‘You look at me with eyes full of hatred” — Ariel Sharon’s first words directed to me at a public meeting in Israel in the mid-1980s. At that time he was out of office and in disgrace. He seemed at the end of his tether and reduced to venting spleen.
If my eyes betrayed my feelings, I was not alone. Yitzhak Shamir, probably Israel’s most right-wing prime minister, told Sharon to his face: “You create an ugly atmosphere and hatred among us.” Sharon’s haters were many and he gave as good as he got. Yet in old age he transmogrified in the eyes of most of his fellow Israelis into a giant teddy bear, a benevolent gramps who offered reassurance and security in a terror-filled and bewildering world.
As a young soldier in the underground Zionist army, the Haganah, during the last days of the British mandate, Sharon recalled carrying “a heavy, knotted club” when travelling on an Arab bus. For the rest of his career, he personified the knobkerrie approach to relations with the Arabs. He was the last major Israeli politician who fought in the 1948 war of independence. That gave him a stature that was hugely augmented by the burnished legends of his performances as a divisional commander in the 1967 and 1973 wars.
He was called a bruiser, a battering ram and a bulldozer. Most Israelis trusted him to give no quarter in fighting against their enemies. They forgave the aura of corruption that surrounded his family and enjoyed stories about how he could gobble 40 lamb chops at a sitting.
Nothing can diminish Sharon’s responsibility for a long series of outrages that indelibly stain his historic reputation — from the slaughter of Arab villagers in the border village of Qibya in 1953 to the Lebanon war of 1982. The Sabra and Shatila massacres in that year led an Israeli judicial commission to declare him unfit to hold the office of defence minister. A fellow general observed that he had “no moral brakes”.
Yet the spouter of venom who seemed all washed up in the 1980s bounced back and won sweeping electoral victories in 2001 and 2003. At first the old Sharon seemed unchanged, as he ordered Israeli forces to lunge into Gaza and the West Bank, sanctioned the assassination of Palestinian terrorist leaders and, against his own initial better judgment, began construction of that monumental folly, the Great Wall of Palestine.
However, over the past three years Sharon changed. The man who had relentlessly hammered Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip in the early 1970s, and who had refused to contemplate any withdrawal from the area in his election campaign in January 2003, astonishingly decided on a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Against ferocious opposition within his own party and despite considerable scepticism among his opponents, he carried it through.
Sharon’s reversal reflected a fundamental change in world outlook on the part of much of the Israeli right. This is one of those rare transformations in consciousness that can change the course of history. Ethnocentric dreams of dominance and defiance have given way to a dawning recognition of unpalatable but inexorable realities. Demographic, economic and diplomatic pressures have come together to persuade many of the former protagonists of “Greater Israel” that their project has no future. A more sober, limited vision of the Jewish state has taken its place. It is a measure of this sea change that Sharon became the most effective exponent of such ideas, hitherto anathema to the Israeli right.
Sharon’s new party, Kadima, until last week looked forward to a shoo-in victory in the elections due on March 28. Now it is bereft of its only outstanding national leader. One possible scenario is that it will suffer the fate of every previous attempt to form a centre party in Israel since the 1960s — a preliminary bubble of success that has invariably burst.
Yet even without Sharon, Kadima’s prospects may still be bright. Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister, is a seasoned operator and skilful tactician. He has already secured pledges of support from key members of his party. Olmert was one of the “young princes” of the nationalist right who have had to wait several decades for the disappearance of the founding generation of leaders such as Shamir, Menahem Begin and now Sharon. This moment of high emotion in Israel offers Olmert a once-in-a-lifetime chance to project himself as a leader who can unite Israelis round consensual policies.
Olmert has the advantage that he was one of the foremost architects of Sharon’s shift of course towards acceptance of the need for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and of much of the West Bank and towards willingness to contemplate a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Kadima, although heavily dependent on Sharon’s personality, has also coalesced around an idea: the need for Israeli territorial retraction. Olmert, once an advocate of large-scale Israeli settlement on the West Bank, has, even more than Sharon, undergone an astonishing change of heart. He has repeatedly called on his fellow rightwingers to renounce their dreams of annexation and to accept that Israel cannot realistically expect to maintain indefinitely its West Bank occupation.
Olmert represents the technocratic, business-oriented elements on the Israeli centre-right rather than the ethno-nationalist, messianic settlers and their supporters. As mayor of Jerusalem for 10 years he shamelessly courted votes from orthodox and nationalist Jews. But he remains a sophisticated, secular politician, well connected in Washington and trusted by American decision makers.
His first challenge will be to hold his party together over the next few days and to secure permanent confirmation of the leadership. His second task will be to form an interim government. In this test of his dexterity he will be able to exploit the prime minister’s patronage powers to political advantage; on the other hand it will inevitably leave many hungry office seekers disappointed. His third priority will be to face down his two chief electoral challengers: on the right Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who now leads the diminished rump of the old Likud party; and on the left Amir Peretz, newly appointed captain of the shipwrecked Labour party.
Shimon Peres, 83, the great survivor of Israeli politics, left the Labour party a few weeks ago, after a lifetime in the socialist-Zionist movement, to join Sharon’s party. Great efforts are reported to be under way to attract him back to Labour. In truth it no longer matters very much. Immensely respected outside the country, he suffers within Israel from proven unelectability and a reputation for deviousness. Far from being a political asset, he may even be a liability to Labour. Olmert may nevertheless find it worth expending some political capital to keep him in Kadima, if only to demonstrate that he can hold his party together.
The next Israeli government, like all previous ones, will almost certainly be a coalition. Since Israel’s establishment in 1948 no one party has ever won an outright majority. Israel’s almost pure proportional representation system and the permanent blocs of Arab and religious Jewish parties, each representing about 20% of the population, render single-party victory almost impossible.
Since its pyrrhic victory over the Arabs in the 1967 war, Israel has faced successive “moments of truth” — only to shy away at the critical juncture into various forms of self-deceit. Sharon’s departure leaves Israel at yet another such moment of choice but one where the room for manoeuvre is much more constricted.
Whoever forms the next Israeli government will find himself (or herself — although Golda Meir has few worthy successors in this generation) operating under the same constraints that led Sharon to move to the centre.
When Calvin Coolidge, the famously taciturn American president, died in 1933, a cruel wit reportedly asked: “How did they know?” Sharon’s disappearance will certainly be noticed but in terms of political consequences it may make little difference.
Bernard Wasserstein is the author of Israel and Palestine: Why They Fight and Can They Stop?
Michael Portillo is away
