'Bulldozer' complicates U.S. mediation in Mideast
By Gregg Zoroya and Paul Wiseman
USA TODAY
Tue May 7, 2002
JERUSALEM -- Known by Israelis for years as ''Bulldozer,'' Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) earned the nickname for his tough and relentless methods.
As he meets with President Bush (news - web sites) this afternoon in the Oval Office, Israel's leader presents as much of a problem for the White House as Sharon's longtime nemesis, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites).
Bush initially supported Sharon's West Bank military offensive, during which Israeli troops and bulldozers knocked down Palestinian homes searching for would-be suicide bombers. But the president then called for a prompt Israeli withdrawal and has since privately expressed frustration and annoyance with the Israeli leader, senior administration officials say.
Despite intense pressure from the United States and the rest of the world, the prime minister has taken so long to wind down the harsh campaign against Palestinians that he angered the American president. The Israeli siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, where roughly 40 gunmen among more than 200 Palestinians took refuge for five weeks, exasperated senior U.S. officials.
And Sharon's adamant refusal to negotiate with the Palestinian leader further complicates hopes for peace.
As the United States struggles to get the enemy camps to resolve their conflict, many people see Sharon himself as much an obstacle to peace as the difficult issues that must be resolved, including Jewish settlers in the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza, the fate of 3.5 million Palestinian refugees and the future status of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital.
In a speech Monday night, Sharon displayed his single-mindedness in describing his refusal to allow a United Nations (news - web sites) investigation into an Israeli attack on a West Bank refugee village. ''With all the pressure, I stood firm,'' he told an audience of Anti-Defamation League supporters in Washington. ''I don't see that any nation in the world has the right to bring the Israeli citizens and the state of Israeli to (a world) court. No one!''
Sharon's admirers praise his hard-line stance. ''He's unbendable,'' his chief spokesman, Raanan Gissin, says. ''He understands that you have no choice. You've got to stand up and fight or they're going to roll all over you.''
Arabs regard the Israeli prime minister with contempt.
Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, says Sharon ''will go down in history as perpetuating more violence than anyone in the history of the Middle East.''
Sharon's hard shell comes from a lifetime of fighting Arabs. Even with the world -- and Israel, at least by prior agreement -- saying Palestinians should have their own state, Sharon seems unshakable in his determination to defend the Jewish state and hold onto territory won at so great a cost.
Aides say Bush views Sharon as canny, determined and ''stubborn'' -- images that easily comport with his profile as an unflinching ''warrior,'' the title of the prime minister's 1989 autobiography.
When he presents his own peace plan to Bush today, Sharon reportedly will make stopping the West Bank military operation contingent on an end to all terrorist attacks against Israelis. Under this plan, a Palestinian state would be years away and possible only if Arafat were no longer in power.
Though Sharon is expected to commit to a peace conference this summer in Europe, it is clear neither Bush nor anyone else will find it easy to lean on him for concessions many believe are necessary to end the current conflict, much less achieve a lasting peace.
Immovable object
Sharon's intractability was evident at an Israeli Cabinet session late last month. At that meeting, the prime minister banged his fists on the table and said there would be no discussion of removing any of the 145 Jewish settlements from Palestinian territory before the 2003 election. And if re-elected then, he vowed, the settlements would stay even longer.
Highlighting the Bush administration's concern about Sharon's intransigence on this key issue, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said Sunday on ABC's This Week, ''If we're going to reach a final status (peace) solution, then the issue of the settlements will have to be dealt with.''
Despite their reservations about Sharon, the White House and Congress have stuck by him. In the 15 months Bush has been in the White House, the U.S. leader has met with Sharon five times. Bush has never met with Arafat.
Though he has urged Sharon to exercise restraint and withdraw his forces, the president also has applauded the Israeli leader, referring to him as ''a man of peace.'' Others strongly disagree.
President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites) of Egypt, a key U.S. ally and one of the few Arab nations with diplomatic ties to Israel, has accused Israel of ''state terrorism.'' Syrian President Bashar Assad was quoted in the local press as saying Arab nations could not consider peace talks with Israel before its ''war crimes'' in Jenin and other West Bank areas were investigated.
Vote for security
Sharon took office 14 months ago during a wave of Palestinian violence that some here say he provoked. He is a man who has shown he can skillfully prosecute a war, but his critics say he has given few signals that he knows when to lay down his weapons. As a result, international opinion that initially was sympathetic toward the Israelis because of the suicide bombings has shifted against Sharon, one senior U.S. official says.
''His strategy is you have to be tough and show resilience,'' says Israeli political analyst Akiva Eldar, a Sharon critic. ''Being a bulldozer means that you have to keep on doing the right things, which is to put up more settlements and put aside all those minor obstacles such as human rights.''
