Feb 7 2002 – How will Ariel Sharon be celebrating today? Will he bring out the champagne and toast the first anniversary of his stunning landslide victory over Ehud Barak, one year ago tonight? Or will he stare glumly into the bottom of his glass and reflect on a year which – by his own standards – has been a miserable failure?
Let’s not apply our own measure, but Sharon’s own. He won his victory on a double slogan, promising peace and security. By that standard, how has he done? Israel is certainly not at peace: on the contrary, it is in a state of bloody war with the Palestinians. The Oslo accords remain a dead letter, the two sides no longer sitting around a table but trading “targeted killings” and suicide bombings – both of which leave more and more civilians, including children, dead.
So there is no peace. What of security? For all Sharon’s pounding of the Palestinians, the intrusion into territories Oslo allocated to Palestinian control and the confinement of Yasser Arafat to virtual house arrest in Ramallah – for all that, Israelis have never felt less secure. They move around their country in soul-devouring fear for their lives, always worried that the bus they sit in, the disco where there children dance, is about to be blown apart by a stranger with an oddly padded coat or even a woman with an overstuffed rucksack – another Hamas or Jihad volunteer bent on death and paradise.
By the two standards Sharon set for himself, then, this has been a year of failure. Maybe that’s no surprise. But what if the notoriously stubborn Bulldozer has realised this failure – and is about to change his ways?
Here’s the evidence for this most optimistic of thoughts. A week ago the PM held his first face-to-face talks with senior Palestinian leaders. In Jerusalem and in secret, he sat not with Arafat himself but three of his most senior lieutenants: Ahmed Qureia, known as Abu Ala, speaker of the Palestinian legislative council; Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, Arafat’s unofficial deputy; and Arafat’s chief financial adviser, Muhammad Rashid.
There was no formal breakthrough at the meeting. The Palestinians asked Sharon to hold his fire for 10 clear days so they could act against the militants responsible for terror attacks on Israel; he refused. He also told them these were not even peace talks: his goal was a ceasefire, then perhaps an agreement of non-belligerency – an armistice – and only much later any political discussion of “final status”. Nevertheless, the very fact of the meeting – and Sharon’s agreement to make this group the formal channel for future talks – looks a lot like a breakthrough. It suggests the PM has finally understood what his critics have been saying for 12 months: that there can be no security without peace and that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is Israel’s only possible partner. Could last Wednesday’s meeting be the glimmer of hope Israelis and Palestinians alike have been craving for so long?
The optimists have a few other crumbs of comfort. They might scan the latest Israeli polls which show Sharon’s job approval rating has plunged from a 23-point positive margin to just five points in two weeks, and that satisfaction in his ability to provide security has fallen by 17 points in the same period. Perhaps Sharon has got the message, concluding that his electorate are tiring of war and want to see the veteran warrior search for peace.
The rose-coloured view has one more bright point: two high-ranking, younger Palestinian leaders, Marwan Barghouti and Muhammad Dahlan have recently stormed the opinion pages of the US press to stake out an essentially conciliatory position, reasserting their belief in a two-state solution, with Palestine coexisting alongside Israel, and promising that any return of Palestinian refugees would “not alter the demographic character of the state of Israel”. This week, in a piece republished in Monday’s Guardian, Yasser Arafat added his own voice to that stance.
Together these movements should make up grounds for optimism. But in a conflict as long and intractable as this one, it’s wise to keep scepticism as well as hope at one’s shoulder.
The sceptical reading of the Arafat move is that words are easy and the step that would really have counted – action against Hamas and Islamic Jihad – was the step he never dared take. The cynical gloss on Sharon’s gesture is just as clear. He travels to Washington tomorrow and surely wants to arrive there cast not as intransigent problem but as flexible, peace-seeking solution. Last Wednesday’s meeting gives him all the cover he needs to be guaranteed a warm welcome.
On this view, Sharon is neither the classic warrior-turned-peacemaker poised to make his own Nixon-to-China journey, nor even a hawk who’s realised his hard line has failed. Instead he is a shrewd operator who knows how to do just enough to keep the US – and his Labour coalition partners, led by Shimon Peres – on side, but who has no sincere peace strategy at all. According to the harshest exponents of this position, Sharon has no plan to make peace because he has no desire to make peace: he doesn’t want a political deal, he wants a military victory.
That’s the suspicion of Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford University. Author of The Iron Wall, a clear-eyed account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he has studied Sharon’s career from its earliest days half a century ago. He describes him as “a sinister man”, who has opposed every peace deal between Israel and its neighbours: the Camp David accords with Egypt, Oslo in 1993, even the treaty with Jordan in 1994.
Shlaim wonders if that last example provides the clue to Sharon’s current thinking. The PM has never publicly renounced the once-fashionable Likud view that “Jordan is Palestine” – that the Palestinian state should be where Jordan is now, to the east of the river Jordan, leaving everything to the west, including the West Bank and Gaza, for Israel.
If that sounds too unhinged to be serious, just take a look at the current Israeli political landscape. Check the musings of Avigdor Lieberman, the ultra-rightist who enjoys a place in Sharon’s cabinet: he advocates a form of “transfer”, expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank, hinting that the same treatment may even be applied to the million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel itself.
Alarmingly similar views are heard from an increasingly vocal faction at the top of Israel’s military command: calling for an end to Sharon’s “restraint” and for permission to take the gloves off: to reoccupy territories ceded to the Palestinians and “root out” the terrorists once and for all.
Which way is Sharon leaning? Is he chastened by the year of failure, and now resolved to turn left on to the road of negotiation? Or was last week a ploy, while his real dream remains much darker: to weaken Arafat and his authority so badly that, in the ensuing chaos, he can send in the tanks and retake the West Bank and Gaza, this time for good? I hope it’s the former; past form makes me dread it’s the latter.
j.freedland@guardian.co.uk