15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
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No time for fear
Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister of Israel has considerable political ramifications and must be approached with the seriousness it merits. Still, we must not exaggerate the gravity of the situation and give in to fear. Fear leads to recklessness, which can provoke a predator and give it an excuse to pounce. It can also cause the potential prey to panic and run. In short, fear, whether it takes the form of impetuousness or cowardice, inevitably yields disaster.
Sharon is a raging bull, and we must neither provoke nor flee him. Provocation will give him a pretext to attack -- which, indeed, appears to be his intention -- in a bid to extricate Israel from its current predicament. The butcher of Sabra and Shatila imagines that a blitzkrieg offensive will give him the ideal opportunity to reshuffle the negotiating deck in favour of the priorities of the Israeli right and, perhaps, to place Israeli society as a whole in a more advantageous position from which to deal with the demands of the post-settlement phase. To recoil in fear, conversely, will fuel the fanatical and arrogant Israeli general's conviction that the Arabs are vermin to be crushed, encourage him to take yet more intransigent positions and feed his hopes of imposing his final conditions by force of arms.
Because the current circumstances oblige us to be neither rash nor weak, we must adopt a responsible stance that reflects the greatest possible degree of self-control and that moreover requires us, more than at any time in the past, to summon all our courage, initiative and self-sacrifice. Such a stance must be firm and unequivocal, and it must be based on a thorough and conscientious analysis of the implications of what has transpired in Israel.
Sharon swept to victory with 60 per cent of the votes cast, a percentage far higher than that won by any of his predecessors since the direct vote for prime minister was introduced. This landslide victory was no random phenomenon; nor was it the product of temporary circumstances that could change in the near future. Rather, it was the natural and logical extension of the increasing shift of Israeli society to the right and, hence, of increasing racism, extremism and religious fanaticism. This trend first surfaced immediately after October 1973 and then began to snowball. The October War demonstrated that, when the Arabs managed to use their resources to best effect, they could inflict irreparable damage on Israel and, perhaps, ultimately defeat it. As this realisation sank in, the left-wing Labour trend, which played the greatest part in establishing the foundations of the Israeli state, increasingly began to appear old and lame from the perspective of Israeli society. It seemed to have outlived its historical purpose, while the Israeli right, under the umbrella of the Likud, seemed prepared to serve as a more viable alternative for a new and different phase in the nation's history.
When President Sadat departed from the traditional mode of confrontation and undertook his landmark visit to Jerusalem immediately after the Likud reached power in 1977, Israeli society was not yet ready to accept the notion of peace based on compromise. Nor did it possess a political leadership willing to conclude such a settlement or capable of rallying Israeli society behind it. Prime Minister Begin treated the Sadat initiative as a sign of Egypt's despair at the exorbitant costs of armed conflict rather than as a sincere desire to conclude an equitable peace. Israeli arrogance and intransigence set off a series of local, regional and international reactions that culminated in the assassination of Sadat, at which point the Israeli government felt that the time was ripe to impose its will, invading Lebanon only months later. It is ironic that the hero of that aborted invasion -- Ariel Sharon, who at the time was Israeli defence minister -- should be chosen by the Israeli people as their prime minister in 2001, in the wake of Israel's humiliating withdrawal from Lebanon.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 5 June 1982, and Sharon's electoral victory on 6 February 2001, respectively mark the beginning and culmination of a lengthy period of mounting frustration within Israeli society at its failure to produce a government strong enough to bring about a durable peace. There was a moment during this interval when the Israeli people felt they had found their answer in the Rabin government, despite the inexorable growth of ultra-conservative forces, especially the religious right. But this moment was short-lived. No sooner had Rabin signed the Oslo accord -- which fell far below the aspirations of the Palestinian people -- than Israeli extremists unleashed their wrath.
The assassination of Rabin could have galvanised the left into containing the menace of the right. Instead, the left-wing candidates vying for political leadership in Israel scrambled to outbid one another in their attempts to appease the right. This rivalry prompted Peres, for example, to flex his military muscles in Lebanon in the "Grapes of Wrath" operation and the Qana massacre. It was in the same spirit that Barak responded to the Intifada by levelling tanks, missiles and air artillery at stone-throwing children and defenceless civilians in Palestine. These power ploys did nothing to temper the extremism of Israeli society and stem its relentless rightward drift. The Israeli electorate chose Netanyahu over Peres, then Sharon over Barak when the latter failed to deliver on his promise to bring both security and a peace settlement.
Ultimately, Barak, the coalition he headed and the majority of the Knesset -- indeed, the majority of the Israeli people -- were unable to achieve security and peace for a very simple reason: they were never prepared or willing to secure a settlement that would meet even the most basic Palestinian demands. In all events, the Israeli right has only continued to gain in strength and momentum, bringing Sharon to power with massive popular backing.
Does this mean that the Israeli people have chosen to deal their last card by placing at the head of their government a brutal war criminal, in the hope that he will succeed where Barak failed? Do they believe he can impose Israel's formula for peace on the Palestinians and then force all the other Arab nations to accept it?
The Arabs could not have helped to save Barak, even if they had wanted to. Sharon had such an enormous lead that the votes of all the Arabs who are entitled to vote in Israel could never have closed the gap. The PA, for its part, did its best to assist Barak by hinting at the recent Taba summit that a final settlement was virtually at hand, but its efforts were fruitless. Indeed, the outcome of the elections tells us that the majority of the Israeli people adamantly reject "concessions" with regard to Palestinian sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. In their opinion, Barak's position on these issues, however woefully inadequate when measured against Palestinian rights, is too lenient by far.
A contingent of Arab commentators has claimed long and persistently that the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, are partly to blame for the floundering peace process because of their refusal to lend sufficient backing to the peace camp in Israel. These accusations, an expression of the self-flagellation that has persisted doggedly since the 1967 defeat, peaked following the 1996 elections. Arab Israelis then had an opportunity to help bring Barak to power in 1999. But the fact is that Arab support had no practical effect on the Israeli left, whether with regard to its stand on the peace process or to its position on the rights of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, whose vote for the left was generally taken for granted. In fact, the Israeli left has committed especially gross injustices against the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.
An impartial examination of the development of attitudes toward peace in Israel must lead one to conclude that the Israeli right most accurately expresses the nature of the Zionist project at this stage in its history. Despite the enormous progress this enterprise has made towards its goals, it is still not prepared to declare its final victory. Successive Israeli leaders since the peace process began may have believed that they could accomplish through peaceful means what they failed to achieve through war, but their goals have remained unaltered and uncontested. At this juncture, the bulk of Israeli opinion feels that Barak offered the Palestinians too much and have found a replacement who will be "tougher on the Arabs." The Israeli voters examined the prominent talents of their military establishment and came up with the butcher himself.
It is possible to read the recent election results two ways, however. Perhaps the bitter medicine Israeli society must swallow if it is ever to be ready for peace has brought it to the delirium that precedes the healing process. On the other hand, Israeli society's current paroxysm of insanity is an indication that it has refused to respond to treatment, and that, in keeping with the intractability of the Zionist enterprise, it will remain inherently incapable of reaching a compromise with the Palestinians and, consequently, with the Arabs. Both readings lead to the same conclusion: the Arabs have no alternative but to work to defeat Sharon and everything he represents. Perhaps then we will see whether the patient requires another form of treatment.
* The writer is head of Cairo University's Political Science Department.
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