The Return of Ariel Sharon

In this hilltop Jewish settlement with a sweeping view of Greater Tel Aviv, Ariel Sharon put his pointer to a map of Israel and the West Bank that existed in his mind long before it was set into the craggy landscape.

The right-wing former army general, now infrastructure minister, drew a line from north to south along a series of blue dots representing Jewish settlements on West Bank lands that Israel occupied in 1967, most of which were built according to a grand scheme that was largely his.

“We wanted to keep certain terrain in our hands,” Sharon said. “We built all of the settlements to give depth to the coastal plain and to keep control of the high ground. . . . As you can see, we aren’t speaking about something temporary here.”

At nearly 70, the hawkish Sharon has also proved to be anything but temporary. The Likud Party stalwart who made the controversial maps for populating the occupied West Bank with Jews so many years ago was relegated to history during the previous, Labor government. And many Israeli leftists as well as right-wing rivals happily declared his political career finished when the younger Benjamin Netanyahu took the reins of Likud.

But Sharon is back again, drawing maps for Prime Minister Netanyahu to use in peace talks with the Palestinians--negotiations that Sharon argues he could conduct better than anyone.

A legendary warrior long reviled by many for his aggressive military and settlement policies, Sharon has suddenly become the elder statesman of Israeli politics. The 1995 assassination of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and defeat of his heir apparent, Shimon Peres, in 1996 elections have left Sharon as one of the few remaining public officials who took part in the major events that shaped modern Israel.

Few Israelis inspire such a range of emotions as Sharon does, from deep admiration and fierce loyalty to outright fear and loathing. But like him or not, most Israelis call him “the bulldozer,” acknowledging his force.

In a country often bogged down in bureaucracy and political battles, he has proven that he gets things done.

That experience and shrewdness, rather than seniority, enabled Sharon to wrest a pivotal role in the government from a reluctant Netanyahu. As infrastructure minister, Sharon took over oil refineries, waterworks, railroads, highways and other areas that affect Israel’s relations with its neighbors.

He became Netanyahu’s chief trouble-shooter--an important post to a prime minister known for his blunders. Last week, Sharon’s rehabilitation was completed when Netanyahu made him a member of the inner committee that will determine Israel’s negotiating position in final peace talks with the Palestinians.

No Longer Exiled From High Places

As a result, Sharon has been admitted to quarters from which he was exiled for decades. In May, he met with Jordan’s King Hussein for the first time since Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War, when Sharon began arguing that Jordan was Palestine. His early view that West Bankers should make their homeland across the Jordan River was perceived as a threat to the king’s rule.

The Clinton administration, which bristled when Sharon was included in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, also received him at the White House last month for the first time since he led the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

For years, Washington has viewed Sharon and his expansion of settlements as an obstacle to peace, and U.S. officials are still wary of him.

In addition, Sharon has begun talking with members of the liberal Israeli media for whom he has long been the personification of evil.

One leftist filmmaker, Avi Mograbi, who went to jail rather than serve in the Lebanon war, even made a humorous film about the retired general, whose nickname is “Arik.” It is called “How I Learned to Overcome Fear and Love Arik Sharon.”

Sharon’s drive and sense of mission are as strong as they were nearly a quarter-century ago, when he led an armored unit across the Suez Canal in 1973 to turn the tide of the Yom Kippur War. But his hair is snow white now, and his age-spotted jowls have grown as loose as a basset hound’s. The old warrior, whose body looks to be nearly as wide as it is long, is less belligerent than he used to be.

His critics, in turn, sheepishly admit that they find him polite, charming, humorous and knowledgeable; the monster has mystique.

“When you are talking to Sharon, you are talking to the general,” said Shimon Shiffer, a columnist at the daily Yediot Aharonot.

Unable to explain the turnabout, Sharon shrugged and smiled.

“I don’t know--maybe they have changed, maybe I have changed,” he said in an interview last week.

But Sharon’s basic beliefs and the maps of disputed land that he insists Israel must hold on to have not changed much from ones he drafted two decades ago for then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Despite the fact that he is talking about a peace agreement, he still views the country as a potential battlefield in a future war.

“Well, maybe it took me 20 years to get my message across,” Sharon said.

To Palestinians, ‘Sharon Spells Disaster’

Sharon may be getting his point across to some liberal Israelis, but it is with Palestinians that the Israeli government must sign a peace accord.

And to them, in the words of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, “Sharon spells disaster.”

The Palestinians reject Sharon’s maps leaving huge swaths of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in Israel’s hands.

