Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, is for all practical purposes dead. They might keep his body alive, but if the bleeding was as massive as it’s been reported, then chances of his regaining his mental powers are nil.
Sharon was a great, though controversial, military tactician. I always thought of him as Israel’s George Patton. He was the father of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He provoked the second intifada. He re-invaded the West Bank and Gaza at a great cost in Palestinian lives. He started the infamous wall in the West Bank area. He was blamed in part by an Israeli commission for the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in the 1980s. He himself, in his early career, led a commando raid that massacred a whole village of innocent people in Jordan.
Sharon was a lot of things, but he was not a man of peace. He never trusted peace. He never trusted the Palestinians. He never negotiated with the Palestinians, and he never intended to. He and his closest friends must have gotten a great laugh when President George Bush uttered that canard about him being a man of peace. The old man treated Bush and Condoleezza Rice like children, ignoring them when it suited him and easily manipulating them whenever he wanted.
He treated the so-called road map to peace like the joke that it is. As I pointed out, not once in five years did he negotiate with the Palestinians. One of his cronies admitted in an interview with an Israeli newspaper that the purpose of pulling out of Gaza was to put off negotiating with the Palestinians. He said they would negotiate with the Palestinians when the Palestinians turned into Finns. If the Palestinians observed a cease-fire, Sharon would provoke them with attacks and assassinations and then claim he had no partners for peace.
In the meantime, he intended to use the wall to provide for a secure Israel and leave the Palestinians in impossible little “homelands” that would make a viable Palestinian state impossible. Sharon’s intention was to do this unilaterally and tell the Palestinians to take it or leave it.
Sharon didn’t mellow with age, but he did come to realize the danger represented by the armies of General Birthrate. The Arab birthrate is higher than the Jewish birthrate. If Israel tries to keep all of the Arabs under its control, in not many years there will be more Arabs than Jews in the land. The Zionist goal of a Jewish state, defined as a state with a majority of Jews and a Jewish-controlled government, could then vanish without a shot being fired.
The worry about the peace process in the absence of Sharon is ridiculous. There is no peace process. That’s just something American politicians talk about to hide the fact that they support the Israelis in taking even more of what’s left of Palestinian land.
Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and the Sinai in 1967. They gave back the Sinai to Egypt after the Carter administration bribed the Egyptians to sign a peace treaty (it costs us roughly $2 billion a year). Thirty-nine years later, however, the so-called peace process has yet to end the Israeli occupation, which has been condemned by the international community from the day it started.
Even though the Israelis have pulled out of Gaza, they still control the borders, the air and the sea, as well as using Gaza for an artillery and bombing range whenever it suits them. That’s not sovereignty. All of those Jewish colonists in the West Bank and in Jerusalem suburbs are living in houses built on Palestinian land, which was seized without compensation. Israel has no intention of returning it, and the politicians in Washington know it. They maintain the smoke screen of a peace process to hide their willing complicity in the crimes and injustices committed against the Palestinians.
That’s the core of our problem in the Muslim world. Every Muslim on Earth knows we are hypocrites of the first order. We say to Iraq, you must obey United Nations resolutions or we’ll go to war to enforce them. We say to Israel, you can ignore United Nations resolutions because we will make sure none of them is enforced. You Muslims must not have nuclear weapons, but it’s OK for the Israelis to have them. It’s the biggest and most obvious double standard on Earth.
The missing ingredients in America’s current foreign policy are justice, honesty and simple fairness. No, Sharon was not a man of peace, but he was a fierce defender of the country he loved. That’s more than one can say of the chicken-hawk politicians in Washington who have an America Second attitude.
