[Peace-discuss] THE LEGACY OF ARIEL SHARON

[David Green]

>From today's Chicago Tribune

THE LEGACY OF ARIEL SHARON

What's ahead for the state of Israel?

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been less a
man of peace than a creator of chaos, as his
successors in Israel will learn soon enough

By Rami G. Khouri, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based
Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle
East with the International Herald Tribune

Published January 9, 2006

BEIRUT -- Ariel Sharon's health seems finally to have
ended the active political career of a man who has
been widely hailed in the West as an innovative,
daring "man of peace." The view from the Arab world is
considerably different and much less fawning. In his
political life--unlike his military escapades--Sharon
often deployed flashy tactics when he could not forge
successful strategies and policies. He was a political
illusionist who took the stage at a time when his
people needed his kind of emotional force and
comforting power, but he leaves behind a confused,
fractured, uncertain landscape, in both Israel and
Palestine.

He ends his public life having patently failed to
achieve the one thing he strived most passionately for
his entire life: to ensure the security and acceptance
of Israel in the Middle East. His reliance on military
force and tactical boldness, in the end, proved to be
high drama, but poor strategy.

He has been less a man of peace than a creator of
chaos, as his successors in the Israeli power
structure will learn soon enough.

He entered the hospital last week during a
foreign-policy episode that is one of the most
ironically shocking testaments to the deadly
combination of his political amateurism and reliance
on force. He was frantically, almost hysterically,
recreating in the northern Gaza Strip the same sort of
"security zone" that had been a colossal failure when
he tried it in southern Lebanon more than two decades
ago.

The Israeli army under his command had occupied much
of southern Lebanon in 1982 and stayed there until
2000, using every possible combination of brute force,
political intimidation, surrogate Lebanese forces and
widespread death, destruction and punitive measures to
subdue a Lebanese population that refused to be
occupied by the Israeli army. Israel finally withdrew
unilaterally in the spring of 2000. He also never
learned the lesson of south Lebanon: that only a truly
free, sovereign Arab neighbor can be a peaceful
neighbor to Israel.

His much-ballyhooed unilateral withdrawal from the
Gaza Strip has neither pushed forward the peace
process with Palestinians nor brought peace and quiet
to that frontier with Israel. This was a magician's
withdrawal, an illusion, with Israel still controlling
many dimensions of Palestinian life, movement and
economy in Gaza. His construction of the separation
wall that increasingly isolates Palestinian
communities, including Arab East Jerusalem and
Bethlehem, has combined with his continued expansion
of settler colonies in the West Bank to generate new
levels of Palestinian resentment.

Unable or unwilling to accept the global consensus
that Israel must withdraw from all the territories it
occupied in 1967, he scrapped the land-for-peace
negotiations leading to a two-state solution. He
replaced this approach with his own
unilateralism--building the wall, leaving Gaza,
steadily assassinating Palestinian militants, and
deciding when and if Palestinians could be engaged in
political discussions.

He refused to deal with Yasser Arafat, but then proved
he could do nothing when he was faced with the newly
elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who
campaigned on a platform of stopping armed resistance
and negotiating peace with Israel. Unable to make
peace with the Palestinians, Sharon played tricks on
naive Americans. Sharon sold himself as a "man of
peace" to a White House in Washington that was as
clueless and belligerent as he was when it came to
dealing with the Palestinians according to the
dictates of international law, let alone common human
decency.

Sharon leaves behind a fractured, bloody landscape
defined by tension and confrontation with the
Palestinians and confusion within Israeli society.
This is because his policies ultimately proved to be
more bravado than real courage based on honesty.
During the last quarter century, he held positions
defining Israel's defense, security and occupation
policies, expansion of Israeli settler colonies, and,
most recently, overall foreign policy. He used that
time to generate fragmented, often leaderless
Palestinian communities of deeply angry and indignant
ordinary Palestinians.

His life's work has now rebounded against him in
several forms, including lawlessness in many parts of
Palestine, a discredited and weak Palestinian
leadership, uncertainty about the future status of
Gaza, a high probability of Hamas and other Islamists
doing very well in the Palestinian parliamentary
elections this month, and rising anti-Israeli
sentiment across the Arab world and even further
afield.

If the measure of a man is in the results of his
life's work, Sharon must be seen as a great purveyor
of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and fear. A strategy
that sees an entire nation try to retreat behind a
wall is not only a great and enduring failure of
policy--it is also a great human tragedy about dashing
warriors who could not stop warring and turned to
illusionist tricks when handed the reins of power.


Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune 




		
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