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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (127135)	3/23/2004 10:41:25 AM
From: boris_a	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

the Temple Mount incident. Situation is at least unclear. The "cynical platitudes" are political business out there. "The Middle East: Snakes & Ladders" nybooks.com "... Sharon's appeal to the party was limited. He looked old and tired, and had little appeal for the more moderate voters in the "center." Netanyahu's loyalists could barely wait for the glorious, vengeful second coming of their leader. Sharon had every reason to fear Netanyahu's return, knowing that Netanyahu could regain his hold over the Likud Party quite easily, thereby robbing Sharon of his last chance, at the age of seventy-two, of ever becoming the prime minister of Israel. And so Sharon acted. In order to block Netanyahu's return he decided to do what he could to take over for himself Netanyahu's support from the hard-core right, in which the Jewish settlers have a prominent part. This is like robbing a rival Republican candidate of the support of the Christian Coalition—a source of the kind of political enthusiasm that wins elections. The Temple Mount was the perfect place for Sharon's move. It was at the center of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians: Barak was accused of giving up, or being about to give up, on Israeli sovereignty over the Mount. For Sharon to go there would look like a protest against the weak Barak; he would be proving his own courage by entering the Palestinians' lion's den. His message, as he saw it, was clear: no one can out-right me. Should the Palestinians protest—so much the better for his purposes. But, from all the evidence, he did not expect the sequence of events that followed his visit. I do not believe, as many Palestinians seem to do, that Sharon went to the Mount precisely in order to provoke them into doing what they eventually did. He had Netanyahu on his mind, not the Palestinians. But of course tension had built up around the Temple Mount (or Haram al-Sharif, as it is called by Muslims). The place was charged with highly inflammable religious and ideological octane. For Barak to have allowed Sharon to go there, escorted by hundreds of armed Israeli policemen, showed the worst possible political judgment. Yet Barak did not try to stop him, because he, too, had Netanyahu, not the Palestinians, on his mind. Barak understood Sharon's act as aimed against Netanyahu, a threat common to them both. He did not want to make it possible for Sharon to accuse him of "preventing a Jew" from going to the top of the holiest of Jewish holy places. And Barak at the time believed, quite rationally, that he had a much better chance against Sharon than against Netanyahu. ..." The author doesn't think Sharon initiated Intafda2. I think he didn't mind about anything except his own career. He's a truly irresponsible man in my eyes, a ME-Milosevic.