On Sharon: As Israel Turns…

Israel goes to the polls today, half-remembering and half forgetful that the man who called these elections is still unconscious in the hospital. His photograph is long gone from the newspapers; the medical bulletins that slowly went from the front to the back pages, and from daily to weekly to monthly, have now vanished entirely.No one even knows any longer what he looks like. What has happened to that huge bulk of a body whose only meals come through intravenous tubes? One of the two times I met Ariel Sharon was at a breakfast in New York in which, after tucking a napkin into his collar like a 19th-century country squire, he proceeded to eat his way through what seemed to me to be the entire menu. If his stricken mind has flashes of dreams, these may be less about unilateral disengagement and future borders than about something as simple as food.And yet these are his elections, not only because he called them, but because he set the agenda on which they are being held. The Israel of March 2006 is not the Israel of February 2001, when Ariel Sharon defeated Ehud Barak and began serving the first of his two terms as prime minister. It is a different country, and for all its problems, a more peaceful, prosperous, confident, and hopeful one, and Mr. Sharon had everything to do with this.It is already difficult to recall how dire the situation in Israel was when Ariel Sharon assumed the prime-ministership. The second intifada was at its height; Palestinian terror attacks and suicide bombings were being carried out on an almost hourly basis; southern Jerusalem had been periodically raked by Palestinian gunfire; tourism to Israel had ceased; foreign investment was drying up; unemployment was in the double figures; the economy was in a nosedive; the country was in a state of severe demoralization.So, it seems, was I. In December 2000 I published an article in Commentary entitled “Intifada II: Israel’s Nightmare” that, re-read today, strikes me as embarrassingly glum and despairing. Israel, I wrote, was in a “new period of prolonged danger in which military victory is not even imaginable – or rather a situation in which the re-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, though easily accomplishable in the space of a few days or perhaps even a few hours, would be politically futile.”It was in this mood of glumness and despair that Ariel Sharon took office. And it was this mood that he completely turned around – first and foremost by insisting on doing the “unimaginable” and winning the war against terror that commentators like myself had said could not be won. He did this, among other things, by re-occupying, with mobile forces that moved in and out, much of the West Bank and Gaza and pounding away there at the organizational infrastructure of terror until it was near collapse. The war that Yasser Arafat launched in the autumn of the year 2000 may not yet be entirely over, but Israel’s victory is longer in doubt.Nor was this victory “politically futile.” On the contrary: It was accompanied by a largely successful effort to discredit Arafat and the PLO and to regain the diplomatic ground that Israel had steadily lost throughout the 1990s. Israel’s international standing is far stronger today than it was before its all-out attack on Palestinian terror began. Once again the old truth has been proven that weak and confused countries invite contempt, even if the concessions they are making are those the world has been calling for. Strong and resolute ones evoke admiration, even if they are criticized for their intransigence.With the subsiding of terror, the Israeli economy revived, too. The tourists returned; so did investment; business confidence rose; economic growth resumed; unemployment began to drop. Part of this recovery was the work of Ariel Sharon’s minister of finance Benjamin Netanyahu, who slashed government budgets, cut taxes, and made some important structural reforms in the economy. And yet Mr. Sharon did not have to give Mr. Netanyahu, who was his active political rival for the leadership of the Likud, the strong backing that he did. It would have been easy to undermine him just as Mr. Netanyahu sought to do undermine Mr. Sharon – and the latter’s refraining from doing so deserved more credit than it got.Above all, Israel is more hopeful now because Ariel Sharon, having won the War of Terror against the Palestinians, demonstrated by means of his disengagement from Gaza that there is a third way between Israel’s waiting forever for a peace treaty with the Palestinians that may never come, and its permanent military presence in all the occupied territories. A unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank to borders fixed by Israel on the basis of its own interests, which Ehud Olmert and Kadima made the main plank of their election platform, was clearly Ariel Sharon’s conception of the future. It is a conception that has once again given Israelis the feeling that they can determine their own fate and need not be the helpless playthings of events beyond their control.Ariel Sharon was not a highly articulate man. There is not a memorable recent speech of his on record, and though he had a reputation for being charming and funny in private, this was not a side of him the public got to see. He spent much of his life as a soldier, and much of his political life as a manipulator and intriguer who was trusted by few people. And yet in the end he will be remembered as one of the best prime ministers Israel ever had. Today’s elections are, in more than one way, dedicated to him.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

On Sharon: As Israel Turns…

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