Charles Krauthammer
The New Middle East- The Return of Ariel Sharon
Foreign Affairs Editorial
The Weekly Standard
Published: 02/19/2001
Imagine General Douglas MacArthur, come back to life in, say, 1980,
defeating Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination and going on to
become president, crushing President Jimmy Carter more resoundingly than
either George McGovern or Barry Goldwater had been beaten. Well, the
equally
improbable has just happened in Israel, minus the resurrection.
To be sure, Ariel Sharon, who won the prime ministership in a landslide,
did not quite rise from the dead. After his disgrace in the Lebanon war
in the
early 1980s, he slowly worked his way back to political viability.
Within a
few years, he had been appointed to minor ministerial posts in various
Israeli administrations. His final rehabilitation came when he was
appointed foreign minister by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1998 and
participated in the Wye River negotiations with King Hussein, Yasser
Arafat, and President Clinton.
But he was still considered unelectable. Not only because of his age
(72)
but because of his history. As a young commander in the Suez campaign of
1956, he sent his paratroopers into the Mitla Pass against orders; 38 of
his men were killed, a terrible toll in a war in which total Israeli
casualties
were only 231. Sharon's military career was seriously damaged.
In 1973, he redeemed himself on that same peninsula. With Israel reeling
from the surprise Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal, he led a
courageous
and risky reverse-crossing of the canal that encircled the Egyptians and
led to their surrender. True to his bold and erratic form, however, just
a
decade later he was disgraced again, leading Israel on its ill-fated
Lebanon invasion and found indirectly responsible for a massacre carried
out by
Lebanese Christians.
In fact, one of Barak's campaign slogans stressed that he was the man
who
had gotten Israel out of Lebanon, while Sharon was the man who had
gotten
Israel in. The problem for Barak, however, is that while he got Israel
out
of Lebanon, he also imported Lebanon into the heart of Israel: The
endless
guerrilla warfare, the daily killings, the roadside bombings, the
drive-by
shootings, the constant fear that had been the life of the soldiers
rotating through Lebanon is now the life of all Israelis who live
anywhere near
their Palestinian neighbors.
Sharon's accession to power was the direct result of this catastrophic
political failure by Barak. It began last July with the diplomatic
debacle
at Camp David. Barak surprised not only the Palestinians but the
American
mediators, and indeed his own close associates, with his astonishing
concessions: offering to divide Jerusalem; to give up Israel's
sovereignty
over its holiest site, the Temple Mount; to yield more than 90 percent
of
the West Bank, including the strategically crucial Jordan Valley. Not
only
were these concessions unprecedented, they were in direct contradiction
to
the campaign promises he had made just a year earlier. Why, even Leah
Rabin, widow of Barak's mentor, said that Yitzhak would be "turning in
his grave"
upon hearing what Barak had offered on Jerusalem.
But unlike his mentor Rabin, who also betrayed his campaign promises but
at
least brought home a piece of parchment signed on the White House lawn,
Barak brought home nothing. Worse than nothing. Sensing Barak's weakness
and desperation and pressing for even better terms, Arafat soon launched
the
low-level guerrilla war now plaguing Israel.
The betrayal of his allies, the humiliation at Camp David, and finally
the
ongoing war-which led a wobbly Barak to offer even greater
concessions-totally undercut whatever support he had in the public and
in
parliament. By late 2000, his government had collapsed. Going into this
election, he had the support of a mere one-quarter of the Knesset.
Here is where Sharon got lucky. Polls showed Barak trailing very badly
against Benjamin Netanyahu, who had come back from a self-imposed
political
exile and was preparing to run for prime minister. Barak was 30 points
behind. Barak knew he didn't have a chance. But he thought he might have
a
chance against caretaker Likud leader Ariel Sharon (who took over the
party
when Netanyahu resigned after his 1999 defeat), since Sharon's checkered
past had for decades made him politically unacceptable to a large number
of
Israelis.
Barak maneuvered. He resigned, calling a snap election. Netanyahu would
be
legally excluded from running on a technicality, because he was not a
member of parliament. Even the jaded Israeli political system could not
stomach so cynical a move. The Knesset quickly moved to change the law
to allow
Netanyahu to run, but Netanyahu wisely decided not to because the
Knesset
would not dissolve itself, and the current Knesset is so fractured as to
be
ungovernable. Netanyahu stepped aside. Sharon became the improbable
challenger. He then won by the largest margin in Israeli history, an
unheard of 25 points.
