Why has Israel stepped closer to national suicide

By Jonathan Freedland

LONDON: It is as shocking as if Jean-Marie le Pen had become president of France, or Jorg Haider chancellor of Austria. On Tuesday night Israel turned to a man who has spent two decades as an international byword for extremism -- a global hate-figure -- and elevated him to the country's top job.

Ariel Sharon, who once seemed destined only for exile into disgrace, is now the prime minister of Israel. For anyone who wishes peace for that nation and its neighbors, today is among the darkest of days.

Sharon's been around so long -- a fighter in the pre-state, Jewish resistance against the British in the 1940s, a key player in every one of Israel's five wars -- that there is barely a need to recite the roll call of shame that constitutes his resume.

Israelis know of the brutal reprisal raids he led against Palestinian infiltrators in the 1950s, just as they recall his blood-soaked invasion of Lebanon three decades later.

They know an internal Israeli inquiry held him "indirectly responsible" for massacres at Sabra and Shatila of more than 2,000 Palestinian refugees, slaughtered by Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militiamen.

They know, too, that same inquiry declared Sharon unfit to serve as defense minister (let alone the job he holds this Wednesday morning). And they know that he has opposed every move Israel has ever made toward peace -- from the 1970s Camp David accords with Egypt, right through to the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians of the 1990s.

They have seen the company he keeps. Men like Avigdor Lieberman, whose game plan for the Middle East includes setting Beirut on fire, launching missiles at Tehran, destroying the Aswan dam and recapturing villages already handed back to the Palestinians. They know that Lieberman is likely to be part of Sharon's coalition, a government which threatens to be the most rightwing in Israel's history.

They know the likely consequences of a Sharon administration. Ostracism beckons, as the world community turns a cold shoulder toward a nation led by a thug whose own law courts (in a libel case against the Ha'aretz newspaper) have branded him a liar. Foreign investment, which depends on stability, will evaporate further; Israel's economy will struggle.

The country's link with the Jewish diaspora will weaken, too: Jews in the United States, Britain and elsewhere may want less and less to do with an Israel that could choose Sharon as its leader.

Above all, they know the most immediate result of their actions yesterday. For the election of a leader who does not believe in peace takes Israel one step closer to the alternative: war. Israelis understand that. Asked which candidate was more likely to plunge Israel into an all-out confrontation with its neighbors, a wide majority plumped for Sharon.

And yet, despite all that, there he stands this morning: Ariel, King of Israel. Why have Israelis done it? Why have they taken a step towards what seems, from the outside, national suicide?

There are the conventional, political explanations of course. A new generation of voters --those under 35 -- and a million new immigrants, chiefly from the old Soviet Union, have no memory of Sharon's past antics: to them the invasion of Lebanon lives only in the history books.

And of course there was Sharon's biggest asset: his opponent. Ehud Barak may have been a masterful soldier, but he was an appalling politician. He came across as arrogant and unfeeling, wholly unskilled in the necessary emolliences of vote-getting.

Meanwhile, Sharon was pulling off one of the great political con-tricks of modern times -- running TV ads depicting him as a cuddly old man, walking Israel's streets holding the hand of a small child.

Still it was not the image-makers who decided this election. Barak's fate was sealed by forces far more fundamental -- starting with fear. Israelis deserted the Labour leader because they no longer believed he could protect them, neither from the random bombs that rip apart a bus or street market in an instant, nor from the Palestinian snipers' bullets that have been raining down on Jerusalem's outermost suburbs for nearly four months.

Israelis have complained of a constant, gnawing sense of anxiety -- and Barak forgot that his task, as prime minister, was to make them feel safe.

That, after all, is why he was elected in the first place. Like his mentor and predecessor, the slain Yitzhak Rabin, Barak was meant to be "Mr Security" -- a former chief of staff who would keep Israelis' enemies at bay. In his determination to forge a peace deal with the Palestinians, Barak forgot that task: on his watch, Palestinian stone-throwing escalated into a conflict just short of a shooting war.

It was a critical lapse of judgment, ignoring the lesson of Rabin at Oslo, and even Menachem Begin at Camp David: that in order to be a dove, by making peace, an Israeli leader must first be a hawk, by providing security.

It was this failure, rather than the concessions Barak was prepared to offer, that cost him so dear. It is true that most Israelis found the outgoing PM's willingness to hand back 95 percent of the West Bank and to divide Jerusalem hard to stomach -- but precedent suggests they would have swallowed it eventually, on two conditions.

First, if the Palestinians had accepted Israel's offer and signed a genuine peace deal and, second, if everyday life had become more tranquil. Neither of those conditions were met, and so voters moved to punish Barak.

Add to Israelis' fear, their confusion. The left especially still cannot quite figure out why Barak's approach -- offering compromises no predecessor had ever dared -- so enraged Palestinians that they rebelled more spiritedly against him than they ever did against the iron fist of Begin, Shamir or Netanyahu.

The Israeli left had always argued that compromise would bring peace -- only for the events of the past few months to prove them spectacularly wrong. Offer compromise and what you get is an uprising, one bloodier than any protest that came when you offered nothing.

Suddenly the right seemed right: the Israeli floating voter looked at Sharon's decades-old contention -- that the Arabs regard every concession as a sign of weakness and reward it with violence -- and reckoned he'd been right all along.

The result is a rejection of the entire Oslo-Rabin-Barak approach. "We've tried the good cop," Israelis said on Tuesday, "and that didn't work. Now let's try the bad cop; see how the Palestinians like that."

Or there might be a deeper impulse, one whose origins go back to the very beginnings of Zionism. That movement always contained two conflicting strands: one which believed the purpose of a Jewish state was to join the family of nations as an equal -- and another which saw a separate state as a way of withdrawing from the world, of the Jews turning their back on everyone else.

The choice of the reviled Ariel Sharon seems like a victory for that latter impulse -- and a defeat for an older, brighter vision of the land of Israel.

-- Guardian News Service