Soldier or Statesman, Sharon at Crossroads

Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister seven months ago, and ever since, Israelis have debated who he is.

Is he is the “Old Sharon”--the swashbuckling, inveterate hawk still fighting Israel’s War of Independence? Or the “New Sharon”--the conservative statesman tempered by a sense of national responsibility?

With the assassination this week of a Cabinet minister who shared both military glories and a close friendship with Sharon, Israelis now expect the prime minister to cast off the trappings of restraint and embark on an aggressive and, some warn, potentially disastrous campaign against the Palestinians.

Israel is making all the preparations to launch a major military offensive. On Friday, tanks and troops pushed deeper into Palestinian territory, tightened roadblocks and laid siege to numerous towns and cities, including Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, where troops took up position in hotels and fought pitched gun battles with Palestinians throughout the day.

The military pressure is meant to force Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to hand over the killers of Rehavam Zeevi, Israel’s tourism minister and a hard-line nationalist who was shot dead in an East Jerusalem hotel Wednesday.

These moves by Sharon, although significant, are still not enough for many Israelis angrily demanding revenge. Will he continue, like the old Sharon, or stop here, like the new one?

This renewed cycle of bloodshed and revenge, so familiar during the last year, undoubtedly comes as bad news to the Bush administration. Washington had urged Israel and the Palestinians to heed a truce as a way to push their conflict to the sidelines while the U.S. seeks the support of Arab states for its campaign in Afghanistan.

U.S. efforts were beginning to gain traction when Zeevi was assassinated. American officials, in phone calls and public statements, have instead had to urgently implore Sharon to hold back and Arafat to prove that he is serious about fighting terrorism.

In Israel, however, the debate within the government and military focuses less on how to make peace with Arafat’s regime and more on options that include ways to fight or eliminate it. Some on the right call for an all-out war on the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of Arafat, the latter being logistically and legally improbable.

Sharon has not yet publicly uttered a preference for such a denouement, but many of his closest supporters have. Israeli newspapers this week quoted him as saying that the “era of Arafat is over.”

Many factors still tie Sharon’s hands, chief among them the likely international rebuke if he crushed the Palestinian Authority or deported Arafat. Also, he would risk losing his dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and Peres’ left-of-center Labor Party, whose presence in the governing coalition has given Sharon certain diplomatic cover as he pursued controversial military policies, such as the targeted killings of Palestinian militants.

But voices of moderation are in short supply these days. In polls published Friday, about two-thirds of respondents said Israel should assassinate senior Palestinian Authority officials and declare Arafat an enemy. A similar percentage, however, also advocated an independent Palestinian state as part of a peace settlement.

Sharon was especially shocked and outraged by Zeevi’s killing, which is reported to have affected him on a deep, personal level.

“I have no doubt that Sharon, like [most] . . . of the Israeli public, considers Arafat an enemy,” Zalman Shoval, a senior advisor to the prime minister, said Friday. “He has lost a great deal of illusion because [restraint] did not work.”

Although all contacts with Palestinian officials are frozen now, Shoval said Sharon remains enough of a pragmatist not to embark on a war of no return--yet.

“We are saying, let us act the way we think we should, but we are not going to go all the way--as the right wants to--and destroy the Palestinian Authority and send [Arafat] back to Tunis,” Shoval said. “This is not on the agenda at the present time.”

People who know Sharon have always said he is torn between his firm belief that Palestinians, for the most part, understand only force, and his keen political sense that dictates the occasional nod to diplomacy. Ironically, after shunning political talks with Arafat for most of his time in office, Sharon had hinted on the eve of Zeevi’s assassination that he was ready to renew dialogue and sketched his perception of a future Palestinian state. Such notions are shelved for now, as far as Sharon is concerned.

“Sharon is reaching his mythological T-junction,” political commentator Hemi Shalev noted in Friday’s Maariv newspaper, “but when he looks right and left, it turns out that all of the roads are mined and might lead to hell of one kind or another.”

Sharon’s hard-line beliefs were honed in his decades as an army commander who fought in all of Israel’s wars and often employed harsh tactics against Palestinian civilians. An Israeli government inquiry held him responsible for failing to stop a massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese militia forces in a refugee camp under Israeli control in 1982.

Sharon was the architect of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which evolved into a calamitous 20-year occupation of part of that country, and opposition leader Yossi Sarid is warning that Sharon again appears headed for similar adventurism.

“This war must be stopped before the [Israeli army] gets sucked into Palestinian cities just like it got sucked into Lebanon,” said Sarid of the leftist Meretz Party. He said Sharon may be using Zeevi’s assassination as a pretext to retake Palestinian territory.

The government is also dispatching a team of diplomats and ministers to Washington next week to press the case for intensified military operations.

Israeli officials are trying to equate Israel’s fight against the Palestinians with the United States’ fight against Afghanistan’s extremist Islamic Taliban regime. In official statements since Zeevi’s assassination, the Israeli government deliberately chose language that replicated President Bush’s statements after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The analogy is meant to suggest that Israel will respond to Arafat the way the United States is responding to the Taliban. As Bush ordered the Taliban to turn over alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, Sharon ordered Arafat to turn over Zeevi’s killers.

Shoval said the language was intended to establish the “legal and formal framework” for regarding Arafat’s Palestinian Authority as a terrorist entity or an entity that harbors terrorists.

Israel’s largest newspaper reported Friday what it said was an army plan to lead to the “removal of the Palestinian Authority by military means” if Arafat does not comply with Israel’s ultimatum to extradite Zeevi’s killers. It said that after tightening sieges on practically every Palestinian town, the army will hit targets such as electrical power plants and telephone facilities and then expand its list of people to be hunted and killed.

Israeli officials appear to be hoping that the Bush administration will become so alarmed at Israeli plans that it will apply enormous pressure on Arafat to crack down on Palestinian militants. It is an untenable position for Arafat, however, who risks upheaval if he is seen to be doing Israel’s bidding.