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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
With his right-wing allies in revolt and Bush unable to cut him any more sweetheart deals, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon is floundering -- and he has only himself to blame.
May 11, 2004 | For Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, this is the most confusing of times. The loss of the Likud Party referendum over his "disengagement" plan to unilaterally withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank hurled Sharon into a leadership limbo. Caught between his commitment to U.S. President George W. Bush to implement the plan, and the resistance of most Israeli Cabinet ministers, Sharon is trying to buy time to regain the initiative and survive politically rather than become a lame duck.
Sharon's original timeline was very upbeat. He wanted to pass the referendum and present the plan for Cabinet approval on Sunday, then make a triumphant trip to Washington next week. He planned to address the annual conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, along with his great friend Bush. There could not possibly be a better stage for an Israeli leader than during an American election year when the incumbent president craves Jewish support. Israeli officials proposed a Sharon appearance before a joint session of Congress. Alas, the prime minister had to call off the visit. Less than a month after his most successful encounter ever with Bush, he has nothing new to tell him.
Instead of exchanging flatteries with the American president, Sharon was forced to begin a long session of "consultations" with his ministers. He holds most of them in only modest esteem, but having ignored them before the referendum, he has to bring them on board now. Such is the price of political hubris. In Sunday's cabinet session, Sharon pledged to come up with an updated plan in three weeks. In the meantime he will try to amend the plan, hoping to win over some opposing ministers and create a slim majority.
This is no easy mission. The key Likud leaders, headed by treasury minister Benyamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu, have vowed to abide by the referendum's outcome: They reject cosmetic changes in the plan and demand that it be shelved. Sharon, however, is reluctant to start from scratch. Last Thursday he told a group of E.U. ambassadors that he would stick to the main components of the previous plan. His aides say that any plan must be based on removing all settlements from Gaza, and four more in the West Bank, just as in the rejected version.
Sharon's entanglement converges with Bush's double trouble in the Middle East. The Arab world exploded in rage last month after the president, in a letter to Sharon, promised to support Israel's positions on borders and refugees in future Israeli-Palestinian final-status talks. Such talks seem like a fairy tale in the current strategic and political environment, where Palestinians and Israelis are killing each other. To soften the impact, Bush had used carefully crafted, somewhat ambiguous diplomatic lingo. Nevertheless, given the zero-sum nature of Middle East diplomacy, both Israelis and Arabs viewed the president's message as a clear tilt toward Sharon's policies. Then came the photographed evidence of torture in Iraq's American-operated prisons, further weakening Bush's already dismal position in the Arab world.
The administration had to appease the Arabs, but couldn't do it at Israel's expense during a tight presidential race, in which neither candidate can afford to be perceived as not supporting Israel. The 2004 election is no different from previous ones: Every four years, Israel's American friends extract pledges of political, military and economic support for the Jewish state. This has been an American tradition since 1948, when President Harry Truman decided to recognize the newly proclaimed state of Israel against the State Department's advice.
Bush tried to extricate himself from the morass by placating the Arabs with nice words, while not abandoning his promises to Sharon. The president announced a resumption of high-level contact with the Palestinian Authority, which Sharon's unilateral plan has all but taken out of the picture. He also repeated his support for an eventual Palestinian state, but shook off the proposed deadline of such statehood in 2005, as set forth in the "road map" -- the official peace plan backed by the "Quartet" of America, Europe, the U.N. and Russia.
Paradoxically, the lost referendum has brought new life to Sharon's plan in the international arena, where the key players have treated it with deep suspicion from the outset. Even the Bush administration needed several months of high-level consultations with Israel before it accepted the proposed unilateral "disengagement." All feared that Sharon planned a quid pro quo: Israel would shrug off the heavy burden of the overpopulated, resource-poor Gaza in return for a tightened grip over the coveted West Bank and East Jerusalem. Sharon had specifically asked Bush for, and received, an exemption from negotiations until the Palestinian leadership changed and fought terrorism -- a euphemism for political eternity.
Israeli officials predicted, however, that if Sharon lost, the international community would immediately appropriate his plan and demand its implementation. This is exactly what happened last week, with the United States leading the way in selling the withdrawal as a historic breakthrough. Back in Jerusalem, senior Israeli officials realized that there is no turning back. For the Americans and their Arab, European and Russian partners, Israeli party politics are irrelevant: Sharon promised a withdrawal, a major break in the bloody status quo, and he must deliver.
