The Man of The Moment
Who could have guessed five years ago that the Israeli prime minister meeting the American president in the Oval Office last week would be Ariel Sharon? Elected in a landslide after the Palestinians organized a war of attrition against Israelis--despite unprecedented peace offers from his predecessor, Ehud Barak--Sharon is now seen by his countrymen as the man who can end the violence, and not pay for peace with the devalued coin of concessions. Sharon's stature, ironically, is due in large measure to Yasser Arafat. If he proved anything during the arduous but ultimately fruitless negotiations with Barak, Arafat convinced even the doves in Israel that pre-emptive concessions and magnanimous gestures are simply exercises in futility. Israelis understand fully today that they must reject Arafat's view that agitation and guerrilla warfare can demoralize Israel into making more concessions--or spark such a violent Israeli response that it will alienate the West, which would seek to impose its own solution on Israel.
Sharon has turned the Arafat dialectic on its ear. He has made it clear that an end to the violence is a precondition for a return to negotiations. Negotiating in the midst of violence, Sharon understands, serves only to embed in Palestinians the belief that Israel will accept the condition of violence. Sharon's purpose is not to negotiate a final-status agreement. The object lesson of Camp David and the war of attrition Palestinians launched immediately afterward is that the Palestinian leadership is not ripe for a historic compromise with Israel. Sharon speaks for a huge majority of Israelis who believe it is impossible to conclude a peace agreement with those whose hostile intentions have recently been made so clear. What is the point of concessions, after all, if they are repaid only with hatred and bloodshed? What is one to make of the gleeful destruction of Jewish holy places? Or of the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah as Palestinian men and women exulted? Sharon certainly knows: For now, tragically, the idea that the Palestinians would agree to share the Holy Land as peaceful neighbors must be rejected as hopelessly naive.
So Sharon will not play Arafat's game. He knows too well how that goes. Arafat ratchets up the violence while posing as Israel's victim. Then CNN's cameras, with their bias for capturing image after image of Palestinian victims, rush in. Sympathizers like the European Union scramble to Arafat's side. Sharon will have none of that. He will seek to apply pressures against terrorism that won't make for good TV and provoke still more hostility against Israel. That is why he is reducing, through closure, areas of contact between Israelis and Palestinians rather than increasing military force. In the end, of course, increased violence by Palestinians may force Sharon to deploy greater force. But that will be his last alternative.
Deterrence and disengagement. Sadly, the violence, since Sharon's election, has intensified. Almost every Palestinian organization today--Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tanzim--is involved. And not only has the Palestinian Authority failed to stop them, it has freed some of the most dangerous terrorists from its jails. Israel has brought substantial evidence to American intelligence officials to support its contention that the PA stands behind the violence in many of the killings.
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