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Masterful Sharon?
David Horovitz

Having spent the past year consistently underestimating and underappreciating Ariel Sharon�s achievements -- most especially his determined maintenance of the widest possible public consensus behind his policies -- much of the Israeli media has lately been moved to paroxysms of delight over his purported masterful leadership skills.

The prime minister has indeed enjoyed a relatively successful two or three weeks (no political success can be more than relative when suicide bombers are still detonating themselves all around us). But the exaggerated praise is premature.

He stood up to Shas over his finance minister�s package of austerity measures -- dismissing the Shas ministers for voting against sending the bill to committee for preparation, in a move all the more gratifying because of its very unexpectedness, its at-a-stroke demolition of two decades� worth of conventional wisdom about the impossibility of defying ultra-Orthodox political clout. But let�s not get carried away here. Sharon has not abandoned Shas as preferred coalition partner, despite its encouragement of a growing no-work, all-study sector that Israel lacks the financial wherewithal to sustain; Messrs. Yishai, Benizri et al. will almost certainly have their feet tucked cozily back under the cabinet table by the time the economic package returns from committee and is approved by the Knesset. Nor has he taken concerted action to prevent the documented abuse, by Shas leaders and those of United Torah Judaism, of government allocations for their yeshivah and other educational institutions.

He stood up to his predecessor and would-be successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, as well -- essentially telling Bibi and a few hundred Likud Central Committee-member acolytes to get lost when they defied him and voted for a party resolution rejecting Palestinian statehood anywhere but in Jordan. Returning to the microphone after the vote at the Likud Central Committee meeting on May 12 to inform party members he was going to take no notice whatsoever of them, Sharon was in the rare and pleasurable position of being able to combine a personal snub of Netanyahu with smart leadership politics: Bibi has now cornered himself as the hard-line rejectionist, while Sharon, hardly an impassioned advocate of generous statehood arrangements for Palestine, can portray himself as a moderate � without actually having had to moderate a whit.

In the best Napoleonic tradition, the ex-general got lucky -- and so did we -- when a bomb at the central Pi Glilot fuel depot on May 23 failed to set alight huge stores of fuel, and thus to cause the fireball in the area that an intelligence report, submitted to his government and gathering dust for months, had warned could cause thousands of deaths.

And he has been at least partly vindicated in his much-derided besieging of Yasser Arafat in Ramallah -- the month-long isolation of the Palestinian leader having apparently catalyzed widening calls for reform of the Palestinian Authority, albeit, as Isabel Kershner makes clear on pages 24-25 of this issue, a reform process by no means guaranteed to produce what Israel would regard as a more compatible Palestinian leadership.

Which brings us to the limitations of Sharon�s leadership -- however masterful it may have seemed of late. As with Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, his predecessors going back more than a decade, Sharon�s ability to achieve his goals, the level of his popularity, indeed his prospects of retaining power, still depend largely on Arafat -- Arafat�s well-being, his whereabouts, his actions and the Israeli public�s perception of him.

No matter how cornered he may currently appear, Netanyahu�s appeal will grow again if the suicide bombings intensify and Arafat continues to prove disinclined to try to thwart them. For Netanyahu can boast that he led Israel through the safest three years in recent memory. By contrast, an almost inconceivably reformed Arafat, perceived anew by the public as a viable negotiating partner, would open an unlikely path to power for Labor, even under its current uninspiring leader Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the man who blabbed the entire content of his meetings with Bush Administration officials, including the Vice President, when he visited Washington in February, and the first mainstream leader since 1967 to publicly volunteer a willingness to concede Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount -- in a speech, to Labor members on May 15, that was largely overlooked amid that week�s Likud Central Committee brouhaha.

Sharon�s best prospect of a long innings at the Prime Minister�s Office -- up to and beyond the scheduled life span of this government in late 2003 -- probably lies in the replacement or, less unthinkable, the marginalizing of Arafat by his own people, a shift that Israelis would regard as a personal victory for Sharon. The latest survey by Khalil Shikaki�s authoritative Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in mid-May, found a staggering 91 percent support (among 1,317 Palestinians) for reform in the PA. Eight-three percent backed new elections for the presidency and the quasi-parliamentary Legislative Council. And, perhaps most interestingly, a 48 to 43 majority favored a change to the PA political system that would transfer power to a newly created post of prime minister, while leaving the president with ceremonial status alone -- effectively ousting Arafat.

If that came to pass and, improbable though this may seem, began to create a climate in which both sides could strive for reconciliation, then Israelis and Palestinians, given Arafat�s despicable record, would have grounds for celebration. And talk of masterful leadership by Sharon would be justified.