Sharon Has a Map. Can He Redraw It?
By DAVID K. SHIPLER - NEW YORK TIMES
CHEVY CHASE, Md. - On a July day in 1979, a jeep bearing Israel's agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, raced up a steep road to the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, where devout Jewish nationalists were explaining to me how Genesis contained their ancient ancestors' deed to this land from God.
Mr. Sharon had come to visit the settlers, but he ignored them once he discovered the brand new Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times , ripe for a lesson on Israeli security. While the settlers waved the Bible, Mr. Sharon pulled out a military map, which he unrolled on the hood of the jeep. It showed the detailed contours and elevations along the spine of hills that divide the eastward plunge to the Jordan River from the westward descent to the Mediterranean.
It was a clear day, so we could see almost the entire sliver of biblical land between the river and the sea. Mr. Sharon wasn't quoting from the Old Testament, however. He was using a general's gift for reading terrain to point out the dry river beds through which enemy armored columns could invade from Jordan, or from Iraq farther to the east, through the hills and onto the coastal plain, Israel's populated heartland. This was the classic Sharon briefing, one he has given many times ? including to a governor of Texas, George W. Bush, during a 1998 helicopter tour. Mr. Sharon will see Mr. Bush in the Middle East again this week, at a summit meeting with the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, to discuss the road map for peace that Mr. Bush now supports as president.
Whether the conflict can ultimately be solved will depend partly on Israel's willingness to dismantle most settlements in areas of the West Bank and Gaza to be used for a Palestinian state, and that willingness will depend on Israel's sense of security.
To block invasion routes, Mr. Sharon would explain on his tours, the Jewish settlements would be "facts on the ground" holding strategic points throughout Arab territories captured in the 1967 war. By placing civilians in those isolated outposts, scattered among Palestinian towns, he was accused of putting children in front of tanks. But this was a criticism he accepted.
"Security is not only guns and aircraft and tanks," he told me in 1979. "Security first of all is motivation ? motivation to defend a place. If people live in a place, they have the motivation to defend themselves, and the nation has the motivation to defend them. The fact that you are present, that you know every hill, every mountain, every valley, every spring, every cave; the curiosity to know what is on the other side of the hill ? that's security. If you have all the guns and tanks in the world, you cannot do anything if you aren't motivated, if you don't know the area, if you don't feel that it is yours. Yes, I want to put the children before the tanks."
Practically every time we met during my five-year assignment, he would happily recall that first encounter at Elon Moreh, as if to underscore its significance and to make sure that I remembered it too.
What I remembered most was the odd juxtaposition of the Bible and the map, the curious alliance between the religio-nationalist zeal of the settlers and the secular military zeal of the warrior. While the younger settlers reached into ancient history to celebrate the reincarnation of the Jewish state, the older fighter held fast to a single-minded obsession with security. The motives were complementary, not competing, yet they contained different calculations. The settlers were doctrinaire; Ariel Sharon was pragmatic, some would say opportunistic.
He translated the settlers' messianic dreams into brick and mortar. The settlers provided the dogmatic vision, and he, as agriculture minister overseeing land, provided the confiscated plots, the house trailers, the wells, the roads, the hookups to the electric grid. Later, as defense minister and then minister of infrastructure and now prime minister, he would remain their most effective political ally, making the key connection between two features of the Zionist enterprise: the yearning bequeathed by history and the construction of a future.
All the while, though, I wondered if his focus on security would ever lead him to reassess defense needs and redeploy, like the quick-thinking general he once was. Since Jordan now has a peace treaty with Israel and Iraq has been conquered by America, tanks are not about to come through those West Bank valleys.
Last week, as tentative plans were being made for the three-way summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, Mr. Sharon stunned his right-wing Likud colleagues by using the forbidden word "occupation," which implies impermanence, to describe Israel's hold over the West Bank and Gaza, where 200,000 Jewish settlers live among 3.5 million Palestinians. "You may not like the word," he told his party members, "but what's happening is occupation. Holding 3.5 million Palestinians is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy."
He also gave the Israeli newspaper Haaretz an updated assessment of Israeli interests. "Eventually there will be a Palestinian state," he declared. "I do not think that we have to rule over another people and run their lives. I do not think that we have the strength for that. It is a very heavy burden on the public, and it raises ethical problems and heavy economic problems." He added, "We will be ready to carry out very painful steps," and he confessed to an inner conflict: "Our whole history is bound up with these places ? Bethlehem, Shiloh, Beit El. And I know that we will have to part with some of these places. . . . As a Jew, this agonizes me. But I have decided to make every effort to reach a settlement. I feel that the rational necessity to reach a settlement is overcoming my feelings." He is 75, he noted, with no further political ambitions.
Mr. Sharon was once described to me as a man with "no moral brakes." His record suggests as much. As commander of the army's infamous Unit 101 in 1953, he replied to a guerrilla attack on Israeli civilians by assaulting a Jordanian border town, Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers. He said later that he had no idea that the houses were occupied. As defense minister during the Lebanon war of 1982, he permitted Lebanese Christian militiamen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred at least 700, women and children. He said that he had no idea such a thing would happen. An Israeli commission ruled that he should have known and that he bore indirect responsibility. He was forced to resign.
He is known for deftly pretending not to be doing what he is doing, or pretending to be doing what he is not. He took the invasion of Lebanon far beyond where his prime minister, Menachem Begin, thought it would go, by trying to rid the country not only of Palestinian guerrillas but also of Syrian troops, and by trying in vain to install a pro-Western government in Beirut. Now his manipulative skills may be in play as he holds mildly productive meetings aimed at getting Mr. Abbas to crack down on Palestinian groups that breed suicide bombers ? the major current threat to Israelis' security.
Mr. Abbas is just beginning to gather internal political support, and to bolster his moderate posture he will need visible compromises from Mr. Sharon to reduce military roadblocks, searches and assaults. Even if such steps are taken to ease tension, core issues will remain: conflicting claims on Jerusalem and Palestinian demands for the right of return to Arab villages inside Israel ? as well as the Jewish settlements. That a solution requires the chief architect of those settlements to agree to their withdrawal may seem to guarantee failure.
Nevertheless, I keep remembering another conversation with Mr. Sharon, at his ranch in early 1982, when I asked him what would happen to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if, as he had argued, Jordan became the Palestinian state. Ah, he said, then the conflict would be just a border dispute. A border dispute? Would he be willing to change the border? Would he relinquish parts of the West Bank he was so aggressively settling? He smiled impishly. As defense minister, he said reasonably, he could not negotiate a border with me.
I thought, though I wasn't sure, that he meant to leave the impression of a pragmatist who would be willing to cut a deal someday if the time was right, if Israel could be secure. I wonder whether the time is drawing nigh.
David K. Shipler won a Pulitzer Prize as the author of "Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land."
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