WASHINGTON -- This
much is clear: Whoever follows Ariel Sharon will follow Ariel
Sharon.
Sharon himself followed
no one. In the army, he was famous for not following orders. Later,
in various governmental posts, he did pretty much as he pleased
-- building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, plunging into
Lebanon, deserting one political party for another (even Likud,
the one he helped form) and, ultimately, reversing himself by
dismantling the Gaza settlements and abandoning Gaza itself. As
opposed to too many Israelis, his ideology was simple: Deal with
reality. A great leader masters the possible.
Consider Charles
de Gaulle. In 1958, he quite literally answered the call of France's
Algerian colonialists and came out of retirement to resume the
premiership. Immediately, he flew to Algiers and told a cheering
crowd there, ``I have understood you.'' The crowds were one thing,
reality something else. Within a year, de Gaulle had proposed
``self-determination'' for Algeria.
In the end, Sharon
made a similar accommodation with reality -- actually, several
of them. The first was demographic: The 8,000 Jews of the Gaza
Strip could not hold the place without the army, and to the army,
not to mention much of Israel itself, the place was not worth
it. Gaza, with more than 1.4 million Palestinians, was abandoned.
No doubt Sharon was
going to do something similar with the West Bank as well. He could
not -- he would not -- simply abandon it, because the West Bank
has in abundance the religious and historical significance that
Gaza sorely lacks. Certain settlements would be retained, east
Jerusalem, too, but the rest was not possible to keep. Here, too,
demographics dictated the outcome: too few Jews, too many Arabs
and not a chance of catching up. (The Palestinian birth rate is
more than double the Jewish one.)
There is yet another
reality and it is too often overlooked: the quality of Palestinian
leadership. Not to put too fine a point on it, but their politicians
make for lousy negotiating partners. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
Authority president, is a realist himself. For that reason, he
has not moved against the plethora of armed militias and outright
gangs that roam the Gaza Strip. Any attempt to disarm them would
probably cost Abbas his life but, lucky for him, he seems disinclined
to try. In October Sharon told me he thinks Abbas' heart is in
the right place; others say it's his guts that have been misplaced.
Whatever the case,
there's no doubt Abbas is ineffectual. He cannot control his own
borders; he cannot control his own police forces. He cannot control
his spending and the growth of the public sector payroll. A once-promising
and relatively prosperous Palestinian society has become deeply
dysfunctional and astonishingly corrupt. Since the Oslo accords
(1993), Palestinians have received an abundance of international
aid. Where's it gone? Europeans and others may exalt Palestinians,
but Sharon has a distinctly less romantic view of them. The Palestinians'
worst enemy is not Israel, but their own inept and corrupt leadership.
Sharon also reversed
himself about Israel's controversial security barrier. He opposed
it once, but no longer. It goes up -- here a wall, there a fence.
In some places, the barrier has isolated Palestinian communities
-- and that is wrong -- and it certainly has created hardships.
But the barrier itself is a perfectly rational response to a perfectly
insane situation: terrorism. Israel is doing what any gated community
in America has done. Once again, reality.
A popular
toy among Sharon's generation of Israeli parents was called ``nachum
takum'' -- lie down, get up. You know it: the toy you knocked
down but which bounced right up again. That's Sharon himself and
that, I think, was his grand strategy. After all, so much of what
he attempted failed -- and sometimes, as with the invasion of
Lebanon, tragically. He had been on the political left, the right
and, more recently, the middle. He demolished what he himself
built -- settlements, political parties, grand plans -- but he
bounced right up to try something else: nachum takum.
This must be the
strategy of the Israeli politicians who follow Sharon, including
the underrated Ehud Olmert, and even Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader
of Sharon's old Likud Party. Any of them will find demographic,
cultural and political reality impinging at every turn, restricting
options until, finally, there is only one: a unilateral imposition
of the plan the Palestinians cannot accept and the Israelis cannot
anymore afford to reject. This, in the end, was the Sharon Plan.
Whoever follows him, will follow it.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
