Sharon's war

According to him, "Arafat wanted to have a grand finale and not to finalize the diplomatic process. He wanted a final act involving lots of violence and he got it. It was a question of historical legacy but also because he believes he has no chance to get what he wants with a signed agreement. He sees a signed agreement as only one way of achieving his goal. When he committed himself not to use violence at Oslo, he did not mean it. That is what has offended Israel most -- the notion that he resorted so easily to violence after the failure of Camp David."

"In Sharon's case, his agenda goes back much earlier than Oslo. Every Israeli leader has a certain amount of suspicion for signed agreements with Arabs, but Sharon takes that suspicion to the extreme," says Barnea, who's been observing Israeli politics up close for years. "He has a problem with having an agreement with Arafat."

"I remember a trip in Washington in the spring of 2001," says Barnea. "It was late at night and I asked him, to distract him, what he thought about bin Laden. This was before Sept. 11. He looked at me with surprise, as if wondering why I wasn't asking him about Bush and Arafat, and said, 'Arafat is bin Laden.' I got a quote but I think it also reflects his way of thinking. His idea of Arafat was crystallized in 1982 in Beirut and he's never changed it." (In 1982 Sharon, using the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat by a dissident Palestinian faction as a pretext, launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon with the intention of smashing the PLO and setting up Lebanon as an Israeli client. Arafat and his troops, trapped in Beirut, were forced to flee Lebanon for Tunis. Sharon recently said he regretted not giving an Israeli sniper an order to kill Arafat as he boarded the ship.) To this date, Sharon has always refused to shake the Palestinian leader's hand -- even at the Wye River Plantation where he joined then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Arafat for intensive talks in a secluded setting.

Then there is the question of settlements. The Jewish implantations in the West Bank and Gaza are Sharon's brainchild and legacy, a project he has overseen in every ministerial role he has held over the decades. "When he was elected people said that now that Sharon is old, he will put the safety of his children and grandchildren before the settlement enterprise, but they're wrong," says Barnea. "His real grandchildren are the settlements, the ones built in the middle of Palestinian population. It would be very difficult for him to evacuate them. For him Israel has to be in Paradise, living in a state of utopia, in order to give up one settlement."

Critics have accused Sharon of deliberately scuttling chances for a cease-fire in the past year by approving provocative military actions -- in particular the so-called targeted assassinations -- at times when Palestinian guns were quiet. Sharon's ultimate goal, they charge, is to buy time and avoid reaching the phase of painful political concessions that would require freezing construction of new housing in the territories and, eventually, dismantling his life's work by giving Palestinians control over most of the West Bank and Gaza.

Political analyst Ezrahi argues that Sharon planted the seeds of the current war simply by promoting settlement-building on conquered land. "It was terribly short-sighted and unsophisticated. Anyone who knew anything about national liberation movements knew that [settling territories conquered in 1967] would be untenable and could only end in bloodshed. Sharon was driven by narrow conceptions of history and Darwinian perceptions of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians."

But if the settlement enterprise was "the worst act taken by Jews against themselves since 1948," Ezrahi stresses that Palestinians have also made a fatal historical mistake by resorting to terror: "Terrorism has profoundly infected the Palestinian movement," he says. "It wakes up terrible memories of the Holocaust. It was the worst possible way of forcing us [Israelis] to compromise."

The general consensus among analysts, however, is that Sharon is following his instincts and doesn't have a long-term plan for what Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians should be. "I don't know what his vision is. He's a brilliant tactician but not a very good strategist," says Goodman -- who makes clear that he also believes Arafat planned all along to use Oslo as a Trojan horse that would lead to the destruction of Israel. Moreover, Sharon is not an ideologue about the settlements, he says -- distinguishing him from the ultranationalist and religious parties and individuals that believe that "Judea and Samaria" were given by God to Israel. "He's primarily concerned with security-oriented issues and he thinks settlements are key to Israel's security."

"It would be an error to take the positions he voiced as a member of the opposition and to project them to understand Sharon's present behavior," says Ezrahi. "These positions were meant to galvanize his constituency. Of course, what he does now is not entirely apolitical. He does it with the intention to crush Netanyahu who has been calling for more action [against Palestinian militants]. Netanyahu is the silent partner, the Iago in this play, inciting Sharon's Othello to go further."

Explaining Sharon's "master instincts" and his failure to have a coherent endgame strategy, Barnea says, "Sharon has principles that are the product of his childhood, of his time in the army and the issues he faces on the political scene. At the same time he has to think about the survival of Israel, his coalition ... All master plans melt in the Israeli sun. Israeli politics are so intensive and constantly changing, that it's very difficult to implement a plan."

"If there are no results to the military offensive, the [Israeli] public can easily turn left and not right," says Barnea. "The Israeli center is zigzagging. You see it in the polls. There is overwhelming support for both military action and wide political concessions. There is no contradiction here. Israelis hate to be impotent and solutionless."

The question, then, is whether after a year and a half of escalating violence there will be a reasonable Palestinian partner to talk to. "Without a different Palestinian voice and a different Palestinian vocabulary [from the current rhetoric of hatred and intransigence], it will be very difficult to convince Israelis who see that Sharon's way has failed to vote for an alternative," says Pundak, who spent many hours with members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (then an illegal terrorist entity) secretly plotting the Oslo breakthrough. "The track record of Palestinians is bad. They have a history of doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment," he says. "But there are still pragmatists among them and we can still make a deal."

Pundak mentions Marwan Barghouti as an example of a Palestinian pragmatist who would embrace a deal along clear political guidelines. An hour later, Israeli television killed that hope, reporting that the Israeli army had just seized Barghouti, once an outspokenly pro-peace politician who had many meetings with Israeli doves. Israeli officials charged that Barghouti was responsible for turning the Tanzim civil guard, part of Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement, into a militia that carried out suicide bombings against Israelis. Israeli security officials and politicians were divided about the wisdom of arresting the highly popular West Bank leader. Politicians on the right called for a public trial and Barghouti's execution, those on the left called for his release. Centrists defended his arrest, but warned that it would lead to bloody reprisals or kidnappings.

Ezrahi joins an increasing number of observers who believe that Sharon and Arafat, two old warriors who cannot change their ways, stand in the way of peace. "It's a tragic conflict fed by unforgivable misconceptions on both sides. Sharon and Arafat are like Siamese twins. There can be no victory of one against the other because of our territorial and demographic proximity. But the real big losers in this war are the Israeli and Palestinian people."

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