Moves Toward Peace Shine an Enigmatic Light on Sharon

He has alarmed the settlers whose homesteads he forged and financed, annoyed the right-wing party that pushed him to power and baffled erstwhile foes by calling for the end of Israeli “occupation” and pushing for a Palestinian state.

Perhaps most of all, however, he has bred a deep uncertainty over his intentions: Is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intent on bringing peace to his troubled homeland -- or is he playing a savvy political game to buy time?

Long before he wore neckties and barreled through corridors of power, Sharon was a soldier and a farmer. But now, under pressure from the United States, the aging leader is hinting that he might exchange both military control and land for a historic peace with the Palestinians.

The trouble is, nobody can figure out whether the famously enigmatic Sharon is sincere in his push for peace. And the prime minister isn’t clearing things up.

“The Sharon riddle wasn’t solved this week,” the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported dryly Thursday.

From the earliest whispers of the most recent round of peace talks, Sharon has undergone a series of whiplash reinventions. Consider the events of a recent week: He made history by cajoling the Cabinet to endorse a peace plan that calls for a Palestinian state. He set off what former Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called an “ideological earthquake” by telling his Likud Party that it was time to end the “occupation.”

But the Sharon who swore he’d beat the Palestinians with might and never negotiate under fire was still around. In the course of the same week, the Israeli leader vowed to keep a grip on East Jerusalem and publicly reassured an irate Jewish settler that his family could grow and flourish for generations to come on occupied Palestinian land.

His friends say even Sharon is wondering what Sharon will do.

“He has a debate with himself,” said Eli Landau, the former mayor of Herziliya who was an army buddy and aide to Sharon and remains a confidant. “But he has to decide. Because everything is on his shoulders, and he knows it.”

Even in this small country, a land where politicians appear to have nine lives, the rebirth of Sharon as Israel’s peacemaker is a peculiar phenomenon.

The son of hard-bitten Russian immigrants who pioneered land in what was then Palestine, the 75-year-old Sharon has been fighting for Jewish nationalism longer than Israel has existed. He was still a teen when he took up a gun and joined the paramilitary Haganah to fight British occupation.

Ever since, throughout his controversial military and political career, Sharon has pounded away at two projects: fighting Arabs and building a network of Jewish townships throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For years, he dismissed Palestinian nationalism with an edged quip: Palestinians already have a state, he’d say -- it’s called Jordan.

Some analysts are convinced that Sharon has undergone a sort of ideological change of life. The prime minister wouldn’t be the only Israeli to conclude that demographics, economics and public opinion are stacked against the occupation.

In the tradition of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- like Sharon a former soldier -- many Israelis have concluded that the Jewish state’s best hope for survival is to make peace, pull out of Palestinian territory and draw a hard border between Israel and a Palestinian state.

“I really believe this is his strategy,” said Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar, head of a peace research center at Tel Aviv University. “I think he came to terms with the idea that in order to achieve peace and security, Israel has no choice but [to] facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

And there are those who believe Sharon just might make peace -- but only because the United States wants him to. President Bush will meet Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday in Jordan in an effort to move the process forward.

For better or worse, Sharon has cast his lot with the Americans.

When Bush surveyed the wreckage of the World Trade Center and declared a global “war on terror,” the Israeli prime minister was quick to link that campaign with Israel’s fight to put down the Palestinian intifada.

Bush was sympathetic, and the two leaders developed a sort of meeting of the minds. Last summer, at the bloody height of the intifada, Bush gave a landmark speech that called for new Palestinian leadership and offered international support for an end to militant attacks on Israel and tangible Palestinian governmental reform.

The United States helped write the so-called road map to peace, which set out phased steps to Israeli security and a Palestinian state.

And when Bush, fresh from shattering Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, turned his attention to the Middle East and took up the push for the languishing road map, Sharon had little choice but to go along. “I don’t believe it’s a matter of Sharon converting, and it certainly doesn’t mean Sharon is playing tricks,” Palestinian pollster and analyst Khalil Shikaki said. “It’s more than that -- he is seeking survival. He doesn’t want to confront the U.S. president.”

Many skeptics on both sides believe that’s all Sharon will do -- take slow, reluctant actions to appease the United States and wait for Palestinian militants to give him a reason to abandon the peace plan.

“If this is a trick,” said Menachem Klein, a political analyst at Bar-Ilan University, “it will end quickly with the help of radicals.”

Observers on all sides agree that the true test will come if Sharon is obliged to destroy the settlements he labored for years to create. The road map orders the abandonment of about 60 outposts of the settlements and a construction freeze in the rest.

“I am very skeptical whether the father of settlements will make them orphans,” said Yossi Sarid, a veteran lawmaker from the far-left Meretz Party.

But nobody can be sure. After all, Sharon orchestrated the forced evacuation of settlers once before, when he drove Jewish families from their homesteads in the Sinai desert in 1982. In that case, too, he was trading land for peace -- that time, with Egypt.

That evacuation was somewhat easier. The sandy washes of the Sinai don’t hold the same spiritual grip on Israelis as the biblical ruins and sacred tombs of the West Bank. Then again, Sharon’s settlement philosophy always differed from the ultraconservative parties that joined his new government after this winter’s elections.

The far-right members of Sharon’s coalition believe Jewish settlers must “redeem the land” of the West Bank and Gaza. God gave the sun-washed terrain of olive groves and ancient limestone ruins to the Jewish people, they argue, and it would be a sin to relinquish the land to the Palestinians who now call it home.

Sharon, although something of a Bible student, sired the settlements mostly out of strategic impulse. He believed -- and might still believe -- that Israel should be insulated from Arab states by a buffer zone.

Sharon’s views on security intersected neatly with the spiritual desires of Israel’s religious parties. And when the leftist Labor Party shunned Sharon this winter, he joined ranks with the far right instead.

Already, the marriage is uncomfortable. Settlers have condemned Sharon’s road map endorsement as an act of treason. “If he does not resign willingly, his party must distance itself from him and fire him,” settlers’ advocate Yisrael Harel wrote in a Haaretz opinion piece.

“You have to understand, the right wing is worried about him,” said Shmuel Sandler, a political analyst at Bar-Ilan University. “He’s a big builder -- and a big destroyer.”

Analysts agree that Sharon’s first concern has always been national strategy and security, not religious ideology. “He doesn’t stop on the red light; he has no moral or ideological inhibitions,” said Israeli journalist Uzi Benzamin, who has been covering Sharon for years. “If he comes to the conclusion it’s time to make peace, or that he has no choice, he’ll be more ready than any other Israeli politician to abandon his views to yield to the circumstances.”

Some Israelis believe the hawkish Sharon has softened, that as he draws to the end of his career, he has become intent on going down in history as the father of Middle East peace.

Landau recalls motoring across the Sinai desert with Sharon three decades back. As the men toured the Egyptian countryside, Sharon was struck by the ancient hieroglyphics wrought in towering rock.

“He said, ‘Do you think that one day my name will be carved on stone like this, telling the story of my life?’ ” Landau said.

“He has the feeling,” the friend of Sharon added, “that he’s part of history.”