Sharon's Wars - Part two
Last, and crucially, Sharon glimpsed an opportunity: to perpetuate Israel's hold on the parts of the West Bank that mean the most to him.
As he told the newspaper Ha'aretz in early April, he saw a chance to ''do the things I want and to get an American commitment.'' Sharon did not want to negotiate concessions from the Palestinians. He wanted concessions from the Americans, in the form of a reversal of decades of policy in the Middle East. In exchange for Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan and evidence of some movement in the Middle East, President Bush promised that in any eventual peace deal Israel would be able to keep its large West Bank settlement blocks, like Ariel and its satellites. He also said that the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war, and their descendants, would never be able to live in what is now Israel.
Whether arising from hubris, hard experience or superior judgment, Sharon's ferocious pursuit of his own visions for Israel and the region previously brought him into collision with American administrations. While struggling to negotiate an end to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan's special envoy, concluded that Sharon was ''the biggest liar this side of the Mediterranean'' and a man whose ''word was worth nothing.'' For his part, Sharon saw the Americans as pursuing an overly ambitious agenda, seeking to use Lebanon to solve problems throughout the Middle East.
It is not that Sharon objects to complex plans; he just prefers his own. As a general, Sharon clashed constantly with his superiors, but he drew up complicated battle plans that limited the flexibility of his commanders in the field and centralized authority in himself. That pattern reappeared in Lebanon, and it is playing out again today. In Lebanon, Sharon set a vaulting plan in motion with an invasion he sold to the Israeli public as limited, intended to clear the P.L.O. away from Israel's northern border. Then as now, he had several aims in mind. He wanted to crush the P.L.O, install a Christian-dominated government that he believed would make peace with Israel and bring forth what he envisioned as a tractable Palestinian leadership in the West Bank that would accept Israeli rule. The plan blew up in his face with the assassination of his chosen Lebanese president and then the massacre by Christian militiamen of Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli commission of inquiry later assigned Sharon indirect responsibility for the massacres.
In Bush, Sharon has occasionally feared he faced another president with an overambitious plan for the Middle East that might conflict with his own agenda. Three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Sharon gave a speech warning that the United States risked appeasing terrorists at Israel's expense the way Europe appeased Hitler by sacrificing Czechoslovakia in 1938. It was meant as a shot across Bush's bows. ''What worried me was what might be,'' Sharon said when he called me two days later for a brief interview in which he expressed regret five times. It was my first clue that for Sharon words are also tactics, with regret deployed as easily as bluster.
A few months later, Sharon demonstrated to Bush that he did mean what he said when he declared he would never compromise what he considered Israeli security. As a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings reached a crest in March 2002, Sharon began Israel's largest offensive since Lebanon, sending ground forces sweeping through the West Bank. Bush demanded an immediate halt, but the army kept going. It was Bush, not Sharon, who gave way.
To Bush's most ambitious attempt to solve the conflict, the so-called road map to peace, Sharon applied what Israelis know well as his ''yes, but'' strategy. He did not rebuff the administration. He agreed to the plan, but then interpreted it in his own way. He attached conditions that changed it substantively. There was a lot that Sharon liked in the plan, including its endorsement of his demands for thoroughgoing Palestinian reform. But its timetable -- three years to a state of Palestine and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace -- was nowhere near Sharon's. Sharon's aides also did not think that the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, could succeed in curtailing Arafat's power and stopping the intifada. Israel, it should be said, took no real risks to help him. When Abbas failed and quit last fall, he blamed both Sharon and Arafat for undermining him. Sharon still has not removed the settlement outposts that he promised Bush more than a year ago he would dismantle under the road map.
Sharon built settlements in the first place because he rejected the idea of any quick solution to the conflict and wanted to make one impossible to achieve. ''I thought it had to become impossible to give a fast, easy, clear-cut solution, because no solution of this sort could accord with the reality,'' he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, ''Warrior.''
