Israel Will Choose Sharon for Survival

Until recently, Ariel Sharon was widely dismissed here as a holdover from Israel’s frontier era, when ends and means were blurred and conflict was a way of life. Even admirers conceded that Sharon was unelectable in a new, pragmatic Israel that valued prosperity more than ideology and the future more than the past. But thanks to Ehud Barak, the most reckless prime minister in the country’s history, Israelis appear set to replace him with Sharon next Tuesday.

Barak has declared this election a referendum on his peace policy, and that is precisely why he will probably lose. Since the failed Camp David summit last July, the Israeli public has watched with dismay as Barak has offered previously unimaginable compromises, especially on Jerusalem, only to be met with accelerating Palestinian violence. Indeed, Barak has established a new model for Middle East negotiations: The more Israel concedes, the more violence it receives in return.

Barak’s fatal mistake was to offer maximal concessions from a position of perceived weakness. Having retreated under fire from Lebanon, he convinced the Palestinians that violence, rather than negotiated compromise, would force an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Barak confirmed the efficacy of violent blackmail when he rewarded four months of Palestinian attacks with additional concessions. The inevitable result of his appeasement policy is that the Arab world views Israel’s unprecedented overture as a loss of will. That perception will only guarantee further violence.

Sharon knows the Israeli public isn’t electing him to build new West Bank settlements or expand existing ones. Tellingly, his campaign has been silent about the West Bank. Instead, he is focusing on those issues that defined the Israeli consensus until Barak conceded them: preserving Israeli control over a united Jerusalem and over the Jordan Valley, the crucial strip of land along the West Bank-Jordanian border that is Israel’s buffer against an Arab invasion from the east.

The premise of the Oslo peace process was that shared rule in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis would emerge after seven years of accumulated mutual trust. Yet Barak has proposed inserting Yasser Arafat and his militias into Jerusalem as the Oslo process self-destructs and with it any pretense of reconciliation. The Israeli public knows that “sharing” Jerusalem with Arafat’s corrupt and expansionist authority will bring intensified violence, not peace to the holy city. Electing Sharon, then, is widely perceived here as a rescue operation for Jerusalem.

Sharon’s second mandate will be to restore some semblance of Israeli deterrence. Appallingly, Barak has continued to negotiate and concede even as Palestinian terrorism, generated largely by Arafat’s security apparatus, continues. Sharon’s election will serve notice to the Palestinian Authority that Israel won’t tolerate the emergence of a terrorist state minutes from its population centers.

Few Israelis really believe the campaign slogan that “only Sharon will bring peace.” Indeed, few believe that Barak or any other Israeli leader for that matter can make peace with Arafat, who refuses to concede the demand for return of several million embittered refugees into Israel, rather than to a Palestinian state--a demand that even Israeli doves dismiss as Jewish national suicide.

Much of the public, though, does see Sharon’s peace sloganeering as a commitment to try to avoid war, reassurance that the Likud leader understands that Israel of 2001 isn’t the Israel of 1982, when he invaded Beirut and bitterly divided Israeli society. Indeed, Sharon appears determined to create a unity government with the Labor Party, which would be crucial for containing the hard-line elements in his likely coalition.

Though Sharon will offer the Palestinians less than Barak has, he will also expect less in return. Sharon’s short-term goal is to replace Barak’s grandiose and elusive vision of a comprehensive peace with a more modest interim agreement. Rather than demand a Palestinian commitment to end the conflict and cede the right of return, as Barak has insisted on, Sharon will settle for temporary nonbelligerency in exchange for Israeli recognition of a limited Palestinian state. Having already been offered near-total Israeli withdrawal from the settlements, along with part of Jerusalem, the Palestinians would probably reject Sharon’s more modest proposal; yet his approach is the necessary antidote to the illusions encouraged by the Oslo process.

Sharon is admittedly a wild card, Israel’s political weapon of last resort. But a majority of Israelis believe that Barak has taken us back to precisely that frontier time when citizens couldn’t take their personal security for granted and Israel’s very existence seemed tenuous. Sharon’s election won’t be the cause of the collapse of the Oslo process but its inevitable result.