Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

The boundaries between the U.S. and Israeli flags literally blur in the backdrop as Cheney threatens Iran from the podium of the America Israel Political Action Committe

Last September, I noted that “the Bush administration appears not to have gamed the outcome of its effort to challenge Tehran’s nuclear program at the UN Security Council” and noted that “Kofi Annan is said to have warned UN member states against bringing matters to the Security Council when there’s no consensus there over how to respond.”

Now that the matter is on the table in New York, the Security Council is struggling to agree on the text of a statement precisely because its key member states have conflicting agendas when it comes to Iran. And not being particularly adept at diplomacy, the Bush administration may actually be shooting itself in the foot. It’s hard not to giggle when Condi Rice in the same breath urges Iran to do the right thing over its nuclear program and also denounces it as “the cental banker of terrorism.” Bush swears he wants a diplomatic solution but reminds journalists that Iran remains part of his Axis of Evil. Rumsfeld, in that psycho whine he reserves for complaining that the media is not portraying his Iraq train wreck as Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, swears Tehan is behind all the trouble in Iraq, although he won’t really get specific. And then we’re told that the
U.S. and Iran are going to hold talks about Iraq, where they clearly have some very important common interests.

If the conflicting messages do not appear to makes sense — you don’t really negotiate with terrorists and their evil bankers, do you? — but the mixed message comes from conflicting policy goals.
The Washington Post informs us that the Bush administration’s internal debate over Iran has been won by the regime-change hawks — so it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. For the hawks, led by duck-and-cover Cheney with the Bolton the Berserker playing point man, the whole diplomatic thing was never designed to work; it was simply necessary to go through the motions to show Iran’s malfeasance and persuade allies of the need for tougher action. (Don’t hold your breath…) For them, the arrival of the issue at the Security Council is a moment to crank up the rhetoric and throw everything they can at Iran, hoping to escalate confrontation. Suddenly Iran is a grave and imminent threat. It has 85 tons of uranium hexaflouride gas which, if enriched, could make ten bombs. Uh-huh. If it’s enriched to the degree necessary to create bomb material. And that’s no minor if. To do so, Iran would have to break out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and kick out inspectors, thereby signaling the world of its intentions. And even then it would take them as long as a decade to turn that gas into bomb material. Nobody’s going to bother with a few details like that when the Berserker is going on TV and warning that the “threat” posed by Iran is “like 9-11, but with nuclear weapons.”

The more sober saber rattlers confine themselves to Israel, repeating at every turn that President Ahmedinajad — who does not actually run Iran — has vowed to wipe Israel off the map. Much as he’d like to, of course, Ahmedinajad lacks the means. And the fact that Israel has the means to wipe out every major Iranian city within an hour or so may be one of the reasons why the Mullahs in charge of Iran have always been very careful to avoid a direct confrontation. Indeed, we learn from the Forward that Iran and Israel had communicated via back channels under President Khatami, and that even today, the key figure in Iran’s foreign policy establishment, national security chief Ali Larijani who is handling the nuclear negotiations, favors what the Iranians call a “Malaysian profile” on Israel — no formal recognition and occasional criticism, but refraining from taking or backing any action against Israel.

But the Bush administration appears also to have ignored the political warning signs at the February meeting of the IAEA board in Vienna, when Egypt forced Washington to accept language making clear that Israel’s nuclear capability would have to be addressed as part of any comprehensive solution to the issues raised by the Iran standoff. The Arab regimes are hostile to Iran, an old enemy to most, acquiring nuclear weapons. But to join the West in pressuring Iran on this question is politically untenable for them if it appears that the U.S. stance is based on protecting Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region. Trying to keep the question of Israel’s nukes out of the discussion, threatening Iran from AIPAC platforms and making Israel the centerpiece of the case against Tehran’s nuclear activities is unlikely to help. The purpose of the NPT is not to maintain the nuclear monopoly of the original five nuclear states and those like India, Pakistan and Israel that subsequently joined the club — its purpose is supposedly to enable global disarmament. So, when the U.S. avoids discussing Israel and makes deals with India that restore its access to nuclear technology despite it having achieved nuclear weapons status, Washington actually provides ammunition for those in Iran who argue that Iran should have the right to pursue the same weapons as its enemies have.

A deeper problem arises, though, when the U.S. goes to the Security Council chanting mantras that sound a lot like the “regime-change” case made against Iraq before the invasion. Because while there is support for the Western position against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, there is no support, even among the Western allies, for another regime-change adventure. For much of the international community, the priority is simply to avoid a damaging confrontation. And for the likes of China, it must be remembered, any action that affects its access to Iran’s oil and natural gas, such as sanctions or military action, are far more threatening to the national interest than anything going on Iran’s nuclear program.

Ask most governments in the world if they support Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and they’d answer no. But ask them whether stopping Iran from doing so is worth launching another war in the Middle East, and I suspect the answer would also be no. Indeed, most of them might be inclined to the view that the more the U.S. threatens regime-change, the more likely it is that Iran will seek nuclear weapons. The consensus of the diplomatic community would far more likely be that they want the U.S. and Iran to settle their differences. Indeed, far from regime-change, the best chance for avoiding the eventuality of Iran going nuclear lies in regime-recognition, i.e. in the normalizing of relations between Tehran and the West.

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Tags: iran; nuclear; regime change; tehran

When it comes to cutting through the thicket of nonsense that’s been written and spoken about Hamas winning the Palestinian election, it’s hard to know where to begin. The Bush administration tosses out vacuous denials and equally vacuous threats that are duly reported in the media as if they were valid foreign policy positions – exhibit A might be Bush himself blurting out that “this is a wakeup call for Fatah.” Uh, no Mr. President, the wake up call is for you; Fatah in the sense that you use the term — the affable Abu Mazen jumping through hoops at your command or apologizing for his inability to do so, but nonetheless waiting patiently, and passively, for you to somehow deliver Palestinian national sovereignty — that Fatah that you speak of is beyond the reach of any wakeup call; it sleeps with the fishes. Abu Mazen will retire quietly to Kuwait when Hamas decides it no longer needs him in place to engage in the occasional evenings of small talk with the Israelis and Americans that the Bush administration dubs a “peace process”; Fatah in the most optimistic case will be revived as a secular equivalent of Hamas, a fighting nationalist organization under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti, that will look to restore its standing through struggle with Israel, and perhaps even governing in coalition with Hamas. In the more pessimistic scenario, Fatah will simply devolve into a bunch of bandit groups led by local warlords. Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy the irony of the Bush administration suddenly insisting that the security forces remain under the direct control of the president rather than be made answerable to the democratically elected government; the exact opposite of the position Washington had taken when Arafat was President and Abu Mazen was Prime Minister.

But wait, it gets worse: Condi Rice — whose self-righteous posturing becomes almost comical in light of her repeated failure, in almost every challenging instance, to grasp the realities of the Middle East — speaks now of the importance of supporting Abu Mazen, who was democratically elected, you know, as if the democratic majority for Hamas is somehow illegitimate. Given the extent of ignorance Rice has displayed about the Middle East, it wouldn’t surprise me if she was actually unaware that Arafat, too, was democratically elected, in an election rather similar to the one that elected Abu Mazen — in the sense that Hamas didn’t run, and there was no serious opposition candidate. (And one wonders whether Condi was shown the Palestinian polls that demonstrated that had Marwan Barghouti run against Abu Mazen from inside his prison cell, he’s have won handily.)

The administration that proclaims its mission as spreading democracy now seeks to punish the Palestinians for using their votes to get rid of a corrupt and decrepit regime (that happens to be headed by a U.S. ally). Shades, here, of Kissinger’s rationale for the coup in Chile: “We can’t stand by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The Bush people are so tragically out of touch with the reality on the ground that they spent the weeks before the election funding desperate last-minute projects by local Fatah candidates in the hope of saving their hides. The effect was probably just the opposite: Hamas was only too pleased to point out that these were America’s candidates, knowing that in Palestinian eyes that’s a kiss of death.

Still, we have told-you-so Condi (as distinct from who-knew Condi), who insists that the election result was simply a protest vote against corruption. Sure it was, the corruption of the administration of, uh, Abu Mazen. But frankly, to attribute the result simply to corruption is to ignore the obvious: The Palestinians are not stupid, and if they saw Fatah as tainted by corruption but nonetheless indispensable to the achievement of their national goals — ending occupation and dispossession — they would have held their noses and voted for Fatah. Palestinians according to the polls still overwhelmingly favor a two-state solution.

So, no, Condi, it’s not only about corruption — in fact, the self-serving venality of so many Fatah leaders may itself have been an expression of the political bankruptcy of the Fatah of Abu Mazen, and Arafat before him, which has been leading the Palestinians to nowhere. The Palestinian electorate was able to abandon Fatah for the simple reason that Ariel Sharon, with the backing of the Bush administration, had shown the Palestinians that Fatah was entirely irrelevant to their fate. The New York Times says some U.S. officials wonder whether the election should have been delayed further in order to allow Fatah to gain maximum benefit from Sharon’s Gaza pullout. And to think that these geniuses are paid a salary out of my tax dollars… The only Palestinians to benefit politically from Sharon’s Gaza pullout was Hamas. After all, it was not negotiated with Fatah or Abu Mazen; it was a unilateral action coordinated with Washington, and the Palestinian street deduced that is must therefore have been a victory for the resistance of Hamas and likeminded Fatah elements. Abu Mazen was never going to get the benefit from Gaza no matter how long the election was delayed, but a second delay (remember, they were supposed to be held last summer) would have doomed his party to an even heavier defeat.

The Palestinians simply decided to move on rather than maintain the illusion that Abu Mazen somehow had a diplomatic strategy that would deliver their national goals. Conventional wisdom after 2001 was that the Palestinians, through their intifada, had elected Ariel Sharon to lead Israel. And five years later, it may be argued that Sharon elected Hamas.

Hamas’s triumph has a parallel in Fatah’s own history: Hamas has identified itself as the party that will take the Palestinians’ fate into their own hands, in contrast with Abu Mazen’s Fatah which had left the Palestinians’ fate dependent on the goodwill of the United States and Israel. And that’s exactly how Fatah came to power in the PLO in 1968, by articulating a line of Palestinian independence and struggle, sweeping aside the earlier leadership that had relied on Arab regimes to save the Palestinians.

Huff and puff as she might, Condi Rice can’t dodge the complicity of the Bush administration’s policies in getting Hamas elected. Commentators who wondered what the Hamas victory would mean for the “peace process” were missing the point: What peace process? The last substantive political negotiations between the two sides were held at Taba in January of 2001, five months into the current intifada and three weeks before Sharon was elected. But Sharon came to bury Oslo, and he succeeded in spectacular fashion – mostly because Sharon, as Condi’s erstwhile mentor Brent Scowcroft so bluntly put it in a dinner with her about a year ago, has the Secretary of State and the President “wrapped around his little finger.”

The U.S. bought into the idea that the problem of violence would have to be solved in a vacuum, without any movement on the question of the occupation (or what Shimon Peres called a “political horizon” without which he believed there would be no progress). No Palestinian leader was going to be able to disarm the militias outside of a clearly defined process to end the occupation with its checkpoints and restrictions, and while Israel continued to expand its illegal settlements on their land. But rather than recognize that Sharon’s position precluded any peace process, the administration simply adopted and echoed Sharon’s mantra that no negotiations were possible first with Arafat, and then with Abu Mazen. (It’s hard not to laugh when you hear Israeli leaders say “Oh, no, we can’t negotiate with a government headed by Hamas…” when they hadn’t bothered to negotiate with a government headed by Abu Mazen, either!)

Instead, the Bush administration gave Israel license to go it alone, define its own borders, build a wall cutting deep into Palestinian lands and cutting them off from Jerusalem, expand settlements and so on, all the while imagining that Palestinians would buy into Washington’s fantasies about lame-duck Abu Mazen being a “strong” leader who would deliver peace and national salvation. It was, quite simply, inevitable that Fatah would collapse sooner or later in the absence of a peace process or a “political horizon.” (Peres had bluntly warned three or four years ago that the PA would collapse if the political track was put on hold in the way that Sharon and Washington were doing.)

No, you say, what about the “roadmap”? Oy, don’t get me started. I laughed out loud on the subway when I read Condi insisting that, among other things, the test of Hamas’s bona fides will be whether it accepts the “roadmap.” Will someone please inform the Secretary of State that the “roadmap” is rather like a kitschy sunset painting given as a gift by the Americans, which is hung on the wall with rolled eyeballs and politely acknowledged every time they come calling – and, of course, it also doubles as a kind of fig leaf for the Bush administration when it stands accused of going butt naked when it comes to any serious engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s simply a set of hypotheticals. Of course, Hamas could choose to hang the picture and mutter approvingly, but why would it bother?

The election of Hamas is not a threat to the peace process; it’s a symptom of the failure of that process. And the Bush administration’s passivity, and its encouragement of Sharon’s unilateralism, contributed in no small part to that failure, and therefore to the victory of Hamas. (I mean, has everyone really forgotten the warnings of years ago from the Fatah moderates and the Israeli doves that failure to reach a deal with Fatah would leave Israel to have to deal with Hamas? It really was that obvious.) For the decade of Oslo, West Bank Palestinians had stood by and watched Fatah leaders enriching themselves while the Israelis continued to grab their land and choke off their economic life. Fatah had come to represent Palestinian powerlessness as Sharon bulldozed his way around, remaking the landscape of the West Bank and Gaza to his own specification knowing that the only consequence would be the sound of Saeeb Erekat complaining to Wolf Blitzer. It’s hardly surprising that Hamas managed to cloak itself in the mantle of the redeemer of Palestinian national dignity and subjectivity.

But scarcely pausing to ponder the scale of the setback she helped author, Condi Rice segued effortlessly into scolding the Palestinian electorate and the party they chose to lead them. The Palestinians want to live in peace, she told them. And to be part of a Palestinian government you have to renounce violence and recognize Israel. Hmmm. Seems that the Palestinian electorate doesn’t quite agree. Democracy can be such a drag…

Reggae legend Peter Tosh, of all people, once summed up the condition of the Palestinians more succinctly, and more melodically, than even Edward Said. In his late 70s anthem “Equal Rights” (which specifically mentions the Palestinians) Tosh opens with the observation “Everybody’s crying out for peace, none is crying for justice.” Sure the Palestinians want peace, but they want their rights, and their dignity. Like Tosh, the Israelis understand exactly why the Palestinians are fighting. Ehud Barak on the way to winning the 1999 election in Israel was asked by a TV interviewer what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian. Without hesitation, he responded, “Join a fighting organization.”

The premise of the peace process was always that the Palestinians would stop fighting and the Israelis would end their occupation. I detect in the statements of Hamas on the question of negotiations a congruity with that broad approach. But they’re not going to symbolically renounce violence without any quid pro quo. (And their terms will always be far tougher than Fatah’s ever were; their negotiating model is Hezbollah.)

As for the demand that Hamas now “recognize Israel” or it won’t get any funding from the U.S. and the EU, one need only note that if the same standard were applied in Iraq, the U.S. would have to cut off support to the Iraqi government, too, since it is dominated by Shiite parties that have signed a declaration committing them, among other things, to refrain from recognizing Israel. Indeed, on this score, Hamas is not necessarily any different from much of the Arab mainstream. Indeed, the Arab League urged Hamas to adopt the “Beirut” principle of extending recognition to Israel if it agrees to withdraw to its 1967 borders.

Formal recognition of Israel by Hamas is unlikely any time soon. Fatah only amended the PLO charter to recognize Israel some five years after the Olso Accords were announced. And the Likud, which was Sharon’s party of power until a couple of months ago, still has within its platform a clause strenuously rejecting any talk of a Palestinian state anywhere west of the Jordan River.

But whatever its symbolic positions are, Hamas is led by clever, pragmatic men, who will clearly recognize Israel as an intractable strategic reality, that cannot be beaten by the Palestinians. Their own political objectives now given them no incentive to escalate a confrontation with Israel. They’ll maintain their truce in order to pursue a wholesale cleansing and rebuilding of the corrupt and weakened Palestinian institutions. Assuming control of the PA is a huge step for Hamas, affirming the independence and vitality of Oslo institutions it had once mocked. In 2001, Hamas could send a suicide bomber to Tel Aviv, then stand by shrugging as Israel pulverized every PA target it could find. Hamas had no stake in those institutions. But now that Hamas has taken responsibility for the PA institutions and the wellbeing of the Palestinians, it has a return address: Israeli retribution for any attack will be far more painful to Hamas’s goals than the loss of individual leaders to assassination.

Instead, Hamas, I suspect, will offer the Israelis pragmatic coexistence, tough practical negotiations on specific, immediate issues, perhaps even “a non-belligerency agreement, for a lengthy and indefinite period.” That phrase, by the way, is Sharon’s, articulated in an April 2001 interview in which he explained his view that no political settlement with the Palestinians was possible in this generation. Curiously enough, that’s a position shared by Hamas. A long-term Hudna, perhaps, but the conflict cannot be formally signed away.
Still, many of its leaders already express a two-state conception of the foreseeable future, and practical coexistence, at least in the short term, appears to be their objective, and the terror weapon will become far more costly and dangerous to maintain. The logic of the choices they’ve made will dictate moderation, although at the same time they’ll face the tricky challenge of finding a response to Israel’s creeping annexation of large swathes of the West Bank. No outcomes are predetermined here, and the coming months will no doubt see fierce battles within Hamas over its direction.

The outcome of those battles will be very important to the prospects for stability and security in the lives of both Palestinians and Israelis. And the positions adopted by the Israelis and Americans could have a substantial impact on how those struggles are resolved. The initial responses from both quarters have not been encouraging. Israel is holding back taxes owed to the PA, but that’s primarily a hedge by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert against the challenge from Likud. The U.S. can’t afford to restrict itself to scolding and warning the new Palestinian government. Engagement is vital at this point, and the grownup position – as articulated by the Europeans – is that Hamas must be judged, in the new situation, on its actions rather than on the contents of its slogans, songs and manifestoes. There is, strangely enough, an enhanced prospect for security and stability in the new situation, if it’s smartly managed on all sides. That, of course, is a big if.

Sharon’s defeat of the Palestinians was sealed
in Washington: Not only did he tear up Oslo;
he tore up U.S. Middle East policy and
got the administration to thank him for it

1. Arafat Gone, His Rival Patriarch Leaves the Scene

“History is made by stomach complaints,” my friend and colleague Jamil Hamad told me by phone from his home in Bethlehem, on the West Bank about 18 months ago. Having covered the shifting tides of Middle Eastern politics for the best part of a century, Jamil — sitting in his home in a town under siege — had long since eschewed any faith in what is still euphemistically referred to as “the peace process” to deliver his own people, and the Israelis, to a better place. But in all his years covering the region’s conflicts and potentates he had divined the reality that the bodily functions of those potentates was often more decisive factor in shaping outcomes than the narratives they proclaimed. Within six months, Yasser Arafat was dead, and over the year that followed the movement he created would collapse quickly in the wake of his passing (a process, admittedly, that had begun even in his final years). Eighteen months after that phone call, Jamil’s words seemed almost prophetic, as Ariel Sharon has been removed from the region’s political equation by an event in his own body.

There are some remarkable parallels in the political impact of the death of Yasser Arafat and the demise of Ariel Sharon. In both cases, nature has removed from the scene men who had succeeded in making their own personages the organizing principle of their people’s national consensus (albeit a substantially more recent achievement on Sharon’s part). Although Israel is a well-established democracy profoundly different from the authoritarian personality cult that Arafat built at pinnacle of the Palestinian national movement, Sharon had nonetheless accomplished a remarkable re-engineering of Israeli politics over the past five years to the point that a new party formed in his image and with no policy or position other than a commitment to follow the direction charted by Sharon over the past year (a destination with no publicly expressed endpoint or even next step) looked likely to romp home in the March 28 election with double the share of the vote of either of the two traditional parties of power, Labor and Likud.

Like Arafat, Sharon had achieved this feat through his unique ability (through a complex combination of his popularity, powers of persuasion, ability to manage the most powerful external force and the powers of patronage that derive from incumbency) to forge a working political consensus among fractious fiefs and factions. And this while never making clear where he was taking them. A
perceptive farewell by Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz, a partisan of the Israeli right explains the secrets of Sharon’s success in terms that would apply in many respects to Arafat:

“Sharon was on the brink of making history here and winning three successive elections not by following a consistent political path. Anything but. He was striding to victory because, unlike any of his rivals, ordinary men and women with ordinary frailties and flaws, he had persuaded Israelis that he was of a different league, a political superman, immune to the limitations of other mortals. He was by no means universally admired, but he had a vast middle ground of confused Israelis wanting to believe that he knew what he was doing – that he, and only he, could steer the country to security and tranquility.

“Had he specified exactly what policies he intended to follow, come cleaner with the electorate, he would have been doing our democracy a service and he would, of course, have left far less of a vacuum now. He would also have dented that extraordinary perception, so widely felt, of his own indispensability.”

In his absence, lesser Israeli political leaders — like their post-Arafat Palestinian counterparts — fret over the absence of an heir with the departed patriarch’s unique standing. Indeed, the Israelis may well follow the Palestinians into their own version of a period of protracted political paralysis, as the least in the matter of how to manage their primary national conflict.

2. Sharon Won, Arafat Lost

But let’s not get distracted by ironic symmetries: There are many important differences between Arafat and Sharon, most importantly, the fact that Sharon appears to have beaten Arafat and the PLO by a knockout. To see the extent of his victory, one need only look at the widespread discussion in U.S. media over what his demise will mean for the peace process. A peace agreement was never Sharon’s goal. He believed no such thing was possible, nor did he relinquish his guiding ideological belief that the fulfillment of the Zionist enterprise required the elimination of the Palestinian national movement.

(This in contrast to Israel’s ideological drift during the Oslo years, when even Zionists of the center-left began to recognize that the Jewish State had been created on the basis of an epic injustice for the Palestinian people, the acknowledgment and redress of which, in some form, was the key to coexistence: Barak had famously conceded in an interview in 1999, that had he been born Palestinian, he too would have taken up arms against Israel. You could bet that the same would be true for Sharon, which may be why he saw so clearly the need to smash the Palestinian national movement, even the Palestinian national idea.)

For many of us, Sharon will always be, first and foremost, the man who hoodwinked his own government in launching a fullblown invasion of Lebanon, then watched through binoculars as the Lebanese falangist thugs unleashed on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp butchered hundreds of unarmed Palestinian men, women and children — a massacre for which an official Israeli inquiry found Sharon “indirectly responsible.” Nor was that episode necessarily an aberration for the most accomplished student of the Vladimir Jabotinsky, the fascist Zionist (literally — the guy saw Mussolini’s blackshirts as a model national movement) thinker of the 1920s still venerated as the founding father of Likud: Jabotinsky believed that the Arab residents of Palestine and its surrounds would never accept the expropriation of Palestine as a separate Jewish state. The only way to fulfill the Zionist dream, therefore was to build it behind an “iron wall,” bludgeoning the Arabs into submission and acceptance. Sharon’s life’s work as a soldier and statesman was premised on the notion that a Jewish state could only be secured by a crushing defeat of the Arabs.

Likud hot-heads criticized his Gaza pullout as a betrayal of Jabotinsky, but the old man knew better. His pursued Jabotinsky’s goals by the “art of the possible,” seeking the to defeat Palestinian nationalism on the battlefield of the military, political and diplomatic battlefield as he found it. He even gave both metaphorical and physical meaning to Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” concept in the way that Lenin did for Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The difference between Sharon and the Likud rejectionists is that the prime minister had a military man’s disciplined approach to politics, avoiding emotionally satisfying mistakes in order to keep his eyes focused on the mission. Typical was his refraining from killing Yasser Arafat when he had him surrounded in Ramallah and his own cabinet was demanding the Palestinian leader’s head. Sharon would have enjoyed nothing more than blowing Arafat away, but he knew there was too much to lose by taking that step — and a lot more to gain by letting Arafat’s own body do the job.

Sharon must have been laughing when the cynical George W. Bush and the craven Tony Blair dubbed him a “man of peace.” That was not why the Israelis elected him, nor did he make any secret of his disdain for the very idea of a peace process: The April 2001 interview he gave to Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, a veritable manifesto for his tenure at the top, made clear that Sharon saw no prospect of a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the current generation. As far as he was concerned, he was still fighting the 1948 war of independence.

Sharon’s Al Aksa walkabout in the wake
of Camp David should be read against
his conception that the 1948 war never ended

Sharon traded not in treaties and promises, but in “facts on the ground.” Rather than engage Israel in a discussion over whether to annex the West Bank, he simply went ahead and built settlements there to make that annexation a reality in large parts of the territory. Rather than seek Prime Minister Begin’s permission to march on Beirut, he told the cabinet that he was sending his troops as far as the Litani River to create a buffer zone deep in Lebanon’s south — and then marched on Beirut, anyway.

3. PLO in Tatters

When he came to power, the Palestinian Authority controlled 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. That, too, was an intractable reality, and Sharon recognized it as such. He made clear he might consider recognizing some form of Palestinian autonomy in the 42 percent of the occupied territories ruled by the Palestinian Authority, or perhaps a little more. That would even suit his objectives, since it was not Israel’s control over Palestinian land, but Israel’s control over Palestinian populations, that had become politically and diplomatically untenable. But he had no intention of completing Oslo, he declared that he had come to bury it.

And in that endeavor he has enjoyed spectacular success. Today there is no peace process; Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza had nothing to do with a peace process — it was, quite explicitly, an attempt to avoid a peace process and resolve the issue of the occupation (the untenable colonial rule over the Palestinians) on Israel’s own terms. The world, even the Palestinians, may have been waiting to see whether Sharon planned to follow that up with withdrawals from the West Bank in line with his own “42 percent” map, as described by his iron wall. Only Sharon knew. But there was never any question of his sitting down to negotiate a final-status agreement with the Palestinian national leadership. And his victory has two dimensions: One is visible in Ramallah; the other in Washington.

The Palestinian national movement today is in tatters. Mahmoud Abbas has to decide whether or not to go ahead with elections which, whether they are held or postponed (once again) will confirm the eclipse of his own leadership, and that of the Fatah “Old Guard” nurtured in exile by Arafat, the generation who authored Oslo from the Palestinian side but whose own corrupt and authoritarian grip on power has seen them thoroughly discredited in Palestinian eyes. The only question now is what the balance of power among Abbas’s inheritors will be, between the younger Fatah militants, led by the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, and the Islamists of Hamas who have profited most from the desire of ordinary Palestinians to punish the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. My money is on Hamas winning a plurality of seats in the next Palestinian legislature, an outcome that would have perfectly suited Sharon’s diplomatic needs by removing any expectation that he go to the negotiating table with the Palestinians.

Sharon and his flock:
Condi visits Sycamore Ranch

4. Twisted Around His Little Finger

Brent Scowcroft famously upbraided his former protege Condi Rice when she enthused that Sharon’s Gaza plan was an important step towards peace, warning her that he was doing that in order to avoid doing much else, and declaring that the Israeli prime minister had President Bush “wrapped around his little finger”.

Indeed, it was arguably in Washington that Sharon won his greatest victory, helped by the ascendancy in the Bush administration of an alliance between the Likudnik neocons, the apocalyptic rightwing Christians of the GOP base, and the hardline foreign policy hawks of the Cheney-Rumsfeld stripe who had always deemed Oslo a mistake. And if that wasn’t enough to tip the balance in Sharon’s favor, the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel’s cities came to define the conflict, in Western eyes, by images of terrorism rather than images of occupation. Sharon jumped on the opportunity to reverse decades of U.S. foreign policy that had sought to achieve a balance between Israeli and Arab interests, and had prioritized resolving a conflict that had come to define Arab relations with the West.

Sharon got Washington to agree that there was no Palestinian partner and embrace his demonization of Arafat (based largely on the mythology aggressively promoted by Israel’s partisans over what had transpired at and after Camp David, notwithstanding the fact that Sharon had rejected the deal offered by Barak far more vehemently than Arafat ever had). He got the administration to sign onto Israel’s insistence that it had no obligations to the Palestinians before the PA had dismantled Palestinian radical groups that Sharon knew could never be summarily dissolved without setting off a Palestinian civil war. He didn’t stop there, he even got President Bush to reverse decades of policy that had proclaimed Israel’s settlement of the territories conquered in 1967 as illegal — as part of his “reward” for his unilateral Gaza withdrawal, Sharon was given a letter declaring U.S. recognition of Israel’s right to keep its major West Bank colonies. (The administration lamely tried to cover itself by saying such recognition had been implicit in the deals being negotiated at the end of the Oslo process, which is correct — but those were premised not only on Palestinian consent, but also on a quid-pro-quo transfer of land from within Israel’s 1967 borders.

And he got the Bush administration to accept the principle that Israel henceforth negotiates changes in the status quo not with the Palestinians, but with the Americans. His diplomatic achievement can not be underestimated. It is, of course, a disaster for the Palestinians. And because it does nothing to resolve the basic lines of conflict with the Palestinians, it ultimately condemns another generation of Israelis to continue fighting Sharon’s 1948 war.

But it would be a mistake to buy into Sharon’s own mythology about his invincibility and ability to sweep all before him. Sharon’s achievement is all the more astonishing because of its improbability. The very idea that Sharon could ever be prime minister of Israel would have seemed laughable before the winter of 2000/1.

He only became prime minister because of the disastrous political errors of others. He’d been left for dead politically by the fallout of the Lebanon invasion, and was widely loathed and mistrusted on both sides of the Israeli mainstream. By the late 90s, his inclusion in Likud governments was generally a sop to the radical settlers whose interests he had long championed. After the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu managed to lose to Ehud Barak, Sharon was installed as leader of Likud precisely because there was no election looming. The party believed, like everyone else, that Sharon was unelectable, but it had no stomach for a bruising competitive leadership battle in the wake of Bibi’s loss, so Sharon was chosen as a caretaker — the cricket equivalent would be sending in a lower-order batsman as a nightwatchman when your side loses one of its opening batsmen shortly before the close of play.

But then came Camp David (a process for whose collapse Barak and Clinton are certainly as responsible as Arafat, but that’s another story), Sharon’s provocative walkabout in the grounds of the al-Aksa mosque, and the onset of the Second Intifadah and the collapse of Barak’s government. Suddenly, the “unelectable” Sharon became the choice of an Israeli electorate looking for a bully to teach the Palestinians a lesson. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sharon’s stewardship came about as a result of the errors of others — Bibi, Barak, Clinton, Arafat and other Palestinian leaders who seemed to forget the basic lesson of insurgency, that you confront your enemy where he is weakest, not strongest (a military confrontation was always going to be won by Israel, and not only that — it effectively neutralized the Palestinians’ advantages in the realm of politics and diplomacy). And his success in rolling back Oslo has been similarly premised on the mistakes and cynicism of others.

But his victories, as profound as they may appear right now, may nontheless prove to be tactical rather than strategic. In the place of Arafat’s PLO there will arise a new Palestinian political consensus, established at the ballot box and both more reflective of Palestinian opinion and more accountable to it than the Arafat generation had been — and probably, as a result, less palatable to U.S. preferences. Hamas will play a substantial role in that new Palestinian political order, to be sure, but as much as that fact will remind Israel and the West that Palestinian sensibilities cannot be ignored, it will also acquaint Hamas with the fact that Israel’s existence is an intractable reality. And an Israeli society that remains locked into a state of protracted conflict with the Palestinians will accelerate the internal collapse of Zionism. Indeed, Sharon may have convinced the Bush administration, but he has failed to persuade the majority of the world’s Jews to sign on to his vision of their future.

So, Sharon may have won the day, and that’s bad news for all who believe in justice for the Palestinians — and those for whom the term ‘Jewish’ is an ethical calling more than a tribal rallying cry. But he has not ended the conflict on his terms. And whether his inheritors manage to complete his work may depend on the ability of all those who seek a just solution understanding how Sharon’s victories were achieved.

The great hope of those on the Israeli left who supported Sharon’s Gaza pullout was that although Sharon had no intention of pursuing a credible two-state solution with the Palestinians, he might nonetheless set in motion a train of events over which he’d lose control. At the time that sounded like nothing more than wishful thinking. Ironically, his departure from the political scene makes it a more plausible belief. But given the current state of politics on both sides of the divide makes any expectation of movement back towards a peace process in the near term seem giddily optimistic.