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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
"From day one, Sharon's main decision was to ruin the Oslo peace process and destroy the Palestinian Authority," says Ron Pundak, one of the early architects of the Oslo accords, now director of the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv. "It was just a question of timing and a matter of how tactfully and skillfully to create an environment most conducive to reducing U.S. pressure and domestic opposition to his plan. It took him a year until he reached this moment and unfortunately Arafat played into his hands."
Ha'aretz commentator Doron Rosenblum predicted the current crisis two and a half months ago. In a savage column titled "The State Rejoices, the Nation Bleeds," Rosenblum wrote, "[T]he inevitable and the obvious happened quite quickly: The mask of the restrained grandfather dropped. Sharon is Sharon is Sharon -- escalation, provocation, complication and all. Even as prime minister, he has turned out to be a 'one-trick pony,' obsessively repeating the exercise of encircling, tightening and siege remembered from the days of the Second Army in Sinai, through Beirut and on to Ramallah ... The suspicion arises that even the Lebanon War will turn into an aperitif to the dish Sharon is now boiling up in the territories in a huge pressure-cooker. By closing off all the openings for negotiations, sealing the lid on his personal foe and raising the temperature of the motives of hatred and revenge, it seems that he is consciously cooking up some big explosion."
During the election campaign Sharon himself was candid about his tough intentions. He promised "peace through security," not the other way around. And ever since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Sharon had harshly criticized, in opinion pieces and Knesset speeches, the land-for-peace negotiation process. This was not surprising, since Sharon's entire career has been defined by battling the Palestinians and other Arabs militarily, on the one hand, and masterminding the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza to create "facts on the ground" that would make it impossible for Israel ever to give back the territories it occupied after the 1967 war, on the other.
Like other Israeli politicians, he toned down the virulence of his criticism after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the accords' signatory, was assassinated by a rabidly pro-settlement and religious Israeli who believed that Rabin had betrayed the Jewish people. But in a well-publicized interview with Kfar Chabad, a religious weekly, last January, Sharon declared: "The Oslo agreement no longer exists. Full stop." He said he would never give up a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza nor divide Jerusalem. When pressed by other journalists to define his vision of a Palestinian state, he described an entity with no control over its borders, cut up by security roads, ruling over at most 45 percent of the occupied territories -- in short, the status quo, preserved indefinitely through "long-term interim agreements" and elusive promises.
The Palestinian response to Sharon's hard-line positions was equally clear at the time of his election. "What [Sharon] has proposed means that it is impossible to reach an agreement," Saeb Erakat told the New York Times. "The result is a description of war."
So when Sharon was elected in a landslide last February, did Israelis expect war? "Many did," says Yaron Ezrahi, a political analyst at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. "There was a mood after the collapse of [talks at] Camp David, that if the diplomatic general [Ehud] Barak [then Israel's prime minister] had come home empty-handed and Arafat had sent us his armed people, we needed to send them the neighborhood gangster [Sharon] and use force against force."
There were other signs that the conflict would escalate under Sharon. Operation "Defensive Shield," as the current campaign is known, was triggered by the deadly suicide bombing in Netanya on the first night of Passover. But the option of reinvading the West Bank and/or Gaza had been discussed as a contingency plan by politicians, pundits and generals months before. Similar operations, on a smaller scale, had been launched repeatedly over the past year: Tanks moved into Palestinian cities after the murder of the Israeli Tourism Minister Rechavam Zeevi last October, for example, and soldiers practiced urban warfare against the Balata refugee camp at the beginning of March. Those were clearly dress rehearsals for the big operation Sharon had been planning all along, says Pundak.
That Sharon's true intention was not simply to put an end to the suicide bombings that have been crippling Israeli life but to smash everything that might make up a Palestinian state is shown by the type of people and buildings the army has targeted in the current campaign, says Pundak. "At the same time as the army is fighting the so-called terrorist infrastructure, it is ruining the Palestinian Authority, breaking in offices, destroying records and dismantling police forces." The population registry, for example, no longer exists. While Israel pounds what remains of a crippled, ineffectual Palestinian administration, Sharon has allowed "the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad [who oppose all peace agreements with Israel] to go on living happily in Gaza," says Pundak. Ironically Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, the organization behind the most lethal terrorist attacks, hasn't been disturbed, he says -- "not even his afternoon nap."
Other Israeli analysts, however, caution against charging Sharon with "premeditated war." Nahum Barnea, a political columnist for Israel's highest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, says Sharon has "master instincts," not a "master plan." "Saying it looks like a plan is a way of relieving the burden of responsibility on Arafat, but it's not right," says Barnea. "From day one foreign journalists have portrayed Sharon as a very strong person. He is not. When he became prime minister, he was torn between contradictory agendas, caught in the political and military situation. It's not easy being prime minister of Israel and go to sleep only to be woken up four times at night by news of bombs or soldiers being killed."
Other analysts argue that Sharon did not necessarily set out to roll back the concessions made since Oslo. "There's no question in my mind that when Sharon went to the Temple Mount he intended to derail Oslo," says Hirsch Goodman, senior research associate at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. "Sharon saw a prime minister of Israel [Barak] ready to give back 97 percent [the actual percentage of land offered by Barak is in dispute] of the West Bank and Gaza and to divide Jerusalem and he thought he had to stop it." But Goodman adds: "His intention was to stop Oslo where it was but not to destroy it. He was ready to have a Palestinian state declared without borders and to negotiate long-term interim agreements."
Pundak disputes that, painting the picture of a man who would never accept a peaceful compromise on the basis of Oslo. "[Sharon] thinks Palestinians don't deserve more than limited self-rule. He doesn't trust Palestinians and thinks we're engaged in a conflict that will last another hundred years. His thinking, shaped by his experience as a general and the climate of the 1960s, is that a Palestinian state would be a bridge to other outside Arab forces [like Iraq] who would use it to destroy Israel. He thinks it's a lousy arrangement to help them with a peace process."
In any event, "Oslo as a process was already dead after Camp David," notes Barnea. After putting major issues like the status of Jerusalem holy places, the fate of refugees and the shape of final borders on the negotiating table, there was no going back to the incremental land-for-peace process begun at Oslo. And then there was the second intifada, in which Arafat has embraced violence. "Sharon didn't have to send soldiers in Jenin to shoot it," says Barnea of the Oslo diplomatic process. "He only had to bury it."
That doesn't mean the yearlong slide toward war was entirely involuntary. "Nothing is involuntary," says Barnea. "Arafat and Sharon have both accomplished their basic agendas."
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