Sharon Wants U.S. to Facilitate, Not Dictate

Trying to overcome what he called the “demonization” of his hard-line record, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon told a U.S. audience Wednesday that he wants President Bush to participate in the Middle East peace process--as long as he doesn’t pressure Israel to make concessions.

The hawkish Sharon, who enjoys an overwhelming lead in opinion polls over caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak in advance of Israel’s Feb. 6 special election, urged the Bush administration to act as go-between in Israel’s negotiations with its Arab adversaries. That was the traditional U.S. role before then-President Clinton produced his own peace formula and demanded that both sides accept it.

Talking from Tel Aviv via closed-circuit television to members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nongovernmental organization, Sharon said that if he becomes prime minister, he will make immediate contact with Bush and key figures in his administration.

“It is very, very important that the United States will continue, as a traditional friend of Israel, to provide those good services” to the negotiators, he said. “But there should not be any pressure on Israel.”

In the weeks before Clinton left office Saturday, Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat accepted--with substantial reservations--his proposal to give the Palestinians more than 95% of the West Bank along with some Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. But the two sides never came close to agreeing on details of a peace treaty.

Sharon rejected the Clinton framework and said it’s time to start anew.

“I listened carefully to Secretary of State [Colin L.] Powell when he said there should be a reassessment” in U.S. Middle East policy, Sharon said.

But a senior State Department official took issue with that characterization, saying, “Sharon is reading things into Powell’s comments for his own purposes.”

The official, who asked not to be identified by name, added: “We have a new president, and we may have a new prime minister in Israel. It is time to take a good look at how to go forward.”

At the same time, he said, “the wholesale rejection of everything that has been done, as Sharon is suggesting, is not going to happen.”

The official said Middle East peace will be a top priority of the new administration, as it was for most past administrations.

Polls indicate that a majority of Israelis have come to terms with Sharon’s sometimes bloody past, including his being held partly responsible for a 1982 massacre in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; his advocacy of widespread Jewish settlements across the West Bank; his assertion that Palestinians already have their own state, Jordan; and his controversial September visit to a disputed holy site in Jerusalem that touched off the current round of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

But members of the Council on Foreign Relations, who characterize themselves as representing the mainstream of U.S. internationalist opinion, were clearly troubled. They peppered Sharon with questions about the controversies in his past.

“I have been demonized for many years,” the 72-year-old former general said. “Everyone wants to speak about the past. I want to speak about the future.”

In the future, he said, Israelis and Palestinians could live together in peace, although only on terms that the Palestinian Authority has long rejected. Sharon ruled out a “separation” plan put forward by Barak, explaining that it would be both impossible and undesirable to try to cut the Palestinians off from Israel.

He said he has already established informal contacts both with the Palestinian Authority and neighboring Arab governments.

Sharon’s assertion that Washington should offer assistance to the peace process without pressuring Israel is the traditional policy of his right-wing Likud Party. But U.S. officials have often found it difficult to mediate without taking sides, even though they have seldom gone as far in outlining their own program as Clinton did.

The administration of Bush’s father became so exasperated with a previous Likud government that then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III once recited the White House telephone number and invited the Israelis to call if they decided to get serious about peace.

The new administration hasn’t outlined its policy beyond Powell’s assertion during his confirmation hearing that “we will do our part to keep the peace process moving forward.”

On Wednesday, Bush telephoned King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan. The White House said the conversations were “introductory in nature.” The State Department said Powell has talked by telephone twice this week with Barak and that he expects to talk to Arafat soon.