What Happens After Sharon

ARIEL Sharon is gone from politics, even if he still clings to life, but what his absence means for the region depends on whether you believe that he underwent some fundamental transformation in the last two years of his life.

If you believed, along with US President George W Bush, that Sharon was “a man of peace”, then his departure is a tragic loss for a promising peace process. If you thought that he never intended to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, just to impose borders on them, then his fall from power offers the first hope in years for progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.Israelis themselves cannot agree on which Sharon was real.There was the one they had always known, who had enthusiastically killed Arabs in every decade since he was a teenager, who spearheaded the movement to create Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and who was officially reprimanded for his “indirect responsibility” in the massacres of Palestinians in Beirut in 1982.And then there was the Sharon who forced the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip last summer.Even Israeli novelist Amos Oz, a founder of the Peace Now movement, was seduced by Sharon’s new image.Writing in The Guardian last week, he admitted that for a long time Sharon “symbolised for me everything I could not stand about my country: violent self-righteousness, a mixture of brutality and self-pity, insatiable greed for land, and a mystical religious phraseology….(He personified) the intoxication of Israelis with the power of power.And then two years ago a sudden change occurred.”Sharon started describing the 38-year-old Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories as a disaster for both sides.Then he removed all 8 500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, despite fierce opposition from within his own Likud party.Oz ended up believing that Sharon really could have made a durable peace with the Palestinians.The tragedy, in the novelist’s view, is that “what (Sharon) did in 35 years he only had two years to begin to undo.”A larger number of Israelis believe that Sharon never meant to negotiate a compromise peace with the Palestinians.Like many on the Israeli right, he had finally accepted, after decades of denial, that Israel could not keep all the occupied territories forever, because the higher Palestinian birth-rate would soon create a non-Jewish majority in the lands ruled by Israel.His conclusion, however, was that Israel should keep the parts of the West Bank where a Jewish majority could be sustained, and leave the Palestinians to rot in the rest.Since this would involve Israel holding onto all of Jerusalem and a wide belt surrounding it, plus the three major “settlement blocks” in the West Bank, no Palestinian leader, however “moderate”, could ever agree to it.Therefore, negotiations were essentially pointless: this arrangement would have to be imposed by force.So Sharon used terrorist attacks as an excuse not to negotiate even with Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate man by anybody’s measure.He pressed ahead with a “security wall” cutting deep into the West Bank that left all the key settlements on the Israeli side.He went on subsidising Jewish settlement in the parts of the West Bank that he planned to keep.The pretence that Israel wanted a negotiated settlement had to be maintained to avoid embarrassment to the US government, but Sharon’s real programme was unilateral withdrawals from unwanted bits of Palestinian territory like the Gaza Strip, and imposed borders around the parts Israel wanted to keep.Opinion polls consistently showed that a majority of Israelis not only believed that this was Sharon’s real strategy, but supported him in it.When the settler-fanatics in his own Likud party rebelled against this policy after the Gaza pull-out last year, Sharon simply walked away from Likud and created his own Kadima party, confident that he would easily win re-election in the national election on 28 March.He would have, too – but now all the certainties have vanished.If the election were held next week, Kadima would win about a third of the seats in the Knesset even without Sharon at its head, and go on to create a coalition that would continue Sharon’s policy.But Kadima is so new that it doesn’t even have a constitution or an agreed method for choosing a new leader.Israeli politics is a fratricidal business at the best of times, and Kadima could easily wound itself fatally between now and the end of March.In which case some interesting new possibilities open up.With the exception of Ehud Barak’s short-lived Labour government at the turn of the millennium, Israel has been run for the past decade by Likud governments that basically did not want to negotiate with the Palestinians.But Labour now has a new leader, Amir Peretz, who sounds genuinely interested in a negotiated peace.A fairly small shift in Israeli voting intentions could make Labour the largest single party in March.Then Peretz might lead the new coalition government, and a revival of Israeli-Palestinian talks on a permanent peace settlement would enter the realm of possibility.Half a dozen other outcomes are equally likely, so it would be unwise to count any chickens yet, but there is more reason to hope than there has been for a long time.