He won because of Barak's incompetence and cynicism. He won because of
Netanyahu's caution. But most of all, he won because of Yasser Arafat.
II
Arafat made a fool of Barak. He proved, even to much of the Israeli
left,
that the entire theory of preemptive concessions, magnanimous gestures,
rolling appeasement was an exercise in futility. Israelis were shocked
by
how far Barak had gone. Dividing Jerusalem was something that no Israeli
government even considered for 35 years. Equally unthinkable was giving
up
the Jordan Valley, Israel's buffer against tank attack from the east.
Barak's own Labor party for 35 years maintained that it should never be
given up. Barak's own army chief of staff said giving it up threatened
Israel's very existence.
It didn't stop there. By the end, just days before the election, Barak
was
offering 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank-plus pieces of Israel
proper to make up the full 100 percent. He was prepared to give the
Palestinians not only their own state but control of the border
crossings
with Egypt and Jordan. Previous Israeli governments had refused to
countenance that because there could then be no controlling the flow of
weapons into Palestine and thus no possibility of a Palestinian state
being
demilitarized.
Working with an equally lame-duck Bill Clinton, Barak tried desperately
in
the final weeks of his administration to wrap up a deal and save himself
politically. Arafat reacted with characteristic cunning (always
misinterpreted in the West as indecision): He equivocated, pocketing
concessions, offering nothing, letting Barak twist in the wind.
Arafat did all this knowing that it would bring on Sharon. Indeed, the
Palestinian Authority broadcast instructions to Israeli Arabs to boycott
the
election, thus assuring Sharon's victory, even had the election been
close.
With Sharon, Arafat will meet resistance. And that resistance may spark
international pressure on Israel and, perhaps better, a regional war.
As pointed out by Ehud Ya'ari, a leading Israeli journalist who has
known
and studied Arafat for over 30 years, a regional war has long been
Arafat's
fondest dream. He knows the Palestinians will always be too weak to
fight
the Israelis head on. And he knows that the best he can get from any
peace
agreement is a small Palestinian state, perhaps with part of Jerusalem.
The
only way to achieve the real dream of conquering all of Palestine, which
would make him Saladin, would be to trigger a replay of 1948 with five
Arab
states invading Israel, but this time with modern armies, modern
weapons,
modern leadership, and massive oil wealth behind them.
That is his ultimate strategy. But he has more limited interim strategic
objectives as well. These less cataclysmic calculations center on the
new
administration in Washington. The Arabs have a rather romantic view of
George W. Bush, remembering that his father, and particularly his
secretary
of state James Baker, were quite tough on the Likud government of
Yitzhak
Shamir in the early 1990s. What they see now is the perfect alignment of
the stars: a hard-line Bush administration clashing with a hard-line
Likud
administration. No Israeli government can long afford a breach with
America. Tension between Israel and its one ally would undermine its
international position and make it far more susceptible to Palestinian
demands.
True. Nonetheless, Arafat is probably misreading the younger Bush. Baker
is
not back. The Bush team is hardly eager to get near the
Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Indeed, the chief objective of Bush's national security
advisers
is to extract themselves as much as they can from the negotiating morass
into which Bill Clinton, with his frenetic legacy-hunting, inserted the
United States. And ironically, the one Israeli George W. Bush probably
knows best is the man who took him on a helicopter tour of the
territories in
1998 and whom he subsequently lavishly praised: Ariel Sharon.
III
Whether intended or not, Arafat will now face Sharon. And he is counting
on
Sharon's reputation, his very name, to cast Israel as the heavy in the
inevitable coming crisis. Sharon carries baggage, most famously Sabra
and
Shatila, the Palestinian villages that suffered a massacre at the hands
of
Christian Phalangists during the Lebanon war. An Israeli commission
found
Sharon, Israel's defense minister at the time, "indirectly responsible"
for
not anticipating and thus preventing the massacre.
Sharon's indirect responsibility, however, is often inflated into more.
