If you can judge a man by the enemies he keeps, then Ariel Sharon is someone in urgent need of a reappraisal. Reviled for two decades as the Bulldozer, the embodiment of the intransigent Israeli right, yesterday he became something else — the unlikeliest standard bearer for those who yearn for progress in the Middle East. You only had to look at those denouncing him, as he won an emphatic 67-45 vote in favor of his planned pullout from Gaza in the Knesset Tuesday night. The most zealous of the settlers, parading their children in their thousands outside the parliament, condemning the prime minister for the treachery of giving away land that, they insist, was bequeathed to the Jews by the Almighty Himself; the theocratic rabbis, ruling that all those who believe in the Torah are divinely compelled to oppose the PM; the nationalist politicians, heckling Sharon from the back of the Knesset chamber, telling this hawk of all hawks to “go home”.
Ariel Sharon has become public enemy No. 1 to Israel’s far right, which is why, if only temporarily, he deserves the support of the left — in Israel and beyond. In Israel, they gave it. It was not just the decision by Labour’s 19 Knesset members, joined by the left- wing Meretz party, to back Sharon, in a bid to cancel out the almost equivalent number — nearly half — of his own Likud MKs who voted against him. It was also the sentiment of the wider peace movement, believing that — bizarre as it may seem — Sharon was, in this specific contest at least, their champion.
There is more to this than the simple calculus of “my enemy’s enemy”. By pushing for a Gaza withdrawal, whatever his long-term motives, Sharon is finally beginning a process which Israel’s doves — to say nothing of the outside world — have sought for nearly four decades. At long last, Israel is proposing to rid itself of part of the territory it won in 1967. Not all of it, not even most of it, but some of it. And that, after 37 years of policy in the opposite direction, constantly tightening Israel’s hold on those lands, is one of the most significant moments in the country’s history.
It is true that Sharon’s destination is not the same as that of the Israeli peace camp. He wants to give away Gaza in return for keeping large chunks of the rest of the occupied territories. The peacemaking left see things differently. For them, the Gaza withdrawal is the first move in a process that would see the bulk of the 1967 territories handed to the Palestinians. Put simply, the peace camp’s plan is Gaza first. Sharon’s plan may well be Gaza last.
Despite that vast difference in long-term objectives, progressives understand they have to be on Sharon’s side for now. His destination may be A, theirs may be Z, but the first step is the same — and, right now, he is the one with the power to make it. If only for this first step, the Gaza pullout, Sharon and the doves must walk together. The rewards are enormous. Sharon has done what no leader of the left could ever have done with as much national credibility: he has, at long last, taken on the settlers and challenged the logic of their cause. He quoted Menachem Begin’s praise of the settlers as great pioneers — and his warning that they suffered from “a complex of messianism”. For Sharon, so long the patron of the settlement project, to utter these words is a tectonic shift. He is a father turning on his children.
Words, though, are the least of it. The planned dismantling of 21 Gaza settlements and a handful in the West Bank is the reason for the left’s current embrace of Sharon. None have come down since 1982’s evacuation of Yamit in Sinai and certainly none in the territories designated as Palestinian lands. If the prime minister sticks to his word, surviving another nail-biting vote next March, that taboo will at last be broken. Territorial compromise will no longer be an abstract horror, but a real, manageable prospect.
More important, especially for the left, is the future of territorial concessions. Outsiders who have spent 37 years demanding an Israeli return to the 1967 borders and the removal of the settlements, should be taking careful note of these past 48 hours. A Gaza pullout could set a precedent for further withdrawals. On the other hand, if this is how difficult it is to leave Gaza — a luckless strip of land with around 8,000 settlers and few biblical resonances — then how much harder will it be for an Israeli government to pull out of the West Bank, with a Jewish population in the hundreds of thousands and a terrain even many moderate Israelis regard as the heart of the biblical homeland? If this is the treatment meted out to an arch-hawk like Sharon, now branded a traitorous friend of Yasser Arafat, what fate would await a dovish leader ready to go much further?
Progressives should draw a double lesson from Sharon’s move. First, sometimes even hate figures can become allies. Second, every slogan, every panacea, no matter how sound in theory, needs to survive in the chill wind of reality. These past few days have given us a blast of that cold air.
