What Is Sharon Doing?

Saul Singer relates an interesting theory of why Sharon is taking the path that he is.

In style, the road map repeats all the mistakes of Oslo. In structure it makes one critical change: In Oslo, Palestinian statehood was to be the end result; in the road map, the state comes in the middle.

What difference does this make? In essence, it means a choice has been made between the gradualist and the "big bang" schools...

As David Ben-Gurion put it in 1919, "Everybody sees the problem in the relations between the Jews and the [Palestinian] Arabs. But not everybody sees that there's no solution to it. There is no solution! ... I don't know any Arabs who would agree to Palestine being ours even if we learn Arabic ... and I have no need to learn Arabic. On the other hand, I don't see why "Mustafa" should learn Hebrew. ... There's a national question here. We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want the country to be theirs."

Ariel Sharon is a disciple of Ben-Gurion and sees the conflict in roughly these terms. This does not mean that Sharon is being dishonest when he talks about peace. It means that the peace Sharon is talking about is not a full "solution" to the conflict, but a form of livable cold war.

The "big bang" school, by contrast, believes the Arab world has fundamentally decided to accept Israel, and therefore a peace agreement simply awaits granting the Palestinians the right terms. The Oslo agreement was built according to this paradigm. Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton were its ultimate practitioners, in that they believed the Palestinians could be induced to drop all further claims and make a full peace with Israel.
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Sharon's real objective is to get to the middle phase of the road map and park there until the Arab world is ready for peace, which may or may not ever happen. It is a reasonably comfortable place for a gradualist to be. Palestine may choose to be belligerent, but Israel will have a provisional border to defend and a state to hold accountable.

The risk of this plan is that statehood will be no more of a firewall against pressure to fulfill Palestinian demands than all the other agreements that the Palestinians sign and the world ignores. Eventually, the Palestinians will use terror again to force their next objective: a full Israeli unilateral withdrawal, without having to concede the demand of "return" to Israel.

The protections against this dangerous scenario are Israeli will and the trust of the United States. Sharon feels that he and Bush can be trusted to ensure that the dates in the road map do not mean that Israel will be forced to fill out Palestine's borders even if it turns out to be a terrorist state. Whether future Israeli and American leaders can be so trusted is another question.

As a good gradualist, Sharon is not troubled by the fact that a full peace is not obtainable in the near future. In 1938, Ben-Gurion said, "The conflict had lasted 30 years, and is liable to continue for perhaps hundreds more."