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In the Shadow of Sharon
By BENNY MORRIS
Li-On, Israel
New York Times
January 6, 2006
IT is too early to assess Ariel Sharon's legacy.
To be sure, he will be remembered as one of Israel's
great field commanders, the wily, bulldozing general
who cracked the Egyptian bastion at Um Katef-Abu
Awgeila in 1967 and led the crossing of the Suez
Canal in 1973, turning the tables in the Yom Kippur
War. With greater ambiguity, he will go down as
the defense minister who orchestrated the 1982 invasion
of Lebanon that, paradoxically, set Yasir Arafat
on the road to Oslo and (however insincerely) peace
with Israel.
Mr. Sharon will also be known as the chief architect
of the Likud Party's settlement drive in the occupied
territories. His defeat, as prime minister, of the
second Palestinian intifada will doubtless be carefully
studied, once the hysteria and hype die down, as
a model of a relatively clean, successful counterinsurgency.
But that is for the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Sharon's
stroke has plunged Israel and the region into deep
confusion.
Just a few days ago, there were a handful of certainties.
All the polls indicated that in the coming Israeli
general elections, scheduled for late March, Mr.
Sharon's new Kadima Party would win handily, reinstalling
him in the premiership. It was not clear how large
a mandate he would enjoy or who would be his coalition
partners. But a Sharon-led Israel was a certainty.
Another certainty was that his next term in office
would be shadowed by the corruption investigation
and charges that have already forced the resignation
of his son, Omri Sharon, from the Knesset. But again,
this scandal was not expected to be a coalition-
or career-breaker: Israeli society has become too
jaded, or simply faces too many existential problems,
to give much weight to personal miscreancy.
Most important, there was a vague certainty that
there would be further steps toward a pacification
of Israel-Palestine and a separation of its two
warring tribes into two relatively homogeneous states.
Mr. Sharon had shown the way, courageously, remorselessly,
six months ago with the uprooting of the Jewish
settlements and the withdrawal of the Israel Defense
Forces from the Gaza Strip. And he had shown the
way, in defiance of often absurd and mendacious
criticism by the Palestinians and their supporters,
by pushing forward with the construction of the
barrier - overwhelmingly a fence, not a wall - between
the Arab West Bank and (Jewish) Israel more or less
along the 1967 Green Line.
Many expected, and some feared, that Mr. Sharon
would continue with such unilateral steps to separate
the two peoples and physically consolidate two separate
states. Unilateral, because he believed (as I do)
that there was and is no viable Palestinian peace
partner. The Palestinian national movement, he believed,
still, in the deepest, immutable recesses of its
heart, aspires to Israel's destruction and replacement
by an Arab-majority state, a "one-state solution."
That aspiration is why Yasir Arafat rejected the
two-state compromise proposed by Mr. Sharon's predecessor,
Ehud Barak, and President Bill Clinton in 2000 and
it is why, from the militant Islamic members of
Hamas through the Palestinian president, Mahmoud
Abbas, the Palestinian national movement refuses
to give up the "right of return" of the
refugees, the demographic battering ram with which
it hopes, ultimately, to bring Israel down.
Now, hopes for further daring steps like a unilateral
pullout from parts of the West Bank have been dashed.
What successor, however peace-minded, will have
the political will or ability to do something so
bold and politically problematic? It is profoundly
unclear who will win the coming elections and with
what sort of mandate: Ehud Olmert, the deputy prime
minister who is Mr. Sharon's likely successor as
head of the new Kadima list (a party without institutions
or structure and a leadership composed of Shimon
Peres, the former Labor Party leader, and former
Likud stalwarts); Amir Peretz, the new blue-collar
chief of the Labor Party; or Benjamin Netanyahu,
the resurrected head of the truncated Likud?
What is likely is that there will be no clear mandate
for any party or leader. Moreover, none of Mr. Sharon's
probable successors to the premiership is made of
that leadership stuff that ultimately endeared him
to the majority of Israelis.
One certainty remains. Israel, and especially and
paradoxically, its large moderate left and center,
is in the grip of a great sadness. Those opposed
to peace, in the slums of Rafah and the Jewish settlement
compound of downtown Hebron, can be expected to
rejoice (as they did when Mr. Sharon suffered his
small first stroke, on Dec. 18 ). The Islamic fundamentalists
and the so-called Palestinian secularists who view
Israel as a cancer and seek its destruction will
honk their horns and hand out candy to the cruelly
misled children of Gaza; and those Jews who are
unwilling to give up the dream of Greater Israel
and, perhaps, of ridding this land of its Arab usurpers,
will offer thanks to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob.
There will also be little sadness at Mr. Sharon's
passing among those Israelis and their Diaspora
supporters who have long demonized Mr. Sharon and
Israel and who long ago gave up any hope or desire
for a lasting Jewish state, and believe, or pretend
to believe, that Jews and Arabs can live together
like a bunch of mindless lambs in equality and under
one political roof.
But the solid center and left of Jewish Israel,
the country's majority, who want to trade land for
peace and reach a stable two-state solution, are
tuning into their televisions this day with heavy
hearts. They realize that the best hope for peace,
that most unlikely of peacemakers, is exiting the
stage and that a vista of turmoil and uncertainty
has opened up. To be sure, Israel's political structure
remains solid and reassuring. But at this bewildering
moment, for those interested in progress in the
peace process, there is little reason for hope.
Benny Morris, the author of "The Birth
of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,"
is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University
in Beersheba, Israel.
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In the Shadow
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IT
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