By: Park MacDougald
Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel, died on Saturday, Jan. 11, in Tel Aviv, eight years after suffering from a debilitating stroke. Sharon was 85.
Source: Associated Press
Ariel Sharon was a controversial figure, to understate the matter. Often considered a national hero by the Israeli (and American) right, Sharon was known in the Arab world as the “Butcher of Beirut” for his role as Israeli Defense Minister in the bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon. While Joe Biden referred to Sharon’s death as being like “a death in the family,” Human Rights Watch issued a press release immediately upon Sharon’s death recalling that he “died without facing justice for his role in the massacres of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by Lebanese militias in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The killings constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Palestinian commentators, such as the eminent historian Rashid Khalidi, have been less equivocal. In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy, Khalidi details the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity in which the former Prime Minister was implicated, including a 1982 transcript from a meeting between Sharon and former U.S. envoy Morris Draper, in which Sharon explicitly told his American counterpart, with regards to the Palestinians living in the Sabra and Shatilla camps, “If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.”
Sharon’s involvement in Lebanon would ultimately lead to his dismissal following an official Israeli inquiry, the Kahan Report. Nevertheless, he was nothing if not a survivor. After the close of his tumultuous military career, Sharon was able to stage an improbable political comeback. Long regarded within the Likud party as a seat-warmer for the younger Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon would become Prime Minister in 2001 in one of the biggest electoral landslides in Israeli history. Ultimately, he would break with the right-leaning Likud and his supporters among the Israeli settlers over the issue of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip – a measure to which Sharon was committed. It was this unilateral withdrawal, supposedly characteristic of his devotion to a “peace process” with the Palestinians, that has earned Sharon a degree of measured praise from many Western commentators. The title of the New York Times obituary, “Ariel Sharon, Israeli Hawk Who Sought Peace on His Terms, Dies at 85,” is but a sample of the genre.
Unfortunately, the narrative of Sharon’s road-to-Damascus conversion is misleading. Sharon’s career, whatever one’s views of the man and his legacy, are indicative of larger developments within Israel that paint a grim picture regarding the possibility of an eventual settlement.
—
Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel in 2001, during a crucial juncture in Israeli history. The 1990s had been a time of considerable optimism in Israel and throughout the international community. Beginning with the Madrid Conference in 1991, it seemed as though, for the first time in Israeli history, the prospect of a lasting peace settlement – the mythic two-state solution of which we hear so much – might be around the corner. What accounted for this opening, and the subsequent collapse of negotiations that would ultimately lead to Sharon’s election?
The peace process of the 1990s – culminating in the Oslo Accords – was the product of a number of determinants. During the Cold War, Israel had developed into a client state of the United States. Israel’s military spending – reaching almost half of the budget by the mid-1970s – and its persistent budget deficits would have been impossible without the mass influx of American dollars. The Arab states, meanwhile, with a few notable exceptions, were generally supported by the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR, obviously, removed this bastion of support, while the American victory in the First Gulf War neutered the only Arab state in the region with the means and political will to continue to finance Palestinian resistance. The United States, moreover, under the first Bush and Clinton, sought to pressure both the Israelis and the Palestinians to resolve the conflict in its own interest; American support for Israel having proved to be a consistent stumbling block for its interests in the region.
However, it was changes within Israeli society that ultimately seemed to provide a window for a settlement. As Yoav Peled has argued, the restructuring of the Israeli political economy in the 1980s and early 1990s – large-scale liberalization of the hitherto state-dominated economy – created a politically powerful section of society that would prove a vocal constituency for the peace process. Traditionally, the Israeli “middle class” had revolved around positions within the large state and state-related bureaucracy. The private sector, such as it existed, played a decidedly subordinate role in Israeli economic life. The liberalizations of the 1980s, however, provided the catalyst for the development of a true Israeli bourgeoisie – an entrepreneurial, private-sector business stratum, that saw the greatest obstacles to economic growth in Israel’s continued conflict with its neighbors. Among the most prominent public advocates of peace were CEOs and business leaders such as Benny Gaon and Dov Lautman.
Peace with the Palestinians, and its attendant prospects for growth, seemed to be the natural extension of the growth-centered restructuring at home. Following the signing of Oslo I in 1993, Israeli foreign direct investment (FDI) jumped from near zero to $2 billion in 1995, while the subsequent lifting of the Arab boycott – especially of Arab labor markets – proved a boon for Israeli business. The political party which came to be most closely associated with the peace process, Labor, which ruled under Yitzhak Rabin from 1992-1995 and Ehud Barak from 1999-2001, was representative of the Weltanschauung of the strata of Israeli society most committed to peace: affluent, cosmopolitan, educated, secular; inoculated by socioeconomic status from the disruptive effects of liberalization; disdainful of the crude nationalism and religiosity of the Israeli lower classes; and overwhelmingly ashkenazi – or European in origin. The twin goals of liberalization and peace became the motive forces of the Israeli elite in the 1990s.
