Unless pollsters are way off the mark, Sharon, who heads the rightist Likud Party, will become Israel’s next prime minister. Voting is just four weeks off and Sharon’s enervated opponent, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, has a fighting chance, it seems, only if he can get a good peace deal with the Palestinians. Prospects for an agreement looked slightly better last week, when Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat gave a hesitant nod to President Clinton’s last-ditch peace proposal. But Arab foreign ministers, meeting in Cairo, took a tough line on the plan–specifically on the rebuff it deals to Palestinian refugees and their demand to return to homes they fled as much as a half century ago. Some of the outstanding issues have been bridged. But the sides are so passionate about what hasn’t been solved that by the end of the week, Barak the would-be peacemaker was talking openly about the possibility of regional war. Even if his rhetoric had more to do with the election campaign than any real threat of escalation, Clinton’s mad dash to clinch an agreement is starting to look like a waste of time. The latest surveys show Barak losing to Sharon even if he does make a deal. And Sharon, in an interview with NEWSWEEK, said he had no intention of honoring any agreement if he takes office.
The position is hardly surprising. Barak has said for months that the election would be a referendum on his peace policies, explicitly on what most Israelis see as his deep concessions to the Palestinians. Barak has been negotiating as a lame-duck prime minister. His own attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, said last week that Barak’s moral mandate for forging a deal was shaky at best. And surveys now show that only about one in four Israelis trusts Barak. That’s shocking for a prime minister elected less than two years ago by an unprecedented margin. Analysts say it mainly reflects Israeli disappointment with the Palestinians and the desire to get even tougher on violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A Gallup poll published over the weekend showed Sharon getting 50 percent of the vote if elections were held today, compared with 22 percent for Barak.
Most Arabs view Sharon as the architect of everything bad in recent Israeli history–massacres, war and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. “I think if Sharon is made prime minister, we’re likely to see an upsurge in Palestinian violence and an increasingly tough Israeli crackdown,” says ex-U.S. ambassa-dor Samuel Lewis, who served in Israel in the 1970s and ’80s. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the conflict spreads to Jordan and Iraq.”
Sharon, hammering at his kitchen table with a single finger, is eager to dispel the premise that his election would spark war. But there’s no question that Sharon pushes limits. That’s how people who know him describe his dominant character trait. In the Army, stories abound of the hard-charging field commander who constantly pushed forward–sometimes without orders, sometimes despite them. “My father had trouble with Sharon,” says Yael Dayan, the daughter of the late general Moshe Dayan, who was Sharon’s superior. “But he used to say he’d rather restrain wild horses than motivate mules.” His admirers say Sharon’s drive showed him to be a true military leader. “He took decisions under fire, and he almost always made the right ones,” says Eli Landau, Sharon’s longtime aide.
When Sharon led Israel into war in 1982, however, it proved to be Israel’s most controversial and, some say, disastrous decision. The invasion of Lebanon, which some cabinet ministers thought would be limited in scope, ended up taking Israeli forces all the way to Beirut. Israel’s allies in the Christian militias massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, a bloodbath that cost Sharon his job as Defense minister. “Lebanon was not an isolated example of Sharon’s tendency to go beyond the set plan,” says Uzi Benziman, who has written an unsanctioned biography of Sharon. “It’s really the climax of a military career built on this kind of thing.” Sharon was also zealous about building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, an effort that has hampered peacemaking in the past 20 years more than anything else.
In his peace offer to Palestinians, Sharon holds out a carrot and a stick. But the carrot is less appetizing than proposals Palestinians have already thrown back in Barak’s face, and the stick is bigger and more threatening. Sharon doesn’t talk about a Palestinian state or even a peace agreement. Instead, he says, Israelis and Palestinians should strive for a “nonbelligerency accord” based on the current alignment in the West Bank and Gaza, economic cooperation and the long-term possibility of establishing a “Palestinian entity.” In plain English: Palestinians would get what they already have. Israel would evacuate no settlements, make no compromises on Jerusalem and offer few, if any, territorial concessions. Sharon talks instead about humanitarian gestures for Palestinians–including provisions for them to work in Israel and travel freely inside the West Bank and Gaza.
Sharon’s gestures would also come with a condition: an end to the violence that has rocked the West Bank and Gaza for more than three months. And he has some characteristic ideas on how to achieve that. He would thwart Palestinian gunmen by causing them to be “busy with their own self-defense.” One way, he says, would be to covertly send Israeli soldiers to ambush militants in Beit Jala, the Palestinian town where gunmen fire frequently on residents of Gilo, a district of Jerusalem that spills over entirely into the West Bank. In doing so, Sharon would be violating peace accords that bar Israeli soldiers from entering Palestinian-controlled areas. Israeli military sources say that’s a line Barak has refused to cross.
Sharon says he has been portrayed falsely as an Arab-hater and an extremist. While he still refuses to shake hands with Arafat, Sharon sent the Palestinian leader a greeting last week for the Muslim feast of Id al-Fitr. The letter was splashed across the pages of Israeli newspapers, but the surprisingly warm response went unreported. It came from Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud Abbas, who was Sharon’s interlocutor in peace talks briefly in 1998. After thanking Sharon for the greeting and voicing hope for a speedy return to peacemaking, Abbas wrote: “I am looking forward to the right opportunity when we can meet once again.”
It was only last September that Sharon drew wrath from the Arab world for his high-profile visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the site of shrines holy to Muslims and Jews. The Israeli-Palestinian fighting that erupted the next day continues unabated. “My visit to the Temple Mount served only as a poor excuse to launch this premeditated, orchestrated campaign,” Sharon argued in an election pamphlet. That’s a view that many Israelis who initially criticized Sharon for the visit have come to accept. The next few weeks will determine not only whether they have forgiven him, but whether they now trust him enough to make him their leader.
