Other fractures

One year on, Ariel Sharon remains king of Israel. But there are cracks in the façade. Graham Usher writes from Jerusalem
On the first anniversary of his premiership Ariel Sharon would appear to have reasons to be cheerful.
He has forged an almost strategic alliance with post-11 September America. "Bush's 'axis of evil' doctrine could have been drawn up in Tel Aviv," comments one Israeli analyst: he is not altogether sure it was not. Sharon has now chalked up his fourth trip to the White House in a year.
He has managed to steer his first budget through the Knesset without wrecking his coalition, no mean feat for the head of the largest Israeli government in history. And his approval rating in the polls remains high, an even rarer achievement for an incumbent Israeli leader.
But the sense of security is a veneer, and not simply because his great political rival Binyamin Netanyahu is hovering in the wings. Sharon may be popular on the Israeli street. But Netanyahu is more popular in Likud. And with Israel's return to the system of one direct vote for party and leader, the signs are it will be Likud -- and not the voters -- who will decide Israel's next prime minister.
There are other fractures. The slightest of these is with the Bush administration. The cardinal message Sharon carried with him on his recent trip to Washington was: "Arafat is not a partner and won't be a partner."
He found few takers. All wings of the administration may agree Yasser Arafat is a problem. But none are yet convinced Sharon's policies for an "alternative leadership" or the slow, attritional destruction of the Palestinian Authority are solutions. Like everyone else in the region, the US may be at a loss over what to do with the Palestinian leader. They are at a greater loss about what to do without him.
But Sharon's main failing is on the terrain where he most prides himself: security and war.
Since the Intifada erupted in September 2000, 883 Palestinians and 267 Israelis have been killed, most of them during Sharon's watch, with the latest Israeli casualties being four women (two soldiers, one civilian and one settler) shot or stabbed in Israel and the West Bank last weekend.
As Israeli commentator Amir Oren notes, this is more than the Israelis killed during Israel's post-1985 war in south Lebanon. He also notes the difference. Israel's "permanent" occupation of the south lasted 15 years, with most of the fatalities being soldiers. The Intifada has lasted 15 months, and the Israeli death toll includes 164 civilians.
"More bombings lead to more resistance," said PA Minister Imad Falugi, after F16s again rained their missiles on Gaza last weekend in reprisal for the Palestinians having fired Qassam-2 rockets into Israel.
Thirty-seven Palestinians were injured, PA headquarters and residential areas were destroyed and interned Palestinian prisoners were set free. But the image was of a wild Israeli elephant flailing desperately, and uselessly, to swat a Palestinian mosquito, as in Lebanon.
There are other spectres from that campaign haunting its architect. One is the burgeoning protest of Israeli reserve officers refusing to serve in the occupied territories, their number now swelling to more than 200 in less than a month.
Another is the slow reawakening of the Israeli peace camp, finally weaning itself from the myths fed by the Israeli and US governments as to who was really responsible for the failure of the July 2000 Camp David summit. On 9 February 10,000 Israelis turned out for a rally in Tel Aviv under the slogan, "The occupation is killing us."
Israel's mainstream Peace Now movement has also launched a series of protests under the rubric "Get out of the territories. Get back to ourselves," culminating, it hopes, in a mass rally in June to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
The significance of the Peace Now campaign is that the movement is no longer predicating a full or partial withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza on negotiations. Like Lebanon, it is predicating negotiations on a full or partial withdrawal, tentatively adopting a proposal from Labour parliamentarian Haim Ramon that Israel must withdraw from all of Gaza and 80 per cent of the West Bank as a prelude to final status negotiations based on President Bill Clinton's proposals of January 2001.
Ramon's "unilateral separation" plan has firm support among the Israeli public. Given the blood between the two peoples, some Palestinians believe it may be the only exit left, akin to De Gaulle's "solution of good sense" for pulling France out of Algeria in 1962.
But neither side has any illusion that Sharon is De Gaulle. He remains, irredeemably, Sharon. And no matter what chimeras he raises about a "pragmatic" Palestinian leadership or a "state" in 42 per cent of the West Bank, his road will return Israel to where it began, predicts Ramon: "The de facto destruction of the PA and Israel's full military reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza."
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor