The Last of the Patriarchs

Aluf Benn

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002

Summary:  Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faces disaster on two fronts: ongoing unrest from the Palestinians on one side and a disintegrating domestic coalition on the other. Seemingly paralyzed, Sharon has not responded well to either. So far, Israelis have remained mostly loyal to the former general, and Washington has stayed largely supportive. Both those situations could change, however, unless Sharon comes up with a plan. He may already have one in mind, but not one anyone else is hoping for.

Aluf Benn is Diplomatic Correspondent for Ha'aretz, an Israeli daily newspaper. He has covered Israel's foreign policy and the Arab-Israeli peace process since 1993.

Sharon had also learned to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Two previous Likud premiers, Yitzhak Shamir and Netanyahu, fell from power soon after clashing with Washington. Sharon at first seemed headed for just such a clash: he had long been the strongest "America skeptic" in the Israeli leadership, going as far as to oppose the Kosovo war in 1999. But after becoming prime minister, Sharon decided to avoid confrontation with the United States. Somewhat grudgingly, he accepted the Mitchell report -- Washington's panacea for the Israeli-Palestinian crisis -- even though it called for a freeze in settlement building. He also acceded to the Tenet plan, a security addendum to the Mitchell report. But true to form, Sharon also demanded a "testing period" of seven days without Palestinian violence before entering the Tenet-Mitchell process -- thereby making its implementation more difficult. He withdrew this demand in early March only when pressured by a White House impatient to reach a cease-fire; Sharon announced that, given the high level of violence, achieving a week of quiet before talks began no longer seemed possible.

Fortunately for Sharon, cooperating with Washington has not in general proved difficult. Bush's declared reluctance to engage in Middle East peacemaking, in fact, was music to Sharon's ears. Relations were not initially smooth: having recognized Sharon as a potential troublemaker, the White House treated him suspiciously at first, and the State Department tried to micromanage the conflict. But then came September 11. Only days before the attacks on New York and Washington, Bush, bowing to Saudi pressure, had agreed to increase American involvement in the Middle East and launch a new peace initiative. After the attacks, however, Washington lost its patience for states with links to any form of terror. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which had long pressed the Palestinian cause with the United States, suddenly started looking like nurseries for al Qaeda terrorists -- and lost their influence overnight.

Sharon leapt at the opportunity this shift presented, publicly comparing Arafat to Osama bin Laden. When Washington rejected this characterization, Sharon, fearing that the United States would try to buy Arab support for the coming war on terror by pressuring Israel to make concessions, publicly lashed out at what he called Bush's "appeasement" policy. This risky gamble succeeded at first. When Secretary of State Colin Powell outlined America's new policy on November 19, 2001, he called for the creation of a Palestinian state -- but refrained from suggesting what its borders should look like or how to resolve delicate issues such as Jerusalem and refugees. The Powell plan also avoided setting the one thing Sharon dreaded the most: a timetable leading up to final-status talks.

The success of the U.S. war in Afghanistan further weakened moderates in the State Department and strengthened the administration's hawks, Sharon's ardent supporters in Washington. As suicide bombings continued in Israel, Bush adopted a new, tougher stance, voicing his support for Israel's "right of self-defense" (that is, its retaliatory operations), while increasing pressure on Arafat to combat terrorists. This pressure redoubled on January 3, when Israeli commandos intercepted the Karine A, a ship loaded with weapons from Iran en route to Palestinian territory. Having been shown intelligence evidence of Arafat's involvement, Bush felt deceived by the Palestinian leader, who had sworn that he knew nothing about it. The president came close to a total break with Arafat. Sharon failed to convince Bush to let him do away with his rival outright, but Palestinian credibility sank to its lowest point in Washington, and Sharon's freedom of action was enhanced even further.

This situation began to change again only in early March, when Washington, upset by the increasing violence, once more shifted gears on the Middle East. As the Bush team started preparing for the second phase of its war on terrorism -- a probable attack on Iraq -- it began to encounter growing opposition in the Arab world. The United States' closest Arab allies, Jordan and Egypt, openly criticized Bush's hands-off approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and warned Vice President Dick Cheney on his tour through the region that it was Sharon, not Saddam Hussein, who posed the real threat to peace.

Bush decided to send his special envoy, the retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, back to the area -- this time with a stronger mandate to mediate a cease-fire. Washington even overcame its traditional distaste for un involvement long enough to sponsor Security Council Resolution 1397, which called for an immediate end to hostilities and embraced the "vision" of Israel and Palestine living peacefully "side by side within secure and recognized borders." And when Sharon overplayed his hand militarily, warning about the need to "hit hard" at the Palestinians and ordering a bloody invasion of Palestinian towns, both Powell and Bush chastised the prime minister. At the time of this writing, however, it still remains to be seen how far Washington really plans to go -- that is, whether the recent American gestures are merely political attempts at damage control or signify an actual reengagement in peacemaking.

B.G. RETURNS

On the domestic front, Sharon's policy over the last year has been based on a commitment to the status quo. After the meteoric rise and fall first of Netanyahu and then of Barak, the Israeli public was tired of self-appointed revolutionaries and warmly endorsed an old, experienced conservative.

One key to understanding Sharon's approach as prime minister lies in his history. Unlike his predecessors, Sharon came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the shadow of David Ben Gurion -- Israel's founder and first prime minister. As a young, brash commando leader, Sharon became Ben Gurion's tool of retaliation against Arab terror attacks. Sitting in Ben Gurion's chair today, Sharon still likes to reminisce about the old days, and his eyes glimmer when he talks about special units now operating nightly in Palestinian towns -- on missions similar to the ones he used to undertake. In fact, his current policy of hitting PA installations to retaliate for terror attacks on Israelis developed in the 1950s, when the prime minister, "B.G.," would send Sharon to attack police stations in the West Bank. Then, as now, Israel believed that humiliating its Arab enemies would pressure them into curbing terror attacks. In both cases, this strategy has had mixed results: in the 1950s, Israel's retaliations inflamed the regional arms race and eventually led to the Sinai war of 1956, which was followed by a decade of relative quiet. In recent years, meanwhile, retaliations against the PA have had little positive effect.

Retaliation is not the only strategy Sharon has borrowed from his old boss. His domestic policies sound like old Zionist propaganda pledges. He hopes to import a million Jewish immigrants in the next decade, from Argentina and elsewhere, and to use them to settle the Negev Desert. Such goals may be noble, but the Israeli public today cares more about its own prosperity than about the Zionist dream, and it has demanded immediate solutions for pressing economic and social problems -- solutions that Sharon has not been able to offer.