Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2002, page 15

Special Report

 

Ariel Sharon Outsmarts Bush and Arafat

By Charley Reese

To understand what’s going on in the Middle East, you have to understand Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister.

Sharon does not now and never has wanted a peace with the Palestinians. He is the father of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and he will never consent to dismantling even one of them. In fact, he is committed to expanding them. He said soon after taking office that he would never sign a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. He has refused to meet with the Palestinians. He himself started the intifada by invading Islam’s third-holiest site and arrogantly calling it Jewish property.

But Sharon had two problems. One, he was being pressured by the United States to make peace with the Palestinians. Two, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president, was winning sympathy in Europe for the Palestinian cause, which is simply an end to Israeli occupation.

So Sharon’s problem was thus: How do you wreck the peace process without being blamed for wrecking the peace process? The short-term solution was to set the absurd condition that seven days had to go by without a violent act before he would even consider talking.

There are 3 million Palestinians there, and Arafat’s authority is limited basically to the boundaries of a few cities. It is literally impossible for him to prevent one individual from taking a pot shot at an Israeli. Especially is it impossible when Sharon himself is ordering the Israelis to commit acts of violence and other provocations.

 

Sharon’s biggest stroke of luck was the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

No country in the world could systematically assassinate more than 27 political opponents without being branded a terrorist state. Of course, Israel gets a free ride in the United States. At the same time this is going on, Sharon is discrediting Arafat by blaming him for any and every act of violence, even those directly provoked by Israel. When Israel assassinated the leader of a Palestinian group, the man’s followers promised vengeance. A few days later, they assassinated an Israeli cabinet member. They publicly took responsibility for it.

Sharon’s response was to attack Palestinian Authority police stations and to blame Arafat. But Sharon’s biggest stroke of luck was the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and President Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism. Now he had Bush where he wanted him, so the Israelis began to put tremendous pressure on the administration to include Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah on its list of terrorist organizations. And they succeeded, as the Israeli lobby so often does in Washington.

Still, Sharon needed one spectacular terrorist attack to justify his coup de grace to the peace process. And he knew how to get it. He ordered the assassination of a prominent and popular Hamas leader. Sharon knew that Hamas would retaliate, and it did, with three suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa. Now he had what he wanted: an excuse to kill the peace process once and for all.

By branding the Palestinian Authority as an organization that harbors and sponsors terrorism, and by declaring two PLO organizations as terrorist organizations, the Israeli government has announced its intention to destroy all three. Then there will be nobody to negotiate with.

Bush is snookered. Sharon can say: “Look, I’m only following your example. The Palestinian Authority is my Taliban, and the PLO organizations are terrorists. You yourself said, Mr. President, that terrorists and people who support them must be destroyed.”

I’d like to be wrong once in a while about the Middle East, but, alas, I’m right. If you wish to look back, you will see that when Sharon became prime minister, I said the peace process is dead. Later, I said the United States’ one-sided support of Israel would bring Middle East terrorism to the United States. That was in August.

Now I suggest we all hunker down. Because of Sharon’s shrewdness and ruthlessness and our stupidity and naivete, the dogs of war have been let loose. Our newborn grandchildren will probably grow beards before the blood stops flowing.

Charley Reese is a syndicated columnist. This column first appeared Dec. 10, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

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