The bulldozer baron

By Michael Jansen
The measure of Ariel Sharon is taken in a brief survey of his career. He joined the pre-state underground army, the Haganah, in 1945 at the age of 17 and fought in Israel's war of establishment. In 1953 he was given command of special forces Unit 101, which conducted raids against Arab targets, allegedly in retaliation for fedayin attacks against Israel. With the raid against the Jordanian village of Kibya that year, Sharon established a reputation for excess by killing 69 villagers in revenge for the murder of three Israelis near Tel Aviv. The infamous Gaza raid of 1955, in which 38 Egyptian soldiers were killed, initiated the chain of events that led to the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt. A similar 1966 raid against another Jordanian village, Samu, led, ineluctably, to the June 1967 War. In 1982, Sharon, then defence minister, launched his own war against the PLO in Lebanon, the campaign that culminated in the massacre of 2,700 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
His political career has been no less bold. In 1979 he voted against the peace treaty with Egypt; in 1985 he opposed Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon; in 1991 he was against Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference; in 1993 he stood against the Oslo Accord; in 1994 he abstained on the peace treaty with Jordan; he rejected the Hebron agreement in 1997 and criticised the way Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. At the age of 72, Sharon is unlikely to change from being a man of war to being a man of peace.
Sharon must also be judged by the company he keeps. His candidacy for prime minister was supported by the darkest and most obscurantist forces in Zionism: ultra-nationalists, messianic religious parties, hard-line Russian immigrants and militant settlers in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and the Golan.
Sharon belongs to the right-wing secular coalition dubbed the "national camp," consisting of the Likud and the breakaway Herut and Gesher factions. The Likud was formed in 1973 by the amalgamation of Herut, the bourgeois Liberal Party and a small right-wing faction of the Labour Party. The dominant component of this coalition was Herut, founded by Menachem Begin, which takes the line that Zionist goals will be achieved by warfare rather than conciliation and negotiation, and that Israel will have to dwell indefinitely behind an "Iron Wall" rather than reach compromise settlements with neighbours. Sharon endorsed this line in a November 2000 interview with the New Yorker when he dismissed as "absurd" the idea that Israel could end the conflict with the Palestinians. "It cannot be achieved," he stated. Although Herut seceded last year, the Likud remains under the sway of its ideology. This bloc has 21 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
The second element in Sharon's constituency comprises the religious parties. The largest is the Oriental or Sephardi ultra-orthodox Shas, which attracted the votes of 400,000 Israelis in the 1999 parliamentary poll. Although Shas's spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, had a reputation as a moderate who supported the "peace camp" for many years, he made a dramatic shift last year. During the election campaign, Yosef called Sharon's Labour rival, Ehud Barak, "a hater of Israel and a hater of Judaism, who is selling out everything to the Arabs. We need to influence people to vote for Sharon. The survival of the Torah depends on Barak falling." Yosef repeated a previous racist characterisation when he accused Barak of "bringing us venomous snakes [the Palestinians] and strengthening their hand." Yosef had been under pressure from influential rabbis to adopt the hard-line approach of the smaller, Western or Ashkenazi religious groupings, the National Religious Party and the ultra- orthodox United Torah Judaism. The combined strength of the religious bloc is 27 Knesset seats.
Israel has two competing parties representing its million-odd Russian immigrants, Yisrael Ba'Aliya, led by Nathan Sharansky, and Yisrael Beteinu, headed by Avigdor Lieberman. During the election campaign Lieberman called for the destruction of the West Bank village of Beit Jala if further shots were fired at the Israeli settlement of Gilo. Lieberman, who believes that "there is no such thing as a secure peace," also predicted a regional war in which Israel would launch missiles at Tehran and demolish Egypt's Aswan Dam. His party has formed an alliance with an extreme right-wing faction, the National Union, headed by Revaham Ze'evi, who advocates the "transfer," or ethnic cleansing, of Palestinians in the occupied territories. During the course of the campaign, Ze'evi said that Palestinian citizens of Israel are not entitled to vote because they do not perform army service and that the Palestinians resisting occupation should have their water and electricity supplies cut off. These three groupings have a strength of 14 seats.
The other large and influential constituency supporting Sharon is the settler lobby, most of whose members belong to the parties mentioned. The settlers condition their backing on Sharon's continued opposition to the dismantling of settlements as part of any peace deal with the Palestinians and the Syrians. Sharon, a practitioner of the policy that "settlements determine Israel's borders," has repeatedly stated that no settlements should be evacuated.
If all members of these parliamentary parties and factions rally behind Sharon he should have a narrow majority of 62 seats to support policies that many Israeli commentators argue will bring disaster upon the country.
On the peace front, Sharon could be expected to unleash the army to suppress the Palestinian Intifada. Although he publicly attempted to distance himself from the tough talk of his ally Lieberman, in private conversation Sharon was quoted as holding almost identical views. Hannah Kim, writing in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on 26 January, said that when Sharon was asked what he would do about Palestinian firing at Gilo, he replied: "'I would eliminate the first row of houses in Beit Jala." And if the shooting persisted, Sharon said, "I would eliminate the second row of houses; and so on. I know the Arabs. They are not impressed by helicopters and missiles... For them, there is nothing more important than their house. So, under me you will not see a child shot next to his father [as was the case of Mohamed Al-Dorra]. It is better to level an entire village with bulldozers, row after row." This is precisely what Sharon did in the Gaza Strip during the late '60s, when he bulldozed Palestinian refugee houses and deported thousands of Palestinians to Jordan, and in southern Lebanon in 1982 when he ordered the destruction of the camps around Tyre and Sidon.
At the same time, Sharon will undoubtedly elaborate his ideas for "a long-term interim agreement" with the Palestinians that would be "based on a non-belligerency accord" allowing Israel to "work in cooperation with the PA [Palestine National Authority] toward the establishment of a Palestinian entity." According to the Israeli press, his "plan" consists of the following points: PA self-rule would be confined to the 42 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza it now fully and partially controls; Israel would provide free access from one Palestinian enclave to another; Jewish settlements would remain and the Israeli army would maintain the roads between them; Israel would keep sovereignty over Jerusalem and retain security zones along the Jordan River and elsewhere. This proposal is, essentially, a recipe for maintenance of the status quo, which is unacceptable to the Palestinians, the Arabs and the international community and violates UN resolutions.
On the domestic front, Sharon has indicated he would promote the extension of the exemption from military service of Jewish seminarians and initiate other measures demanded by the religious parties but vehemently opposed by the secular majority. This would intensify the rift between these two deeply antagonistic groups. Sharon could also bring financial ruin on the country. He has pledged subsidies for farmers and industries, increased funding for education, settlers and Palestinian citizens of Israel. During his stewardship of the agriculture, housing, defence and infrastructure ministries, he gained a reputation for extravagance, carrying out misbegotten projects and ignoring ministerial responsibilities and democratic norms. Little wonder that out-going Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that he would not take the Labour Party into a "Tehran-Aswan" coalition ruled by Sharon. However, other Labour politicians have said that they would consider joining a "national unity government" if Sharon was prepared to exclude the "loony right" and resume peace talks with the Palestinians at the point they were suspended at Taba.
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