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Sat Jan 7 11:05:56 PST 2006

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AFTER SHARON
Jan 5th 2006  

The death or departure of Israel's superhawk will darken hopes for peace

SO HISTORY repeats itself after all. For the second time in the modern
history of Israel, a tough and popular leader who had come to see the
need for compromise with the Palestinians appears to have been cut down
in mid-stride. Ariel Sharon may yet survive the massive stroke that
felled him on January 4th. But even if he does, his chances of
remaining prime minister and delivering the massive victory his new
Kadima party was expecting in Israel's general election in March look
remote. Like the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, this could
revive the prospects of Israel's bedraggled hawks and make the path to
peace still harder. 

Many non-Israelis, and especially the Palestinians, will find it hard
to accept the notion that Mr Sharon's departure could be bad for peace.
Even before earning notoriety as the architect of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, Mr Sharon had established himself as a superhawk. As a
young officer in the 1950s he gained a reputation for trigger-happiness
as commander of Israel's cross-border "retaliation" raids. After the
Lebanon war, he was forced out of his job as Menachem Begin's defence
minister after a commission of inquiry found him indirectly responsible
for allowing a Christian militia to massacre hundreds of Palestinians
in Beirut's Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. As housing minister in the
1990s, he was responsible for building many of the Jewish settlements
in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. And in 2000, his provocative
walk on Jerusalem's Temple Mount is said to have sparked the second
Palestinian INTIFADA and so delivered a fatal blow to Bill Clinton's
attempts to broker a peace settlement between Ehud Barak and Yasser
Arafat. Most Arabs reacted with scorn in 2002 when George Bush called
him "a man of peace". The Arab media more often calls him a war
criminal. 

ONLY HAWKS CAN MAKE PEACE
For all that--and like Rabin before him--Mr Sharon seemed this past
year to offer Israelis a unique mixture of qualities. On the one hand,
and specially after leading a ruthless counter-insurgency fight against
the INTIFADA, his credentials as a security hawk could not be
challenged. On the other, he claimed to accept the need for Israel to
make painful territorial concessions and permit the emergence of an
independent Palestine. Last August came proof that this was not just
talk. Unfazed by the resistance of his own ruling Likud party, Mr
Sharon evacuated all of Israel's settlements from the Gaza strip. No
one knows whether following up on the West Bank formed part of his
thinking. But the fence he started to build around the West Bank has
always looked like an attempt to mark out a political border as well as
a security barrier. Such a border would give Israel 15% or so of the
West Bank. That is still unacceptable to the Palestinians, but to
Israelis on the national-religious right, offering up 85% of divinely
promised "Judea and Samaria" is a betrayal verging on apostasy. When
the rightists in the cabinet mutinied, Mr Sharon simply broke with
them, quit the Likud, and formed his brand-new Kadima party. 

Even by the standards of Israel's volatile and fractious democracy,
this was a colossal gamble. But until this week's stroke it seemed to
be working. A party of the centre, ready for a two-state solution but
tough on security, is just what the secular Israeli mainstream seems to
want. Opinion polls suggest that with Mr Sharon at its helm, Kadima
would have trounced Likud at the election in March. The question now is
whether it could do so without its paramount leader. So new is the
party that Mr Sharon had not nominated his ministers and lieutenants
before going into hospital. No natural successor stands out. Israel's
acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is a capable politician who thinks
along Mr Sharon's lines, but lacks a national following. Shimon Peres,
who defected from Labour to Kadima, is a serial loser of elections and
widely distrusted. As in 1996, in the first election following Rabin's
assassination, it is not impossible that the disappearance of a tough
leader of the centre will make way for the return of a coalition led by
the Likud. As in 1996, the Likud happens once again to be led by
Binyamin Netanyahu, who after winning that election did much to delay
and ultimately derail the Oslo peace process. And this time, following
the creation of Kadima, the Likud is even less a party of the centre
than it was a decade ago. 

MEANWHILE IN PALESTINE...
The vacuum that Mr Sharon's departure would now create at the centre of
Israeli politics makes it hard to imagine how there can be any swift
progress in peacemaking with the Palestinians. What is worse is that
politics in the Palestinian camp is, if anything, in even greater
disarray. Mahmoud Abbas, the man the Palestinians elected president
after the death of Mr Arafat just over a year ago, has proved incapable
of administering either the West Bank or the recently evacuated Gaza
strip. In parliamentary elections later this month, the violent Islamic
extremists of Hamas are expected to do very well. Israel says that if
they join the government of Mr Abbas's shambolic Palestinian Authority,
it may cut off what little contact it still maintains with the
Palestinian leadership and suspend its already largely nominal
compliance with the international "road map" for peace. A final worry
is that the self-imposed year-long period of calm that has lately taken
the steam out of the Palestinian INTIFADA has just come to an end. An
abrupt escalation of violence, which would in turn strengthen the
extremists on both sides, is all too possible. 

It would be wrong to imply that if Mr Sharon had not suffered a stroke
Israel would have marched inexorably ahead towards peace with the
Palestinians. No matter who leads them, the gap between the
expectations of the two peoples remains frighteningly wide. All the
same, Mr Sharon's new party had seemed poised to make a breakthrough of
historical significance, by mobilising the moderate majority in Israel
and breaking the stranglehold of the settler movement. This remains an
essential first step towards compromise. It is indeed an irony that
Israel's arch superhawk looked like the man most likely to pull it off.
But it is no less true for that. Without Mr Sharon, hope will darken
yet again.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VPGQSJV&no_na_tran=1

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