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In the Shadow of Sharon

(New York Times) Benny Morris - Sharon will be remembered as one of Israel's great field commanders, the wily, bulldozing general who cracked the Egyptian bastion at Um Katef-Abu Awgeila in 1967 and led the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, turning the tables in the Yom Kippur War. His defeat of the second Palestinian intifada will doubtless be carefully studied, once the hysteria and hype die down, as a model of a relatively clean, successful counterinsurgency. Sharon believed (as I do) that there was and is no viable Palestinian peace partner. The Palestinian national movement, he believed, still, in the deepest, immutable recesses of its heart, aspires to Israel's destruction and replacement by an Arab-majority state, a "one-state solution." That aspiration is why Arafat rejected the two-state compromise proposed by Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, and President Bill Clinton in 2000, and it is why, from the militant Islamic members of Hamas through Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian national movement refuses to give up the "right of return" of the refugees, the demographic battering ram with which it hopes, ultimately, to bring Israel down.
2006-01-06 00:00:00
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