“He is from the school that says, between settlements and peace agreements, he’ll take settlements. He thinks Israel’s tanks and planes are security, and he belongs to the past. Unfortunately, he is making the future for us,” Erekat said.

Sharon, Netanyahu, Foreign Minister David Levy and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai are hammering out the extent of Israel’s second troop redeployment from the West Bank and its opening position for final peace negotiations.

Sharon is the one with the most complete maps, however, and he argues that the settlements strategically placed along Israel’s back side must never be handed over to the Palestinians.

Israel must hold on to a “security zone” inside the West Bank about five miles wide and running the length of the pre-1967 border, to keep the heights overlooking Israel’s major population centers and infrastructure, he said.

A second strip, about 12 miles wide, also must be retained along the Jordan Valley to prevent hostile ground forces from entering the country. And, he added, Israel must have key roads running east and west.

“These must be Israel’s red lines,” he insisted.

An American official familiar with the proposal, which Sharon also laid out to U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger during a White House meeting, said it is a nonstarter.

“It doesn’t give us enough to work with. As far as the Palestinians are concerned, it is dead on arrival,” the official said.

Sharon is unimpressed and unmoved.

“I believe we can reach an understanding with the United States on the concept that the security zone is the basic cornerstone,” he said. The Palestinians, he added, must be told that “this is what exists. It [a peace accord] will not be without security zones. Whether they are wider or narrower is a different story.”

But can’t the Palestinians rally international pressure against such a map?

“I don’t think so,” Sharon said.

This blunt, unrelenting posture is trademark Sharon.

A Checkered Career in Military

Born to pioneer parents in the farm town of Kfar Malal, in what was then British Palestine, Sharon was raised with a hard-nosed work ethic in a three-room house that had homemade furniture. He joined a Jewish paramilitary organization at 14 and was shot in the abdomen fighting in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

After the war, then-Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan recruited Sharon to head a new commando unit to fight Arab attacks against Israel. In one retaliatory raid against the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953, Sharon’s forces blew up homes and killed 69 civilians. He insisted that he thought the houses were empty, but the incident earned Israel its first condemnation by the U.N. Security Council, and it would not be the last time that Sharon would be implicated in a massacre.

Sharon’s paratroops landed in the strategic Mitla Pass in the Sinai campaign of 1956--a maneuver that cost Israel 38 dead and 120 wounded and prompted Dayan to say later that the only reason Sharon was not court-martialed was Israeli’s doctrine that soldiers were to be punished for doing too little and not too much.

His promotion to general was delayed for several years. Sharon finally made brigadier general in 1967 and earned a reputation as a master improviser during the Mideast War. His greatest military triumph was in 1973, when he led Israeli troops across the Suez Canal.

Sharon was appointed defense minister in 1981 and ordered the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon the following year. While he still claims this as a success for rousting the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut, many Israelis blame him for getting the country into a quagmire from which it has yet to extricate itself; Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon have since been locked in a war of attrition with Lebanese Shiite Muslim guerrillas.

Meanwhile, Sharon was dismissed as defense minister after a state commission of inquiry found he had failed to prevent Maronite Christians from massacring hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982. Israeli troops were in control of the area at the time.

Many political observers believe that a desire to remove, or at least to override, that stain on his reputation is what drives Sharon to continue working as hard as he does in national politics. Others say Sharon is motivated by his hunger to be prime minister, one of the few high government posts he has never held. Sharon says he acts because he can get the job done--whatever the job may be.

In 1996, the job was the defeat of the Labor government, which had signed the Oslo land-for-peace agreements with the Palestinians. Infuriated by the accords, Sharon went neighborhood to neighborhood and rabbi to rabbi to urge the ultra-Orthodox religious communities to turn out for Netanyahu, who was a relative upstart a generation Sharon’s junior.

Then he persuaded his friend David Levy, who had broken away from Likud, to support Netanyahu in a coalition government.

“You must vote for Netanyahu for prime minister. Every vote counts,” Sharon said at rallies across the country. And he was right--Netanyahu won by 29,000 votes.

After his victory, however, Netanyahu tried to keep Sharon out of the Cabinet. Though both were hawks, they were not friends. They were political rivals, and Netanyahu feared that the independent Sharon would be a loose cannon in his government, as Sharon often was in previous Likud governments.

Netanyahu denied Sharon the defense and finance portfolios he sought, but when Levy threatened to pull his new party out of the coalition and bring down the government, Netanyahu was forced to create the Ministry of Infrastructure for Sharon.