It is not that Sharon does not want peace. He often says he wants peace more than other politicians who have not seen so much suffering and death. But Sharon does not put his trust in treaties. He still likes to quote words of advice he received from his mother in the early 80's, when he was negotiating with the Egyptians: ''Do not trust them! You cannot trust a piece of paper!'' When I asked him how he described Arabs as a nation, he asked me how long I had lived in the region. I replied three years. ''I tell you it will be hard for you to understand that, and I must tell you that even for me -- and I was born here -- it's hard to understand,'' he said before pausing, evidently for emphasis. His voice rose: ''This area here, it's an empire of lies. It's an empire of lies. They look into your eyes and lie. It's very hard for you to understand. It's very hard for us to understand. But that is the situation here. Therefore, you have to be careful. Here, in this region here, declarations, speeches, words, are worthless.''
Sharon does want a peace agreement. But he wants the agreement that he wants -- a so-called long-term interim agreement. It is a kind of standstill arrangement. He wants the two sides to go to separate corners, cool off over many years and only then begin talking about the big issues, like Jerusalem. No credible Palestinian leader could agree to such a deferral of the Palestinian national dream. But Sharon may have picked his historical moment well enough, and maneuvered his allies and enemies skillfully enough, to impose it.
n the 50's and 60's, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, took a shine to the brash leader of Israel's commandos. Much to the irritation of Sharon's superior officers, Ben-Gurion would invite him for private chats in his office or even his home. Ben-Gurion's papers reflect a fatherly interest in Sharon, whom he referred to as Arik and whose roguishness both charmed and worried him. During this period, Ben-Gurion was in his 60's and then 70's, Sharon in his 20's and then 30's. Their chats followed a tender pattern. Sharon would describe and sometimes defend his exploits. He would complain about his superiors. While lending a sympathetic ear, Ben-Gurion would gently relay to Sharon some of those officers' concerns, and his own, about Sharon's behavior. Prodded by Israel's white-haired founder, Sharon would admit that he lacked discipline and even that he lied, sometimes to Ben-Gurion himself.
''An original, visionary young man,'' Ben-Gurion noted on Jan. 29, 1960. ''Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional military leader.''
On Nov. 24, 1958, Ben-Gurion recorded an unusual encounter with Sharon. Sharon was just back from 13 months of military study in England. ''This was the first time he met with Jews, and he is anxious about the future of our relations with them,'' Ben-Gurion wrote in his journal. By ''Jews,'' he meant non-Israeli Jews living in the Diaspora. Born and raised in what is now Israel, Sharon had not encountered such Jews before.
''The Jews in England are not accepted in the English clubs and golf courses, and they have to situate themselves in Jewish institutions,'' Ben-Gurion wrote, recounting Sharon's impressions. Sharon, he continued, was astonished that these Jews nevertheless did not feel ''any personal connection of any kind with Israel.''
It was an insight with a great impact on Sharon. He still speaks about it. When I quoted the passage from Ben-Gurion, it triggered an 18-minute monologue about his fears for the survival of the Jews. ''I have many worries, but something that really bothers me is what will happen with the Jews in the future -- what will happen to them in 30 years' time, in 300 years' time, and with God's help, 3,000 years' time.'' He laughed. ''But I don't think that then I'll have to take care of that.''
Returning to his stay in England, he recalled how British officers aimed their anti-Semitism at British Jews but not at Israelis. ''It was a kind of an attempt to draw a distinction between Israel and Israelis and 'their own Jews,' I would say -- Jews in the Diaspora,'' he said.
''That worried me,'' he continued. ''It worried me. I didn't like it.'' He added, ''I felt it's going to be a danger.''
That is classic Sharon: the sweep of the sense of duty, the depth of the tribal consciousness, the sensitivity of the antennae to any threat, maybe real, maybe merely perceived. He regards Israel as a worldwide Jewish project, and he did not want to see any divergence in the Israeli and Jewish identities.
