Sharon, The Enigma?
By Samer Elatrash
13 June, 2004
Zmag
Although Ariel Sharon will probably go down in history as a brutal army general, a footnote might mention that he did inspire a new genre of political commentary after winning Israel’s 2001 elections. This commentary serves to convert Sharon, whose intentions are no more subtle than a spitting camel, into an enigma. Just when you thought that you had Sharon figured out, so the argument goes, he pulls out a “historic compromise” and fires cabinet ministers who threaten to vote against it, again confounding the commentators. Just who—they ask—is Sharon? Is he the man who in 1982 dismantled Yamit, an Israeli settlement in the Sinai after the conclusion of a peace treaty with Egypt, or the man who for years tried to convince the Palestinians to call Jordan their state?
Sharon may dislike honesty—“a most hypocritical and lie filled concept”, he told an Israeli newspaper—and he may, as David Ben Gurion confided in his diary, be a habitual liar, but he is not an inscrutable man. He is often derided for being a skilled tactician yet a poor strategist. This is inaccurate; Sharon exhibits the same patience that characterized the leaders of the nascent Zionist movement who led it to the establishing of Israel. After years of poring over planning maps for new settlements in the occupied territories, Sharon is perhaps unrivalled in Israel for his knowledge of the terrain, of every nook and cranny, he would boast.
Yet unlike the settler movement, which is now accusing him of betrayal after his promise to dismantle Israel’s settlements in Gaza, Sharon resembles the hedgehog from Archilochus’s parable: the hedgehog, wrote the Greek poet, “knows one big thing”, while the fox “knows many little things.” Sharon knows one thing: that while the “international community” and many of the settlers see the withdrawal from Gaza as precedent that will in time lead to the dismantling of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state, “time”, as Sharon told an Israeli reporter, “is not working against us.”
V.I. Lenin never tired of reminding the Bolsheviks, who always had trouble following Lenin’s abrupt turns and reversals in policy, that “one has to be able at each moment to find that particular link in the chain which…will give one a firm basis from which to go on to the next link.” Sharon understands this and puts it to practice, even when grasping on to the link might require some backpedaling on previous statements and tactics, the breaking of party alliances or the dismantling of a few settlements.
The Sharon who, as Israel’s Defense Minister, oversaw the dismantling of Yamit in April 1982 was the same Sharon who convinced the Israeli cabinet to wage a war in Lebanon a month later with the objective of destroying the Palestinian national liberation movement and, so he calculated, the national aspirations of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. While the “international community” and the settlers saw in the dismantling of Yamit a precedent, Sharon treated it as a compromise that would secure Israel’s western front while Israel waged war in the north with the objective of ensuring its dominance in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel’s treaty with Egypt gave it more leeway to embark on an ambitious campaign which, far from the pragmatism which many observers thought was evinced by the dismantling of Yamit, sought to reverse the formation of Palestinian national consciousness, while redrawing the map of Lebanon. It was no less an ambitious—and ill conceived—a plan than the idea which led France to participate alongside Britain and Israel in the 1956 war against Egypt with the hope that the removal of Jamal Abdel Nasser, who had allowed the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) command a base in Egypt, would bring the Algerian revolution to an end. Even after the military defeat of the FLN in Algiers and the capture of its political command, there was no stemming the national aspirations of the Algerians, and France was defeated in less than a decade.
Sharon of course has studied the Algerian conflict; after winning the elections, Sharon confided that his reading list included Alaister Horne’s account of the Algerian revolution: “A Savage War of Peace.” Sharon has evidently learnt from France’s experience in Algeria as well as Israel’s experience in Lebanon. The key lesson is that, in a war against a national liberation movement, the objective is not to bring a swift end to the uprising by deploying overwhelming force—France killed a million Algerians, and forced thousands more into concentration camps during the war—but to contain the uprising, to reduce it a “manageable level”, and most importantly to ensure international legitimacy, while waiting for the uprising to exhaust itself.Four years into the Palestinian uprising, it is apparent that Sharon has enjoyed a great deal of success, not least because he faces a disorganized opponent. If only Israel were to be left alone for another few years, it may well succeed in dealing yet another irreversible set back to the Palestinians. Sharon’s ‘disengagement plan’ is no proof that Sharon is willing to pay the “painful price” for peace, but it is evidence that in Sharon, the State of Israel has again found a Prime Minister who is willing to pay the price for gaining time—time to allow the repression of the Israeli army and the creation of more ‘facts on the ground’ to lead to an irreversible situation, which would rule out the establishing of a viable Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. If the shock over George Bush’s recent declaration that Israel’s settlement blocs in the West Bank are “realities in the ground” were of any indication, one can predict a brief ! chorus of indignation after some future American president declares that the “realities on the ground” dictate the creation of a Palestinian state elsewhere than the West Bank—in the Sinai and Gaza, perhaps.
Sharon reportedly hopes that evacuating Gaza will buy Israel another 50 years in the West Bank. It is not so far fetched a hope, considering that during the months leading to the cabinet vote that endorsed the plan last week, the West Bank and Israel’s separation barrier have almost disappeared from the “international community’s” attention, scarcely four months after the case against the barrier was brought before the International Court of Justice. The surrounding countries are immersed in their own problems and under heavy US pressure, the Palestinians, after facing the entire might of the IDF with little support for four years are exhausted, encircled behind walls and fences and led by political groups that have failed to make any use of the opportunities afforded by the intifada, aside from enlarging their memberships.
Suspending disbelief is a leisure that one can indulge in when watching a magic show, not when one is dealing with a consistent policy of colonization and the denial of an entire people their land and freedom. The agonizing over Sharon’s real aims, the conjecture over whether we may yet see Sharon inaugurate an independent Palestinian state, are new lows in the already execrable tradition of mainstream North American commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Sharon knows what he is doing, while here in North America, people are debating the identity of General Sharon.