Gradually, however, Netanyahu came to realize how much he needed the old pol on his side to keep his right-religious coalition from coming apart at the seams over conflicting interests and to mend fences with other allies.

Winning Confidence of King Hussein

When Israel and Jordan got into a spat in May over Israel’s obligation to allocate water to the Hashemite kingdom under the terms of their 1994 peace treaty, Sharon was brought in to resolve the dispute. He ended up promising--and delivering--more water than Jordan had requested, winning the confidence of King Hussein.

That confidence came in handy when Israeli Mossad agents were captured in Jordan after a failed bid to assassinate a leader of the extremist Palestinian group Hamas in downtown Amman, the capital, in September.

A furious Hussein refused to meet with Netanyahu when the prime minister flew in to see him and would negotiate only with Sharon for the agents’ release in exchange for Israel freeing Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and dozens of other Palestinian prisoners.

The success of that deal has convinced Sharon that “the Arabs want to talk to me” and that he is the member of government best equipped to negotiate a final agreement with the Palestinians.

“On those agents, there was nothing in writing. It was all done by word, and it was respected,” Sharon said.

“More and more, people realize that, although it is hard to negotiate with me, maybe I am one of the few with whom they can reach an agreement. I make clear what Israel can and cannot do, and if there is a timetable, it will be implemented. Maybe that is what is needed to move the process forward. And I believe I can do it,” he said.

Not everyone feels the same way. American and Jordanian officials say they have not suddenly fallen in love with Sharon, but they recognize his role in the government.

“We cannot afford to ignore him,” said a U.S. official in Israel who asked not to be identified. “He works with key elements of the coalition to keep it together. . . . On strategic issues, he has a great deal more influence than Netanyahu does.”

“He is one of the pillars of the Israeli government, and we have to deal with the government,” added a senior Jordanian official.

“That doesn’t mean we agree or approve of his ideas. We are in total disagreement with his maps. Our position is that all of the territories occupied in 1967 is Palestinian land. He is considered a hawk on this. . . . We only hope his maximalist position is not a final position,” said the official, who also asked not to be identified.

Pragmatic Views Set Far Right on Edge

Some Israelis go even further. Yossi Sarid, leader of the leftist Meretz Party and a member of parliament, said Sharon remains “the father of all evil, politically speaking,” and is not presenting realistic proposals for a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.

“Sharon is responsible for all obstacles with the Palestinians we now have to overcome. He is still for building in the settlements. He voted against the Hebron agreement [to withdraw Israeli troops from most of the city]. Sometimes he likes to appear pragmatic . . . but I don’t advise anyone to trust Sharon. Sharon and trust is a contradiction,” Sarid said.

Sharon has, indeed, appeared to be a pragmatist in recent months. While stating that he still does not support the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, he says he recognizes the reality created by the Oslo agreements and the hand-over of territory to Palestinian control in the last three years.

Noting that the Palestinians have a flag, a fledgling government and internationally recognized passports, Sharon said, “I don’t think you can ignore what has been created. . . . Several years ago I wrote an article that said that autonomy means statehood and that it’s only a matter of time.”

He also has given up his earlier insistence that the Palestinian map should be a series of “cantons” instead of a solid landmass, saying he believes that the Palestinians will trade territorial continuity for less land.

This shift has set his natural constituency among the extreme right on edge.

Pinhas Wallerstein, one of the leaders of the Yesha--the Council of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--says the settlers must not follow Sharon and “Bibi” Netanyahu blindly.

“We must never forget that Sharon is the man who evacuated [the Sinai settlement of] Yamit for Menachem Begin. If Bibi wants to pull down settlements or narrow their growth in the future, he would need Arik Sharon with him. . . . This is how we see it, and we should be careful,” Wallerstein said.

When Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt after their 1979 peace treaty, Sharon evacuated the border settlement of Yamit and destroyed the town rather than hand Jewish buildings over to Arabs. While some view the withdrawal from Yamit as proof of Sharon’s inherent pragmatism, Israeli rightists view it as a kind of capitulation on his part.

Nonetheless, when it comes time to decide on a deal with the Palestinians, the right will be looking to Sharon. His experience and attention to detail on security issues give extra weight to his word, so much so that a yea or a nay from him could be the difference between passage or rejection of a peace offer in the Cabinet and Knesset, the parliament.

“He is the only one who has the power to give something back to the Palestinians,” said Shiffer, the Yediot columnist. “When he does, it will be easier for the settlers to swallow. It will be more reliable for most Israelis. They will say, ‘If Arik is ready, we can stand behind him.’ So he has a key role now to find a solution with the Palestinians.”