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The jailer
Ariel Sharon is lauded for breaking with his hard-line past. But the
truth is that he simply embraced a smarter way of locking up the
Palestinians.
By Juan Cole
01/12/06 "Salon.com"
-- -- Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive
stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have
fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is
likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy
fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from
isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the
noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant
respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.
The conflict between Sharon and the Likud Party, with which he
recently broke, was over two distinct far-right-wing visions of
Israel. The somewhat messianic Likud is committed to completing the
creeping dispossession of the Palestinians by relentlessly
colonizing the West Bank and Gaza (at least), and refusing to accept
any clear demarcation between Israeli territory and that of its
neighbors. This 19th-century-style settler colonialism, reminiscent
of the French in Algeria or the Italians in Eritrea, is so blatantly
aggressive that it continually threatens to disrupt vital economic
and diplomatic relations between Israel and Europe. Sharon saw that,
but his rival Benjamin Netanyahu never could.
Likud is hoping that somehow along the way the indigenous population
will gradually be convinced to leave for Egypt or Jordan, as the
Israelis move in. (Some hard nudging is not ruled out by some
elements of the party.) In the meantime, in the words of Likud
leader Netanyahu, the Palestinians might have self-rule, but would
not be allowed to have self-government.
In reality, it is the Palestinians, with their high population
growth rates, who have the demographic advantage. Israel's ability
to retain new immigrants fell during the second intifada or
Palestinian uprising. As the Russian economy benefits from high
petroleum prices, further major immigration by Jews from that
country seems unlikely. Indeed, some of the 1 million Russians in
Israel, many of them not actually Jewish, may start returning to the
old country. By 2020, most projections predict that Jews will be a
minority in the area comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Even
among Israeli citizens, Israeli government demographers predict that
by 2030 the population could be a third Arab.
Sharon, unlike the Likud, understood the threat these demographic
trends posed to Israel, and so saw the future as one in which Israel
stopped expanding in some directions, instead accepting a fixed
territory. It would become a huge gated community, surrounded by
seven or eight small enclaves. Each enclave might remain a bad
neighborhood, but gates, punitive raids and assassinations would
keep the ghetto dwellers from storming the citadel. The "gates"
include checkpoints, highways and a wall that would have made the
first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi -- who built his own Great
Wall -- proud. It would break up the Palestinian regions into
isolated cantons and guarantee that they could never mobilize
politically and would remain de facto stateless. It would also
preserve the Jewish polity by keeping the Palestinians in their
current limbo, prevented from claiming Israeli citizenship even as
they are denied a viable state of their own.
That the scheme probably creates a permanent state of low-intensity
warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is a price Sharon was
willing to pay for the permanent territorial gains and diplomatic
superiority it guaranteed Israel. Indeed, this condition of staccato
conflict between the wealthy Israelis behind their various gates and
the dispossessed Palestinians outside is what Sharon seems to have
thought of as "security" for Israel.
Both the Likud and Sharon were dedicated to forestalling the
emergence of even a weak Palestinian state, of a sort implied by the
Oslo peace process accepted by the late Israeli leader Yitzhak
Rabin. Although they said they feared that such a state would pose a
military threat to Israel, that seems rather unlikely. It is more
probable that they feared that it would gain diplomatic and
political legitimacy in the world, gaining a voice among nations
that the Palestinians currently lack. Likud and Sharon roared that
Rabin had made an error of biblical proportions in agreeing to such
a state. Elements of the Israeli far right agreed, and one Yigal
Amir took matters into his own hands, assassinating Rabin in 1995.
Amir's bullets ended the Oslo process and sounded the death knell
for a genuine Palestinian state. Even in the 1990s, the number of
Israeli colonists in the West Bank had doubled, which enraged
Palestinians took as a sign of bad faith, and which ultimately led
to the outbreak of the second Intifada. Sharon's provocative visit
to the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in
the Muslim world, was merely the spark that ignited the uprising.
During his three years as prime minister, 1996-99, Rabin's successor
and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly derailed what was
left of the Oslo process, which had called for a phased Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank and movement toward a Palestinian
government.
Despite the myth that at Camp David in summer 2000 Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat 98
percent of what he was demanding, in fact the Israelis were not
nearly so forthcoming. Barak declined to meet with Arafat privately
(so that it was the Palestinians who had difficulty finding an
Israeli interlocutor). And Barak insisted on keeping 10 percent of
Palestinian land, rather as though the British had offered to end
the Revolutionary War in 1780 if only George Washington would agree
to cede Maine to them. Clayton Swisher, in his fine study "The Truth
About Camp David," shows that the Israelis bear significant blame
for the breakdown of the negotiations.
The conflict between Sharon and his own Likud Party over his
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 reflected the two differing
visions of the Israeli right. For Sharon, Gaza itself could be
configured as an enormous slum. The withdrawal of the Israeli
colonists from Gaza was simply a way of moving them into the gated
community, so as to keep them safe more cheaply than military
patrols and reprisals could hope to. (Gaza had not been notably
rundown in the 1940s, but the rise of Israel and the isolation of
the Strip from its natural markets, especially after 1967, gradually
turned it into a huge penitentiary.)
