Ariel Sharon's legacy will be true to his life -- built for war, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem Doctors may be measuring the chances of Ariel Sharon's physical survival but the political obituaries have already been penned. "Sharon's Final Battle," cried one Israeli headline on 6 January, less than 24 hours after it was announced that Israel's prime minister had suffered a massive stroke and was lying comatose in a West Jerusalem hospital. Nor was there much demurral that Israelis were seeing the eclipse of their most important political leader since David Ben-Gurion, founder of the Jewish state and Sharon's first and last mentor. "He was a towering figure," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, referring to Sharon. The tower's shadows are cast far and wide. Many Israeli Jews felt orphaned, deprived of a father just as he appeared poised to become prime minister for a third time at the head of his new "centrist" party Kadima -- founded (unlike his earlier creation, Likud) not for the dream of Greater Israel but for the older, more "pragmatic" myths of "peace and security". Among many Palestinians the only regret was that their most ruthless adversary was dying a natural death, still un-indicted for what Israel's Kahane Enquiry admitted in 1983 was his "personal responsibility" for the Phalangist massacres in Sabra and Shatilla. These were the worst of his crimes. There were others. The only debate was over his legacy. "Is it the outposts he built or the outposts he evacuated?" asked Israeli political commentator, Nahum Barnea, in Yediot Aharonot on 6 January. Will Sharon be remembered as the "warrior" who massacred Palestinians at Qibiya in 1953, encircled the Egyptian army in 1973 and manufactured Israel's longest and costliest war in Lebanon in 1982? Or the "shepherd" who pulled the settlers out of Gaza in 2005 as he forged the new Israeli consensus that while retention of all the 1967 conquered territories was untenable, a negotiated settlement of their fate was unrealistic? The short answer is neither and both. For what was truly remarkable about Sharon was the consistency of his vision, even if in later years he became increasingly skilled at "adapting his slogans to changing times and circumstances", says veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery. That vision rested on two cornerstones. The first was his visceral hostility to all manifestations of Palestinian nationalism. This was not simply due to an inherited colonial mentality that viewed Arabs as inherently venal. It was also driven by the accurate perception that Palestinian nationalism, especially the version that advocated a two-state solution, represented the gravest threat to his map of Israel. This is why he forced the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, in futile hope that by crushing the Palestinian head its limbs would wither in the West Bank and Gaza and somehow migrate to Jordan. It also explains his deliberate dismemberment of the Palestinian Authority during the Intifada as well as his constant dismissal of all and any Palestinian "partner", whether the "terrorist" Arafat or the "featherless chick" Abu Mazen. The goal in all cases was the same, says Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling, which he coined politicide : "the dissolution of the Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate, social, political and economic entity". The second cornerstone was the map Sharon carried in his head for the West Bank and then proceeded to create during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in his various incarnations as minister of agriculture, industry and trade, defence, housing, foreign minister, infrastructure and prime minister. On the drawing board in 1975 the map projected Israel's annexation of territories along the pre-1967 border and Jordan Valley as well as several lateral corridors connecting them. On the ground in 2005 it had translated into Israel's practical incorporation of East Jerusalem and the establishment of 137 settlements and 100 outposts that together housed 400,000 settlers and commanded nearly 60 per cent of all West Bank territory, including 10 per cent "effectively annexed" behind the West Bank wall. Between these expanses would be the Palestinian enclaves. In 1975 Sharon referred to them as Bantustans. Thirty years later he said they could become a Palestinian state "with provisional borders" and "transportation contiguity". The substance was the same. And this is the map Sharon would have carried into his third term, says Uri Dan, Sharon's "favourite Israeli journalist". Yes there may have been further West Bank withdrawals, he wrote in Maariv on 8 January, but "the settlement blocs would be maintained as would security areas like the Jordan Valley. Above all, there would be a strengthening of a united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel". Unlike earlier phases of the map, however, Sharon would have endeavoured to "enlist as much US support as possible". This is the only Sharonian legacy that matters. According to Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert it will stay his and Kadima's "political path" for the future, with or without their leader. But it is not a vision for the future. It is the flight to the past, back to those older Israeli myths which believed that Palestinian nationalism could somehow be "managed" through a mixture of colonial control, military might and political denial. Sharon believed in those myths, no less at the end of his life than the beginning. That is why he spent his time fighting wars and shepherding un-negotiated, inconclusive withdrawals. So will his heirs.
