Now that Ariel Sharon's personal involvement in the
era of territorial expansion and the galloping colonization that he promoted
and then played a major role in brutally generating is ending, a revisionist
assessment of his role from the inside looking out is in order. I say "revisionist"
because a distressing and scandalous process of unmerited lionization has already
begun. It is being indulged in by too many in Israel and elsewhere who surely
know better but have a stake in pretending otherwise. So he is being affirmatively
portrayed by all the usual suspects as a laudably tenacious soldier/statesman
with exceptional vision - a modern day Joshua in fact. Actually the opposite
has been true. So better now than later to weigh in with an appraisal that runs
counter to the conventional reviews monopolizing time and space in organs of
mass communication especially in the West and most especially in the U. S.
More than any other leader, including Rabin whose pre-Oslo break-their-bones
policy of oppression, suppression and repression makes the successor current
post Oslo era of despotic and retaliatory violence seem like the good old days,
Sharon was responsible for persuading fellow Israelis that the exponentially
growing population of Israeli squatters in the occupied territories which he
championed and encouraged was not only right but defendable. In fact because
he insisted that they were defendable, in others words secure, he was able to
persuade most Israelis that the occupation still was right. But he was wrong
on internationally agreed to or accepted legal, moral, and ethical grounds.
Not only are Palestinians paying the price for his lethal chutzpah but it is
beginning to dawn on a potentially growing number of Israelis who allowed themselves
to be lulled into a false sense of security with respect to squatting in the
West Bank that they like their counterparts in Gaza may be required to pay the
same kind of price. The end of the age of Sharon has been marked by not only
an escalating Palestinian removal from their plots and home sites but by Israeli
removal from their home sites in Palestine too. A bitter first for Israelis
and not what they had been led to expect from Arik.
So believe it or not, I sympathize with the pain of betrayal felt by the Israeli
squatters in Gaza and the West Bank although not their reason for having been
there. First they were lulled into moving there by Sharon's and others' siren
songs of Israeli invincibility and pseudo rights. Then after settling comfortably
in and remaining there for so many years, they believed that they were actually
secure enough to put down roots. But they were suddenly astounded and bitterly
disillusioned by the rudely abrupt change in their fortunes ordered by the man
who more than any other had assured them that the land was theirs for good.
Suddenly, however, he was telling these would be modern day pioneers that they
had to leave. With hindsight, better perhaps they should have stood in Brooklyn
or Skokie.
Now in addition I am also poised to sympathize with the pain of those Israeli
squatters still living in the West Bank who are beginning to sense a Sharon
inspired hand writing on the wall with respect to their own residential tenure
in the territories. They too have every reason to worry about feeling abandoned
and betrayed and to a considerable extent simply bamboozled into participating
in Sharon's obsessive dream of a Greater Israel. They have that reason because
rumblings from the neo-centrist camp he had been forging indicate that further
removal may well be in the cards.
Sharon's mischief making with respect to enticing Israelis into a gigantic real
estate scheme on someone else's land without foreseeing the cost in Israeli
lives (or, even worse; perhaps he did) has been far more than mischief making
where Palestinians are concerned. It has been a terrible and continuing ethnic
disaster. So it is sad to note that while I acknowledge this specific Israeli
pain, I am nevertheless even more sadly aware that Israeli pain is the only
pain being recognized or acknowledged these days by too many Israelis, even
though the Palestinian pain of dispossession and brutal domination by Sharon
and other Israeli policy makers as well as a relatively indifferent Israeli
public is monumental in comparison. Palestinian pain is still mainly unacknowledged
on the other side of the "annexation" wall or - more cruelly - still
being judged irrelevant not only by too many Israelis but by too many reporters
and commentators in the western oriented international mass circulation press.
And since those journalists are judging Palestinian pain irrelevant it continues
to be underreported or not at all. (Neither Gideon Levy nor Amira Hass would
last long as reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post or other big
city U. S. newspapers.)
Sharon learned the hard way during his several long years of self indulgent
violent repressive fury that not only does might not make things right for either
Israelis or Palestinians it is not defendable either. The larger the Israeli
residential populations of Gaza and the West Bank grew especially after the
Oslo Accords were signed, and later during the current uprising, the more difficult
it has been for Israel to make its population on either side of the wall secure.
But unlike Joshua, a military/political leader with considerable single minded
determination who is scripturally reputed to have got the job of brutal territorial
conquest done, Sharon's Joshua-like persistence and single mindedness (despite
the spin being given it these days) has had an exactly opposite effect. That's
because his vision as to what he felt capable of brutally and disdainfully being
able to make happen turned out to be several parts bluster futilely backed up
by bullets instead of one hundred percent fact. But again for the most part,
that's not what you may be hearing or reading these days in the organs of mass
communication.
