Sharon Takes Umbrage at Criticism From Israelis

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has President Bush on Israel’s side as he prepares to fly to Washington next week to coordinate policies on Iran and the Palestinian Authority.

Sharon also has Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat right where he wants him, politically weakened and under military siege at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah.

The 73-year-old former general should be feeling his might. But in the first interviews he has granted in months, Sharon gives the impression that he is the one besieged. With a new poll showing his approval rating sagging at the end of his first year in office, Sharon is impatient with Israelis on the left and right who criticize his handling of the 16-month Palestinian uprising.

“The Bulldozer,” as he has long been called, is thin-skinned, apparently, about attacks from fellow Israelis.

“Jews as individuals are great individuals--talented, ambitious, intelligent, smart,” he told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper in an interview published Friday. “As a people, I would not give them as high a grade. Jews know how to hate.

“One might have thought that we had gotten over it. The signs, from Tel Aviv to [my] farm, ‘Sharon is a murderer,’ ‘[Menachem] Begin is a war criminal,’ had almost completely disappeared,” he said. “But now there are new signs . . . signs pointing to the home of ‘the murderer.’ The hatred seethes.”

Speaking to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, journalists who have known and covered Sharon for decades, the prime minister expressed a yearning to be back on his farm in the Negev desert.

“I need landscapes,” he said. “Fields. I need birds. Animals. Because of the security madness, I live behind closed curtains. It’s oppressive to me.”

Sharon’s nemesis, Arafat, may also be chafing at a lack of space. The Palestinian leader has been confined to Ramallah for nearly two months, most of the time shut in his headquarters surrounded by Israeli tanks. To hear Sharon talk, Arafat won’t be leaving soon.

“The greater Arafat’s sense of isolation grows, the more he will employ the measures required of him,” Sharon said.

Sharon has demanded that Arafat arrest those who organized and carried out the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in October, and those who arranged a 50-ton arms shipment that Israel says was headed for the Palestinian Authority when it was intercepted last month.

If he does not, “then he’ll sit there,” Sharon said. “I don’t think that we have exhausted all the pressure. I see the United States is increasing its pressure on him. It is postponing [U.S. envoy Anthony C.] Zinni’s returning, even though Arafat longs to see him.

“We pledged not to harm Arafat physically. Nor did I set as a goal expelling him from here. But I plan to tell President Bush next week, ‘I suggest you ignore Arafat, boycott him, don’t hold any contacts with him and don’t send any delegations to him.’ ”

In an interview with the Maariv newspaper, also published Friday, the prime minister was asked why he didn’t kill Arafat in 1982 when, as defense minister, Sharon led the invasion of Lebanon and had the Palestinian leader under siege in Beirut.

“We made a promise, and promises must be kept,” Sharon said, referring to Israel’s pledge to the United States at the time not to harm Arafat.

Asked if he regretted that, Sharon said: “There is no question that he has caused us many losses and very heavy damage. Absolutely, but we made a promise not to.”

The Palestinian Authority has called Sharon’s comments “very dangerous.” It cites Israel’s killing last month of Raed Karmi, a military leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement, and other targeted attacks as proof of the government’s willingness to assassinate Palestinian leaders.

But Sharon insisted to Maariv that he has “no plan to touch Arafat personally. This would cause Israel damage. We have no intention today of harming Arafat.”

Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin lashed out at the media for publishing only excerpts of the interview dealing with Sharon’s regrets and suggesting that they meant the prime minister was threatening to kill Arafat.

“If he wanted to kill Arafat, he could have done it. He doesn’t,” Gissin said in a telephone interview. “Besides, Arafat will bring about his own demise. It’s a different world after Sept. 11.”

Sharon calls Arafat “irrelevant” and refuses to meet with him, although he has allowed Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to continue a dialogue with Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Korei. Israel Television reported Friday that Sharon met this week with Korei; Arafat’s chief deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen; and Arafat’s financial advisor, Mohammed Rashid.

Although critics on the right say Sharon should cut off all contact between his government and the Palestinian Authority and topple Arafat--as former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in Maariv on Friday--left-of-center politicians charge that Sharon has no plan for ending the uprising and reaching a long-term peace settlement with the Palestinians.

In a poll published in Maariv on Friday, 48% of respondents said they were satisfied with Sharon’s performance in general, compared with 57% in December.

Asked if they were satisfied with his performance on security matters, just 37% said yes--down from 54% in the previous poll. Moreover, fewer than a third of those polled said they believe that Sharon has a plan, compared with 58% who said he is “just reacting” to Palestinian shootings and suicide bombings in Israel.

Sharon insisted that he does have a vision.

“I want to reach a diplomatic arrangement which will be followed by peace. But to reach an arrangement, terrorism has to stop first,” Sharon told Yediot Aharonot. “We need a lot of restraint. Patience. If we believe, we will reach both security and peace.”

Sharon said he is willing to make “painful” territorial compromises for a peace treaty with the Palestinians that establishes a demilitarized Palestinian state.

The Palestinians say Sharon’s vision falls far short of their demand for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War, with traditionally Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.