I write as Ariel Sharon’s funeral proceeds; the Israeli media is flooded with flattering memories: he was brave; he was loyal; he was charming; he was headstrong, thus charismatic (even if, at times, he defied commanders and shaded the truth); he was pragmatic; he did his homework, then acted boldly; he could reverse course. None of this changes perhaps the most important thing.
Sharon’s public record speaks for itself: his wounds at Latrun, in the War of Independence; his 101st Brigade’s retaliatory massacre, in 1953, of women and children at Qibya; his victory (and insubordination) at the Mitla Pass, in 1956; new battles and new victories in the 1967 war; his crushing of Gaza, in 1969, followed by his being passed over for chief of staff; his catalyzing of the Likud Party, in 1973, then his emergency reassumption of command and his canal-crossing during the Yom Kippur War, which he politicized while still in uniform (“Al tazdiah, tatzbiah”—“Don’t salute, vote”); his bolting to Yitzhak Rabin’s government, in 1975; his rejoining Menachem Begin and the Likud, in 1977; his stint as Agriculture Minister, when he began building West Bank settlements; his destruction (on Begin’s orders, after Camp David) of the Sinai town of Yamit.
By 1982, Sharon had achieved his dream of taking charge of the Army when he became Defense Minister. He escalated on Israel’s northern border and attacked the P.L.O. and Lebanon in 1982, culminating in a reckless effort to install Bashir Gemayel as President, and then the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. After a judicial commission pushed him out of the Defense Ministry, his flame burned lower but proved no less consuming. Through the remainder of the nineteen-eighties, as Construction Minister, he funnelled money to dozens more settlements and built a network of roads. He created the town of Ariel and populated it with Russian immigrants. He opposed the Oslo Accords and joined the street incitement against Rabin. Then came his provocative visit to the Noble Sanctuary, or the Temple Mount, in September, 2000—an act that ignited a new intifada, an uprising that he would go on to suppress.
What held all this together was an ideology of sorts. He believed in national force as the fundamental driver of history, something that would be called by its right name in almost any other Western country but that for Israeli Jews, whose formative historical claims now focussed on the Holocaust, seemed only just and daring. “Arabs may have the oil,” he famously said, “but we have the matches.” Might makes, of all things, right.
It was Sharon’s added conviction, acquired honestly from what roiled Palestine under the British Mandate, during the nineteen-thirties and forties, that the Jews’ new military forces and agricultural settlements had been handed to his generation as a sacred trust. In this, Sharon was in many ways the distilled embodiment of what Amos Elon meant when he spoke about the sons of the founders—sons who believed (as Moshe Dayan had put it) that walking the Land of Israel taught Jews how the sun comes up in the morning and sets at night; that founders who believed in planetary motion were overcomplicating things.
Sharon, it is said, never bothered with the polls. But, then, great men like Sharon never have to poll in order to pander to opinion. They tap into the primordial longings of ordinary people, especially young men (and, more especially, young immigrant men), to sacrifice and to show fidelity, to scorn those they fear and then intimidate them, to brand as traitors or, at best, naïve those who argue for everyone’s humanity.
Imagine if Ike’s ailments had somehow stricken him so that he could not become President, in 1952. Imagine, instead, that George Patton had emerged with the moral prestige of having commanded America’s military during the Second World War, and that Patton had somehow presided over the transformation of America during the Korean stalemate, the Cold War with a nuclear Soviet Union, the time of the McCarthy hearings, the early efforts to overturn Jim Crow. Something like this nightmarish transfiguration can be seen in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, and is due in large measure to Sharon’s determination.
I can’t deny that, when I lived in Jerusalem during the 1973 war, I, like so many, felt transcendent gratitude to Sharon for his daring encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. I would still concede that, were it not for its having been expelled from Lebanon to Tunis after 1982, Yasir Arafat’s Fatah leadership in Tunis might not have changed course in 1988 or pursued a two-state solution thereafter. But Sharon’s military feats are the post hoc that count on indifference to the propter hoc. The 1973 war was almost certainly preventable—Israel’s unbudging military posture on the 1967 borders all but dared Egypt and Syria to launch an attack; the U.S.S.R.’s Leonid Brezhnev had warned of war the summer before and had appealed to Nixon and Kissinger to start a peace process, which Israelis like Sharon insisted was superfluous, owing to the I.D.F.’s military superiority.
