The New York Times Sunday Week in Review section has a long, very interesting article on Sharon this morning by James Bennett, emphasizing, as the Martin Indyk piece did, his paradoxical character. Bennet ends the article with a discussion of the dark side, which is the side that makes sense to me.
Warning: it's long.
Comments?
March 17, 2002
ABOUT FACE
The Enigma That Is Sharon
By JAMES BENNET
nytimes.com
JERUSALEM
There are times, as they bestride the carnage and chaos here, that Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat seem a little like Godzilla and Mothra, roused from political slumber to fight out their antediluvian rivalry over the vulnerable heads of a terrified city. Indomitable and rubbery, equipped with mysterious powers, the two have laid waste to offices, stores, airports and lives — so far without mortally wounding each other.
The question is whether either can address their dispute with anything besides savage blows. After more than a year of pressing Mr. Arafat to answer that question, the Bush administration has begun putting it to Mr. Sharon.
Now, Prime Minister Sharon does not seem like a subtle man. He is known to Israelis as "the Bulldozer," to Palestinians as "the Butcher." But what Ariel Sharon really wants — his endgame for the Middle East conflict — is a mystery.
Some people here believe he would sign a far-reaching peace agreement, if Mr. Arafat would first put a stop to all Palestinian violence. Others insist he is executing a dark master plan, provoking Palestinian violence to build a pretext for occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And some say he is making it up as he goes along, scrambling daily for his political footing as he fends off his chief rival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Seeking support in the Arab world for a possible war on Iraq, the Bush administration recoiled from a massive Israeli assault on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and demanded a withdrawal. The administration's special envoy, Anthony C. Zinni, is here now, hoping to broker a cease-fire.
In that effort, Mr. Sharon could be either ally or adversary, and it is a testimony to his wiliness that it is impossible to know for sure which he is. It is possible, in fact, even he is not sure.
In Israeli politics, nobody is better credentialed to make peace than Mr. Sharon, though that is because he seems so unlikely to do so. He has repeatedly said he would make "painful concessions" for peace, provided the Palestinians first stopped all violence. They have not put him to the test.
"Only the hawks can make peace," said Meir Sheetrit, the Israeli minister of justice. "Sharon is the best person now to make such a step."
It seems like a fantasy, in the shadow of the recent violence here. But this Nixon-to-China — or Menachem- Begin-to-Camp-David — scenario has its adherents in Israel, who cite Mr. Sharon's stage of life and his searing experience fighting Israel's war in Lebanon.
In fact, some settlers have long had a fear about Mr. Sharon, their ardent supporter: Lebanon might have cost him his nerve. "He feels that he wants to clear his name," said Shaul Goldstein, a settler leader.
As Israel's defense minister in 1982, Mr. Sharon led the invasion into Lebanon. He was forced to resign after a commission of inquiry held him indirectly responsible for the slaughter, by Christian militiamen, of Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. Israeli protesters called him a murderer. In his autobiography, "Warrior," Mr. Sharon, who rejects any blame, recalled that residents of nearby kibbutzim would not give one of his sons a lift to high school.
Mr. Goldstein proposed what he called a "theory of conspiracy": Mr. Sharon's aides have exaggerated the American pressure to give him an excuse to withdraw from refugee camps that the army has invaded in the West Bank. "Maybe Sharon does not want to go into the camps because of Sabra and Shatila," he said.
Mr. Sharon is thinking about his place in history, many analysts here believe. He does not trust the younger generation to negotiate with the same regard for Israel's security needs, they say.
Moving toward peace would cost Mr. Sharon his right-wing support, but he is already less popular than Mr. Netanyahu within his own party, the Likud. To be re- elected next year he must have his party's backing.
A move toward peace could permit Mr. Sharon to lock down the political center, and the idea has been floated here of his running, with the dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, at the head of a new fusion party. Last week, he accepted without blinking the resignations of two far-right ministers, over what they saw as a softening toward the Palestinians.
"In terms of his willingness to do something bold and sweeping, he's capable of doing that," said Amotz Asa-El, the editor in chief of the international Jerusalem Post. "That's how he earned his fame as a general." Those who envision this, and those, like Mr. Goldstein, who fear it, like to point out that Mr. Sharon evacuated the settlements in Sinai after peace with Egypt.
What is missing from this scenario, they argue, is not Nixon but China. A peace agreement is something Mr. Sharon would "dream about," said Limor Livnat, another minister in his government. But, she said, "the issue is whether the Palestinians are willing."
The Ariel Sharon in this scenario is the one who declared early this year, in reflecting on the fact that he was almost 74: "There was one thing I wanted to accomplish: to reach a political settlement which will lead to peace with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. That, I thought, would be the last thing I would do in a political life. Then I would have been glad to go back to the farm."
However, there is another, different Ariel Sharon. He is the man who declared earlier this month: "The aim is to increase the number of losses on the other side. Only after they've been battered will we be able to conduct talks." This is the Ariel Sharon who carried a club as a boy to defend the family farm against Arab attacks and, according to his critics, never put it down.
IN this darker scenario, Lebanon is not a lesson learned but a template. While talking about concessions for peace to con the Americans and his centrist allies, Mr. Sharon is carefully executing a long- term plan to topple Mr. Arafat and destroy the Palestinian Authority, according to those who hold to this view.
Here is how this plan was supposedly executed: First, Mr. Sharon provoked the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 by visiting a site holy to both Muslims and Jews in the company of hundreds of police officers. That enabled him to scuttle peace negotiations and be elected on a promise of peace and security.
Then, by blockading Palestinian areas, selectively killing suspected militants and attacking Palestinian security forces, he guaranteed that chaos and terrorism would rise, providing pretexts for ever more aggressive assaults. An inexperienced American president, impressed by an older general and intent on a war against terrorism, played into his hands, this scenario goes.
Along the way, Mr. Sharon persuaded Israelis that they had been dangerously naïve. Almost half of them, according to a recent poll, now support the "transfer" of Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza, and three- quarters support exiling Mr. Arafat. So, by constantly getting tougher on the Palestinians, Mr. Sharon could please his right-wing base and push the political center to the right at the same time.
In this scenario, Mr. Sharon saw to it that China would never want to receive him.
The echoes of Lebanon in the oratory and violence of today are eerie. Then as now, Mr. Sharon complained that Mr. Arafat had built a "kingdom of terror." Then as now, he rejected public criticism as naïve at best and politically motivated at worst, and a comfort to the enemy either way. Then as now, Mr. Sharon chafed at American intervention for a cease-fire, which he believed Mr. Arafat manipulated to stall for time. He demanded that Mr. Arafat and his henchmen leave Lebanon, and he achieved that, though Israel became mired in an 18-year war of attrition.
The Ariel Sharon of the first scenario is the one who declared recently that he envisioned the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. That of the second scenario wrote, in "Warrior," that Palestinians should find a political home in "the Palestinian state of Jordan." As he wrote, "We must say very clearly that our concern for our own survival does not permit the establishment of a second Palestinian state on the West Bank."
Mr. Arafat's record, of course, has supplied enough clues to various, conflicting identities for a seminar on scenarios, from terrorist to daring peace partner. Whether any scenario is accurate, Mr. Sharon's stated conditions for a possible agreement fall far short of offers Mr. Arafat has already spurned.
Perhaps both men have changed, or can change. Or perhaps one or both must fall before this brutal impasse will break.
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