was in his 60's and then 70's, Sharon in his 20's and then
30's. Their chats followed a tender pattern. Sharon would describe and
sometimes defend his exploits. He would complain about his superiors.
While lending a sympathetic ear, Ben-Gurion would gently relay to
Sharon some of those officers' concerns, and his own, about Sharon's
behavior. Prodded by Israel's white-haired founder, Sharon would admit
that he lacked discipline and even that he lied, sometimes to
Ben-Gurion himself.
''An original, visionary young man,'' Ben-Gurion noted on Jan.
29,
1960. ''Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth
and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional
military leader.''
On Nov. 24, 1958, Ben-Gurion recorded an unusual encounter
with
Sharon. Sharon was just back from 13 months of military study in
England. ''This was the first time he met with Jews, and he is anxious
about the future of our relations with them,'' Ben-Gurion wrote in his
journal. By ''Jews,'' he meant non-Israeli Jews living in the Diaspora.
Born and raised in what is now Israel, Sharon had not encountered such
Jews before.
''The Jews in England are not accepted in the English clubs
and golf
courses, and they have to situate themselves in Jewish institutions,''
Ben-Gurion wrote, recounting Sharon's impressions. Sharon, he
continued, was astonished that these Jews nevertheless did not feel
''any personal connection of any kind with Israel.''
It was an insight with a great impact on Sharon. He still
speaks
about it. When I quoted the passage from Ben-Gurion, it triggered an
18-minute monologue about his fears for the survival of the Jews. ''I
have many worries, but something that really bothers me is what will
happen with the Jews in the future -- what will happen to them in 30
years' time, in 300 years' time, and with God's help, 3,000 years'
time.'' He laughed. ''But I don't think that then I'll have to take
care of that.''
Returning to his stay in England, he recalled how British
officers
aimed their anti-Semitism at British Jews but not at Israelis. ''It was
a kind of an attempt to draw a distinction between Israel and Israelis
and 'their own Jews,' I would say -- Jews in the Diaspora,'' he said.
''That worried me,'' he continued. ''It worried me. I didn't
like it.''
He added, ''I felt it's going to be a danger.''
That is classic Sharon: the sweep of the sense of duty, the
depth of
the tribal consciousness, the sensitivity of the antennae to any
threat, maybe real, maybe merely perceived. He regards Israel as a
worldwide Jewish project, and he did not want to see any divergence in
the Israeli and Jewish identities.
After a few years, Sharon thought the problem went away. ''I
would
say the European countries -- maybe others as well -they started to
treat us as Jews,'' he said. In other words, the danger receded as
European Christians began treating Israeli Jews with the same prejudice
with which they treated Jews at home. It seemed an odd source of
comfort.
Sharon plowed on. A Jew, he said, can only ''live as a Jew''
in Israel.
There were many fewer mixed marriages, he said. ''All the time I worry
-- and I check it all the time -- that Jews, I would say, might
disappear,'' he said. That is, the threat to Jews' survival exists if
they are physically in danger or not. If they are safe and welcomed
where they are, they are threatened with assimilation.
Sharon explained that he regularly told Jews in the Diaspora
that if
Israel were to grow weaker or disappear, ''the Jews around the world
will not be able to have the lives that they are having now.''
Then he summed up: ''So, all that, I would say, brings me to
think
that the main goal of the state of Israel is immigration.'' He wants to
bring another million Jews to Israel in the next 15 years.
Sharon views Jews around the world and in Israel as under
threat from
rising anti-Semitism. Two days before I saw him, the World Court in The
Hague condemned as illegal those segments of Israel's new barrier that
stand inside the West Bank. Sharon saw the decision as pure evil. I
asked what he thought it would take for Israel to be fully accepted in
the world. ''Not to exist as an independent state, maybe,'' he shot
back. ''Look, it's a Jewish state inhabited by Jews. Not patronized.
Maybe the world would have accepted patronized Jews.'' A week later, he
declared that the ''wildest anti-Semitism'' was on the rise in France,
and he urged French Jews to move immediately to Israel.
It may be that the world is blind to the anti-Semitism that
feeds its
criticism of Israel. But Sharon appears blind -- maybe willfully so --
to the rising anti-Israeli-ism in what he sees as anti-Semitism. The
World Court did not rule against Jews. It ruled against Israel, and the
fact is that the barrier is built partly on occupied land.
Despite the danger Sharon sees for Jews abroad, new immigrants
are
barely trickling to Israel -- 24,652 came last year. And more may be
leaving Israel each year. (There are no hard numbers.) Sharon's
associates point out that no one predicted in the 1980's that nearly a
million Jews from the former Soviet Union would arrive in the 1990's.
But to reach those levels Israel will need a large contribution from
the only country other than itself with five million Jews -- the United
States -- and there is little hint of that.
The divergence Sharon glimpsed in England and came to fear
half a
century ago is becoming obvious. A clear Israeli identity has emerged,
and it is steadily drifting from the identity of Jews in the United
States and Europe. ''We're moving from being brothers to being
cousins,'' one of Sharon's close advisers acknowledged, speaking about
the Americans. ''And in the next generation we will be distant cousins
with some sense of shared history.''