- Project Syndicate * Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.If you thought that he never intended to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, just to impose borders on them, then his fall from power offers the first hope in years for progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.Israelis themselves cannot agree on which Sharon was real.There was the one they had always known, who had enthusiastically killed Arabs in every decade since he was a teenager, who spearheaded the movement to create Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and who was officially reprimanded for his “indirect responsibility” in the massacres of Palestinians in Beirut in 1982.And then there was the Sharon who forced the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip last summer.Even Israeli novelist Amos Oz, a founder of the Peace Now movement, was seduced by Sharon’s new image.Writing in The Guardian last week, he admitted that for a long time Sharon “symbolised for me everything I could not stand about my country: violent self-righteousness, a mixture of brutality and self-pity, insatiable greed for land, and a mystical religious phraseology….(He personified) the intoxication of Israelis with the power of power.And then two years ago a sudden change occurred.”Sharon started describing the 38-year-old Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories as a disaster for both sides.Then he removed all 8 500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, despite fierce opposition from within his own Likud party.Oz ended up believing that Sharon really could have made a durable peace with the Palestinians.The tragedy, in the novelist’s view, is that “what (Sharon) did in 35 years he only had two years to begin to undo.”A larger number of Israelis believe that Sharon never meant to negotiate a compromise peace with the Palestinians.Like many on the Israeli right, he had finally accepted, after decades of denial, that Israel could not keep all the occupied territories forever, because the higher Palestinian birth-rate would soon create a non-Jewish majority in the lands ruled by Israel.His conclusion, however, was that Israel should keep the parts of the West Bank where a Jewish majority could be sustained, and leave the Palestinians to rot in the rest.Since this would involve Israel holding onto all of Jerusalem and a wide belt surrounding it, plus the three major “settlement blocks” in the West Bank, no Palestinian leader, however “moderate”, could ever agree to it.Therefore, negotiations were essentially pointless: this arrangement would have to be imposed by force.So Sharon used terrorist attacks as an excuse not to negotiate even with Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate man by anybody’s measure.He pressed ahead with a “security wal
l” cutting deep into the West Bank that left all the key settlements on the Israeli side.He went on subsidising Jewish settlement in the parts of the West Bank that he planned to keep.The pretence that Israel wanted a negotiated settlement had to be maintained to avoid embarrassment to the US government, but Sharon’s real programme was unilateral withdrawals from unwanted bits of Palestinian territory like the Gaza Strip, and imposed borders around the parts Israel wanted to keep.Opinion polls consistently showed that a majority of Israelis not only believed that this was Sharon’s real strategy, but supported him in it.When the settler-fanatics in his own Likud party rebelled against this policy after the Gaza pull-out last year, Sharon simply walked away from Likud and created his own Kadima party, confident that he would easily win re-election in the national election on 28 March.He would have, too – but now all the certainties have vanished.If the election were held next week, Kadima would win about a third of the seats in the Knesset even without Sharon at its head, and go on to create a coalition that would continue Sharon’s policy.But Kadima is so new that it doesn’t even have a constitution or an agreed method for choosing a new leader.Israeli politics is a fratricidal business at the best of times, and Kadima could easily wound itself fatally between now and the end of March.In which case some interesting new possibilities open up.With the exception of Ehud Barak’s short-lived Labour government at the turn of the millennium, Israel has been run for the past decade by Likud governments that basically did not want to negotiate with the Palestinians.But Labour now has a new leader, Amir Peretz, who sounds genuinely interested in a negotiated peace.A fairly small shift in Israeli voting intentions could make Labour the largest single party in March.Then Peretz might lead the new coalition government, and a revival of Israeli-Palestinian talks on a permanent peace settlement would enter the realm of possibility.Half a dozen other outcomes are equally likely, so it would be unwise to count any chickens yet, but there is more reason to hope than there has been for a long time. – Project Syndicate * Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.