For
example, consider a front-page article by Lee Hockstader in the
Washington
Post (February 3, 2001): "At the time, Sharon was leading Israel's
invasion
of Lebanon and made no attempt to stop the militiamen from attacking the
refugees." This implies that Sharon knew that the massacre was taking
place. The fact is that he did not. Allegations that he had discussed it
in
advance with Phalangist leaders led Sharon to file a libel suit in New
York City.
The court unequivocally found the allegation to be false.
Moreover, it is remarkable that Sharon's indirect responsibility for a
massacre that occurred 18 years ago should be constantly cited and held
up
as a disqualification for leadership, while Arafat's direct
responsibility
for a myriad of terrorist massacres both predating and postdating 1982
(including the cold-blooded execution of the U.S. ambassador in Sudan)
seems to concern no one. It has been consigned to the memory hole.
Israelis have accepted Arafat as a negotiating partner. Americans too.
Bill Clinton had
him to the White House more often than any other leader on the planet.
Yet
Sharon, uniquely, is considered damaged goods.
Moreover, this is the same Ariel Sharon with whom the Palestinians
negotiated quite freely at Wye River in 1998. Everyone seems to have
forgotten that Sharon, then Netanyahu's foreign minister, helped
negotiate
the agreement, ending in a White House ceremony in which a dying King
Hussein spoke movingly about peace and the progress they had just made.
Abu
Mazen, Arafat's number two, subsequently gave a rather favorable
Thatcher-on-Gorbachev assessment of Sharon as interlocutor.
The other charge against Sharon is that his visit to the Temple Mount at
the end of September 2000 is responsible for the current fighting. It
was a
phony excuse at the time and it remains a phony excuse today. Abu Mazen
himself said on Palestinian radio that the visit was "only a pretext."
It
was after the Camp David summit-when Arafat refused Barak's offers and
President Clinton publicly blamed Arafat for the failure of the
talks-that
the Palestinian leadership decided it needed to renew the conflict to
regain its international footing. "We decided on this [the intifada],"
explained
Abu Mazen, "to demonstrate our rejection of the ideas and plans offered
by
Israel at the Camp David summit."
IV
Ironically, it is Sharon's very reputation as a tough and ruthless
warrior
that gives hope in some quarters that he can be the man to make peace.
Sharon was important in securing peace with Egypt. He is the defense
minister who forcibly evacuated and destroyed the Israeli settlements in
the Sinai in compliance with the Egyptian-Israeli treaty.
Is he going to be Nixon in China?
No. And not because he might not want to. Sharon has a history of
unpredictability. He might be tempted. The problem is, there is no China
to
go to. If the Palestinians rejected the abject appeasement Barak offered
them, where is there for Sharon to go? After the Israeli electorate
spoke
so resoundingly in repudiating Barak, no one in his right mind, not even
what
is left of the Israeli left, will go much farther.
What Barak demonstrated for all but the most deluded is that there is no
partner on the other side. The Palestinians don't want a final peace,
because, being the weaker party, they would at this point in history
achieve only half a loaf at most, and they have been raised from infancy
to
consider that surrender. Arafat's strategy is clear: continued
agitation, continued
unrest, continued guerrilla war that over time will either (1)
demoralize
Israel into caving in, or (2) spark an Israeli military reaction that
will,
at the least, alienate the United States, and, at the most, ignite a
regional war that the Arabs might once and for all win.
In a recent campaign meeting with "Russians," as the million new
immigrants
from the ex-Soviet Union are known, Barak justified his concessions as
having unmasked the true face of Arafat. At which point an audience
member
said, "Yes, you unmasked him, but then you continued with appeasement as
if
you had not."
Barak never faced the logical consequence of the unmasking. He wavered
and
equivocated. He issued his Yom Kippur ultimatum-stop the violence within
48
hours or else-then withdrew it. He called "time out" in the negotiations
when the Palestinians did something particularly hideous-like lynching
two
Israelis in Ramallah-and then returned to negotiations as soon as the
dead
were buried. He proved a negotiator with no red lines, no point beyond
which he wouldn't go.
