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 says 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 is less a man of peace than a creator of chaos, as his successors in Israeli power will learn soon enough. He entered 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 over 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 — which ultimately translates into new forms of resistance.
Unable or unwilling to accept the global consensus that Israel ultimately 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, he played tricks on naive Americans. Sharon sold himself as a “man of peace” to a White House in Washington which 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 past 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 sentiments across the Arab world and even further afield.
If the measure of a man is in the results of his life’s work, Ariel Sharon this week must be seen as a great purveyor of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and fear. To encapsulate this legacy in 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.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 6 January 2006
Word Count: 799
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