[Mb-civic] Peace -- on a warrior's terms - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Peace -- on a warrior's terms

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  January 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

I MET ARIEL SHARON 30 years ago when I was making the rounds as the new 
Jerusalem correspondent for the Washington Post. It was the twilight of 
the old Labor Party ascendancy, and Sharon was prominent in the 
opposition Likud that would very soon bring Menachem Begin and his right 
wing party to power for the first time to change the face of the Middle 
East. It was also, looking back, the high-water mark of Israel's 
territorial expansion that Sharon, back then, so ardently endorsed.

Everyone then remembered the famous photo of Sharon -- the general with 
the bandage around his head, leaning on a tank in the Sinai Desert, 
contemplating a bold crossing of the Suez Canal into Egypt that would 
reverse the early setbacks of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Sharon, adored by his men, was a brilliant, pugnacious, and resourceful 
field commander in the mold of George S. Patton, with a similar flair 
for self-promotion.

As Admiral Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye at the battle of 
Copenhagen, to avoid reading the more timid signals from his superiors, 
so Sharon would tell his radio operators to report communication 
difficulties when his commanders tried to reach him to urge caution. He 
was nearly fired for insubordination.

He had earned respect in the War of Independence and in the Six Day War 
in 1967, but the Yom Kippur War made him a national hero. Unlike Moshe 
Dayan, Sharon had no appreciation or sympathy for Arabs, and they would 
suffer under his lash. He believed passionately in a greater Israel to 
include all the territories captured in the Six Day War and famously 
backed Jewish settlements to make it politically impossible for any 
Israeli leader to give occupied lands back.

Yet when Egypt made its peace with Israel in exchange for the Sinai, it 
was Ariel Sharon who had to dismantle Jewish settlements there at the 
bidding of Prime Minister Begin. I doubt the Labor Party could have ever 
agreed to return all the Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty.

In 1982, as minister of defense, Sharon would persuade -- some would say 
con -- Begin into invading Lebanon and driving all the way to Beirut in 
an act of transformational warfare that was designed to install a 
friendly Lebanese government and destroy his arch enemy, Yasser Arafat. 
Just as Donald Rumsfeld promised that Americans would be welcomed with 
flowers in Iraq, so did Sharon underestimate the difficulties and soon 
enough Lebanon became Israel's Vietnam -- a long and painful experience 
that in the end did Israel no good and much harm.

Sharon's political nadir was the massacres in the Palestinian refugee 
camps of Sabra and Shatilla by allied Christian Lebanese militias, whom 
the Israelis had brought up to do the killing.

The Israelis remained just outside but turned the night into day with 
illumination rounds so their surrogates could see for the task at hand. 
An Israeli fact-finding commission found Sharon indirectly responsible 
for the atrocities.

It was Sharon's provocative walk on the Temple Mount that did much to 
provoke the second Palestinian Intifada, the uprising that would bring 
him to the height of political power.

He spent much of his time smashing any vestiges of Palestinian claims to 
statehood.

Yet something changed when Sharon became prime minister. He seemed to 
realize that he had a greater responsibility, and he managed, with 
considerable political skill, to engineer a unilateral Israeli 
withdrawal from Gaza, dismantling his beloved settlements --something no 
other Israeli leader has done. He could do it because of his record -- 
like Nixon and China -- and he probably will be Israel's last leader to 
have led men in battle during the birth of the nation.

We will never know whether Sharon was simply sacrificing Gaza in a 
strategic move to hold on to most of the West Bank, or whether, as head 
of a new party, he would have promoted really meaningful concessions for 
a Palestinian state. But the distance he traveled toward a two-state 
solution would not have been believed 30 years before.

No Israeli leader ever so dominated Israel's relationship with its most 
important ally, the United States. Time and time again, he would get 
away with simply ignoring George W. Bush's initiatives.

Bush called Sharon ''a man of peace" at a time when he was not. But if 
Bush was right about him in the end, you can be sure that the peace 
would have been on the old general's terms.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/10/peace____on_a_warriors_terms/
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