Ariel Sharon: a political assessment

For the religious and ultra-nationalist forces towards whom Likud was increasingly orientated after its defeat in the 1992 election, the agreement with the PLO under the Oslo Accords of 1993 was a betrayal. It meant the surrender of part of “Eretz Israel,” the biblical land of Israel.

They believed that the Jews “had an eternal and inalienable right to biblical Palestine”—not only the East Bank of Jordan, but also the slopes of Lebanon and the approaches to the Nile. While Likud was not formally committed to establishing control over the “land of Israel,” it was committed to a Greater Israel that was, at the very least, significantly larger than the country’s pre-1967 territory.

Benyamin Netanyahu was the Israeli ally of the Republican neo-conservative faction in the US that rejected Clinton’s policy of reaching an agreement with the PLO. He became leader of Likud in 1993.

Opposed to any negotiations with the PLO and to the establishment of a Palestinian state, no matter how truncated, Netanyahu refused to accept the re-partition of the West Bank. He and his colleagues in Likud turned to the ultra-nationalist and religious forces to terrorise and provoke the Palestinians and sabotage the Oslo Accords.

They routinely likened Rabin, Shimon Peres and the Labour Party to British pre-war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and other appeasers of Hitler, and compared Oslo to the 1938 Munich agreement with the Nazis. They played a crucial role in inciting the far right and creating the political environment that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious zealot in November 1995.

The assassination revealed the political Frankenstein monster that the Israeli elite had created by its expansionist policies, especially in the aftermath of the 1967 war, and foreshadowed a rightward lurch away from any settlement with the Palestinians. While the Israeli ruling elite, for the most part, condemned the killing and the right-wing forces behind it, and attempts at a negotiated peace agreement continued before finally reaching an impasse in 2000, the assassination provoked a major political crisis.

In 1996, Likud was returned to power on a wave of revulsion and fear within Israel over a number of terrorist attacks that were laid at the door of the PLO. Netanyahu’s ascendancy froze negotiations with the Palestinians, but pressure from Washington forced him to take part in discussions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland organised by President Bill Clinton in 1998. That same year Netanyahu brought forward Sharon, now portrayed as an elder statesman, as his foreign minister. It was Sharon who was given the responsibility of handling the talks at Wye.

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To what extent will Sharon's absence from the scene affect the Middle East equation, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

Sharon's condition has been described as "critical but stable" in the wake of the massive stroke he suffered last week. It is only after he is brought out of his induced coma that doctors can begin to evaluate the damage to his brain, but they are already discounting the possibility of a full recovery. This somber prognosis is in stark contrast to the upbeat tone of the early medical reports, when doctors seemed to believe they were in control of the situation.

Throughout the medical crisis, the reports issued by the team of treating doctors at the Hadassah Hospital have been praised for their transparency and their alleged democratic character. But how true is that? While I do not usually subscribe to the conspiracy theory, there is no doubt that news of Sharon's health can profoundly affect the course of Israeli politics and that the medical reports may have been issued with an eye on Israel's upcoming national elections to be held on 28 March. Could the early optimistic medical reports have been designed to give a boost to Sharon's new party, Kadima, and finalise the contest to his benefit not only vis-à-vis his opponent Netanyahu, but even vis-à-vis his partner, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert? Has the game become trilateral instead of bilateral; that is, does it now involve Sharon? Netanyahu and Olmert and not only Olmert and Netanyahu, in the aim of lengthening the pre-electoral (and possibly also post- electoral) period? Are the Arab parties aware of this possibility?

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/778/op3.htm