As for the Palestinians, mayoral elections in the West Bank in 1976 brought to the fore a new leadership—loyal to Fatah and willing to act as its proxy in preliminary contacts—that might well have launched negotiations for two states after the Camp David Accords and long before 1988. More important, after Jordan’s Black September, in 1970, and through the George Shultz initiative after 1983, King Hussein was eager to make peace with Israel in return for the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem.
It was Israeli designs on Greater Israel that made this impossible, designs Sharon shared so strongly that he was prepared to defy his own Defense Minister, Ezer Weizman, and the Supreme Court to push illegal settlements deep into occupied territory. When Sharon took over responsibility for the settlements, in 1980, there were about ten thousand settlers. By 1988, there were a hundred thousand.
Still, it is precisely on the question of settlements that Sharon’s legacy becomes mixed. As it happens, I was in the audience at the Herzliya Conference, in December, 2003, when he announced his intention to evacuate Gaza. Like many others, I was encouraged, if not moved. He had begun using the term “occupation”: if the reality principle could catch up with Sharon’s pleasure principle, it could catch up with anyone’s. Now, after his death, it seems useful for peace advocates in Israel and Palestine to try to mobilize his posthumous reputation as a belated peacemaker to encourage Benjamin Netanyahu to coöperate with John Kerry. This rehabilitation has already begun.
But the evidence that Sharon would have made peace had he remained in control after 2006 is, let us say, weak. His decision to disengage from Gaza and to build the “separation wall” was not meant to precede a negotiated settlement of any kind but to obviate the need for one. Sharon’s idea was to annex all of Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, the major settlements, Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and so on, and to isolate West Bankers on less than half the territory beyond the Green Line.
Sharon, in other words, aimed to leave in place most of what he had built—the bypass roads, the towns, the bases, the network of informers—and to hunker down. In effect, his idea was to cut Israel’s losses, its most exposed targets, and simply take what he wanted. He couldn’t care less what the Palestinian Authority wanted. He worried only about what he could sell to the Bush Administration. He said that he would offer the Palestinians an “interim” deal.
Nor, for this reason, did this disengagement do the moderates of Fatah any good. Yes, it was encouraging to see an Israeli government uproot eight thousand settlers. But nobody imagined that force could be used against seventy-five thousand or more, many of whom were armed. Sharon’s abrupt withdrawal from Gaza, without consulting or coördinating with the newly elected Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, pretty much sealed the rise, in 2005, of Hamas—the party of stubbornness in the face of Sharon’s new “facts on the ground.”
Remember, by 2005 we had seen the Taba agreements of 2001, including modalities through which to manage the Palestinians’ “right of return”; the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002; and the Geneva Accord of 2003, in which Arafat’s people came to a comprehensive understanding with moderate Israeli leaders led by the former Labor Justice Minister Yossi Beilin—who, predicting disaster, strongly opposed Sharon’s unilateralism. Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s deputy and his successor as Prime Minister after Sharon’s debilitating stroke, once told me that some of Sharon’s discussions with Mahmoud Abbas after 2005 were so preëmptive and condescending that Olmert himself felt uncomfortable.
“The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself,” Sherwood Anderson wrote, in “Winesburg, Ohio,” the moment he “called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque, and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” That might be the most generous thing one can say about Sharon: that he was a man of his time, that, had he not been born, someone else would have filled up the space he occupied. (Today, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon seems there most of the time.)
For Sharon’s fate was to take the truths of old Zionist settlement to heart and, face down, unable or unwilling to appreciate the larger human story that animated them, to turn them grotesque. His death may now inspire an effort to reach peace. If that comes to pass, then may his memory be blessed. But his life’s work has placed before peacemakers almost unimaginable obstacles.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: BERNARD AVISHAI
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