Sharon’s Pliability
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post (26 September 2002), Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected a military solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Asked about ending the war completely, he answered: “our policy is to prevent an escalation of terrorism and in fact to reduce it.”
This clearly implies that Sharon’s policy is to maintain Arab terrorism at a “tolerable” level. Which means he is willing to sacrifice Jewish lives so long as the number is not “excessive.”
The same is implied in his saying, “I have always acted to prevent escalation of the situation to progress, perhaps more slowly but in a manner that has provided us with freedom to act diplomatically in our struggle against terrorism…. [G]oing in and destroying terrorism [as advocated by some Israeli politicians] is a wrong approach.”
Here we see that Sharon refrains from utterly uprooting Arab Palestinian terrorism for diplomatic reasons. Presumably, he fears that Israel’s favorable relationship with the United States would be jeopardized by an all-out war against the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Besides, Sharon believes that Israel needs the PA—a reformed PA—to negotiate a settlement of the conflict, a settlement, he admits, that will require Israel to make painful sacrifices. This means that Sharon has NOT abandoned Oslo! Oslo’s ultimate goal, as perceived by its architects, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, is nothing less than a Palestinian state. Hence those who think Oslo is dead are simply mistaken. It lives on in Sharon.
Sharon is simply waiting for someone to take Arafat’s place, some new and trustworthy leader with whom Israel can begin a process of achieving peace with the Palestinians, a process that may take a few years. Sharon has no alternative to Oslo—certainly no thought of ever incorporating Judea, Samaria, and Gaza into the State of Israel. As he put it: “You have to understand that over three million Palestinians live here without the million Israeli Arabs. We don’t want to return and sit forever in Jenin or Nablus or Ramallah.”
Sharon is resigned to Palestinian statehood. To which one might ask: “Is there enough room between the Jordan and the Mediterranean for two sovereign states? And for how long, seeing that, in a few years, there will be more Arabs than Jews west of the Jordan?”
Although Sharon admits that a complete military victory over the PA is possible, he hastens to add, “if we want to get a situation where we can conclude a diplomatic agreement—and I want to get to a diplomatic agreement—we have to achieve a situation where after we leave the areas there will be someone who will oversee things there.” In other words, we need some sort of Palestinian leadership to conclude a diplomatic agreement that will allow us to get out of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
Actually, Sharon’s policy is identical in principle to that which was pursued by the Shamir-led government of national unity. Just as the Sharon government refrains from crushing the present “intifada,” so the Shamir government refrained from crushing the first “intifada,” which erupted in December 1987. And the reasons are the same. Shamir needed a negotiating partner to carry out the so-called “autonomy” plan. Accordingly, the government released from administrative detention the most notorious intifada leader, Faisal Husseini, and desisted from indicting two other prominent Palestinian leaders, Sari Nusseibeh and Abu Ayyash. By permitting these Arab insurrectionists to roam at large, the intifada was allowed to continue at a “tolerable” level of violence. Hence Jews were sacrificed for the sake of the government’s policy of “territory for peace,” the policy still pursued by Ariel Sharon.
Finally, to further explain why he opposes a military solution, Sharon makes his most revealing and reckless observation: “You need to understand, there is a difference between what I call operations in a time of peace and operations in an all out war. It isn’t that we are not at war. We are at war. But the general sense of the world is that we are at peace. Operations and activities that you take during an atmosphere of peace are more limited.”
From this it follows that how Sharon conducts the war against the Palestinian Authority depends on how other nations perceive this conflict. To admit this is to invite other nations to pressure Sharon to use less force against Israel’s enemies. Sharon thus reveals his pliability.
Is this why some 500 Jews have been murdered under his government?
