Sharon's self -defeating vendetta

By H.D.S. Greenway, 4/5/2002

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to make sense out of the Middle East mess without understanding that Israel's Ariel Sharon, in his year in office, has been waging war not just against terrorism, but against the Oslo accords and a peace process that promised a two-state solution with Israel living beside a Palestinian state.

Sharon, the architect of Israel's land-grabbing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, essentially envisions a one-state solution with Israel maintaining its occupation and expanding Jewish settlements with, perhaps, one day a Palestinian state relegated to little Bantustan enclaves modeled on the apartheid South African model.

Sharon came to office promising an end to terrorism. His priority has been steadily to attack and dismantle the Palestinian Authority by destroying all the symbols of Palestinian nationhood - demolishing the PA's offices in Gaza and Ramallah, putting Yasser Arafat under house arrest, and bombing Palestinian police stations in response to every terrorist incident whether or not it came from Arafat's people or from Islamic extremists who have no interest in a peaceful compromise.

Sharon is too smart to believe his rhetoric that all terror emanates from Arafat. But blaming everything on the Palestinian Authority while at the same time dismantling and discrediting its ability to function makes sense only if at the end of the day, you would rather face an enemy that, like Sharon, believes in a one-state solution. Better to face an enemy that admits it wants the destruction of Israel, so the reasoning goes, than a seducer such as Arafat with his Nobel Peace Prize, his international recognition, and his promises of a two-state solution.

If you are Ariel Sharon, with a personal obsession of ridding the world of your old nemesis, Arafat, better to face extremists with whom no American administration will ask you to compromise than the hated Oslo accords. Despite Sharon's promises to the contrary, Arafat's life is in extreme danger.

Make no mistake about it: The suicide bombings against Israeli civilians are, as Colin Powell put it, ''terrorism in its rawest form.'' No government could sit idly by and take it. But Sharon's answer to the problem is the wrong one.

All his life Sharon has been a believer in brute force in its rawest form. Under his vengeance-is-mine policy of beating and humiliating the Palestinian people until they submit to his will, the current campaign is likely to degenerate into something approximating state terror that will only generate more violence, legitimize suicide bombers in the eyes of Palestinians and Arabs everywhere, silence moderates throughout the region, enormously complicate and discredit American attempts to build an antiterror coalition, and in the end cause more pain for Israel, just as Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of Arafat did 20 years ago.

Yesterday President Bush appeared to withdraw his blank check to Sharon. But much damage has been done to America's entire position in the region. Arab leaders, who so recently and unanimously voted to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 lines - an enormously important symbolic gesture that could still serve as a basis for serious negotiations - now look like fools. Rage in the Arab world is on the boil.

''Arab leaders will soon make one of two choices,'' commented Walid Kazziha of Cairo's American University. ''To support the US and Sharon and be completely discredited in the eyes of their people, or to opt to be with their people and the Palestinians.''

Arafat is cunning and unreliable and has a great deal to answer for. He could have stopped the intifadah when it first broke out. He has not served his people well. But for Bush to berate him for not stopping terror now that the Israelis have him sitting in a dark room, with his people under a massive Israeli attack, is unrealistic. Even Arafat's own people have told him that there will be no cease-fire that simply maintains the status quo of Israeli occupation.

Amid the dismal performance of the Bush administration in this matter, a ray of hope came at midweek when Powell said: ''The Palestinian people have to see that there is a political process, and not just a cease-fire and a security process.'' Bush did the right thing yesterday in sending Powell to the Middle East.

Sharon has told his people that ''there is no compromise with terrorism,'' but there can and must be a compromise that recognizes the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. Sharon has said he fights to ''pull up these wild plants by the roots, smash their infrastructure,'' but as Yossi Bailen, an Israeli architect of the Oslo accords, wrote: ''The Israeli war against the terrorist infrastructure will give birth to more terrorists because the terrorist infrastructure lies within people's hearts. It can be uprooted only if there is hope for a different kind of life in the Middle East.''

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.