So when Sharon comes along and promises that he’s got a solution, the despairing Israeli prefers to believe him rather than to come to terms with the fact that the present path, the frustrating path of negotiation, with its painful compromises, is the only path we have that can lead to peace.
Sharon is selling Israelis a miracle cure — he says he won’t negotiate under fire. “If they shoot, we don’t talk.” To put it in simple language, Sharon is prepared to place the future of the peace process, Israel’s future, the future of the entire region, in the hands of every fifteen-year-old boy from Nablus or the Deheisheh refugee camp who’s got a Molotov cocktail hidden behind his back. Because if they shoot, we don’t talk.
Sharon promises, with absolute certainty, to “wipe out terrorism.” Despite his decades of run-ins with terror, he has still not learned that it can’t be obliterated by military means alone. One can certainly not wipe out the struggle of a nation with a solid national consciousness, motivation, and both great hope and great despair.
Do any of Sharon’s supporters really believe that he will have any more room for maneuver than Barak has had? Can anyone today seriously believe that Israel will always be able to do whatever it pleases in the Middle East, without paying a terrible price for it? Will Israel always enjoy American support for realizing its belligerent fantasies? Will there eternally be enough Israelis to follow their leaders into more wars that could have been prevented?
This writer has much criticism to level against Ehud Barak. Against the way he acted, his style of interpersonal relations, his tactlessness toward both those close to him and his enemies. But I am certain of one thing: it would have been impossible to lay one’s hand directly on the deepest part of the Israeli-Palestinian wound — as Barak did — without causing an eruption of the kind that has occurred. It couldn’t have been done without awakening all the most primal fears, instincts, insults, and loathing, without shaking the cratons on which the two peoples, the Israeli and the Palestinian, live.
I do not see today any other leader who would have dared to put the very core of this historic conflict on the table, raising all the most underlying questions about the Israeli and Palestinian identities, boundaries, and true existential concerns.
Barak did it. Not with great enthusiasm, certainly, not with profound personal recognition of the need to concede and compromise. Most of all, not with respect for his Palestinian partner, or with real sensitivity for his suffering and his plight. But, little by little, by twists and turns, we saw him shake off the illusion of force, the harsh and narrow military view of the world.
Do we now have no choice but to wait for Sharon to change as well? To wait for him to recognize the limits of force, the limits of reality, and reach the same insights that Barak did? What price will we all have to pay for Sharon’s schooling? And who can promise us that this man will transform himself, his way of life, his character, to their very roots?
Israel’s citizens have never before faced a decision that demands such responsibility and maturity, such a need to overcome their fears. The Israeli public must act against the wild instinct to vote from the gut, to punish the Palestinians, the left, Barak, and life itself, which demands such difficult and threatening compromises from them. But those who are not prepared to delude themselves, who live here in this tormented and turbulent region, know deep inside that there is no choice but to carry on with this difficult and frustrating process — to continue, while making concessions, to manage this complex conflict with wisdom and resolution, until finally, slowly, some years from now, the conflict fades away.
In a few hours we will know — not only who Israel’s new prime minister is, but also to what fate we have condemned ourselves and the entire Middle East.
After the Elections
February 2001
Ariel Sharon won an unprecedented landslide victory over Ehud Barak. Barak announced in his concession speech that he was resigning from the Knesset and party leadership. Later he rejected an offer to be appointed minister of defense. Sharon proceeded to create a unity coalition that included members from the defeated Labor Party, the right, and the center and religious parties. The resulting cabinet was the largest in Israel’s history, with twenty-eight ministers. The unity government was dismantled in October 2002, when Labor ministers resigned over the national budget debate.
When Ariel Sharon made his victory speech on Tuesday night, his supporters whistled in contempt and loathing each time their leader mentioned Barak, the left, and the Palestinians. The Israeli public has clearly punished that triad in the most painful way possible. As one voter said, in naïve sincerity, “I’m not sure that Sharon is the best for Israel, but the Palestinians deserve him!”
May I register my suspicion that Ariel Sharon himself does not believe what has happened to him? This man, who many had already eulogized as a has-been, this power-obsessed, devious extremist of questionable behavior who has failed in nearly every public office he has held, who has ruined nearly everyone who has been his ally, has now been handed an entire country. He can experiment on it with his views and his impulses. Unlike in the past, this time there is hardly anyone who can stop him. But perhaps that is precisely the reason that in the final days of his campaign, when his victory was already assured, Sharon’s mood suddenly changed.
Sharon, who has a cynical and venomous sense of humor, and an almost compulsive urge to crack jokes, looked melancholy and lifeless during the days leading up to the election. One of his associates was quoted saying, “It’s as if something in him turned off.” At moments, perhaps for the first time in his life, he looked almost frightened.
All his life Sharon has operated from the position of the oppositionist, even when he was a cabinet minister. He always, but always, challenged the authority of his superiors, both in the military and in parliament and government. A large part of his military and political careers was based on circumventing authority, disobeying orders, inciting against his leaders, and even — as in the case of the Lebanon War — deceiving his superiors.
And now, suddenly, at the age of seventy-three, he himself is the supreme command. He is authority. He is the man who is responsible for the country.
And there is no one to stop him.
Now he is prime minister of one of the most complicated countries in the world, deep in the most extremely delicate situation it has seen for decades. Perhaps Sharon knows, deep in his heart, that if he does indeed mean to ensure his country’s future, he will have to abdicate many of the opinions and beliefs and symbols that he has valued for the past generation. If he refuses to do so, there can be no doubt that he will lead Israel into a full frontal collision, not only with the Palestinians, but with the entire Arab world.
Perhaps that’s why Sharon is worried. Paradoxically, this anxiety, and this initial awareness of his true political responsibility — and of the complexity of the dilemmas that only a leader is forced to face — are encouraging signs that we can take comfort in today (since there is no other hope).
In this context it is interesting to note that, when the right has come to power, there has always been a sense that its leaders do not feel truly confident at the wheel. Something in the rhetoric of Israel’s right-wing prime ministers, from Begin to Netanyahu, has continued to be opposition rhetoric, dissent against some lawful regime, even when they themselves were the regime. There were periods during Netanyahu’s term, for example, when the government itself behaved as if it were a minority group being persecuted by some wraithlike hostile administration, as if it did not really believe in its own legitimacy.