Hawkish Sharon’s Campaign for Premier Takes a Peace Platform

With a success his opponents find infuriating, former Gen. Ariel Sharon, a hawk whom the world has long associated with Israel’s wars, is selling himself to voters as a pragmatic statesman who will succeed where Prime Minister Ehud Barak has failed: as a peacemaker.

Sharon has managed to shed the image of a loose cannon that has dogged him since he planned and executed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He now portrays himself, at 72, as a kindly, white-haired grandfather, a reassuring figure who, as his soothing campaign jingle says, is the only one who can bring peace.

An exasperated Barak has said he can’t believe that Israeli voters will be fooled by “this wolf lying in bed in a grandmother’s clothes,” but he seems unable to shake Sharon’s popularity.

With less than a month to go before the Feb. 6 election, polls show Sharon holding a strong lead over Barak. A poll published Friday in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper said 50% of the 510 voters surveyed plan to vote for Sharon, against 32% for Barak. A Gallup Poll put Sharon’s support at 44%, compared with 22% for Barak.

It was good news for Sharon in a week that saw him kick off his campaign with a mass rally in Jerusalem and then take his message of “peace with security” on the road to Israel’s northern border towns. In fact, things are going so well that he and his staff fret that their biggest problem might be overconfidence on the part of their supporters or apathy among voters in general.

“Let no one think that we have already won,” Sharon cautioned activists with his right-wing Likud Party in this northern seacoast town Thursday. At all his campaign stops that day, crowds were friendly but unenthusiastic. A small core of campaign workers, using his nickname, chanted, “Arik, King of Israel!” at each stop but never got the audiences to join in.

Frightened and confused by the collapse of peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians and the explosion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israelis aren’t excited about the upcoming election. Voters express anger with Barak, but few who turn out at Sharon’s campaign appearances seem to believe that the situation will dramatically improve under his leadership.

“We have no choice. We have to replace Barak because he wants to sell the whole country,” Beni Zaken, 35, said as he watched Sharon tour Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. If he votes, Zaken said, he will vote for Sharon. But “this campaign is just a waste of money,” he said. “The country is already destroyed. Nothing will change that.”

In 1983, Sharon was forced to step down as defense minister after a special commission found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies in Lebanon. If the polls are right, he now seems poised to take the reins of power at a time when many Israelis believe they are headed for war.

Taking on All Comers

So dismal is Barak’s standing in voter surveys that Labor Party leaders are speaking openly about the need to persuade Barak to step aside and allow former Prime Minister Shimon Peres to run in his place if the gap does not close in another week. Polls show Peres--a noncandidate--running even with Sharon.

Sharon says he doesn’t care whether he runs against Barak or Peres. He can beat either one, he says.

“I will bring peace with security,” he promised elderly Russians in Carmiel, an eastern Galilee town that is home to thousands of immigrants who have moved there in the past 10 years. Russian immigrants voted heavily for Barak in the May 1999 election, and polls show that they are now strong supporters of Sharon.

“I know that the Labor Party says that I am going to bring war,” Sharon said, his face beaded with perspiration that he mopped frequently with a white handkerchief as he spoke. “There is no truth to it. I participated in all of Israel’s wars. I lost the best of my friends in battle.”

He was injured twice in battle, Sharon said, “and I had to make life-and-death decisions about myself and others. Therefore, be sure that I understand the importance of peace much better than many politicians who speak of peace but have never seen the things that I have.”

Barak, his opponent, is a former army chief of staff and commando leader--and Israel’s most decorated war hero.

Sharon has steadfastly refused to lay out his plans for quelling Palestinian violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or for making peace with the Palestinians.

“I do not intend to repeat the mistakes made by Mr. Barak, when he came to negotiations and put everything on the table,” Sharon told his audiences in the north. “Will there be a confrontation following my election? No. And why not? Because the Arabs know that I say what I mean and mean what I say, and that I have red lines.”

In interviews, Sharon has said that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has “violated every part” of the Oslo peace accords that Israel signed with the Palestinians in 1993, and that those accords are dead.

He also has said that even if Barak manages to initial an agreement with the Palestinians before the election, he will not honor it. The government, he has said, “will find a new basis for the peace process.” He has spoken of negotiating limited disengagement agreements with the Palestinians that would not be tied to the timetables that the Oslo accords incorporated for Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank.

Sharon’s Image Intact

Sharon has said that he will not cede the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians, as Barak is willing to do, and that he will not divide Jerusalem or cede sovereignty over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was Sharon’s heavily guarded visit to that site, a compound in the Old City that is holy to both Jews and Muslims, that Palestinians say triggered the riots and violence that have so far claimed more than 350 lives, most of them Palestinian.

But neither that incident nor his role as the driving force behind the construction of controversial Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has tarnished Sharon’s image with voters.

“With either Barak or Sharon, there is going to be war,” Tikva Azulai, 50, said as she watched Sharon shaking hands in the Mahane Yehuda. “At least with Sharon we’ll have our pride back. Barak is leaving him a terrible situation, but Sharon will restore our pride. He’s not going to talk to the Arabs when they’re shooting.”

Her friend Tamar Dori, 51, said, “The main thing is to punish Barak.” She voted for Barak, Dori said, “but he’s a liar. We withdrew from Lebanon under Barak, but he brought the war to us.”

Naftali Raz, a veteran antiwar activist, said he will spend every day until the election trying to remind Israelis of Sharon’s past. A Barak supporter, the 53-year-old teacher drove three hours to heckle Sharon at his Nahariya campaign appearance. With four friends, Raz held up cutouts of the Cedars of Lebanon that are the national symbol of Lebanon as Sharon and his entourage arrived at City Hall for a meeting with the City Council.

“We want to remind him and remind the people of his Lebanese history,” said Raz, who added that he had fought in three Israeli wars as a paratrooper. “To call Sharon the candidate for peace is such a huge lie.

“The oldest of my five kids is a sergeant in the paratroopers now, as I was. If my kids have to fight in three wars as I did, I don’t know if Zionism was worth it.”

Several angry Sharon supporters crowded around Raz, raising their voices as they confronted him.

“So what do you want? To sell the whole country? What kind of peace do you want? A peace that divides Jerusalem?” shouted one woman. “Thanks to Arik Sharon, all the Arabs are shivering. They’re terrified.”

“I am too,” Raz shot back. Sharon ignored the group as he was whisked into the building by his security entourage.

But Raz is not the only one determined to bring up Sharon’s past. The left-wing Meretz Party, headed by Yossi Sarid, has said it will devote its efforts in the campaign to highlighting Sharon’s role in Lebanon, a role that many young voters and immigrants are only dimly aware of. And on Friday, several newspapers ran long articles detailing Sharon’s controversial past as a military and political leader.

“But all this may not matter to voters,” Larry Derfner wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “because most of them appear to favor Sharon not because they believe he’ll bring peace, but simply because he’s not Ehud Barak.”