After a few years, Sharon thought the problem went away. ''I would say the European countries -- maybe others as well -they started to treat us as Jews,'' he said. In other words, the danger receded as European Christians began treating Israeli Jews with the same prejudice with which they treated Jews at home. It seemed an odd source of comfort.
Sharon plowed on. A Jew, he said, can only ''live as a Jew'' in Israel. There were many fewer mixed marriages, he said. ''All the time I worry -- and I check it all the time -- that Jews, I would say, might disappear,'' he said. That is, the threat to Jews' survival exists if they are physically in danger or not. If they are safe and welcomed where they are, they are threatened with assimilation.
Sharon explained that he regularly told Jews in the Diaspora that if Israel were to grow weaker or disappear, ''the Jews around the world will not be able to have the lives that they are having now.''
Then he summed up: ''So, all that, I would say, brings me to think that the main goal of the state of Israel is immigration.'' He wants to bring another million Jews to Israel in the next 15 years.
Sharon views Jews around the world and in Israel as under threat from rising anti-Semitism. Two days before I saw him, the World Court in The Hague condemned as illegal those segments of Israel's new barrier that stand inside the West Bank. Sharon saw the decision as pure evil. I asked what he thought it would take for Israel to be fully accepted in the world. ''Not to exist as an independent state, maybe,'' he shot back. ''Look, it's a Jewish state inhabited by Jews. Not patronized. Maybe the world would have accepted patronized Jews.'' A week later, he declared that the ''wildest anti-Semitism'' was on the rise in France, and he urged French Jews to move immediately to Israel.
It may be that the world is blind to the anti-Semitism that feeds its criticism of Israel. But Sharon appears blind -- maybe willfully so -- to the rising anti-Israeli-ism in what he sees as anti-Semitism. The World Court did not rule against Jews. It ruled against Israel, and the fact is that the barrier is built partly on occupied land.
Despite the danger Sharon sees for Jews abroad, new immigrants are barely trickling to Israel -- 24,652 came last year. And more may be leaving Israel each year. (There are no hard numbers.) Sharon's associates point out that no one predicted in the 1980's that nearly a million Jews from the former Soviet Union would arrive in the 1990's. But to reach those levels Israel will need a large contribution from the only country other than itself with five million Jews -- the United States -- and there is little hint of that.
The divergence Sharon glimpsed in England and came to fear half a century ago is becoming obvious. A clear Israeli identity has emerged, and it is steadily drifting from the identity of Jews in the United States and Europe. ''We're moving from being brothers to being cousins,'' one of Sharon's close advisers acknowledged, speaking about the Americans. ''And in the next generation we will be distant cousins with some sense of shared history.''
Sharon bears much of the responsibility for bequeathing Israel an image that unsettles and distances Jews and non-Jews overseas. As with so much else, this was a pattern he set early. One raid that Ben-Gurion called him in to explain was his attack in 1953 on the village of Qibbiya in the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan. Sharon was retaliating for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers. He later said that he and his men believed that the 45 houses they blew up over several hours were empty. But 69 Arabs were killed, about half of them women and children. The killings brought Israel its first condemnation from the United Nations Security Council. (In his autobiography, Sharon wrote that Ben-Gurion told him that the raid would serve as a warning to other Arabs.)
Then and now, Sharon's use of force may have stirred some who longed for Jewish power and reassured many that Israel would remain a shelter in an unpredictable world -- the only place, as Sharon puts it, where ''Jews can defend themselves by themselves.'' But it also dismayed those who hoped Israel might be a moral beacon, or just that it would become a normal nation accepted like any other.
At the same time, the West is where Israel sees its future. This is the ultimate meaning of the withdrawal from Gaza and the barrier. The disengagement plan is an attempt to turn Israel's back on its region and reach westward toward the European Union and the United States. From long before Oslo, Israelis dreamed of integration with their neighbors into a new Middle East. Now they are willing to wait. Maybe the Palestinians will eventually come around and form a democratic, pacifist government. Maybe not. It does not matter.