The demographic and political counterpart to this sector of the liberal middle class was the Israeli working class, largely mizrachi, or Middle Eastern in origin. While the 1990s were boom years for the Israeli economy as a whole, this was the sector of Israeli society hardest hit by liberalization. As traditional pillars of the Israeli state apparatus, including the massive Histadrut complex, fell to privatization, so went traditional elements of the relatively egalitarian (for Jews, at least) social compact – guaranteed employment and social housing, among others. Meanwhile, the increasing openness of the labor market to Arab labor– meaning, for the bottom of the income distribution, a decrease in wages and bargaining power – began to pull the economic rug out from under them.
The political response of the mizrachim would find a largely cultural expression. In a pattern that will be familiar to American readers, an economically battered lower class articulated its rage against a detached bien pensant elite by way of a fierce religious conservatism and a virulent, ethnically defined nationalism. The meteoric rise of the right wing Shas party in the mid-1990s typified this phenomenon. Nominally ultra-Orthodox but drawing support from a much wider swath of Israeli society, Shas grew to be Israel’s third-largest party, and kingmakers in Labor and Likud’s attempts to form governments. While Shas was (initially) willing to compromise on the issue of the peace process, as well as aspects of Labor and Likud’s economic plans, the party’s program of Jewish social solidarity proved, in practice, to be an immovable political obstacle to the further retrenchment of the Israeli welfare state. This opposition to “reform,” set alongside Shas’ ethno-religious conservatism, came, in the eyes of the Israeli elite, to be further evidence of the lower class’s Luddism. The governments of Netanyahu (1996-1999) and Barak (1999-2001) – which tried to balance the drive for liberalization with a (half-hearted, in the case of Netanyahu) commitment to peace – would founder on the rocks of Shas’ opposition.
It was the collapse of the peace process at the turn of the 21st century that would break this political stalemate. All pieties to the contrary, the deal that Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat at the 2000 Camp David Summit served only to underscore the distance between what even the liberal sections of Israeli society were willing to offer and what would be politically acceptable for the Palestinians. Given the contents of the offer – Israeli annexation of its settlements in the West Bank, military and political control over a non-contiguous Palestinian statelet, no major pre-1948 city, and a final, formal rejection of any right of return or recompense for Palestinian refugees – Arafat’s rejection, ostensibly shocking, was utterly predictable.
The immediate aftermath of the failure at Camp David was the outbreak of the second intifada. With Barak and his peace process thoroughly discredited, the former war hero Ariel Sharon was catapulted to the prime ministership in one of the largest electoral landslides in Israeli history on a platform of national security. The political center of gravity lurched to the right, as much of the Israeli left convinced itself, in the words of Barak, that there was “no partner for peace,” and immediate political concerns shifted towards suppressing the Palestinian revolt. Meanwhile, the attacks of September 11th, following Sharon’s election by mere months, ensured the United States’ total support for Israel during the time period.
Sharon’s political position secured by the overriding issue of security, it was now possible to move forward with the deep neoliberal restructuring that had previously stalled due to Shas’ opposition. As a glowing Market Watch editorial from the time put it, Sharon’s then-finance minister Netanyahu was given a free hand to “launch a Thatcherist reform”of the Israeli economy. As taxes were slashed, state assets privatized, and military spending increased, the state budget was cut by nearly 20 percent in the years 2001-2003, with the most draconian cuts falling on welfare spending and transfer payments. When Shas ministers revolted, Sharon had them dismissed. In his second government, formed in 2003, Shas was excluded altogether. If, during the 1990s, business interests had seen a domestic stalemate over liberalization, while the peace process promised growth, the first years of the Sharon government reversed this calculus. The retrenchment of the welfare state provided the opportunity for domestic growth, causing the desire for a permanent settlement to lose much of its economic urgency. One of the crucial political constituencies for peace evaporated almost overnight.
It is in this context that Sharon’s supposedly redeeming withdrawal from the Gaza Strip should be viewed. Far from being a nod to a peace process, of which Sharon was always skeptical, the unilateral withdrawal was, as one of Sharon’s top aides Dov Weissglass put it, intended to put the peace process in “the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians” — a decision made possible by the withering of any material Israeli interest in peace. From the Israeli perspective, the occupation of Gaza cost far more in blood and treasure than it was worth. Far better to build a security wall and leave the administration of the bantustan to its client, the Palestinian Authority. The unilateral nature of the withdrawal – whatever it said about the ease of removing Israeli settlers – was no coincidence. Sharon would never countenance negotiation with the Palestinians. Developments in the Occupied Territories would proceed by Israeli fiat alone.
—
It is in the same situation, more or less, that we find ourselves today. Under Sharon’s former colleague and rival Benjamin Netanyahu’s second prime ministership, half-hearted declarations of fealty to the two-state solution – intended, in any case, mainly for foreign consumption – have proceeded side-by-side with the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. As a recent op-ed in Haaretz put it, Netanyahu’s announcement that he has “no solution” to the Palestinian problem belies the fact that Israel does have a solution, albeit not one that can be said out loud: do nothing. With every settlement, a greater amount of Palestinian territory becomes irrevocably Israeli. The Israeli constituency for peace, where it still exists (mostly in the universities and pages of Haaretz), is politically negligible. Meanwhile, the demographic and political weight of the far right – who openly proclaim the goal of a Jewish state covering the entirety of Eretz Israel – grows stronger with each year. The “peace process,” if it was ever alive, is now almost certainly dead.
