Ariel Sharon may be an increasingly ill old man, but it is fast becoming clear what he wants his political legacy to be: He wants to be the premier who sets Israel’s illegal frontiers in concrete across Palestinian land and do so while the world looks on and congratulates him for being reasonable.
Every Israeli leader has protested moderation in public. Meanwhile the government machine continues with pretty much the same hard-line policies regardless of who is in power. Only one man, Yitzhak Rabin, looked as if he might have abandoned the traditional Zionist political script — and he was shot dead.
But Sharon, as befits the insubordinate general that he once was, has taken the duplicitous international face of Zionist politics and recast it in himself, as an amiable, avuncular figure, tough but fair and sadly forced to take difficult repressive decisions because of Palestinian anarchy and violence. Sharon looks at the world’s cameras and says, “If only things could have been different — if only the Palestinians had been more reasonable, more grateful.” Then a crocodile tear slides down his cheek.
It is hard to believe that this is the same Sharon who pulled his men back to allow Christian militiamen to commit mass murder in the Palestinian-Lebanese refugee camps in Shatilla and Sabra. Yet Sharon’s new Kadima Party, which pundits believe is set to win the coming general elections, is being presented by the world’s media as a moderate alternative to radical Zionism. It is no such thing.
Sharon’s Gaza pullout was a military and administrative necessity, not an act of political sacrifice and generosity. Dramatic proof of this comes because the Israeli Army has now declared a wide swathe of this territory returned to the Palestinians to be a free-fire zone. Yet Sharon is given huge credit by the Americans for giving back part of what Israel had stolen in return for hanging on to other stolen land. The “road map to peace” specifically freezes settler development. Yet since Israel headed into that overlong interregnum between elections, Sharon’s caretaker government had pushed through almost a thousand new permissions for internationally illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
These new developments, the wall, the new free-fire zone in the north of the Gaza Strip, the attempted ban on Palestinian voters in East Jerusalem, serve no purpose other than to provoke. Indeed it is arguably their sole purpose. What the Zionists want are strong extremist voices in the Palestinian community. They want Hamas to triumph in the upcoming elections because they know that they will never be forced by Washington to talk to Hamas. If on the other hand moderate opinion were to win through, then however much their American Zionist supporters might object, the international community would compel the Israelis to sit down and talk honestly to the Palestinians. This is the moment that every Israeli leader, except perhaps Rabin, has always dreaded. Sharon could crown his career by destroying moderate Palestinian opinion, and handing at least the next decade to radicals.
