Sharon’s Legacy Of Hopelessness
Yale Roe
Twenty years ago this month, I sat with Gen. Ariel Sharon as he laid out for me his strategy in Lebanon during a war that had begun a few months before. It was an unusual situation. I was no one important, not the prime minister of a foreign country, not even a president of a Jewish organization. I was just a journalist, one who did his reporting with a film crew.

The only thing larger than Sharon in that small room was the map behind him. It was huge and detailed, a street map of Beirut. Sharon aimed a long pointer at the map and guided me through every street, around corners and across open squares with total familiarity. Sharon knew Beirut better than I knew my hometown.

No question, Sharon is a smart man. Most Israelis agree with that.

They know his politics, that Israel’s survival depends on its own strength, a first-rate military force, an industrial base that can manufacture weapons and as much land as it can manage to control. That it’s them or us.

They know his history, that he fought in every one of Israel’s wars. I still remember the image in the Yom Kippur War when he led his soldiers across the Suez Canal, Sharon with his bulky body and broad shoulders, that wave of white hair sweeping ever the large bandage across his forehead, smiling with his I-told-you-so-confidence. It was Sharon at his best.

Israelis know, too, about his disregard of orders. They remember Israeli soldiers killed in an ambush in 1956 when Sharon ignored orders to not attack the Egyptians in the fortified Mitla Pass. They remember him disobeying orders in Lebanon in 1982. The Palestinians had assembled a massive array of armaments inside Lebanon, on the Israeli border. Begin’s orders were to remove that threat. Sharon succeeded and then kept going, all the way to Beirut. He turned an incursion into an invasion, not what Begin had in mind.

One thinks of Sharon as brilliant, brave and beyond control. And often impulsive, as in the recent siege of Ramallah. Or maybe Ramallah was not irrational. Was it a clever attempt to undermine the Palestinians’ efforts to put in place a prime minister more malleable than Arafat? Is the Sharon plan simply to crush and curfew the Palestinians into submission?

No one, not even the peaceniks, quarrel with Sharon’s powerful response to the suicide bombings. No one questions how many suicide bombings he has prevented. But many Israelis wonder where Sharon is going.

It’s not just a matter of the Palestinians or us. What happens to them affects our economy, our levels of employment, our levels of investments, production, trade and social services. Where is the imagination to seize the Saudi peace proposal, even if it is more theater than substance, and try to use it as a framework for an Arab-EU-U.S. Marshall Plan for the Palestinians?

Where are the subtleties of establishing constructive, substantive contacts with the Palestinians who will be tomorrow’s leaders. After all, we met secretly for years with our then-enemy King Hussein. Where is some effort to do something beyond the charade of an emasculated Shimon Peres dancing with the enemy?

For Sharon there is one answer to every problem. And always the same answer — brute force.

There is no plan. On one side there is the Palestinians’ pointless self-destructive intifada that has degenerated into suicide bombings. On the other side is the excess of Sharon’s actions that have gone beyond military reprisals to gratuitous killing and humiliation, have encouraged many of the extreme Orthodox to forget their God-given ethics in their obsession with their God-given land, and have encouraged the extremism of right-wing politicians whose talk of transfer is a stain on Jewish history. The peace movement has done no better, intimidated into silence by their anger at the Palestinians and by their absence of leadership.

The dream that has been Israel has been replaced by hopelessness. That is the mood in the land. After two years of the intifada, that is the legacy of Sharon.. n

Yale Roe is a journalist and filmmaker who has reported on Israel for 30 years. He lived in Jerusalem from 1972 to 1986.

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