However, despite his preeminent role as a mover, shaker, and shaper of the failing
impossible dream of a Zionist Greater Israel, it would be a mistake to make
him the scapegoat for that deservedly faltering venture. Others are equally
culpable. The difference between him and the others (and to begin with I am
thinking of the Labor Party's former leader Shimon Peres) was that they like
him came to the conclusion that the best they could do in view of continued
Palestinian recalcitrance was to find a life saving face saving way out of their
dilemma and some of the expendable territories (but not all) instead of still
trying to stay permanently and pervasively in place. Failing at that challenge,
they were more than willing for Sharon to get the job done and join him in the
doing. That is why Peres was very happy after the last election to join his
"good friend" Sharon's national unity coalition government and even
more recently become a charter member of Sharon's new political party. Peres
already had his Nobel "Piece" Prize, but since then failing to get
the job done of getting the Palestinians to agree to a diminished decidedly
unviable state lying behind extremely insecure borders he was more than happy
for Sharon to do Labor's dirty and bloody work.
If consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, then Sharon's career-long self-assured
undeviating until recently persistence in pursuing a policy of Palestinian dispossession
and perpetual disempowerment reveals that his has been among the smallest. His
antediluvian convictions motivated him to encourage his people to dangerously
overreach the bounds of contemporary international propriety in the territories.
So his change of mind (not necessarily heart) with respect to removal of his
own citizens from land that is not theirs has not been the sign of a sagacious
political leader but instead a sign of a massively and dangerously flawed out
of control ego trying to pick up the pieces of self generated debacle over other
people's dead bodies: friends as well as foes.
In trying to preserve as many of the old paradigmatic facts on the ground in
the territories as possible and which he played a major role in establishing,
Sharon has acted more like a petulant pied piper than a dependable political
leader with the sense to understand that the promised land he promised clearly
belonged to a much earlier age. The effect has been classic lose-lose for both
Palestinians and Israelis, even though the Israeli establishment would have
us think otherwise. Thus the Palestinians and the Israelis trying to work on
their behalf have had to endure the deceitful "piece process" masquerading
as the "peace process:" the U. S. backed Israeli establishment shell
game being conducted in order to preserve as much of the failed dream of absolute
domination of the territories as possible. The modus operandi has been to continue
to populate the West Bank and East Jerusalem at a far faster rate than the rate
of removal of any squatters already undertaken or contemplated. (See From the
Inside Looking Our report 60, Relaxing the Grip But Not The Hold, October 3,
2005, and report 61, The Stealth Hawks, January 3, 2006).
To conclude: Sharon's leadership tenure has been marked by a frantic and bloody
effort to salvage, along with his reputation, the remnants of a failed mini-imperial
adventure whose original aim was to force the inclusion of the West Bank and
Gaza into the State of Israel. Sharon arguably the most consequential member
of the contemporary Israeli plutocracy was able to not only sell but propel
the political dream of territorial infestation to not only the Israeli people
but to many American romantics who had been proudly raised on the story of the
often scripturally rationalized European conquest of North and South America.
If it was good enough for America it surely would be good enough for Palestine.
How tragic it has been that Sharon was able to charismatically personify for
this zealous core a rationale for investing their lives in a colonizing land
expropriation scheme that ran against the grain of the present age.
If only the early Zionists had simply sought to live among the people already
in Palestine instead of rule them, they might have found common cause with the
more than 500,000 Muslims and Christian Arabs and 25,000 Jewish Arab already
living there: a joint struggle to end the Ottoman occupation and forge a truly
democratic society. At the time the indigenous inhabitants of all three faiths
had been suffering for centuries under a corrupt Ottoman yoke and had been dreaming
just like the original Zionists of forming a society that could determine its
own future.
But, of course, that is not what happened. Instead it has been terrifically
bad luck for the world - not just Israel and Palestine - that Sharon and his
neo-manifest destiny partners hitched their ethnocentric star to a Zionist paradigm
that was based on the fading model of European imperialism. The most militant
strain of Zionism that persisted and which Sharon and so many of his contemporaries
embraced was based on the four hundred plus year European model of brutal and
paternalistic third world take-overs by the first world but which by the end
of World War I began falling from favor and by the end of World War II was out
of date. Nevertheless the Sharon legacy will be that his fellow travelers on
both the left and the right will continue to try to make as much of their dream
of a Greater Israel as possible come true even though the effort can best be
described as 1) trying to force a square geopolitical peg into a round geopolitical
hole or 2) trying to move upstream against a tide of history that is flowing
the other way…using a gun instead of a paddle.