Paris, January 5, 2006 – Ariel Sharon has always seemed a man of destiny, whether by calculation or nature; but the Middle East may be fortunate now to escape that destiny.
That is cruel to say, but the destiny Sharon was preparing for Israel and the Palestinians almost certainly has been a redesigned version of the greater Israel to which he has been committed all his life.
Many have hoped that he would – and could – reach an agreement with the Palestinians that gave them a genuinely autonomous state.
There is evidence that his terms would have excluded them from a political presence in Jerusalem. That would have been unacceptable in the Islamic world, and would have perpetuated the conflict, with continuing insecurity for Israel.


His driving principles have always been Israel’s security and its territorial expansion. He himself launched the settlers’ movement following the 1967 war.
He won elections because of his man of destiny aura, earned through his military achievements in the 1948 war, in which Israel achieved nationhood, and in the wars with the Arabs that followed. He made the Israeli majority believe that whatever came, he could assure their ultimate security.
It seemed not to matter that the military record consisted of brilliant tactical successes followed by a catastrophic strategic failure. As a unit commander in 1948 and in later wars he was innovative, decisive, courageous, ruthless, and successful.
His military career culminated in Lebanon’s invasion in 1982, motivated by his belief that he could with a single stroke do away with the Palestinian military and terrorist threat, and turn Lebanon into a client state. This was a profound political miscalculation.
The invasion drove the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, where it had found refuge after its expulsion from Jordan in 1970. However it established a new base in Tunisia, where it regrouped and continued to harass Israel with terrorist actions.
The invasion was expected to install a new government in Beirut based on rightist militias drawn from the Lebanese Christian community. This ended in monstrous atrocities against Palestinian refugees by those Christian militias, with Sharon’s complicity, for which he was later condemned in Israel.
Eight years of civil war followed in Lebanon, as well as a border conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah Moslem militia that lasted until 2000, and ended in a humiliating Israeli withdrawal.
His departure from the scene fundamentally changes the country’s political situation because he dominated today’s Israel, and there is no major figure to replace him.
As prime minister, Sharon combined realism with geopolitical fantasy. He acknowledged that Israel could not forever continue military and political domination of the occupied Palestinian territories, whose population would soon become more numerous than the population of Israel itself.
That was the realism. The fantasy was that a new politico-structure could be agreed that would leave Israel still in effective control of a Palestinian political entity that was cut off from East Jerusalem, and from important sectors of the territories taken during in the 1967 war.
Sharon’s retreat from Gaza last fall was a military tactician’s withdrawal from a vulnerable position of minor strategic interest, exchanged for strategic advantage. The strategic advantage sought was international acquiescence in a further partition of the Palestinian territories that incorporated East Jerusalem into Israel by means of the security wall.
After the Gaza withdrawal, he refused negotiations on what by now is the effectively defunct “road-map” towards a two-state solution, on grounds that the Palestinian Authority has failed to disarm Hamas and crush resistance to its own authority.
Collapse of the Authority would be to Israel’s interest, from Sharon’s perspective -- evidence to the world that Palestine is ungovernable, and that negotiating with Palestinians is futile.
Sharon’s legacy was planned to be a defensible “greater Israel” including Jerusalem. He was not prepared to recognize that this new Israel, unreconciled with the Palestinians, would only have perpetuated its essential insecurity.
His departure from the scene leaves Israel without a man of destiny. It has a marginalized and shrunken Benjamin Netanyahu as leader of the expansionist Likud right. There is a new Labor Party leader, Amir Peretz, whose record was made in domestic and trade-union affairs.
However Peretz has been close to the so-called peace camp, and to Yossi Belin, Israeli co-author of the Geneva plan for a two-nation settlement, providing an autonomous Palestine and a shared Jerusalem.
Israeli public opinion – according to nearly all the poll evidence – wants a two-state system and is prepared for the division of Jerusalem. It has supported Sharon until now because of its insecurities, and his seeming promise of military safety.
Now the Israelis may be presented with a choice between a peace strategy and what amounts to a perpetuated conflict strategy.
In the latter, Israelis would live behind the steel and concrete wall they are now erecting, in increasing resemblance to the Americans behind the Green Zone’s wall in Baghdad: trying, but failing, to dominate events outside the wall.
Copyright 2006 by Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.