The Mixed Legacy of an Israeli Unilateralist
Ariel Sharon in Israel in 2006 (Courtesy Reuters)
For most Arabs, no Israeli in
history is more synonymous with violence and Israeli expansionism than
Ariel Sharon. His name quickly conjures the worst massacres, deepest
pro-settlement fanaticism, and most extreme nationalistic provocations
in the Palestinian bill of particulars against Israel. Less readily
appreciated by most Arabs is the complexity of Sharon's legacy and the
important lessons, both positive and negative, his final policies
suggest for peace.
For most of his life, Sharon was the epitome of what has been called
"gun Zionism": the notion that Jewish Israelis have a kill-or-be-killed
relationship with the Arabs, and above all the Palestinians, surrounding
them. He spent most of his professional life armed, first as a teenager
in the Jewish underground under the British mandate in 1942, and then
as a Haganah fighter in the so-called "Battle for Jerusalem" in the fall
of 1948. Sharon quickly earned a reputation as a maverick best suited
for missions that required ruthlessness -- before long, he was placed in
charge of Israel's early "special operations" Unit 101.
This group eventually specialized in tit-for-tat raids with
Palestinian guerrilla groups, which often resulted in civilian deaths on
both sides. The most notorious of these was the Qibya massacre in 1953
when troops under Sharon's command attacked a West Bank village and
killed 69 Palestinians, two thirds of whom were women and children.
Sharon later wrote that he had believed that the civilians had already
fled the village when their homes were destroyed, although
contemporaneous documents cast doubt on that account. Sharon told his
troops the purpose of the attack was "maximal killing and damage to
property," and reports from both the Israeli military and UN observers
are consistent with a deliberate effort to kill civilians as opposed to
Sharon's version.
In Israel's conventional wars with Arab armies, Sharon was generally
regarded as an effective, but unpredictable and undisciplined,
commander. But the Israeli public was quick to lionize his performance
in the 1973 war, during which he was credited with creative maneuvers
that defeated Egypt's Second and Third Armies on the crucial southern
front. National fame led to a political career, and in 1981, Sharon
became Israeli Minister of Defense.
That made Sharon Israel's de facto commander-in-chief during
the country's invasion of Lebanon. In September 1982, Sharon's forces
facilitated and, in effect, permitted a large massacre of Palestinian
civilians by Lebanese Christian militias at the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps under Israeli control. Although Lebanese carried out the
actual killings, the Israeli government in general, and Sharon in
particular, are almost universally considered by to be responsible. As
Israel's defense minister at the time, the troops controlling the camps
were under his direct command. Israel's own Kahan Commission of official
inquiry into the massacre held the Israeli military "indirectly
responsible" for the massacre and found that Sharon "bears personal
responsibility" for not anticipating the entirely predictable killing or
taking any measures to stop it. The Commission recommended his removal
from office.
The bodies piled up in Sabra and Shatila irrevocably defined Sharon's
reputation for Arabs and many others. For almost two decades, his
political career languished on the margins. But, as memories faded, he
clawed his way back into favor, cultivating a growing constituency on
the ultra-nationalist right during the first premiership of Benjamin
Netanyahu. Succeeding Netanyahu as head of the Likud party, Sharon
proved that he had maintained his talent for provocation. In September
2000, Sharon, accompanied by large numbers of police officers and some
Israeli extremists, marched through the Haram Al-Sharif complex, also
known as the Temple Mount, and declared that the holy Muslim sites there
would remain under permanent Israeli control.
In most Palestinian and Arab narratives, this is considered the
beginning of the second intifada. Standard Israeli narratives, by
contrast, hold that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat launched it
through deliberate Palestinian violence after the failure of the Camp
David summit in the previous summer. Both versions are contradicted by
the definitive Mitchell Commission Report, which cites instead Israeli
border police use of live fire against Palestinians at same holy site a
few days after Sharon’s visit. But if Sharon was trying to provoke an
incident, as the Mitchell Report strongly implies, he certainly
succeeded.
The subsequent explosion of the Second Intifada propelled Sharon, at
long last, into the premiership, in February 2001. His attitude towards
the conflict was tough by Israeli standards (and even by Sharon's own
standards) and ensured that many more Palestinian civilians perished
than Israelis. Yet as he was confronting, perhaps for the first time in
his career, a conflict that clearly had no military solution, he
endorsed, with some reservations, the U.S.-led Roadmap for Peace in
2003. And, in 2004, Sharon explicitly acknowledged the need for a
Palestinian state. He even started referring forthrightly to the Israeli
"occupation" of Palestinian lands, something most Israeli right-wingers
rarely admit.
Sharon was shifting. But why? In general, Israeli leaders who have
gone from being pro-occupation to supportive of Palestinian statehood
have been impelled by the same factor: demographics. Sharon was no more
able to answer what Israel was to do with 4.5 million occupied
Palestinians -- men and women whom it could neither incorporate nor
peacefully dominate -- than his predecessors. The only viable
conflict-ending solution was a Palestinian state.
Sharon was not the Israeli leader who would make a final peace
agreement with the Palestinians. But he did take a major step, the
implications of which Palestinians and Israelis alike cannot
underestimate: he evacuated settlements in both Gaza and the northern
West Bank. Sharon did not do this in the interests of peace. He did it
as an Israeli national imperative, and a way to resolve a strategic
liability. Sharon's action is sometimes erroneously described as a
"withdrawal" from Gaza, but Sharon more accurately termed it a
"unilateral redeployment." In other words, Sharon's shift was not one
towards an agreement with the Palestinians, but rather towards increased
Israeli unilateralism. His action was entirely pursuant to Israeli
interests and conducted without any agreement on the Palestinian side.
In his unexpected action, Sharon faced and overcame substantial
resistance from the settlement movement in Israel. By explaining why the
evacuation was a strategic and military necessity, he ultimately
mobilized the support of a large Israeli majority. Indeed, the
experience led him to leave the Likud and form a new center-right party,
Kadima, shortly before the stroke that incapacitated him. Several
Israeli journalists have suggested that Sharon was anticipating
repeating a larger withdrawal in the West Bank should he become Kadima’s
first prime minister.
There are two crucial lessons to be drawn from Sharon's last major
action and final legacy, one positive, the other negative. On the
positive side, Sharon demonstrated that settlements can, in fact, be
evacuated. Because of his actions, it is no longer even possible to ask
whether the Israeli government is capable of dismantling settlements.
The questions are simply when and where they will choose to do so. And
that means that none of the existing settlements and other demographic,
infrastructural, topographic, or administrative changes Israel enforces
in the occupied territories should be regarded as irreversible. The
implications of this for the prospects of a two-state solution are
profound.
On the negative side, Sharon yet again demonstrated that
unilateralism between Israel and the Palestinians is a dead-end that
only produces more conflict. Unilateral acts do not leave a party on the
other side that has entered into a mutual agreement for its own reasons
and therefore has a stake in making things work. It would have been
wiser for Palestinians to have responded to the Gaza redeployment
differently -- in the event, they allowed Gaza to fall into the hands of
Hamas rather than reflecting a well-functioning and properly-governed
society. But Israel did not give them any clear incentive to see the
action as an opportunity for progress. Exactly the same can be said of
Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, which was as unilateral as its
various invasions of that country had been.
Israelis should consider this when they complain that their
“withdrawals” from Lebanon and Gaza were "rewarded" with rocketfire from
Hezbollah and Hamas. To conclude that Arabs are recalcitrant or that
agreements with them are impossible is to badly misread the reality of
such policies. What unilateralism produces is a change in the context of
conflict, not an end to it. The same would almost certainly apply to
any Israeli unilateral action, as reportedly contemplated by Sharon, in
the West Bank.
One need only contrast the track record of unilateralism with that of
mutual agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The peace
treaty with Jordan is rock solid, and that with Egypt has survived the
transitions from Anwar Sadat to Hosni Mubarak to military rule to
Mohamed Morsi and now the new, interim Egyptian government, entirely
unscathed. Even the armistice with Syria has been largely satisfactory
from the Israeli point of view.
The real legacy of Israel's most famous and notorious practitioner of
"gun Zionism" was to simultaneously demonstrate that the government of
the State of Israel is, despite all its doubts, capable of overriding
the settler movement in the greater national interest, but also that if
it does so unilaterally, it will be a dead-end. Whether Sharon himself
would have come to see this by now, or would have clung to a vision of
unilateralism -- as so many on the Israeli right are increasingly coming
to embrace -- we cannot know. But, even if he never got the chance to
draw the right conclusions from the unsatisfactory consequences of his
final policies, the rest of us can, and must, act on their implications
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