The most astonishing fact about Barak's year and a half of negotiations
is
that Arafat never made a counteroffer. The talks were always about
Israeli
concessions. By the end, Barak had moved the goal post 90 yards down the
field to the other side. Arafat had hardly moved an inch from the
original
maximal demands enunciated when the Oslo peace process began in 1993.
Sharon's election was a referendum on precisely this "peace process" and
constitutes a national rejection, by an overwhelming majority, of
Barak's
new and supremely dangerous concessions. The day after his election,
Sharon
declared he was not bound by any of them.
Nonetheless, the damage is done, and it is lasting. Israeli policy can
change, but the change Barak wrought in American policy may be
irreversible. For 35 years it was American policy to support an
undivided Jerusalem. That support is now in ruins. In his final speech
on the Middle East, President Clinton called for the division of
Jerusalem. Can the Bush administration turn back the clock? Can it be
more pro-Israel on Jerusalem than a recent Israeli government?
The Palestinians are well aware of the gift that Barak has bequeathed
them.
Within hours of Sharon's election, the Palestinian Authority issued a
statement after its weekly cabinet meeting in Gaza calling on the new
government in Israel "to resume the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations
from
the point they have reached."
V
Fat chance. Sharon's election is a decisive statement by the Israeli
people
that they reject the new baseline. Sharon's task is to resist the
inevitable pressure-diplomatic pressure from abroad, violent pressure in
the
territories-to pick up where Barak left off. His mission is not to get a
final peace. There is no final peace to be had, unless it is the peace
of
the grave. His mandate is to restore the relative stability and security
of
the Netanyahu years-there's no hope of returning to the comparative
nirvana
of the pre-Oslo years-when Arab expectations were kept low, and
negotiations were about the margins.
Above all, his mandate is to restore Israel's deterrent. Barak responded
to
Palestinian violence by continuing negotiations and offering more
concessions. Not surprisingly, a recent poll of Palestinians found that
an
overwhelming majority believed that the additional concessions Israel
made
at the last-ditch preelection negotiations at Taba, Egypt, were a result
of
the violence. The Palestinians also look at Barak's unilateral
withdrawal
from Lebanon and conclude: If the Lebanese could get all they wanted
from
the Israelis by violence without negotiation or compromise, why can't
we?
Sharon needs to give them an answer: For Israelis, Lebanon was not home.
Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley and the Galilee are home. Restoring
Israel's deterrent does not mean an all-out war with the Palestinians,
but it does
mean making the Palestinians pay a higher price for violence: No
negotiations without a cessation of violence; no lifting of the closure
of
Palestinian territory; no work within Israel. (It is rather odd for
people
to claim that, while they are making war, the enemy is obliged to give
them
employment.)
Deterrence also applies, even more dangerously, to the Lebanese front.
When
Barak evacuated Israeli troops from Lebanon, he warned that any
cross-border attack would be met by Israeli retaliation not just at
Hezbollah and Beirut but at the puppet master itself, Syria. True to
form, he flinched.
Hezbollah is now dug in all along the northern Israeli border, with
Katyusha rockets capable of reaching the suburbs of Haifa.
It will be Sharon's job to make good on Barak's threat if and when
Hezbollah tests his resolve. And that is where the danger lies. An
emboldened
Hezbollah could easily trigger an Israeli retaliation that could in turn
bring Syria actively into war-that could spark a regional conflagration.
Fear of such escalation made Barak helpless in the face of Lebanese
cross-border provocations and attacks. Sharon understands that Israel
cannot sustain this position of non-deterrence because in the end it is
only
deterrence-not goodwill, not pieces of paper, not even the friendship of
the United States-that keeps Israel secure.
For the last quarter-century, the general Arab consensus was that any
attack on Israel would render the Arabs worse off. That consensus has
dangerously eroded. It is Sharon's task to restore it.
Following Barak in the prime ministership is a blessing and a curse. It
is
not hard to follow the act of the worst leader in Israel's history,
probably the worst leader in the West since Chamberlain. On the other
hand, Barak has left his country in a condition of insecurity and
vulnerability not seen
since 1949. Given the instability of the Israeli political system, and
the
narrow majority he'll have in parliament, Sharon's tenure may not be
long.
But it could be one of the most decisive in Israeli history.