The Sharon credo is simple, Eldar says: Arabs understand only power and can never be trusted.
Sharon's Israeli supporters say he is the right leader at the right time, coming into power after Palestinians rejected the most viable peace plan yet: the Camp David peace proposal in 2000 by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (news - web sites) that offered the Palestinians 97% of territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
The Palestinians say they objected because the lands would remain divided and Israel would control borders, airspace and water resources.
In electing Sharon to replace Barak, Israelis voted for security over negotiations. Sharon's approval rating among Israelis stands at 65%.
His spokesman, Gissin, says Israelis trust Sharon to protect them. ''There is only one person who can turn around the Israeli people and say, 'OK, we have to make painful concessions now,' '' Gissin says. ''He understands the meaning and value of peace much better than those who talk about peace but have never gone through war.''
Palestinian detractors say Sharon is bent on humiliating their people and keeping control over their territory.
''As long as Sharon is in power, no Palestinian will ever be able to make peace with Israel,'' says Palestinian legislator Hatem Abdel Kader, a close adviser to Arafat.
Battle in his blood
Born in British-controlled Palestine to Russian immigrant parents, Sharon wrote in his autobiography that his father was a tough and uncompromising man who often feuded with other Jewish settlers in their home village, Kfar Malal. His father sent him, at 13, into the farmlands to fend off intruders with a club and an engraved dagger. The knife was a gift for his bar mitzvah, a Jewish boy's coming-of-age ceremony.
In 1942, Sharon joined the Jewish guerrilla army, the Haganah, in its fight for independence against Great Britain. He wrote that he found greater affection and warmth in the militia than at home. He thrived there, becoming one of the nation's most brilliant military tacticians. But he also earned a reputation for headstrong decisions that at times brought charges of brutality.
As the head of an Israeli commando unit in 1953, when Palestinians were fighting the newly created Jewish state, Sharon led a raid into the West Bank village of Kibbiya to retaliate for the killing of a young Jewish woman and her two babies. Every building in the village was dynamited, and 69 people were killed. Sharon later said his soldiers checked the houses before detonating explosives, but families hid in cellars.
In the Six Day War of 1967, his armored brigades seized the Sinai Desert from Egypt. During a 1971 campaign against terrorism, Sharon launched what critics called a brutal house-by-house search for gunmen hiding in the occupied Gaza. The operation, similar to Israel's military operation in the West Bank last month, involved the use of bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes.
And in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he came out of retirement to lead Israeli troops in a brilliant crossing of the Suez Canal with an armored division that ultimately ended the war with Egypt.
These events, coupled with his pugnacious physical appearance, earned Sharon the nickname Bulldozer. Leslie Susser, senior writer for the Jerusalem Report, a news magazine, says, ''(Bulldozer) is an Israeli conceit which means someone who will do just about anything to get his own way, who is very kind of power-driven.''
Sharon's pursuit of Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (news - web sites) over the past 30 years perhaps best defines his tenacity.
Trying to secure Israel's northern border, which had come under attack by Palestinians based in Lebanon, including Arafat and his PLO, Sharon, then defense minister, ordered Israeli forces to invade southern Lebanon in 1982. Christian Phalangist militia allied with Israeli forces massacred hundreds of Palestinian refugees in camps near Beirut.
An Israeli government inquiry later concluded Sharon was indirectly responsible for the attack.
The finding drove him from office. In his autobiography, Sharon wrote of his outrage over the finding. ''It was a stigmatization I rejected utterly,'' he said.
Despite the recriminations, the Bulldozer began a slow, determined ascent back to public office and power.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (news - web sites) was defeated by Labor Party leader Barak in 1999, Sharon took over as head of the opposition Likud Party and held onto the post by opposing the Barak peace proposals as too generous.
His popular support was secured by what may have been his most controversial act: On Sept. 28, 2000, just weeks after the collapse of peace talks between Barak and Arafat, Sharon visited Jerusalem's Noble Sanctuary, holy to Muslims and known as the Temple Mount to Jews.
His tour of the site was all the Palestinians needed to launch their uprising, some here argue. Sharon disputes this, but the ensuing violence doomed Barak politically. Sharon became prime minister by a 2-to-1 margin.
Palestinians have launched waves of shooting and suicide attacks inside Israel. The death toll since his Temple Mount visit exceeds 2,000.
Throughout his controversial career, Sharon has refused to bow to external pressure or be swayed from his convictions.
''He's someone who senses that he has a historical responsibility on his shoulders,'' Sharon adviser Dore Gold says. ''That sense . . . guides him, not the sense of what's going to be in the newspapers or what they say on American television.''
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