Losing Sharon …
By Denise Best | Related entries in In The News, The WorldWhat’s next for Israel and the peace process embarked upon by Sharon?
The impact of Israel losing Sharon’s as its leader looks to be a blow to a direction which appeared to be offering a viable solution to the territorial hostilities which have plagued that region.
The stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could prove to be one of the great disasters in the country’s nearly 60-year history.
As I write this, Sharon’s condition remains uncertain, but the severity of his stroke makes it unlikely that he will survive, let alone return to power.
That could be disastrous because Sharon represented, indeed embodied, the emergence of a rational, farsighted national idea that seemed poised in the coming elections to create a stable governing political center for the first time in decades.
Very much a “black and white” point of view without much room for needed compromise or reasonable negotiation.
For a generation, Israeli politics have offered two alternatives. The left said: We have to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. The right said: There’s no one to talk to because they don’t want to make peace; they want to destroy us, so we stay in the occupied territories and try to integrate them into Israel.
The left was given its chance with the 1993 Oslo peace accords. They proved a fraud and a deception. The PLO used Israeli concessions to create an armed and militant Palestinian terrorist apparatus right in the heart of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel’s offer of an extremely generous peace at Camp David in the summer of 2000 was met with a savage terrorism campaign, the second intifada, that killed a thousand Jews. (Given Israel’s tiny size, the American equivalent would be 50,000 dead.)
With the left then discredited, Israel turned to the right, electing Sharon in 2001. But the right’s idea of hanging on to the territories indefinitely was untenable. Ruling a young, radicalized, growing Arab population committed to Palestinian independence was not only too costly but ultimately futile.
Sharon’s genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way. With a negotiated peace illusory and a Greater Israel untenable, he argued that the only way to security was a unilateral redrawing of Israel’s boundaries by building a fence around a new Israel and withdrawing Israeli soldiers and settlers from the other side. The other side would become independent Palestine.
What have been the effects to date of Sharon’s direction?
The success of this fence-plus-unilateral-withdrawal strategy is easily seen in the collapse of the intifada. Palestinian terrorist attacks are down 90 percent. Israel’s economy has revived. In 2005, it grew at the fastest rate of the developed countries. Tourists are back, and the country has regained its confidence.
The Sharon idea of a smaller but secure and demographically Jewish Israel garnered broad public support, marginalized the old parties of the left and right, and was on the verge of electoral success that would establish a new political center to carry on this strategy
Without the time necessary to develop and groom others with the ability to lead in his place, the stage unfortunately will be empty and likely to revert back to the previous dynamic of rigidity and standoffs.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 and is filed under In The News, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 7th, 2006 at 10:17 am
Nice summary and best I’ve read so far. I’ve been thinking along similar lines and am afraid that there is too little time for the new center to regroup and hold. I don’t think Labor has the answers nor do I think Israel will vote them in, but the Likud is now isolated on the right. By splitting the Likud Sharon reduced his base and it will be hard from any successor to draw enough support from potential labor voters to make up the difference. I assume the right will be capably led by Netenyahu and will retain its hard right constituency. It was a tough ask with Sharon well; now it looks like it will be hard to sustain the current momentum even though a lot of people must have come to the view that Sharon’s way was better than the other two alternatives. I expect that we’ll end up with a center right coalition between Sharon’s new party and Likud. In other words back where Sharon started.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
News this morning -
Peretz has been reported as saying that he is prepared to lead Kadima, giving it as much creditbility as he gave the Labor Party.
Olmert, on the other hand, has been entrusted with State leadership by Sharon. Most importantly he does not have (to my knowledge) the historical baggage of Sharon, Peretz, and Netenyahu.
So, Olmert may well be the greatest hope.
Who will the US back? My guess Netenyahu. Oh dear! How sad! Never mind…