Sharon: The hard-line option for Israelis

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "I want to say something about my demonization," said Ariel 'Arik' Sharon last week. "I am known as someone who eats Arabs for breakfast. This is baseless."

Good point. In his entire life, Sharon has never been known to eat an Arab before lunch. Nevertheless, the man who is almost certain to be Israel's leader after the election on 6 February (he currently leads Prime Minister Ehud Barak by about 20 points) must have trouble keeping a straight face when the Likud Party spin-doctors try to re-package him as a kindly old man who wouldn't hurt a fly, let alone a Palestinian.

He doesn't need to do this to win over the Israeli electorate, who back him mainly because of his hard-line reputation, though it may reassure some swing voters.

It's more important in terms of calming panicky foreign leaders. But the image of a kinder, gentler Sharon took a beating with the publication in this week's New Yorker of Geoffrey Goldblatt's November interview with him.

In the interview, Sharon calls Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "a murderer and a liar." And he shows no remorse for his provocative visit last September to the Haram al-Sharif, the sacred Muslim precinct in Jerusalem atop Temple Mount, accompanied by 1,000 police, even though it unleashed the "second intifada" that has already led to almost 400 deaths.

"I unmasked the Palestinians," he claims.

The coarseness of the man shines through in the way he mocks Muslim claims to the Haram al-Sharif.

"When the Jews pray, all over the world, they face the Temple Mount. When an Arab prays, he prays to Mecca. Even when an Arab is on the Mount, his back is to it. Also some of his lower parts." But the real problem is not Sharon's language.

Around 40 percent of today's Israeli voters are too young to remember the worst episodes of Sharon's past, and most foreigners have lost track of them, too.

But Arik Sharon has been around for 72 years, and he has a remarkable track record as a killer of Arabs. He first gained notoriety as the commander of Unit 101, a force set up to conduct raids into the West Bank (then under Jordanian control) against Arab guerrillas.

In October, 1953, Unit 101 raided the village of Kibya -- and blew up 45 houses, killing 69 Palestinian civilians, half of them women and children.

Two wars later, Sharon wound up in charge of Southern Command, including the densely populated Gaza Strip that had been captured in 1967. When some guerrilla attacks occurred in 1971, he opened up broad roads to help the army deploy rapidly by bulldozing some 2,000 homes and making about 16,000 people homeless.

Hundreds of suspected activists were deported without any legal proceedings; others were simply killed .

"The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them," recalled Raj Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. "Every day, one, two or three bodies would be brought into the morgue."

During the second half of 1971, 104 young Palestinian men suspected of being guerrillas were killed in the streets or in their homes.

Sharon's lasting fame dates from the 1973 war, when his tank force crossed the Suez Canal and surrounded the Egyptian army, but he was afterwards denied the job of chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces: his fellow generals found him too simplistic and blindly aggressive.

So he joined Menachem Begin's right-wing Likud government in 1977 as Minister of Agriculture -- and launched the settlement policy that has since been the biggest single obstacle to peace.

It's forgotten now, but for the first decade after the 1967 war most Israelis agreed that the conquered Arab lands should eventually be given back in return for a lasting peace.

Then came Sharon, who lavished government funds on building Jewish settlements all over the West Bank, with the explicit purpose of "creating facts" that would make it politically impossible ever to trade territory for peace.

But Sharon seemed to have wrecked his political career when, as Minister of Defense in 1982, he misled Begin into launching a deeply unpopular invasion of Lebanon, and then allowed Israel's Maronite allies to commit ghastly massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila.

Many hundreds, and perhaps as many as 2,000, were murdered.

The Kahan commission of inquiry found him "indirectly responsible" for the massacres, and declared him unfit ever to serve again as Israel's defense minister.

Though he didn't leave politics, he was effectively sidelined for 17 years -- until the defeat of Binyamin Netanyahu's scandal- ridden government in 1999 let him seize control of the demoralized Likud Party.

Sharon's calamitous visit to the Haram al-Sharif in September was mainly intended to upstage Netanyahu, who was contemplating a political comeback, though he may also have foreseen that the ensuing violence would derail a peace process he condemned as "national suicide".

Ironically, Barak's December decision to call an early election was also driven by fear that even the seedy Netanyahu, if given time to recapture the Likud leadership, would prove a more formidable opponent than Sharon.

It turns out, however, that Israelis are so disillusioned, frightened and angry at the moment that Sharon is exactly what they want.

His solution for almost every problem is violence, but he is undeniably very good at killing Arabs.

Sharon's fellow generals thought he was unfit to lead the armed forces. The Kahan commission found him unfit to be Minister of Defense. Now he is going to be prime minister. It will be an interesting couple of years.