Death as a Way of Life

After the Elections

February 2001

Ariel Sharon won an unprecedented landslide victory over Ehud Barak. Barak announced in his concession speech that he was resigning from the Knesset and party leadership. Later he rejected an offer to be appointed minister of defense. Sharon proceeded to create a unity coalition that included members from the defeated Labor Party, the right, and the center and religious parties. The resulting cabinet was the largest in Israel’s history, with twenty-eight ministers. The unity government was dismantled in October 2002, when Labor ministers resigned over the national budget debate.

When Ariel Sharon made his victory speech on Tuesday night, his supporters whistled in contempt and loathing each time their leader mentioned Barak, the left, and the Palestinians. The Israeli public has clearly punished that triad in the most painful way possible. As one voter said, in naïve sincerity, “I’m not sure that Sharon is the best for Israel, but the Palestinians deserve him!”

May I register my suspicion that Ariel Sharon himself does not believe what has happened to him? This man, who many had already eulogized as a has-been, this power-obsessed, devious extremist of questionable behavior who has failed in nearly every public office he has held, who has ruined nearly everyone who has been his ally, has now been handed an entire country. He can experiment on it with his views and his impulses. Unlike in the past, this time there is hardly anyone who can stop him. But perhaps that is precisely the reason that in the final days of his campaign, when his victory was already assured, Sharon’s mood suddenly changed.

Sharon, who has a cynical and venomous sense of humor, and an almost compulsive urge to crack jokes, looked melancholy and lifeless during the days leading up to the election. One of his associates was quoted saying, “It’s as if something in him turned off.” At moments, perhaps for the first time in his life, he looked almost frightened.

All his life Sharon has operated from the position of the oppositionist, even when he was a cabinet minister. He always, but always, challenged the authority of his superiors, both in the military and in parliament and government. A large part of his military and political careers was based on circumventing authority, disobeying orders, inciting against his leaders, and even — as in the case of the Lebanon War — deceiving his superiors.

And now, suddenly, at the age of seventy-three, he himself is the supreme command. He is authority. He is the man who is responsible for the country.

And there is no one to stop him.

Now he is prime minister of one of the most complicated countries in the world, deep in the most extremely delicate situation it has seen for decades. Perhaps Sharon knows, deep in his heart, that if he does indeed mean to ensure his country’s future, he will have to abdicate many of the opinions and beliefs and symbols that he has valued for the past generation. If he refuses to do so, there can be no doubt that he will lead Israel into a full frontal collision, not only with the Palestinians, but with the entire Arab world.

Perhaps that’s why Sharon is worried. Paradoxically, this anxiety, and this initial awareness of his true political responsibility — and of the complexity of the dilemmas that only a leader is forced to face — are encouraging signs that we can take comfort in today (since there is no other hope).

In this context it is interesting to note that, when the right has come to power, there has always been a sense that its leaders do not feel truly confident at the wheel. Something in the rhetoric of Israel’s right-wing prime ministers, from Begin to Netanyahu, has continued to be opposition rhetoric, dissent against some lawful regime, even when they themselves were the regime. There were periods during Netanyahu’s term, for example, when the government itself behaved as if it were a minority group being persecuted by some wraithlike hostile administration, as if it did not really believe in its own legitimacy.

If such will be the situation again, we will soon witness a dangerous eruption of Israeli policy. This is liable to be expressed in more aggressive behavior, along with contemptuous arrogance toward our neighbors. (Remember, Sharon instigated the Lebanon War in order to allow the Palestinians to take over Jordan!) This will also ignite the atmosphere within Israel and make its social and political polarization more severe. The experience of the years when the right ruled warns us of spectacular acts, which more often than not take place on the boundary between the grotesque and the catastrophic.

The most extreme, fanatic, and fundamentalist groups are now returning to the center of Israel’s public stage. The hopes of the moderate, liberal, secular center to turn Israel into a truly democratic country, less militant in character, more civilian in nature, more egalitarian, have been dealt a resounding blow.

Again, there is that old, disheartening feeling that due to an unfortunate series of events, and because of our historical trauma, Israelis are doomed to repeatedly make the same old mistakes. To once again accelerate settlement in the occupied territories and escalate the conflict between our neighbors and us. Once again, the rule that applies to our private lives has come true: over and over again we stumble precisely in those places where we are most in need of redemption, of being reborn.

Immediately after he was elected — as during his entire campaign — Sharon invited the Labor Party to join a national unity government. There can be no doubt that in this he expressed the wishes of many Israelis on both the right and the left who yearn to re-create the sense of partnership and kinship that are so lacking in Israel today. It is difficult, however, to understand what policies the two parties can unite around. Yet if they do succeed in finding a middle ground, Israel will find itself prisoner of that same familiar, tragic error that it has been trapped in for years. Once again Israel will present the Arab world with a position that is a respectable compromise between its center-right and center-left blocks. But this compromise will have almost no relation to the demands and anguish and hopes of the Palestinians — that is, no connection to reality. Israel will again conduct virtual negotiations among itself and between itself and its own fears. Then it will be astonished, and perhaps even feel betrayed, when the Palestinians throw its offers back in its face and instigate a new Intifada.

As for the Palestinians, when they declare that as far as they are concerned there is no difference between Sharon and Barak, they know full well how significant the difference is and what the outcome will be. This might be the reason why the Palestinians hurried, in the two weeks leading up to the Israeli elections, toward a compromise with Israel at the Taba talks. It is unfortunate that this zeal was not evident in the preceding weeks or months. It is also unfortunate that Arafat did not succeed in taking control of his people. He could have channeled the authentic vitality of the early Intifada into reaching an agreement while Barak was still in power. Palestinian terrorists murdered dozens of innocent Israelis, women and children among them, during the election campaign. Each funeral, each orphan’s tears, supposedly proved to the Israeli public that Barak had erred in agreeing to compromises. The public was practically pushed into the arms of the man who promised them he would not negotiate under fire. The despair and anxiety that possessed Israelis — and their total lack of awareness of Palestinian pain and suffering — are the reasons for Sharon’s rise to power.

What is obvious from these elections is that the Israeli public is not yet ready for peace. Israelis crave peace, of course, but they are not yet able to pay the heavy price that such an agreement requires. As for the Palestinians, they too, apparently, have not yet internalized the need for the painful compromises that peace requires. It is impossible to predict how we can get out of this impasse without another round of violence.

Fairness requires that we give Sharon a chance to prove that he is right. But there is a heavy, glum feeling in my heart. It is one thing to report about a train running off the tracks from a vantage point to the side. It is entirely another experience to report it from inside the train.