[Mb-civic] Peace -- on a warrior's terms - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston
Globe Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Tue Jan 10 03:59:59 PST 2006
Peace -- on a warrior's terms
By H.D.S. Greenway | January 10, 2006 | The Boston Globe
I MET ARIEL SHARON 30 years ago when I was making the rounds as the new
Jerusalem correspondent for the Washington Post. It was the twilight of
the old Labor Party ascendancy, and Sharon was prominent in the
opposition Likud that would very soon bring Menachem Begin and his right
wing party to power for the first time to change the face of the Middle
East. It was also, looking back, the high-water mark of Israel's
territorial expansion that Sharon, back then, so ardently endorsed.
Everyone then remembered the famous photo of Sharon -- the general with
the bandage around his head, leaning on a tank in the Sinai Desert,
contemplating a bold crossing of the Suez Canal into Egypt that would
reverse the early setbacks of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Sharon, adored by his men, was a brilliant, pugnacious, and resourceful
field commander in the mold of George S. Patton, with a similar flair
for self-promotion.
As Admiral Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye at the battle of
Copenhagen, to avoid reading the more timid signals from his superiors,
so Sharon would tell his radio operators to report communication
difficulties when his commanders tried to reach him to urge caution. He
was nearly fired for insubordination.
He had earned respect in the War of Independence and in the Six Day War
in 1967, but the Yom Kippur War made him a national hero. Unlike Moshe
Dayan, Sharon had no appreciation or sympathy for Arabs, and they would
suffer under his lash. He believed passionately in a greater Israel to
include all the territories captured in the Six Day War and famously
backed Jewish settlements to make it politically impossible for any
Israeli leader to give occupied lands back.
Yet when Egypt made its peace with Israel in exchange for the Sinai, it
was Ariel Sharon who had to dismantle Jewish settlements there at the
bidding of Prime Minister Begin. I doubt the Labor Party could have ever
agreed to return all the Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty.
In 1982, as minister of defense, Sharon would persuade -- some would say
con -- Begin into invading Lebanon and driving all the way to Beirut in
an act of transformational warfare that was designed to install a
friendly Lebanese government and destroy his arch enemy, Yasser Arafat.
Just as Donald Rumsfeld promised that Americans would be welcomed with
flowers in Iraq, so did Sharon underestimate the difficulties and soon
enough Lebanon became Israel's Vietnam -- a long and painful experience
that in the end did Israel no good and much harm.
Sharon's political nadir was the massacres in the Palestinian refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatilla by allied Christian Lebanese militias, whom
the Israelis had brought up to do the killing.
The Israelis remained just outside but turned the night into day with
illumination rounds so their surrogates could see for the task at hand.
An Israeli fact-finding commission found Sharon indirectly responsible
for the atrocities.
It was Sharon's provocative walk on the Temple Mount that did much to
provoke the second Palestinian Intifada, the uprising that would bring
him to the height of political power.
He spent much of his time smashing any vestiges of Palestinian claims to
statehood.
Yet something changed when Sharon became prime minister. He seemed to
realize that he had a greater responsibility, and he managed, with
considerable political skill, to engineer a unilateral Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza, dismantling his beloved settlements --something no
other Israeli leader has done. He could do it because of his record --
like Nixon and China -- and he probably will be Israel's last leader to
have led men in battle during the birth of the nation.
We will never know whether Sharon was simply sacrificing Gaza in a
strategic move to hold on to most of the West Bank, or whether, as head
of a new party, he would have promoted really meaningful concessions for
a Palestinian state. But the distance he traveled toward a two-state
solution would not have been believed 30 years before.
No Israeli leader ever so dominated Israel's relationship with its most
important ally, the United States. Time and time again, he would get
away with simply ignoring George W. Bush's initiatives.
Bush called Sharon ''a man of peace" at a time when he was not. But if
Bush was right about him in the end, you can be sure that the peace
would have been on the old general's terms.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/10/peace____on_a_warriors_terms/
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