The banner headlines have been about the Great Debate over the question of whether Israel should drop its obstinate insistence that no negotiations with the PLO take place as long as PLO violence and atrocities continue. The campaign against this Israeli position is astounding, and all of the usual political and propaganda machines are cranking. We have the U.S. State Department insisting Israel has no right to condition making further appeasements to the PLO on the PLO refraining from atrocities. Jerome Segal, the imam of the "Jewish Peace Lobby," is back with another of his petitions, signed chiefly by Reform rabbis, demanding the U.S. pressure Sharon to accept PLO demands. It goes without saying that the Israeli Left, led by Ha'aretz and Shimon Peres, agree. So here we have the Foreign Minister of the Sharon government insisting that Israel should ignore PLO atrocities and continue to make unilateral concessions.
If, as appears daily to be more and more the case, Sharon does nothing but pursue Oslo Lite in the style of Netanyahu, and it turns out that, like Netanyahu, he believes in nothing but trying to keep himself in power, then the future of Israel is far darker than anyone ever thought. Here we have a man from the furthest right segment of the Likud elected by a landslide who talks about continuing Oslo under the "proper conditions."
It could very well be that Sharon's actual role in history will be to take Israel to the brink of destruction. If even he pursues Oslo, if even he has no agenda and no vision, then what hope is there for survival? After a Sharon regime of appeasement, no abandonment of Oslo will be possible without the most enormous bloodbath of Jews since the end of World War II.
If Sharon has a "hidden agenda", he is keeping it well hidden: so far, every move of his signals his commitment to Oslo Lite. The Sharon government is one of the worst collections of incompetents in Israeli history. The only good thing that can be said of Benjamin "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer, the new Minister of Defense, is that the other Labor Party candidates were even worse. The appointment of Shimon Peres as Foreign Minister after eight years of Oslo bloodbaths defies mockery. But perhaps the worst signal of all is the appointment of Salah Tarif. Sharon wanted to have a Druse cabinet minister and told the Labor Party to assign one of its backbenchers, Salah Tarif, to be the first Druze Minister, in this case of Minority Affairs. No sooner was the appointment announced than Israel Television pulled out a tape of an interview of Tarif by the PLO's TV station two months earlier. In it he called for the victory of the intifada, for the Arab liberation of Jerusalem, and denounced Sharon for having started the violence by polluting the Temple Mount with his presence. Sharon's response to release of the tapes? Tarif remains a Min- ister in his government.
The only person of ability and talent in the coalition is Uzi Landau, the new police chief. Others with potential for doing good are Limor Livnat, the new Minister of Education, who announced that purging the curriculum of post-Zionism is her number one priority, and perhaps Silvan Shalom, the Minister of Finance, although he is already speaking out about raising the deficit and printing money.
There is only one way that Sharon can restore Israeli military deterrence after a decade of cowardice, appeasement, and self-debasement, and that is to use military force. The days when Israel could demonstrate its might through "signaling" are long gone. Since 1992, Israeli governments have given the Arabs every reason to believe that Israel has lost its will to survive and is prepared to commit national suicide. No amount of talk and gestures now will repair this. Only massive military action, and I do not mean a few "symbolic" assassinations and missile strikes on empty buildings.
The small civilian community of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip can be viewed as Israel's Stalingrad. Under all the Oslo agreements, the PLO agreed to leave the community in peace and exist in full security and protection. Netzarim is the best barometer there could be of the intentions of the PLO and of Israel's willingness to insist on compliance with Oslo. Reflecting the PLO's contempt for Oslo, Netzarim has been a nonstop battleground and under constant siege by the PLO for years. In the last few weeks, the violence against the community has escalated. Almost every day, the PLO fires mortar shells into it. The Sharon government has done absolutely nothing, leaving the civilians of Netzarim, who are often unable to move in and out of their settlement, to cope on their own. Encouraged, the PLO has now fired mortars across the Green Line into pre-1967 Israel. It fired at Kibbutz Nahal Oz near the Gaza Strip. To be sure, there is considerable justice in kibbutzim, which were the avant garde of the Labor Pary's appeasement policy, coming under mortar attack by our "peace partners."
While the Israeli establishment debates whether or not the PLO violence should stop before continuing Oslo appeasements, there is not a single politician in Israel, outside the splinter Ichud Leumi party of Rehavam Ze'evi and the one-man Herut Party of Michael Kleiner, that is clearly stating that Oslo is dead, that Israel should refuse to resume negotiations even if the PLO were to halt its atrocities, and that the only acceptable "peace process" is the invasion of the West Bank and Gaza by Israeli tanks and the expulsion of the PLO back to Tunisia, followed by a program of decades of denazification of the Palestinians.
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa.
April 2001 - 9 - Outpost