Home > Sharon betrays Israel’s founders
by Henry Siegman
PARIS Many observers of the Middle East believe "something good is stirring," as an editorial in The Economist put it on July 31. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel seems to have emerged as the champion of a new pragmatism that challenges the rightist dogmatism of the Likud and the settlers as he seeks to disengage from Gaza. And a newly assertive Palestinian young guard is challenging not only a corrupt entourage around Yasser Arafat but also the leader of the Palestinian national movement himself.
Unfortunately, such optimism is based on a complete misreading of both Israeli and Palestinian realities. Sharon is not about to agree to the most minimal conditions for viable Palestinian statehood. His unshakable resolve to avoid dealing with the Palestinians - even to prevent chaos in the wake of the promised withdrawal from Gaza - and to widen Jewish settlement activity throughout the West Bank gives the lie to such wishful thinking.
Sharon has candidly insisted that he intends to disengage from Gaza only because he believes it is the price Israel must pay for retaining enough of the West Bank to assure permanent Israeli control of the area. On Tuesday he announced massive new construction in the West Bank settlements.
As for the Palestinians, the emerging young guard will never agree to Sharon’s notion of a peace agreement - an "interim" arrangement that leaves Israel in control of the West Bank and defers Palestinian statehood for decades while Israel continues to fragment what is left of Palestinian territory into isolated cantons.
The young guard is demanding an end to the corruption of its leaders and a coherent strategic approach to the struggle for Palestinian statehood, which Arafat has failed to provide. Whether it will succeed in producing such a strategic approach, and whether it will embrace or reject violence, will be determined in large measure by Israel’s willingness to assure Palestinians that a viable state is achievable by nonviolent means. That is an assurance that Sharon’s proposal for unilateral disengagement from Gaza does not begin to offer.
The difference between Sharon and his rightist Israeli critics is largely in the packaging, not in the substance of their positions. They differ over whether Palestinians should be allowed to call an apartheid-like arrangement of disconnected and isolated cantons a state. Sharon insists they should be, for otherwise the arrangement would be rejected by the United States. Many in the Likud, including Benjamin Netanyahu, argue that conceding a Palestinian right to statehood would trigger a dynamic toward sovereignty that Israel would be unable to control.
Whatever their differences over semantics and tactics, and over whether to let go of Gaza, Sharon and his Likud critics share an essentially identical vision. No one has described the rationalization for that vision more revealingly than Uzi Arad, who was a foreign policy adviser when Netanyahu was prime minister. Arad is now with the Interdisciplinary Institute in Herzliya, at whose annual meetings Sharon and the heads of Israel’s security establishment make their most important pronouncements. It was at such a meeting in December that Sharon announced his intention to disengage unilaterally from Gaza.
Writing in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz on Aug. 6, Arad scoffs at the argument that because Jews will become a minority in Palestine, they must withdraw from the territories or impose an apartheid regime on the Palestinians if they are to preserve a Jewish state. He writes that "for the last decade, all Israeli governments have been implementing political disengagement from the Palestinian population of the territories. The cities and towns of the West Bank have long since been evacuated. The number of Palestinians between the river and the sea is no longer relevant to Israel being a Jewish democratic state."
The South African government also "disengaged" from the Bantustans that they had set up as homelands for the black majority. Arad and those who support Sharon’s policies seem not to understand, or not to care, that it is precisely South Africa’s "disengagement" that defined its racist regime, and that disengagement will do the same for Israel if persists in following the South African model.
Sharon and Israel’s right wing represent a radical departure from the dominant sensibility of the founders of the Zionist movement, such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann and others. These founders were animated by progressive Western democratic concepts and could not have conceived of a Jewish state that would rule over a permanently disenfranchised people.
It is one of the ironies of history that the Jewish people, who were disproportionately involved in struggles for universal human rights and civil liberties all over the world - and believed the Jewish national return to Palestine to be consistent with those values - should now be supporting policies of a rightist Israeli government that are in danger of changing the Jewish state into a racist enterprise. For if Sharon - with the support of Israelis, world Jewry and the United States - leverages his promised withdrawal from Gaza into an Israeli presence in the West Bank that is impossible to dislodge, a racist enterprise is surely what his policies will produce.
The Palestinian national struggle, and the terrorism resorted to in its name, has created major security problems for Israel. But these security concerns cannot be invoked as a pretext for policies that will bring apartheid rule to the West Bank and Gaza. It is not true that Palestinian violence represents an existential threat to the state of Israel. More to the point, whatever the seriousness of the threat, it can be dealt with by Israel at least as effectively from within Israel’s pre-1967 borders as it has under conditions of occupation.
It had been an article of faith with the overwhelming majority of Israelis for a long time that their most vital security interests required them to remain in southern Lebanon. They believe the same thing about their presence on the Golan Heights. But since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, security along its northern border has improved dramatically. And we now know that Moshe Ya’alon, the Israel Defense Force’s chief of staff - like his predecessors - does not believe that the Golan Heights are important for Israel’s security.
Sadly, Israel remains there - and in the West Bank - because for its political leaders, and for many Israelis, real estate has become more important than justice, or peace, or the founding principles of Zionism.
Henry Siegman, a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a former executive head of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America. This is a personal comment.