Sharon, the Enigma?

[Violet_Crumble]

by Samer Elatrash
June 12, 2004

Although Ariel Sharon will probably go down in history as a brutal army general, a footnote might mention that he did inspire a new genre of political commentary after winning Israel’s 2001 elections. This commentary serves to convert Sharon, whose intentions are no more subtle than a spitting camel, into an enigma. Just when you thought that you had Sharon figured out, so the argument goes, he pulls out a “historic compromise” and fires cabinet ministers who threaten to vote against it, again confounding the commentators. Just who—they ask—is Sharon? Is he the man who in 1982 dismantled Yamit, an Israeli settlement in the Sinai after the conclusion of a peace treaty with Egypt, or the man who for years tried to convince the Palestinians to call Jordan their state?

Sharon may dislike honesty—“a most hypocritical and lie filled concept”, he told an Israeli newspaper—and he may, as David Ben Gurion confided in his diary, be a habitual liar, but he is not an inscrutable man. He is often derided for being a skilled tactician yet a poor strategist. This is inaccurate; Sharon exhibits the same patience that characterized the leaders of the nascent Zionist movement who led it to the establishing of Israel. After years of poring over planning maps for new settlements in the occupied territories, Sharon is perhaps unrivalled in Israel for his knowledge of the terrain, of every nook and cranny, he would boast.

Yet unlike the settler movement, which is now accusing him of betrayal after his promise to dismantle Israel’s settlements in Gaza, Sharon resembles the hedgehog from Archilochus’s parable: the hedgehog, wrote the Greek poet, “knows one big thing”, while the fox “knows many little things.” Sharon knows one thing: that while the “international community” and many of the settlers see the withdrawal from Gaza as precedent that will in time lead to the dismantling of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state, “time”, as Sharon told an Israeli reporter, “is not working against us.”
V.I. Lenin never tired of reminding the Bolsheviks, who always had trouble following Lenin’s abrupt turns and reversals in policy, that “one has to be able at each moment to find that particular link in the chain which…will give one a firm basis from which to go on to the next link.” Sharon understands this and puts it to practice, even when grasping on to the link might require some backpedaling on previous statements and tactics, the breaking of party alliances or the dismantling of a few settlements.

The Sharon who, as Israel’s Defense Minister, oversaw the dismantling of Yamit in April 1982 was the same Sharon who convinced the Israeli cabinet to wage a war in Lebanon a month later with the objective of destroying the Palestinian national liberation movement and, so he calculated, the national aspirations of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. While the “international community” and the settlers saw in the dismantling of Yamit a precedent, Sharon treated it as a compromise that would secure Israel’s western front while Israel waged war in the north with the objective of ensuring its dominance in the West Bank and Gaza.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=5697