Clear skies do not provide the best opportunity for the landscape artist to practice his art. Clouds offer a greater chance for a subtle interplay of light and shade. Leaders with military skills, such as Winston Churchill, who also happened to be a painter, flourished under conditions of war. When the war was over, he returned to watercolors. Ariel Sharon was also a man of war, but when the skies cleared he did not retreat into his hobbies; instead, he searched for opportunities to ignite war once again.
Sharon knew about Churchill. As long as Britain was engaged in war, the people sought his strong leadership. When it ended, they voted him out of power. In 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, the largest protest in the history of Israel came out against Sharon. A commission of inquiry, headed by the Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan, determined that Defense Minister Sharon was negligent, and should have foreseen that permitting Lebanese Phalangist forces to enter the Palestinian camps carried the potential for catastrophe. Sharon was forced to resign. This could have been the end of his political career. The man did not have a social vision for his country; economics bored him. He must have known that he would get a second chance only when the drums of war began to beat again. It is not surprising, then, that when the Oslo Accords were concluded—promising peace at the end of an interim period—Sharon provocatively waged a fierce battle against the agreement. His return to power came after he deliberately walked with a large contingent of armed guards into the Dome of the Rock compound in September, 2000, helping to ignite the Second Palestinian Intifada.
Can leaders like Sharon, whose special talents flourish only in periods of instability and war, have a vision of peace? During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Sharon proved a master at breaking ceasefires that the United States and others brokered. He used these same skills in his fight against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The pattern of Israeli assassinations and invasions of Palestinian territories suggests that whenever Sharon felt cornered into making a political concession for peace, his government would take an action that was bound to provoke Hamas or other militant Palestinian groups, thus insuring the premature demise of any efforts at a political resolution to the conflict.
But Sharon knew that he was not going to live forever. He became less concerned with his own political survival than with his legacy. He sought to secure Israel’s hold on the maximum area of Palestinian land, while at the same time suppressing Palestinian resistance. What others called his vision for peace—which he pursued as relentlessly as he pursued war—was based on the total surrender of the Palestinian side and its submission to the dictates of a militarily stronger Israel. But, with the whole world watching, Sharon’s brilliance was to portray Palestinian surrender as a painful compromise he was willing to make on behalf of his country, to win for it a true and lasting peace with its aggressive neighbors. This vision was based on sweeping aside the international consensus regarding the end of Israeli occupation of the territory seized by Israel in 1967.
Instead, Sharon was working to force the unequal division of the land between Israel and Palestine, in which Israel would annex, without payment of any compensation, more than seventy per cent of the total land of historic Palestine—the territory administered by the British prior to 1948—including all those areas where water reservoirs are situated. Thereafter, the Palestinians living in the fragmented land beyond the wall Israel had built inside their territory would be free to declare their own state or to federate with Jordan. This “vision for peace” was based on an utter mistrust of the other side, and the conviction that any peace could be maintained only by a fortress Israel in a state of perpetual mobilization. Even if Sharon had succeeded in forcing his vision through, leaving the other side to make do with its patchwork territory—without a peace treaty, since his moves were always unilateral—any lull in the conflict would have been temporary. So glaring would have been the injustice against the Palestinians, suffering apartheid conditions, that sooner or later any respite would have come to an end, and hostilities would have flared up once again.
But, in so intimate a struggle as the one between Palestinians and Israelis, it is never the case that a leader of one side could impose such an unfair and discriminatory vision without the assistance of the other side. And so responsibility for the failure to achieve peace between the two sides must surely be shared, albeit unequally. Despite the fact that there were times when there was near-unanimity among Palestinians for a two-state solution, the Palestinian leadership failed to communicate this aspiration to the Israeli public and lend support to Sharon’s political opponents. The Palestinian Authority also failed to protect its own population, and to mobilize international and local nonviolent resistance against Sharon’s strategy to legitimatize his brutal actions against Palestinian civilians as defensive, justified, and necessary.
Now the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank is trying to do this. It is an uphill battle, not only because of the bitterness between the two sides that Sharon had a huge role in fostering but also because, through his unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Sharon proved that it was possible for Israel to deceive the world by portraying its actions as striving for peace, when in fact they were efforts to abort it. Sharon was always a pioneer. He went further than most in his crimes against Palestinian civilians, and further than others in his deception; he showed Israeli leaders that they could retain the tactics of war while calling them efforts for peace, and this is his most corrosive legacy.
A day will come when it will be recognized that leaders such as Sharon, and those who have shared his vision of Israel as a fortress state rather than one that can attain peaceful relations with its neighbors, have done their own people the greatest disservice.
Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and a writer, whose books include “Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine,” “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” and “A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle.“ He lives in Ramallah.
Photograph by AFP/Getty.
