The Election of Ariel Sharon as Israel’s New Prime Minister

 

The Champion Of Violence Takes Over

 

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Many American Jews are responding to the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister of Israel with sadness, mourning and despair. When Ariel Sharon was forced to resign from his position as defense minister during the Lebanon war, most Israelis felt that they had finally rid themselves of a man whose record of violence could no longer be ignored. Though his troops didn’t personally do the brutal killings of the hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, but merely let the murderers in and provided flares through the night for them as the stabbings and rapes and murders proceeded by soldiers known to have participated in other attrocities against civilians, the Israeli public knew of his many other acts of terror (including massacres of civilian Bedouins in the Sinai). By standards now being applied in Kosovo and Serbia, Ariel Sharon would have been brought to trial for war crimes. Instead, he now has been elected prime minister.

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak would like to blame this all on the Palestinians and their failure to accept his generous offers. But the reality is that Barak’s offers were mean-spirited and limited. Barak was elected in a euphoria of hope for peace—and he had a mandate to move ahead decisively. Had he announced an unequivocal intention to dismantle the West Bank settlements, allow for a limited number of Palestinian refugees to return each year, and create a climate of real cooperation to provide Palestinians with the economic infrastructure to make a Palestinian state viable, Barak could have built his electoral mandate into a permanent peace force.

Barak could have appealed to traditional Jewish values like the Torah’s unequivocal commandment to “Love the stranger.” He could have urged Israelis as a patriotic duty to begin to create dialogue groups with Palestinians and Israeli Arabs and to explore other paths for people-to-people reconciliation.

Israelis are a generous people, and their idealism would have responded had it been tapped. Instead, Barak played to his right. He insisted that he would never compromise on Jerusalem or dismantle settlements. He did nothing to prepare the population for concessions he would eventually find necessary to make or to build reconciliation. Nor were his peace offers as generous as the media sometimes portrays.

Peace activists in Israel last September were bemoaning the Palestinians’ failure to accept Barak’s offer at Camp David, but today many of them have studied the actual maps of his offers and realize that they were very far from the deal offered at Oslo: Israel receiving recognition and peace in return for a 5-year process in which Palestinians would get the West Bank and Gaza to build their autonomous state. Barak’s “generosity” would have left 200,000 settlers, fully armed and hostile to Palestinians, on the West Bank.

Nor would Barak acknowledge what every serious historian now knows: that Israel, while not solely to blame, played the major role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem—and hence has a major moral responsibility to find a solution (probably bringing a small quota of Palestinians back to Israel each year for the next 30-40, so as not to disrupt the Jewish character of the State, while offering as an alternative massive aid for resettlement of those refugees in an economically viable Palestinian state or in the countries where they now reside).

Barak’s failure wasn’t just with West Bank and Gaza. Israeli Arabs contributed mightily to Barak’s electoral victory in 1999, but Barak refused to give them even a single seat in his cabinet on the grounds that having such an Arab would “discredit” his government. (To his credit, Sharon has been less racist.) When Israeli Arabs protested the massive use of force to repress their Palestinian brothers and sisters rioting in outrage after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount last September, dozens were wounded, thousands faced pogroms from angry Jewish crowds wandering through and stoning their homes in northern Israel’s Arab villages, and at least 17 were killed by Israeli bullets—yet Barak could only find the courage to apologize for this in the last three days of the election when he finally realized how much he had lost his own base of support. No wonder so many found it hard to rally to his support. Sharon did not win more votes than Likud had won in the past—but it was a higher percentage of the total because so many Israelis couldn’t stomach voting for Barak, stayed home, and created the lowest voter turnout in Israeli history.

The path that Israel is following in electing Sharon is no surprise. Countries that seek to maintain by force the occupation over another people will eventually drift toward repressive or even fascistic leadership. It’s that very fear of Sharon that led Peres and others to justify joining a “unity” government as their only way to contain this scary figure. But they will be dragged by Sharon further and further to the path of repression for a simple reason: half-way measures of the sort offered by Barak and his weak-kneed friends in the right-wing of the Labor Party cannot work. Either Israel ends the occupation, dismantles the settlements, and gets out of the West Bank, or it will drift to the right as it has now done. But with Sharon, Israel could follow a path designed to provoke a wave of ethnic cleansing much like that which caused the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place.

George Bush senior was the only U.S. president to have the courage to stand up to the “Israel-right-or-wrong” lobby that claims to speak for most American Jews. Bush Sr. told them to stop expanding settlements or lose U.S. “loan guarantees” for money Israel sought to resettle Soviet Jews. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused, Bush stuck to his guns, and the result was to create economic pressures inside Israel which helped elect pro-peace Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992.

It seems unlikely that George W. will have similar courage or vision. Ironically, standing up to Israel and insisting that it dismantle the settlements, get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and accept publicly part of the responsibility for having caused the Palestinian refugee problem (and state its willingness to take back a portion of those refugees small enough to not upset the Jewish character of Israel) is the most pro-Jewish thing he could do, though many Jews wouldn’t read it that way.

The truth is that Judaism and the Jewish people are suffering from the impact of the occupation. The mean-spiritedness in Israel that leads to a Sharon landslide makes many younger Israelis wish to leave Israel and settle in the U.S., and many young American Jews to say “my parents were Jewish” rather than claim an identity defined by Israelis as oppressors and people who think that power is more important than love.

When the American Jewish establishment rallies around such an Israel, they do more to drive young Jews into assimilation than any fear of anti-Semitism could ever do. So, many American Jews greet the election of Ariel Sharon with great sadness and mourning—mourning for Israel and mourning for the soul of the Jewish people. With Ariel Sharon leading Israel, the world will be a scarier place for everyone.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of TIKKUN: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics Culture and Society, author most recently of Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul (Hampton Roads, 2000), and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco.