Palestinians fear Ariel attack
Sharon: the real face of Israeli culture
The election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister has been seen by many as a turning point in the history of Israel, and as the definitive end of the "peace process".
Sharon, after all, is reviled in the Arab world as the "Butcher of Beirut", remembered with fear and loathing by Palestinians for his part in many massacres over the past fifty years, and scorned by liberal Israelis as almost the devil incarnate.
The fallacy of such an apocalyptic view, however, is apparent from the haste with which the Israeli Labour Party, prodded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, declared its willingness to serve under Sharon in a "government of national unity".
As foreign minister, Peres who until just before the election was being touted by many as the "left" alternative to outgoing PM Ehud Barak, will have the task of justifying Sharon’s policies internationally.
Another Labour member, former general Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, will be defence minister, in charge of implementing Sharon’s policies in the occupied territories. According to the Jerusalem Post (4 March),
"Ben-Eliezer … intends to do away with the carrot and use a stick to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiation table".
Ironically, Sharon’s will be the first government in Israel with an Arab minister – Labour’s Salah Tarif, will be minister without portfolio. In an ominous move, former general Rehavam Ze’evi, of the far-right Moledet party, whose entire policy is the "transfer" (ie expulsion) of all Arabs from Israel, will be minister of tourism.
None of this should come as any surprise. Sharon is not a radical break from previous Israeli prime ministers: he is the genuine face of Israel’s political culture.
And, despite much anguished hand-wringing from parts of the Israeli peace movement, it is clear that he won the election because of, not despite, his questionable past.
Sharon, it should be remembered, is a product of the Israeli labour movement.
He was brought up in a semi-collective village, his earliest sponsors were Labour prime minister David Ben-Gurion and Labour chief-of-staff Moshe Dayan, and his political mentor, and friend, was Labour PM Yitzhak Rabin.
His political background, like Rabin’s, was the activist Ahdut Ha’Avoda wing of the Labour Party, associated with the pre-state Palmah shock force of the nascent Israeli army.
In the early 1950s, he was appointed head of a new army unit charged with pursuing Palestinian infiltrators across the borders and eliminating them. Among the exploits of this notorious Unit 101 was the raid on Qibya in Jordan, in which over 70 civilians were murdered when their homes were blown up while they slept.
Under Sharon’s command, the unit carried out scores more raids in Jordan and Egypt, some characterised by sickening brutality.
Sharon was also responsible for the "pacification" of the Gaza refugee camps in 1970-1. His troops bulldozed scores of homes to provide easy access for tanks, and carried out a war of assassination against suspected PLO members; an unknown number of Palestinians died as a result of his exploits.
As an army officer, Sharon was noted for his adventurism and insubordination, and frequently accused of leading his troops into unnecessary danger.
Deliberately excluded from consideration as chief-of-staff, he entered politics, originally as a supporter of negotiations with the Palestinians and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This state, however, was not to be in Palestine; for Sharon, "Jordan is Palestine", and his strategic goal in the 1982 Lebanon war was to remove Palestinians from both Lebanon and Palestine, and to overthrow the Hashemite regime, which would be replaced with a compliant Palestinian state.
He left parliament soon after he was elected, having been appointed special adviser to defence minister Rabin in 1975.
Sharon’s 1981 appointment by Menahem Begin as defence minister sparked a huge controversy, in the course of which one of his aides commented:
"When (Sharon) was not appointed chief-of-staff, I said that those who did not want him as chief-of-staff would get him as defence minister.
"Now I say that those who don’t want him as defence minister will get him as prime minister".
His role during the 1982 Lebanon war is well documented, as is his subsequent resignation after an official enquiry found him "indirectly responsible" for the murder of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut.
All of this is, of course, well known to the Israeli electorate. In electing Sharon, they have shown their disdain for international opinion and their contempt for Barak’s political manoeuvrings.
Barak lost the election because, in the space of eighteen months, he had managed to alienate a large part of his constituency. When first elected, he gained 95% of the votes of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
His first step was to declare that he would build a purely Jewish coalition, with no reliance on Arab members of the Knesset.
Like all earlier PMs, he failed to appoint an Arab cabinet minister. He permitted the police chief in Galilee (where there is still an Arab majority) to conduct a campaign of harassment against Arab political activists, in the course of which several Knesset members were threatened with prosecution for incitement.
And he oversaw the pogroms against Palestinian citizens, in the course of which 14 were killed with no investigation and no apology. It is no surprise that the Arab vote plummeted to a reported 1% this time.
The unprecedentedly low turnout shows that many Israeli Jews, too, refused to vote for either candidate in this choice between two war-criminal generals.
Barak, who had promised to bring peace, also lost much of the centre vote which he had won in 1999. He offered "concessions" which, while far from sufficient to win Palestinian support, were viewed by many Israelis as too great. And his behaviour led to the uprising, driving many voters into the arms of the Israeli "right".
Russian immigrants, for instance, most of whom who had backed Barak in 1999, switched in large numbers to Sharon.
But Sharon’s victory was not merely a result of Barak’s loss.
Throughout the campaign, Sharon portrayed himself as the grandfatherly figure, who could make peace from a position of strength.
Many Israelis, tired of the violence, isolation and economic cost of the conflict, clearly believed that Sharon would be a sort of Israeli De Gaulle, talking tough while making an offer the Palestinians couldn’t refuse.
After all, they remember that it was Begin’s right wing government which brought peace with Egypt, withdrawing from the entire Sinai peninsula, and dismantling settlements in the process.
This optimistic prospect, however, is no more likely under Sharon than it was under Barak, Netanyahu or Rabin.
Until there is a change in the Middle East balance of forces, no Israeli government will be prepared to offer the sort of deal which Palestinians will be able or willing to accept.
Sharon, with eight Labour ministers in his cabinet, can be expected to continue the policies of his friends Barak and Rabin, though with his own style and approach. The combination of his "Jordan is Palestine" views, and Ze’evi’s support for "transfer" are of particular immediate concern.
But it would be a mistake to view Sharon as uniquely evil, and to focus opposition to his well-documented war crimes.
Sharon’s positions are the logical development of Israel’s actions over the past fifty-two years. These, rather than the personality of Israel’s current leader, are the source of the conflict.