Steven Plaut

Zephaniah Ch. 2; verses 4-7 (addressed to the nations in the Land of Israel):

4. For Gaza shall be forsaken [Hebrew pun: aza... azuvah], and Ashkelon a desolation; they shall drive out Ashdod at the noonday, and Ekron shall be rooted up [Hebrew pun: Ekron... tei'aker].

5. Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea-coast, the nation of the Cherethites [Hebrew Pun: Kreitim; part of the Philistine nation; from the word to cut off, tear away]! the word of the Lord is against you, O Canaan, the land of the Philistines; I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no inhabitant.

6. And the sea-coast shall be pastures, even meadows for shepherds, and folds for flocks.

7. And it shall be a portion for the remnant of the house of Judah, whereon they shall feed; in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in the evening; for the Lord their God will remember them, and turn their captivity.

There are three main schools of thought when it comes to Ariel Sharon.

One is that he is simply being bullied and extorted by the U.S. State Department and the Bush administration. According to this view, Sharon is unable or unwilling to stand up to Bush and Powell, who are twisting his arm mercilessly and coercing him to act like the-other-Shimon-Peres. This school of thought believes that Sharon knows better, understands perfectly well that driving the Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip will escalate violence and not bring tranquility, and that the whole set of "goodwill gestures" and "painful concessions" his government regularly rains down upon Palestinian Arab gunmen will only be seen as proofs of Israeli weakness and as catalysts for far worse Arab terrorism.

The second school of thought holds that Sharon is simply exhausted or senile. This school argues that Sharon truly has come to believe in the fantasies of the "New Middle East", the mindless pursuit of Xanadu initiated by Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, based on denial of all reality. Or, maybe worse still, if he does not, he is simply so old and worn-out that he no longer has the stomach to resist the forces of Israeli self-annihilation. In part, this school believes, his throwing up his hands in surrender is due to his being targeted in a national corruption investigation, directed at him and his family. He has himself largely to blame, both because of the sleaze of his campaign finances and his having left the Left's Dream Team to operate the Attorney General's offices. The slogan that best sums up this school of thought is the one running around the Likud these days, regarding Sharon's new Gaza "policy": Is this a Program for a Statesman or a Statesman under Interrogation? To appreciate the deliciousness of the slogan though, you have to say it in Hebrew, where "program" and "interrogation" have the same Hebrew roots and resemble one another.

There is a third school of thought that argues that Sharon is a wily strategist who knows exactly what he is doing, that he will take the heat off Israel on other issues and especially Judea and Samaria if he preemptively surrenders in Gaza, removing all Israeli settlements. Uri Dan, a veteran Israeli journalist and close confidant of Sharon, may be the leading exponent of this point of view (see, for example, the New York Post of February 3 and the Jerusalem Post of February 5). But the Wily Coyote School for explaining Sharon's behavior suffers from numerous problems, apart from the fact that Wily generally gets stomped and out-maneuvered by the Road Runner he chases.

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Every set of concessions by Israel has resulted in escalated demands for new concessions, as well as renewed accusations that Israel is obstinately blocking peace.

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The Wily Coyote axiom that Israel can take the pressure off itself by making concessions is belied by all of modern history. Every set of concessions by Israel has resulted in escalated demands for new concessions, as well as renewed accusations that Israel is obstinately blocking peace. Ehud Barak's suicidal offer to the PLO at Camp David II resulted not in congratulatory telegrams for Israel's demonstration of generosity but only triggered new demonizations of Israel, new assaults on Israeli legitimacy, and new outbreaks of anti-Semitism all over the planet.

Israeli demonstrations of generosity are nothing more than precedents for even more acts of open-ended generosity and appeasement. They never trigger quid pro quos from the Arabs and they never defuse the pressures on Israel. They simply fuel greater pressures and escalated demands. When the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir generously agreed to grant the Palestinian Arabs autonomy, within years it was taken as a foregone conclusion that Israel would be willing to grant them a state. And when Israel was signalling it might grant them a state, it was taken as obvious that this state should control East Jerusalem and the Old City and the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
In my opinion, there is a fourth explanation that is far more appropriate, namely that the Likud is now and always has been simply the Other Labor Party. The Likud has never been a true political party with its own vision and agenda. Until 1978, the Likud -- and its previous reincarnations Herut, the Liberal Party, and Gahal -- was nothing more than a debating society on the back benches of the Knesset, rhetorically challenging the leaders of Israel's One-Party Mapai-controlled state. Only after the debacle of the Yom Kippur War did the Likud find itself astonished and unprepared to wake up one morning as the governing party. An analysis of the party platforms of the Likud before its gaining power and after holding power is instructive. From the party of Zionist militancy and free markets while in the permafrost of opposition, the Likud morphed overnight into the Me-Too-Labor-Party. It spent the next few years implementing the same policies that had been advocated by the Labor Party. The "free market" rhetoric of the early Likud was manifested in dirigiste state control and planning, the suppression of competition and markets, and the wholesale printing of money, which characterized the Begin reign.

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Netanyahu converted Oslo from a failed program of clueless leftists into an unchallengeable national consensus.

