Johann Hari: Sharon's vision of peace is so flawed
that the Palestinians can never accept it
The selling of Sharon as a dove is setting up the
Palestinians for another fall
Published: 24 November 2005
It would make a beautiful biopic: the blood-splattered
old General, in his 77th year, discovers the cause of
peace. The movie opens with a young Ariel Sharon leading
Unit 101 - a notorious Israeli death-squad that was sent
into Palestinian villages to burn houses and terrorise
civilians in raw revenge attacks. Cut to Sharon 50 years
later, sitting over a plate of gefilte fish with Abu
Mazen, the elected Palestinian leader, haggling over he
status of east Jerusalem as grandchildren play at his
feet.
This story is so intoxicating that many Israelis
-desperate for an end to the grinding war of attrition
that has haunted the country since its creation - have
convinced themselves it must be true. Look at the changes
Sharon is bringing, they say: he has now dismantled two
big settlement blocs in his career - Sinai in 1982, and
Gaza in 2005. He has torched the Israeli political
landscape by quitting his own right-wing party, Likud,
and formed a new centre party for peace. His people are
briefing the Israeli press that they want a binding peace
treaty and the creation of a Palestinian state in
Sharon's third term. So is it time to clear the Israeli
film studios and start casting the movie?
the facts, alas, do not back-up this blissed out fantasy.
Ariel Sharon has dedicated his career to destroyig any
sort of peace negotiations, and to denying the
Palestinians a viable state. Far from representing a
Damascene conversion, his statement reveal the underlying
continuity of his plans. Just a year ago, Sharon said he
accepted the Road Map because "first and foremost it
does not demand a return to the 1967 borders; it allows
Israel permanently to keep large settlement blocks which
have high Israeli populations; and [it entrenches] the
total refusal of allowing Palestin ian refugees to return
to Israel." Yesterday his top political strategist,
Eyat Arad, said that the idea of swapping land for peace
was "false philosophically, and naive
politically", and insisted Sharon would never lead
his new party to a return to the Green Line. You can't
say they haven't warned us.
In reality, what Sharon means by "peace" and a
"Palestinian State" is so withered and weak
that the Palestinians can never accept it. He is
proposing - as a non-negotiable starting point to talks -
to annexe much of the West Bank, one of the few remaining
scraps of land inhabited by the Palestinians.
Today only 22% of historical Palestine is designated for
its Arab inhabitants, and this is too much for Sharon: he
will append even more to Israel by force and seal it off
with an iron wall. All that will remain on the other side
is a Palestinian statelet consisting of the scrag-end of
the West Bank, an isolated Gaza, and a lonely east
Jerusalem. Three decades ago Sharon said the way to
control the Palestinians was to "salami slice"
their land, separating them from each other and
surrounding them with armed Israeli settlers. That is
precisely what he is proposing today.
Even to get to the miserable position where this offer is
made, the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen has to do the
impossible and dismantle "all terrorist
organisations" operating on his soil. this is hard
when almost all your police stations have been demolished
or blown-up. And it is harder still for Mazen to persuade
a people living under vicious occupation that they should
pre-emptively hand over all their weapons, on the off
chance that Sharon is now suddenly interested in peace
after all these years of killing them.
Yet most of the world is ignoring Sharon's explicit
statements and buying the rhetoric of Sharon as centrist
peacemaker. Partly, this is because the genuine shift
that occurred in Sharon's political thought in the early
Noughties has been poorly understood. He has genuinely
moved - but only a few inches. He used to believe in a
Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea,
populated by new waves of pioneering Jewish settlers like
his parents. He was the leading champion of these
settlers in the Knesset, allocating huge funds for them
to build homes on Palestinian land.
But then - sometime earlier this decade - he began to
understand that this bloated Israel was resting on a
demographic time-bomb. Because Palestinians have far more
children than Jews, within twenty years Israel was set to
become an apartheid state presiding over an Arab
majority. this is unthinkable - so sharon had to claw
back Israel's borders to accomodate a firmer Jewish
majority. His adviser Dov Weisglass explained that Sharon
gave up as little as possible to the Palestinians,
shedding Gaza - "which is of no strategic
importance" - precisely so he could retain control
of the choicest morsels of the West Bank. "These
settlers should have been dancing around the Prime
|Minister's office" in glee at this clever move, he
said.
So, here's the reality: sharon has shifted from believing
in Greater Israel to believing in the greatest Israel
compatible with a Jewish majority. This is enough to
enrage the crazies in the \likud, but it is hardly a
conversion to the cause of peace. It is not likely to end
in a Palestinian State that even moderates like Abu Mazen
can settle for. that's why I am extremely nervous about
the pre-emptive selling of Sharon as a dove: it is
setting the Palestinians up for another fall..
There is now a real danger that Sharon will be elected on
a "peace" landslide, sweep up to Mazen with a
derisory, dangerous offer, and be rejected. (If Mazen
gives in to American pressure to accept a lousy deal,
there is a risk of triggering a third intifada among an
outraged population.) Cue the accusations once again that
the Palestinians have inexplicably rejected Israel's
"generous offer"(copyright Ehud Barak), when in
fact they have merely been offered a cheap Tesco Own
Brand peace they could never accept.
I hope I am wrong. I hope Sharon has - in his late
seventies - undergone a much larger change of heart than
is revealed in is words and actions.
But everybody who has put their trust into Sharon seems
to have been cruelly disappointed. Levi Eshkol - the
Israeli Prime Minister during the 1967 War - trusted the
General, only to find out years later that Sharon had
suggested mounting an anti-democratic military coup
against him. Menachem Begin - the first Likud Prime
Minister - trusted Sharon in 1982 when, as Minister of
Defence, he led the country into an invasion of Lebanon
he claimed would last a matter of weeks. Israeli troops
remained for 18 years, and Begin retired into near
seclusion, believing Sharon had deliberately deceived
him. Sharon's own soldiers trusted him, until he was
found by the Israel Knesset's own investigation to be
indirectly responsible for the 9/11-sized massacre of
over 2,000 innocent Lebanese civilians.
If you were a Palestinian or an Israeli peace activist,
would you trust in this half-offer of a half-state?
j.hari@independent.co.uk
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