Moreover, the Gaza maneuver took pressure off Israel to move in a
deliberate way toward withdrawal from the West Bank. Sharon's
advisor Dov Weisglass notoriously explained the Gaza withdrawal to
Haaretz in October 2004:
"I found a device, in cooperation with the management of the world,
to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be
no timetable to implement the settlers' nightmare. I have postponed
that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to
with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be
dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the
Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we
did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. And
when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a
Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees,
the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is
called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been
removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority
and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the
ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been
anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?"
Weisglass, who later repudiated his interview, actually called the
Gaza withdrawal a sort of "formaldehyde" for the negotiations into
which Israel had been pressured by the United States and the
European Union, for all the world as though he were a diplomatic
kidnapper. The unilateral Gaza withdrawal would involve no
negotiations with the Palestinians, since Sharon had decided that
there was no one to talk to. This allegation, of there being no
Palestinian interlocutors, is an updated version of the old
(monstrous) Zionist myth, most famously articulated by former
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinians at
all.
Supporters of the Likud demonstrated in the tens of thousands
against the Gaza withdrawal in summer of 2005. They did not accept
Sharon's theory of enclaves and a fixed gated community. They saw
Israel as an ever-expanding, territorially dynamic political
reality. Sharon could see that an expanding Israel might well
eventually be saddled with new Palestinian citizens of Israel, since
the world community would not forever accept their demotion to
statelessness even in their own homes. Spinning off the enclaves,
and building an apartheid wall, would forestall this scenario.
The fiction that the Palestinians would ultimately get their state
could be maintained to the sour Europeans and naive Americans until
the point at which it was obvious it would never happen, a decade or
more hence ("until the Palestinians become Finns"). The Palestinian
Authority, or whatever entity survived, could then claim authority
over the congeries of Palestinian ghettos, and could call them a
state if it liked, but it would never actually have the sort of
territory or authority or sovereignty associated with states.
Observers have long drawn a parallel between Sharon's policy of
ghettoizing the Palestinians, and the way the South African whites
spun off small Bantustans to relieve themselves of unwanted
potential black citizens.
The Israeli prime minister appears to have believed that he could
destroy the militant fundamentalist movement Hamas, which launched
large numbers of deadly terrorist operations against Israel, by
murdering enough of its leaders. (I use the word "murder" to
describe extra-judicial killings. That the victims were leaders of a
terrorist movement was something for which they could have been
arrested and convicted instead, and is irrelevant to whether they
were murdered.) Israeli security officials adopted a political
science theory that you can cause an organization to collapse if you
neutralize even a fourth of its leadership.
Sharon's systematic execution of the civilian Hamas leadership even
extended to firing a rocket at a nearly blind old man in a
wheelchair, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who could surely have
been arrested if Israeli authorities had evidence he had committed a
crime. Yassin, ironically, had after years of militancy begun urging
a "hundred years truce" with the Israelis, and his voice may have
restrained some impatient Palestinian youth activists. That voice
went silent as Yassin was wheeled out of a mosque on March 22, 2004.
Six others were killed by the rocket, and a dozen wounded. Soon
thereafter militants in Fallujah, Iraq, killed four Western security
agents, claiming to have done so in the memory of Yassin, setting
the stage for the destabilization of western Iraq.
Far from wiping out Hamas, Sharon watered its saplings with the
blood of martyrs. It has done unprecedentedly well in recent
Palestinian elections, even on the West Bank, where it had earlier
been weak. The moderate, secular president of the Palestinian
Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was reported in the Jordanian press on
Monday to be privately considering resigning if Hamas wins the
forthcoming legislative elections.
Sharon's formaldehyde was powerful, and it did indeed put the world
to sleep on the pressing issue of continued Israeli dispossession
and oppression of the Palestinians. Still, he dealt a permanent, if
partial, setback to the expansionist and aggressive Likud Party. It
is hard to imagine that even if it returned to power, the party
could realistically hope to put colonists back into Gaza. Instead,
the Hamas Party, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will almost
certainly rule the strip.
The old general with so much blood on his hands was given the
equivalent of formaldehyde by his physicians over the weekend, to
induce a coma. Induced sleep is never more than a stopgap measure,
however, since the patient must eventually awake to face the real
world. The dark vision of Ariel Sharon, of Israel as walled
fortress, with hordes of leaderless, hopeless, violent Palestinian
plebeians trapped in serial enclaves outside the marble walls,
virtually guarantees a Hundred Years War in the Mideast. It enrages
the Arab and Muslim world and is a leading cause of its hatred of
Israel's patron, America. It hardly creates a situation that would
attract Jewish immigration, or help retain Jews already in Israel.
It erases the Palestinians as persons, reducing them only to the
occasional violence in which some of them engage. Sharon himself
never understood, and now perhaps never will understand, that only
war can be waged unilaterally. Peace requires negotiations and
partners.
Copyright ©2006 Salon Media Group, Inc
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