The True Colors of Ariel Sharon

Michael Oren writes in The New Republic about the true nature of Ariel Sharon. Seems to be right on the money. Ignore his conclusions about where the peace process should go, however.

Sharon's transformation from warrior to peacemaker, making the Gaza withdrawal his personal crusade, has shocked the Israeli left, but many right-wing Israelis long anticipated that change. Raised in a secular Labor environment, Sharon was never nurtured on religious or conservative ideology, and, for all his opposition to a return to Israel's pre-1967 borders, he repeatedly conceded territories captured in the Six Day War. And, when his policies no longer enjoy public support, Sharon, unlike true rightists, pays no mind to the will of the people--a tendency historically displayed by members of Israel's socialist left. Sharon, rightists insist, is actually a Mapainik.

Mapai is a Hebrew acronym for the Israel Workers Party, the dominant Zionist movement in pre-Israel Palestine and the ruling political party for the first decades after Israel's independence.

...Sharon formed his own party, Shlomtzion, in 1977, and personally drafted its platform. Not only would Israel forfeit territories in order to achieve peace, Sharon wrote, but it would also negotiate with any Palestinian organization--presumably including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)--willing to recognize the Jewish state. Sharon later said he formed his own party, rather than simply joining Labor, the successor to Mapai, because he was disgusted with the cronyism in Labor. Still, following his pragmatic Mapai instincts, Sharon initially tried to have Shlomtzion form a joint list with Labor. After Labor refused, Sharon approached the centrist Shinui. When they, too, refused, Sharon revised his platform along more right-wing principles, declared his admiration for Begin's commitment to Greater Israel, and approached Herut. Begin embraced Sharon and, together with other factions, they formed the Likud, which then dealt Labor its first national defeat.

...By talking right but acting pragmatically, Sharon was adhering to the classic Mapainik tradition. Yet, in addition to its distinctive stands on territorial and security issues, that heritage also had a peculiar relationship with democracy. In contrast to Revisionists and Likudniks, who traced their intellectual roots back to nineteenth-century Central European liberalism, Mapai's founders came from the revolutionary turmoil of turn-of-the-century Russia, with its preference for proletarian dictatorships. In Israel, the nonreligious right has always been the champion of individual freedoms and the rule of law, while leftist leaders were notorious for pushing through their personal agendas, irrespective of democratic norms. The young Ben-Gurion, who modeled himself on Lenin, rejected the liberal constitution proposed by Herut shortly after independence. He waged a war against Egypt in 1956 without so much as informing the Knesset.

In his disavowal of democratic institutions, Sharon is much less a Likudnik than a Mapainik. Several ministers insinuated that he executed Israel's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon almost unilaterally, without fully consulting the cabinet. Similarly, Sharon was accused of singlehandedly allocating vast sums for the construction of roads and settlements in the territories. And today, Sharon is once again revealing his Mapainik relationship with democracy. His decision to disengage from Gaza is based on the practical realization that the majority of Israelis are no longer willing to defend the settlements there and that Israel's occupation of the Strip only strengthens Palestinian demands for the creation of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Evacuating Gaza also enables Sharon to test the willingness and ability of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to crack down on terrorism before Israel proceeds to negotiate the future of the West Bank and Jerusalem--all policies unacceptable to true Likudniks like Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, who could be pragmatic under U.S. pressure but would never give up on the idea of a Greater Israel.