Sharon bears much of the responsibility for bequeathing Israel
an
image that unsettles and distances Jews and non-Jews overseas. As with
so much else, this was a pattern he set early. One raid that Ben-Gurion
called him in to explain was his attack in 1953 on the village of
Qibbiya in the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan. Sharon was retaliating
for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers. He later said
that he and his men believed that the 45 houses they blew up over
several hours were empty. But 69 Arabs were killed, about half of them
women and children. The killings brought Israel its first condemnation
from the United Nations Security Council. (In his autobiography, Sharon
wrote that Ben-Gurion told him that the raid would serve as a warning
to other Arabs.)
Then and now, Sharon's use of force may have stirred some who
longed
for Jewish power and reassured many that Israel would remain a shelter
in an unpredictable world -- the only place, as Sharon puts it, where
''Jews can defend themselves by themselves.'' But it also dismayed
those who hoped Israel might be a moral beacon, or just that it would
become a normal nation accepted like any other.
At the same time, the West is where Israel sees its future.
This is the
ultimate meaning of the withdrawal from Gaza and the barrier. The
disengagement plan is an attempt to turn Israel's back on its region
and reach westward toward the European Union and the United States.
From long before Oslo, Israelis dreamed of integration with their
neighbors into a new Middle East. Now they are willing to wait. Maybe
the Palestinians will eventually come around and form a democratic,
pacifist government. Maybe not. It does not matter.
This same Sharon adviser said the barrier was both ''a
physical and a
mental wall'' and that the mental component was more important. ''What
we really want is to turn our backs on the Arabs and never deal with
them again,'' he said, summarizing what he considers the prevailing
Israeli view. ''We don't want to be accepted into the Middle East
anymore.'' Another top adviser said of Sharon's plan: ''It could help
the Palestinians. It could hurt them. We don't care.''
hen
both sides can sustain their finest illusions about each other, as the
Israelis and Palestinians could for a while under Oslo, reality has a
way of rising to meet them. There was a day when Israeli Jews went to
Palestinian jazz clubs in Ramallah. Fear follows a more certain road to
fulfilling itself. The extremists who kill off illusions will staunchly
protect this route. If you believe you have no peace partner and act as
if you do not, you will have no peace partner.
When I asked Sharon if he still believed, as he once wrote,
that it
was possible to instill a ''psychology of defeat'' in the Arabs, he
turned his head to me and stared. ''No,'' he said after a silence,
speaking slowly for emphasis. ''I think that if Israel will show
weakness, it will be endless war.''
Sharon's methods of demonstrating strength -- the invasions
and
blockades of entire cities, the plotted killings of militants, the mass
arrests and detention of young men -- have devastated the Palestinians.
Rabin believed in fighting terror as if there were no negotiations and
negotiating as if there were no terror; by doing away with that second
thought -- with, it sometimes seems, any second thoughts -- Sharon has
reassured Israelis that they can rebuff the blows of terrorists. But he
has left the Palestinians with no dignified exit from the conflict,
weakening their pragmatic leaders. It is not only Israelis who say they
have no peace partner.
And it is not only Palestinians whose hopes have dimmed.
Sharon has
largely transferred the conflict from Israeli cities to the occupied
territories. But even if he manages to withdraw from Gaza, Israel will
remain a nation always on guard and often on offense. It will remain a
nation with support groups for parents whose children are enforcing an
occupation they would rather not think about. When a soldier forces a
Palestinian to strip at a checkpoint or when a soldier demolishes a
Palestinian's home, not only the Palestinian suffers and not only the
Palestinian may harden.
Sharon told me that ''if circumstances would have been
different,'' he
would probably have chosen farming rather than a military career.
Drawing his nation into implicit parallel, he added that he would have
preferred that Israel be known as one of the world's leaders in
in-vitro fertilization, that is, as a giver of life. ''I would have
liked that Israel will be known not for being warriors,'' he said.
That is a sentiment Sharon expresses fairly often. It is hard
to know,
as the words come out, how deeply he feels them. He had good reason to
accept and even embrace a garrison society as Israel's fate long ago.
It is harder for other Israelis to come to terms with it now. They
still dream of an Israel that is more about the blithe spirits of Tel
Aviv than the ghosts of Jerusalem, more about the dancers on the table
in Sharon's living room than the weary soldiers patrolling along his
wall.
Because it scorns negotiation and agreement, Sharon's
long-term
interim arrangement is an acceptance of, and maybe a goad to, enduring
conflict -- almost surely at a lower level, but sustained. As this
conflict grinds on, Israel will no doubt remain morally alert --
morally conflicted, as demonstrated by the soldiers who refuse to serve
in the territories -- but it will also remain morally compromised in
the eyes of the world. Its back to the rest of the Middle East, its
face to the Mediterranean, Israel could become ''the largest ghetto in
modern Jewish history,'' in the words of Ezrahi.
Sharon may be right. This could be the only way to secure
Israel's
survival as a Jewish haven. But it may mean a poignant legacy for this
indomitable, secular Jew born into the Middle East: an Israel that is
increasingly religious, walled off from its neighbors, simultaneously
yearning after and fearing a Western community of nations that sees it
as more and more foreign.
* James Bennet, a Times correspondent based in Washington,
was
chief of the newspaper's bureau in Jerusalem from September 2001 until
last month.
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