[Mb-civic] Now, Forward - Yossi Klein Halevi - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

Now, Forward
Israelis Must Continue What Sharon Began
<>
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, January 15, 2006; B01

JERUSALEM

When Ariel Sharon was hospitalized nearly two weeks ago, I found myself 
bereft. Like so many others here, I grieved for the most hated man in 
Israel who in the past five years had become the most beloved.

I grieved, too, for a nation that had just lost the only man it trusted 
to keep it safe. How could the general who taught the Israeli army never 
to leave its wounded on the battlefield abandon us now, with missiles 
from Gaza falling on Israeli towns and Iran about to go nuclear?

My love for Sharon was hardly a given. Indeed, until I voted for him in 
the 2001 elections that brought him to power, he represented, for me, 
the tendency for excess in our national character. He was one of the 
most heroic Israelis of a heroic generation, who had repeatedly helped 
save Israel on the battlefield; yet he had also led us into adventures 
that turned into disasters.

I immigrated to Israel from the United States in 1982, just as Sharon's 
most ambitious initiative, the invasion of Lebanon, veered out of 
control with the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in 
Sabra and Shatilla. I found myself joining a tormented nation. For the 
first time, Israelis had not only failed to rally during war but were 
actually divided because of war. Sharon had jeopardized Israel's 
greatest strategic asset: its ability to unite during crisis.

What changed for me, and for most Israelis starting in 2000, was, of 
course, the Palestinian terrorism war, which vindicated Sharon's 
warnings over the years against empowering Yasser Arafat and the 
Palestine Liberation Organization.

By the time Sharon was elected in 2001, the Israeli majority had reached 
two conclusions about its conflict with the Palestinians. The first was 
that the left had been correct in warning against the illusion that 
Israel could occupy another people and still remain a worthy Jewish and 
democratic state. The second was that the right had been no less correct 
in warning against the illusion that Israel could make peace with an 
organization committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

With the fading away of the two ideologies that had determined Israeli 
politics for several decades -- "greater Israel" on the right, and 
"peace now" on the left -- the public found itself with an ideological 
hangover. Out of the wreckage of Israel's dreams, Sharon fashioned a new 
political center: hard-line on security, flexible on territory. The 
emergence of this center marked the end of the era of our romantic 
politics, the politics of wishful thinking.

Sharon, though, did more than merely define a sensibility: He turned a 
mood into a policy. If we can't occupy the Palestinians and we can't 
make peace with them, he argued, the only option left for Israel was to 
determine its own borders. The result was last summer's unilateral 
withdrawal from Gaza -- in effect, a withdrawal from the failed policies 
of the right and left.

The withdrawal lessened the threat of Jews becoming a demographic 
minority in their own country, even as it posed new challenges for 
keeping Israeli towns safe from Palestinian rocket attacks. Most of all, 
though, the withdrawal exposed the asymmetry of Israeli and Palestinian 
efforts for peace.

According to the American-initiated "road map" for resuming peace talks, 
the Palestinian Authority's first step would be disarming terrorists, 
while Israel's final step would be dismantling settlements. In Gaza, 
Sharon took Israel to the very end of the road map -- a typical Sharon 
short cut. While the more intractable issue of West Bank settlements 
remain, Palestinian leaders, by contrast, haven't even begun fulfilling 
their first road map responsibility.

The Gaza withdrawal confirmed Sharon as our great builder and destroyer, 
even of what he himself created. The withdrawal also confirmed that the 
man who once symbolized our excesses had become, in his old age, the 
measured leader that Israel needed in its most desperate time. The wise 
guy had become the wise elder.

When he entered office he realized that Israelis were desperate for 
Sharon the anti-terrorist warrior of the 1950s and '60s, but not for 
Sharon the settlements builder of the 1970s and '80s. And so he put 
aside one part of his biography in order to offer the nation, as a 
rallying point, another part. Though he continued to maintain that he'd 
been right all along to try to annex the West Bank, he abandoned the 
settlements project and focused on defeating terrorism.

As prime minister of a demoralized nation, Sharon reminded Israelis what 
they once knew: that there was no negotiating at the point of a gun and 
that the only way to deal with existential threat was with national 
resolve. But Sharon had also learned from his mistakes and, this time, 
understood the need for consensus, especially because a long-term war 
against terrorism requires the nation's patience and fortitude.

Sharon restored consensus, in part, through uncharacteristic restraint, 
declining to unleash the Israeli army until he was certain that the left 
would back him. And so he patiently waited, even as buses and cafes were 
exploding. When he finally ordered the reinvasion of the West Bank 
following the Passover massacre in March 2002, a year after he took 
office, some army reservist units reported more than 100 percent 
response: Even some people who hadn't been called showed up anyway. It 
was the antithesis of the Lebanon war, when antiwar demonstrators 
protested in Tel Aviv while soldiers were fighting at the front.

Sharon maintained that consensus in the terrorism war by resisting 
right-wing demands to employ the full force of Israeli power against the 
Palestinians -- like bombing neighborhoods where terrorists hid, as the 
United States did in Iraq when it tried to target Saddam Hussein. The 
provocation was enormous. Israel, after all, had offered to end the 
occupation, create a Palestinian state and redivide Jerusalem, and it 
received, as its counteroffer, four years of suicide bombings. Given the 
overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the relatively low 
Palestinian civilian causality rate kept the Israeli public comfortable 
with the army's basic moral health. That's one reason why an Israeli 
draft resistance movement never drew more than a few score supporters.

In recent months, Sharon initiated two unilateral moves, the first 
strategic, the second political. Withdrawing from Gaza was likely to be 
the first phase of a Sharon plan to establish Israel's de facto borders. 
And when he withdrew several months later from the Likud and founded the 
centrist party Kadima, he was attempting to re-create Israel's political 
system.

Both processes required Sharon's continued guidance. Yet he has left 
without telling us what was supposed to happen next in the West Bank, 
given the absence of a credible Palestinian partner for peace. Do we 
risk another unilateral withdrawal, even though that could mean missile 
attacks on greater Tel Aviv? Or do we remain in the territories for now, 
even though Palestinians are turning toward their most fanatical 
political groups?

So too, Sharon left before transforming Kadima into an effective 
alternative to the Likud. Indeed, this default party of government isn't 
yet quite a party. There are no members, no institutions, not even a 
list of parliamentary candidates. That list exists, but it is locked in 
Sharon's brain.

And so that too is why Israelis grieve: We are caught in Sharon's 
incomplete historic shift, even as the threats around us grow. Can we, 
who came after Israel's founders, manage without them?

In the 1990s, two prime ministers emerged from the post-founders' 
generation. Both failed to win the country's trust. Binyamin Netanyahu 
lasted three years in office, Ehud Barak barely half that long. In 
desperation, the public turned to Sharon, last of the heroic generation, 
who had helped define nearly every military and political turning point, 
good and bad, in the nation's history.

With Sharon's passing from the scene, there is no father to turn to for 
protection. We're on our own. Yet, because he has steered Israel away 
from the impassioned excesses he once embodied, his legacy is clear: on 
the military front, resolve against terrorism; on the political front, 
consensus in times of threat and a pragmatic approach that replaces the 
fantasy politics of the left and right.

After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin 10 years ago, a slogan appeared 
at memorial gatherings: "In his death, he bequeathed us peace." That 
hope turned out to be an illusion. Yet even as Sharon struggles for 
life, this much can be said with confidence: However unexpected, Ariel 
Sharon has bequeathed us sobriety.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an academic 
research institute in Jerusalem, and the Israel correspondent for the 
New Republic.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011400004.html
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