LONDON, 2 September 2004 — Despite his humiliating defeat at the hands of Likud rebels last month, Ariel Sharon Tuesday pressed ahead with his plan for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, presenting a new timetable for evacuation of settlements.
His actions threaten to exacerbate the split between his pragmatic expansionists and the diehard fundamental expansionists. Sharon still enjoys the support of most of his ministers and the Likud parliamentary faction, but this backing is fickle.
Regardless of his bravado, it is now doubtful whether Sharon can deliver the goods to his American masters.
This is also a heavy blow to Sharon’s would-be partner, the Labor leader Shimon Peres. But in the long run, it may also herald the emergence of a new political alignment, comprising Sharon’s followers in Likud, Labor and Shinui. This will give an organizational framework to the political consensus and class interests of Israel’s influential pro-American middle class.
Political experts tend to wonder at Sharon’s survival. He has managed to obfuscate the nuances of Israel’s political spectrum, and turn himself into a jack of all trades: A “negotiator”, a warmonger, a tough militarist and a “visionary peacemaker”. While building the separation wall, bombing Palestinian civilians, and planning extensive additions to West Bank settlements, he still has the Israeli center-left on his side.
Three months ago the so-called left rallied in Tel Aviv in support of Sharon’s “disengagement plan”. Laborite commentators in the press, including in the liberal Ha’aretz, are cheering for a government of national unity. This type of self-deception is a typical feature of the Israeli center-left, but the media’s preferential treatment of Sharon is a relatively new phenomenon.
There are two principal traditions in Israeli political history, and Sharon has a foot in both. Labor tradition is mostly about pragmatism, which translates into pragmatic expansionism or pragmatic moderation, according to changing circumstances.
Its goal is to grab the most land with the fewest Arabs on it, while maintaining a measure of international acceptability for Israel. The means: Building a large number of settlements in the occupied territories, not too near Palestinian centers of population — thus asserting facts on the ground while maintaining a constant soundtrack of peacemaking.
The Likud tradition is far more declarative than pragmatic, and is predicated on the ideology of territorial expansionism. The use of military force to achieve these goals is a matter of course. It doesn’t shy away from provocation and scorns international concern.
Sharon is a typical turncoat. He was a Labor Party member during his long service in the Haganah and the Israeli Defense Force, and temporarily deserted Likud to work for Yitzhak Rabin’s first government. His defection to Likud in the late 1970s was not due to a sudden ideological transformation. He never really abandoned Labor’s traditions and values, but felt that Likud would be a more convenient platform from which to implement them.
What could the Labor Party do but embrace its own maverick offspring, despite his official position in Likud? After all, it has always been part of the same deception, and never dreamed of creating a real ideological alternative to Likud.
No Labor leader intended to dismantle all the settlements, retreat to the internationally recognized 1967 border, or acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
Fortunately for them, Sharon supplied the magic remedy for their predicament: The disengagement plan. It has provided Peres with the perfect pretext for crawling back into Sharon’s government: Ensuring that the old pushmi-pullyu can carry on with a classic Laborite plan, turning Gaza into a huge prison, taking over most of the West Bank, and calling it peacemaking.
There is one salient advantage to this situation. It exposes the fact that the alleged conflict between the Zionist right and center-left in Israel has always been a sham. By taking the “lefty” slogans to the extreme, Sharon demonstrates to the whole world how bogus and insincere they were to start with. But perhaps they are now in a position to sell a softened version of Sharon’s nightmarish prescription for a pacified, rather than peaceful, Middle East. Sharon’s obstacle to becoming the unchallenged leader of the nation was planted by his real enemies inside Likud, rather than his nominal rivals in Labor. The battle over withdrawal delineates the real demarcation lines separating the pragmatic expansionists from the fundamental expansionists. But the referee, back in the White House, will call the final shots.
— Daphna Baram’s book, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, is published by Guardian Books.
