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Journalism of Courage
For Israelis who hated and feared him, the Palestinians who chafed at his corruption, or the Western and Arab diplomats who despaired at his mendacity and unwillingness to settle the conflict that was his life’s work, Yasser Arafat’s apparently imminent death is the best news to sweep a turbulent Middle East since before September 11, 2001.
But for his greatest nemesis, Ariel Sharon, it is a potential disaster—one that threatens to undo what has been a smooth and highly advantageous relationship with President Bush. Yes, the 76-year-old Sharon has the satisfaction of seeing the burial of an enemy with whom he has warred for decades. But the indefatigable Israeli hawk also has lost, at a stroke, the underpinning of a strategy that has allowed him to undo a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, block US plans for a Palestinian state and unilaterally redraw Israel’s borders.
For Sharon, the Palestinian warlord has been indispensable to him since January 2002, when he was caught trying to smuggle a boatload of Iranian weapons into the Gaza Strip even as US envoys were brokering talks. A furious Bush agreed with Sharon that Arafat could no longer be a partner in any peace process. That has excused Sharon from any serious pressure to pursue Bush’s ‘‘road map’’ for side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states. Why not the road map? Because, as he has candidly explained in occasional interviews, Sharon doesn’t like the look of the deal Israel would get. Among other things, the deal calls for Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, as well as up to 95 per cent of the territory in the West Bank—far-reaching concessions that an intransigent Arafat conveniently rejected.
Sharon knows Israel eventually must accept a Palestinian state, but he hopes for considerably better terms: Annexation of at least 10 per cent of the West Bank, exclusive Israeli control of Jerusalem and its suburbs, and a Palestinian territory divided into islands separated by Israeli roads and settlements. —LAT-WP
