WHO IS ARIEL SHARON?
The rise of Israeli anti-Americanism
When Ariel Sharon visited an agricultural high school outside Beersheva in
the final phase of his campaign to become Israel's Prime Minister, he was met
by 16-year-old Ilil Komey, whose father has suffered from shellshock in the
wake of Israel's illegal 1984 invasion of Lebanon. In a scene recorded by
Israeli national television , Ms. Komey pointed her finger at Israel's
premier warhawk, and said:
"I think you sent my father into Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of
having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my
father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a
lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be
elected as prime minister."
GREAT NEWS!
While Ms. Komey's outrage may be righteous, her future as a political pundit
seems cloudy, at best: if the polls are correct, it looks like Sharon – known
as "the Bulldozer" for his policy (while minister of "infrastructure") of
destroying Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli "settlements" – will
flatten Ehud Barak and emerge at the head of the Israeli government at a
crucial time in his nation's history. They tell a story about Sharon's early
career that helps to put his expected election victory in perspective, and
gives us an idea of what makes the incoming Prime Minister of Israel tick: As
the head of "Unit 101," the notorious terrorist squad, Sharon and his fellow
thugs were camped out on a kibbutz near the Syrian border, having been
ordered not to make a move unless provoked. One day, Sharon ran into the
headquarters, yelling "Great news! They've just killed the guard!"
A MORAL MONSTER
The history of this man as a moral monster – as the mass murderer of
Palestinians while a Haganah terrorist in the 1950s, as the man who presided
over the massacres at Shatilla and Sabra, as the ethnic cleanser who forced
the resettlement of 160,000 Palestinians from East Jerusalem – is already
well-documented, and I won't belabor the point here: Alexander Cockburn's
recent article in the New York Press, spotlighted on Antiwar.com last week,
covers those bases quite well. In any case, the crimes of Ariel Sharon are
well-documented on the Internet, and I want to make a different though
related point about the man they are calling "Arik, King of the Jews" – that
his triumph represents a growing Israeli anti-Americanism.
SHARON'S ROOTS
Having reached the apex of his military career after the Yom Kippur War of
1973 – after having been disgraced in high military and political circles for
refusing to follow orders and continually placing his soldiers in danger for
his own glory – Sharon joined Menachem Begin's Gahal coalition, a merger of
the old Herut with the Liberal party, and with three smaller rightist parties
later merged to form the Likud bloc. The party traces its origins back to the
radical Revisionist Zionist movement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founded in 1925. In
opposition to the secular and universalist conception of a Zionist state
envisioned by the Labor left, Jabotinsky and his right-wing followers upheld
a more down-to-earth philosophy of blood and soil clearly influenced by the
rise of European fascism. Jabotinsky sang the praises of Mussolini, as did
other Revisionist leaders: the Revisionist, as one writer put it, "maintains
that the state is the highest expression of a people."
THE COLONIZERS
Jabotinsky regarded Palestinians as "alien minorities" who, in a future
Jewish state, "would weaken national unity." Their transfer, if not
accomplished voluntarily, would "have to be achieved against the will of the
country's Arab majority. An 'iron wall' of a Jewish armed force would have to
protect the process of achieving a majority," according to the Revisionist
leader. To Jabotinsky, the Palestinian Arabs were a subhuman people who had
contributed nothing to civilization: it was up to the Zionists to "push the
moral frontiers of Europe to the Euphrates," he wrote. The ethnic cleansing
of Palestine was a precondition for the success of the Zionist project, and
the difference between the Israeli right and its Laborite-socialist utopian
adversaries was that the former did not mince words or in any way shrink from
this task. While the other Zionist leaders dithered and tried to conciliate
their opponents, both in Israel and the West, Jabotinsky disdained
incrementalism and boldly maintained that the Jews had the right to take the
land of Israel, granted to them, of course, by G-d. In 1923, he summed up the
Revisionist ideology and program succinctly and presciently: "Zionism is a
colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of
armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but,
unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am
through with playing at colonization." This is a policy that the heirs of
Jabotinsky in Israel, with Sharon at their head, intend to reaffirm.
