With Israel still reeling in the aftermath of a worldwide terrorist alert directed against its interests, with Israeli embassies in four countries closing due to security threats, with Israeli international aviation being hit by a realization similar to what American aviation went through in September 2001, Israelis were looking for creative ideas and leadership.
The primaries were the expression of the Likud voters’ desire to get both Binyamin Netanyahu and Sharon at the same time. Netanyahu turned the primary into a 2-for-1 deal by promising to appoint Sharon as his foreign minister if he were elected, and Sharon made the same offer in reverse a few hours later. For the past two years, Sharon has succeeded in rolling back the concessions of Oslo while enfeebling any domestic opposition that he faced and currying increasing favor with Washington. Netanyahu failed on all three of these fronts and the Likud voters remembered this in making him Sharon’s number two.
But together with Sharon at the Herzliya conference, Netanyahu, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen, Moshe Ya’alon, and a host of other political, military, academic and journalistic leaders expressed pessimism and fear about the developing environment in which Israel sits.
It has become increasingly clear over the past few months that Sharon’s high wire act with Palestinian terrorism is being played out while he virtually ignores the other threats Israel faces. Speakers at the conference described three rings of threat currently facing Israel, of which Palestinian terrorism is only the most immediate. Beyond them, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are operating an axis first described to the US Senate in a report from August 1992. This axis has been operating smoothly for over a decade and its twin aims are the total conquests of Lebanon and Israel.
Ehud Barak gave this axis its first aim on a golden platter with his withdrawal of Israeli troops from Southern Lebanon in 2000, leaving the entire country in the hands of Syria and its Hizbullah puppets.
The continued firing by Hizbullah of anti-aircraft weapons at Israeli planes and settlements in the north show how the front line has been shifted southward since Barak’s withdrawal. The capture of the Karine-A weapons ship en route from Hizbullah munitions dumps to the Palestinians with Iranian-purchased weapons in January 2002 illustrates how the second aim is to be fulfilled. The only thing standing in its way is Israel’s incremental gains against the Palestinian terror networks in the months since then.
The third ring is Iraq. President Bush’s leadership in the war on terror is faltering badly as world attention shifts to Iraq. Rather than send US forces into Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein the way he did the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, Bush prefers to hide behind a UN inspections team and Security Council resolutions that are meant more to protect Saddam than to ensure that Islamic terrorism does not gain the ability to use non-conventional weapons.
As a result, non-conventional terrorism is now a firm possibility in the region, and the recent attack on an Israeli plane in Kenya could have been the opening shot in the new terrorist war against Israel.
The entire world sees this. The concerned reactions from most world powers to the day of terrorism launched against Israel last Thursday is evidence enough that the new realities are starting to take hold in world capitals. Sharon’s speech in Herzliya is evidence that he is the exception to this rule.
In a move clearly meant to win him more seats at the expense of Labor’s new superdove, Amram Mitzna, Sharon laid out his plans for a future settlement with the Palestinians, followed by a pledge to form a national unity government with Labor, whose new leadership is harking back to the morally and defensively bankrupt positions that the electorate rejected when they threw Barak out of office.
What is most bothersome, though, is that Sharon, who has proven to be a masterful political chess player the past two years, is also proving to be singularly unimaginative in his policy outlook. The final status plan he laid out before the Herzliya gathering is the same one envisioned by former minister Yigal Allon in 1968 and used by former prime minister Menachem Begin during the Camp David talks ten years later. It was this vision that dragged Yitzchak Shamir to Madrid in 1991, and it was this vision that formed the basis of the Oslo Accords two years later under Yitzchak Rabin.
A demilitarized state in about 40% of Judea and Samaria and three quarters of the Gaza Strip – basically Areas A and B under the now defunct Oslo Accords. Israel would control the airspace and borders but would provide territorial contiguity in Judea and Samaria and political and social autonomy to its residents.
This system has already proven to be unworkable. No independent state can be prevented from acquiring arms, and no independent state will be condemned for demanding control over its own borders and airspace. If the Palestinians should by some quirk accept this arrangement, they need only move to correct these anomalies six months later and no one will be able to lift a finger to prevent it. But even that won’t happen. The Palestinians have already rejected far more generous offers from Ehud Barak and used them as an excuse to launch the current violence in the first place.
Sharon’s vision is no vision at all. But Israelis have no choice. There is no longer any challenge from Netanyahu in the Likud and by announcing his intention to form a national unity government despite Mitzna’s suicidal positions in Labor, Sharon has removed him as a viable alternative even among Israel’s remaining left wing.
The chess is superb. But Israelis can now see that by electing Sharon, we will face four more years of regular bus bombings, restaurant massacres, and downtown shootings and four more years of economic degradation due to a continued lack of creativity on the part of the Prime Minister.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