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The Shamir governments were often in fact national unity governments, ruling together with the Labor Party. They were also characterized not only by even worse socialist kibitzing in the economy than under Labor, but also by growing manifestations of Likud cowardice and appeasement. The Shamir government released 1100 terrorist murderers in the infamous "Jibril Deal," setting the precedent for Sharon's capitulation recently to Hezbollah. When the violence of the first "Intifada" broke out, the government responded with cowardice and "restraint." Had 50 rioters been eliminated in its first days, many thousands of people would still be alive today and Israel would not be tottering on the brink of self-destruction. And when Shamir's Labor Party coalition partners began illegal "negotiations" with the PLO behind Shamir's back, he responded by turning his other cheek -- and ours as well.

Netanyahu was even more desperate to be the Other Shimon Peres. Elected by the Israeli voter for the sole purpose of ending Oslo, Netanyahu quickly morphed into the Wye's Man of Chelm, turning Hebron over to the barbarians, and converting Oslo from a failed program of clueless leftists into an unchallengeable national consensus.

Sharon took over as a result of Netanyahu shooting himself in his electoral foot by falling into the trap Ehud Barak laid for him. (Netanyahu vowed to run only if there were elections for both the Knesset and Prime Minister and, when Barak called for elections only for Prime Minister, was forced out of the running.) But by this time, Sharon was no longer the Sharon of 1973, the dashing, courageous hero of the Suez Canal. He was the overweight, aging Sharon, slow of mind, cowardly of ways. No sooner did he trounce the Labor Party's Amram Mitzna than he began mumbling about the "painful sacrifices" Israel would have to soon make to the PLO's mini-fuhrer.

With buses exploding, Sharon at first resisted the calls to build a security wall. Then under pressure to do something, even if only a symbolic act, he acquiesced. But the security wall cannot provide security. What exactly does Sharon think the PLO will be doing behind any security wall he builds? Taking up quilting? Sharon does not have the stomach to do what really needs to be done to stamp out PLO terrorism, and that is to re-establish the tightest military control over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, open-ended and with no timetable to remove it, together with expulsion or execution of the PLO "leadership," combined with a wide-ranging program of de-Nazification.

Of course such a program would anger the Americans, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that, unless Israel is prepared, when necessary, to defy the Americans, it will not survive. What ever happened to "Just Say No"? Israel should normally go out of its way to cooperate with and assist the United States, but there are certain existential matters where Israel simply has to say "No." Appeasing the PLO any further is one such area.

Sharon's new Gaza Plan is no better than the juvenile self-indulgences and Spanky-and-Alfalfa "Peace Plans" of Yossi Beilin. What does Sharon think the PLO will do in Gaza after Sharon expels all the Jewish settlers and delivers to Arafat a Judenrein Gaza Strip, this as the "first stage" in the Sharon Doctrine? Will the PLO engage in peaceful nation-building and economic development? Or will it rain rockets and mortars down on the nearby Jewish towns inside the pre-1967 "Green Line," sending out suicide bombers in boats and ladders, who dig under the "Wall," run around it, and shoot over it?

The PLO has been allowed to import unlimited tons of explosives from Egypt through the Rafiah tunnels Egypt operates, even when Israel's army was supposed to be on the ground and in control in Gaza! (And have you noticed that the same Powell, who wants to deduct from U.S. aid to Israel any money Israel expends on its security fence, has never suggested that Egypt be penalized for these tunnels and munitions?) So what will happen once the settlers are driven out? In the last Israeli elections, Labor's Amram Mitzna ran for prime minister on a platform of unilateral Israeli withdrawals from the "occupied territories" with no quid pro quo from the PLO in any form. Mitzna was beaten by Sharon in the largest election landslide in Israeli history. Or was he?

In fact, Amram Mitzna won that election. Ariel Sharon's proposals for unilateral withdrawal/surrender in the Gaza Strip show that Amram Mitzna may have lost the election but he was victorious in imposing his suicidal policies on Israel through Ariel Sharon.

Sharon's tenacity was further on display when he agreed to reward Hezbollah for murdering three Israeli POWs in cold blood, by releasing 450 murderers, all in order to "buy" back their corpses and to release one Israeli whom Hezbollah had been holding. Sharon's government has signaled every Israeli soldier that, should he be captured and murdered, the Beilinized government of Israel will not avenge him but rather will reward his murderers. Sharon has shown the world that the "Never Again" slogan thought to be the raison d'etre of Israel has been replaced by defeatist appeasement of Islamist terrorists and Arab fascists.

Bullied or cowardly? Victim or exhausted? I think the problem is that Sharon and the Likud leadership believe in nothing except staying in power as long as possible. Even those once thought to be people of courage and principle, like Ehud Olmert (ex-mayor of Jerusalem), have undergone Beilinization. Those very few in the party who still seem to believe in something are too small in number to mount a leadership challenge, other than Moshe Feiglin's heroic but quixotic attempts. And given the track record of the Likud, there is always the fear that even they could morph into born-again Peresites if they ever got the chance.

Most of Jewish history consisted of long periods of desperation and hopelessness. Today the Israeli government seems determined to help us identify emotionally with those millennia of Jewish history. 

Steven Plaut teaches economics at the University of Haifa.