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Hirsh Goodman: Sharon the Unspontaneous
Hirsh Goodman

Some people wonder if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be able to outflank those in the Likud who oppose the idea of even a provisional Palestinian state and who want to bring him down. The answer is an unqualified "yes" and some advice to those who are trying: Sharon is not a desirable enemy. He is smart, cunning, ruthless, charming and totally unspontaneous. Every move, every word, every gesture is pre-planned, always with a clear goal in mind.

Take the past six months. As recently as December of last year, Sharon was prime minister at the head of a Likud faction with only 19 members in the 120-seat Knesset. The Likud did not control the Finance Committee, the House Committee, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The prime minister, essentially, had no clothes. He could do nothing and achieve nothing and his first year as head of a country at war, with its Treasury fast being depleted, made him understand that if he was ever to deliver his promise of peace and security rather than a legacy of a country in ruins he had to change the dynamic.

To do this, Sharon knew he had to work on three levels simultaneously: with the Palestinians, by isolating Yasser Arafat and allowing the emergence of a successor with whom he could deal; with the Bush Administration and domestically. But first he needed a mandate.

Along come talks on the 2003 budget. Sharon, bolstered by

polls giving the Likud 48 seats if elections were held then, maneuvers the head of the Labor party, Binyamin (Fuad) Ben-Eliezer into a position where he has to pull out of the government, by refusing to grant Fuad a single concession, even on funding for settlements. If Ben-Eliezer had remained in the government, he would have lost his party leadership position. He knew it and Sharon knew it and a new election was arranged.

During the election campaign, Sharon is caught with his hand in the till over the Cyril Kern affair, involving a loan to pay back $1.5 million in allegedly illegal campaign contributions to his race for the party leadership in 1999. The prime minister is up against a wall. The entire country is caught up in the scandal. Commentators are outraged that the prime minister remains silent, refusing to answer any questions. So Sharon agrees to call a special press conference in which, instead of explaining the Kern affair, he tells the nation about the witch hunt against him and his family and then, with malice aforethought, launches into a political attack against Amram Mitzna, the forgettable Labor leader at the time. It is a flagrant violation of election laws which ban politicking (open electioneering by candidates for office on TV and radio news broadcasts) before the election, forcing the head of the Central Elections Committee, Justice Mishael Cheshin, to pull the plug on the prime minister�s broadcast. Within hours the glare of public attention is not on Cyril Kern or the prime minister, but on the judge who stopped the airing of the press conference.

There was also scandal in the Likud central committee meeting that chose the party�s Knesset candidates. Bribery, corruption, vote-buying, criminals pulling strings -- mud was flying all over the place, but not at Sharon. He allowed the rank and file to make itself look ridiculous while he was statesmanlike. And while the media focused on one juicy sad story after another about the goings-on inside the Likud, it failed to notice Sharon's comments about a Palestinian state which sort of got lost, perhaps intentionally, in the general pre-election mayhem but was very much part of the reason for the election itself. Six months before he was to face the Likud Knesset delegation that would oppose his agreement to the road map, a day he knew would come, he was preparing to tell them: "But I told you so."

Sharon will not do a final deal with the Palestinians, only an interim one. He will start the process off, including taking down those settlements that prevent territorial contiguity of the Palestinian state-in-the-making. Benjamin Netanyahu, Natan Sharansky, Avigdor Lieberman, Tzachi Hanegbi and the other ministers who oppose Sharon's adoption of the road map will not stop him from doing so. The only thing that will is something over which Sharon has little control: Continued terror which will divert the national debate from long-term vision to short-term gut reaction making it impossible, even for an artful manipulator like Sharon, to deliver the deal.

Either way, the Israeli right or the Palestinian terrorists who oppose a deal should know that in Sharon they have an undesirable enemy and that if he decides to move ahead toward resolution of the conflict, if there is minimal terror, he will have the support of the people and that if there is unbearable terror and he has to act harshly, he will have the support of the people as well.

Pundits now claim that Sharon has been manipulated by the American administration into a position he did not want to be in. It may be convenient as well for those around Sharon to present the picture in this way in order to soften criticism of his moves. The truth is that Sharon is nowhere he did not expect to be. As he said several months ago when describing his role as prime minister and the decisions he has to take: "What you see from there is not what you see from here." And apparently, what you see from here means that even the man who created the settlements understands that many of them will have to go and the conflict with the Palestinians has to be resolved.

Sharon, the unspontaneous, did not use the word "occupation" lightly when he told the Likud Knesset delegation that it has to end. He did not say it to The New York Times in English, but to the Likud in Hebrew. He knew what the reaction would be and what the plans of those opposed to him would be.

If Abu Mazen can control the terror, Sharon will deliver. The opposition in the Likud and his cabinet, even with Avigdor Lieberman promising a civil war if settlements are removed, will not stop him. If Menachem Begin could not stop Sharon on the road to Beirut, Lieberman will not stop him on the way to conciliation.