This same Sharon adviser said the barrier was both ''a physical and a mental wall'' and that the mental component was more important. ''What we really want is to turn our backs on the Arabs and never deal with them again,'' he said, summarizing what he considers the prevailing Israeli view. ''We don't want to be accepted into the Middle East anymore.'' Another top adviser said of Sharon's plan: ''It could help the Palestinians. It could hurt them. We don't care.''
hen both sides can sustain their finest illusions about each other, as the Israelis and Palestinians could for a while under Oslo, reality has a way of rising to meet them. There was a day when Israeli Jews went to Palestinian jazz clubs in Ramallah. Fear follows a more certain road to fulfilling itself. The extremists who kill off illusions will staunchly protect this route. If you believe you have no peace partner and act as if you do not, you will have no peace partner.
When I asked Sharon if he still believed, as he once wrote, that it was possible to instill a ''psychology of defeat'' in the Arabs, he turned his head to me and stared. ''No,'' he said after a silence, speaking slowly for emphasis. ''I think that if Israel will show weakness, it will be endless war.''
Sharon's methods of demonstrating strength -- the invasions and blockades of entire cities, the plotted killings of militants, the mass arrests and detention of young men -- have devastated the Palestinians. Rabin believed in fighting terror as if there were no negotiations and negotiating as if there were no terror; by doing away with that second thought -- with, it sometimes seems, any second thoughts -- Sharon has reassured Israelis that they can rebuff the blows of terrorists. But he has left the Palestinians with no dignified exit from the conflict, weakening their pragmatic leaders. It is not only Israelis who say they have no peace partner.
And it is not only Palestinians whose hopes have dimmed. Sharon has largely transferred the conflict from Israeli cities to the occupied territories. But even if he manages to withdraw from Gaza, Israel will remain a nation always on guard and often on offense. It will remain a nation with support groups for parents whose children are enforcing an occupation they would rather not think about. When a soldier forces a Palestinian to strip at a checkpoint or when a soldier demolishes a Palestinian's home, not only the Palestinian suffers and not only the Palestinian may harden.
Sharon told me that ''if circumstances would have been different,'' he would probably have chosen farming rather than a military career. Drawing his nation into implicit parallel, he added that he would have preferred that Israel be known as one of the world's leaders in in-vitro fertilization, that is, as a giver of life. ''I would have liked that Israel will be known not for being warriors,'' he said.
That is a sentiment Sharon expresses fairly often. It is hard to know, as the words come out, how deeply he feels them. He had good reason to accept and even embrace a garrison society as Israel's fate long ago. It is harder for other Israelis to come to terms with it now. They still dream of an Israel that is more about the blithe spirits of Tel Aviv than the ghosts of Jerusalem, more about the dancers on the table in Sharon's living room than the weary soldiers patrolling along his wall.
Because it scorns negotiation and agreement, Sharon's long-term interim arrangement is an acceptance of, and maybe a goad to, enduring conflict -- almost surely at a lower level, but sustained. As this conflict grinds on, Israel will no doubt remain morally alert -- morally conflicted, as demonstrated by the soldiers who refuse to serve in the territories -- but it will also remain morally compromised in the eyes of the world. Its back to the rest of the Middle East, its face to the Mediterranean, Israel could become ''the largest ghetto in modern Jewish history,'' in the words of Ezrahi.
Sharon may be right. This could be the only way to secure Israel's survival as a Jewish haven. But it may mean a poignant legacy for this indomitable, secular Jew born into the Middle East: an Israel that is increasingly religious, walled off from its neighbors, simultaneously yearning after and fearing a Western community of nations that sees it as more and more foreign.
James Bennet, a Times correspondent based in Washington, was chief of the newspaper's bureau in Jerusalem from September 2001 until last month.
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