Behold the Rise (and Imminent Fall) of Ariel Sharon

 

By Ahmed Bouzid

When historians write the final draft on the short and bloody tenure of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, they will undoubtedly point to June 18, 2001 as a watershed moment.

That was the day a group of Palestinians brought a lawsuit in a Belgian court against Sharon for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his involvement in the September 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. History will show that public opinion against Sharon began to build soon after that fateful day, with the first signs that he and his coalition were in deep trouble showing when he took his early July trip to Europe. During that trip, he was greeted by throngs of demonstrators chanting “Sharon assassin” and “Sharon to The Hague,” while behind closed doors, and later publicly, European leaders flatly rejected Israel’s policies.

Historians also will note something even more important: that Israel’s relationship with its longtime guardian and custodian, the United States, began to show evidence of strain. Historians will retrace the early indications of the rift to Feb. 25, the day Colin Powell shocked the Sharon administration by using the word siege to describe the Israeli blockade of Palestinian cities and villages.

They will then point to March 19 as another crucial date, when Powell delivered a speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, when he uttered the following fateful words: “The U.S. continues to support a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, one based on U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the formula of land for peace.” Mention of 242 and 338, historians will remind us, was hardly ever made during the eight years of the Clinton administration.

From then on, historians will explain, things began to unravel: In early May the Bush administration publicly condemned Israel for crossing into Palestinian territory; later, it strongly objected to the use of F-16 fighter jets; later still, it supported an international commission’s call for a total freeze on settlement building; then in June, the United States stated that it no longer opposed, in principle, Arafat’s long-standing demand for international observers on the ground to monitor the situation; and in late July, as Israel heedlessly intensified its assassination policy, U.S. official displeasure mounted to such a crescendo that words such as “excessive” and even “highly provocative” were being used by the U.S. State Department to denounce Israeli actions.

On the domestic front, historians will point to the election of Sharon as the beginning of the end for the settlement movement and the creeping presence into the occupied territories. They will note that while Ehud Barak was able to underhandedly push the policy forward with great success (with no opposition from the U.S. administration), Sharon crudely blew the lid off the whole enterprise when he blockaded whole cities, shelled civilian buildings, rolled his tanks into Palestinian territory and deployed F-16s against Palestinian targets.

What historians will no doubt relish most is the political resurrection of the historically unelectable Shimon Peres. They will note how the Machiavellian Peres inserted himself in Sharon’s government, how he took over the foreign ministership and how he stood by his prime minister early on, but eventually began to publicly disagree with Sharon on key points: settlement freeze, the assassination policy and the effort to unseat Arafat.

Once his alliance with Sharon is broken, Peres will stand as the only viable alternative in the eyes of the Israelis—the only man capable of carrying the momentous historical mission of making the necessary compromise and closing a deal with the Palestinians. Disillusioned in Sharon’s “security through strength” solution, Israelis will at long last take their first step away from forcing a military settlement on a political conflict.

As for the Sharon tenure, historians will tell us that without the bloody Sharon months that brought the whole region to the brink of disaster, Israel never would have dared to turn its back, once and for all, against its old, destructive habit of conquer and wait.

Ahmed Bouzid is president of Palestinian Media Watch. This article appeared in The Keene Sentinel (NH) and the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 2001. Reprinted with permission.