THE IRGUN
The merger of numerous right-wing parties under the banner of Likud, in the
early sixties, represented the culmination of a developing trend: the
consolidation of a majority program around a somewhat watered-down version of
Jabotinsky's original vision of a Greater Israel. Menachem Begin, the leader
of the largest Likud component, Herut, had been the leader of the terrorist
Irgun, an offshoot of Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement. The Irgun carried
out numerous attacks on civilians – British, Jewish, and Arab – in their
struggle to "liberate" Israel, planting bombs in Arab markets and other
public facilities. On July 22, 1946, they carried out their most spectacular
raid when they blew up the King David Hotel, killing ninety-one people. While
the Irgun was outgunned by the British, as Michael Palumbo, author of The
Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People From Their Homeland,
points out:
"The government in London, however, feared that the Americans would retaliate
against a firm anti-terrorist campaign by holding up a much-needed loan. The
British army was not allowed to use the tough tactics required to halt the
Irgun and Stern Gang. Execution of captured terrorists was rare, house
searches were limited and roundups unusual."
SHARON SAYS NO TO DEMOCRACY
Begin and his fellow post-Revisionists, Sharon among them, were determined
not make the same errors that forced the British out of Palestine. They
maintained Jabotinsky's vision of a Greater Israel sustained by military
power and a strident nationalist vision that, even today, echoes the
admiration of their founder for the swaggering authoritarianism of Il Duce.
"Our forefathers did not come here in order to build a democracy but to build
a Jewish state," brayed Sharon in answer to his liberal critics [Menachem
Shalev, Forward, May 21, 1993]. The incompatibility of Zionism and liberal
democracy has long been recognized by the Palestinians and some elements of
the Israeli left. That this is now openly proclaimed by the soon-to-be Prime
Minister of the Jewish state is a development that Israel's friends in the
West did not foresee.
THE BULLDOZER
The foreign policy of a Sharon government will carry out the Revisionist
program of a Greater Israel, with an accelerated program of "settlements"
surrounded by Israeli military facilities. We all remember his plan, as
Begin's minister of agriculture, to "Judaize the Galilee" – driving out the
Arab Israelis, whom he denounced as "foreigners" – and his scheme to colonize
the Sinai. As Flore de Preneuf pointed out in Salon,
"More than any other politician, Sharon has been the engine behind Israel's
thinly disguised annexation policy. Whatever ministerial portfolio fell into
his hands, Sharon made sure to direct massive state funds toward building
houses, roads and water pipes that would consolidate Israel's grip in the
occupied territories. Not for nothing have Israelis nicknamed Sharon 'the
bulldozer.'"
FROM THE NILE TO THE EUPHRATES
But it isn't just the occupied territories that will be annexed, and the
inhabitants expelled, because the rationale for a more aggressive
expansionism is religious: "In the same day the Eternal made a covenant with
Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt
unto the great river, the river Euphrates." [Genesis 15:18] Zionists cite the
Bible as the source of their view that the actual borders of Israel must
extend from the Nile to the Euphrates, and that will be the operative
principle of Israeli foreign policy under the heirs of Jabotinsky. This
presents certain problems for Israel's amen corner in the US, which, slightly
queasy at the prospect of an outright nutcake at the Israeli helm, is now
putting out the "Nixon-to-China" line, which goes something like this: only a
hardliner like Sharon could sell an agreement to the troublesome Israeli
right-wing, while still maintaining his nation's security. Besides, they
assure us, once he's in power, he'll be forced to moderate his position.
Whether this is an outright lie, or else represents wishful thinking, matters
little: it is, in any event, a crock.
SEIZE THE TIME
After all, it isn't as if we have no knowledge of how he might act once in
office: as Israeli Foreign Minister, in 1998, days before he was scheduled to
negotiate with the Palestinians over the final status of the occupied
territories, Sharon "urged Jewish settlers to seize more land in the occupied
West Bank," the BBC reported. He declared that Israelis "should enlarge
existing settlements because everything they did not occupy would revert to
Palestinian control." In a speech to one of Israel's far-right parties,
Sharon exhorted his audience to seize the time: "Everyone should take action,
should run, should grab more hills," he told the political gathering. "We'll
expand the area. Whatever is seized will be ours. Whatever isn't seized will
end up in their hands. That's the way it will be...That's what must be done
now." [BBC 11/16/98]
COLLISION COURSE
"Whatever is seized will be ours" – this is the principle of Zionism in
practice, particularly of the Revisionist variant upheld by Israel's
far-right, and it has been the underlying premise of Israel's foreign policy
since its founding in 1948. Kept in abeyance by the political predominance of
the Labor party until recently, this overriding expansionist impulse puts
Israel on a collision course with the United States, which has every interest
in averting another all-out Arab-Israeli war. An important factor in the rise
of Sharon is his often flamboyant anti-Americanism, which thrills Israel's
right-wing nationalists, who see more clearly than anyone in the US that the
interests of Israel and its chief benefactor diverge. They cheered Sharon's
letter to then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright, in which he defended
his outrageously provocative visit to the Temple Mount:
"I wish to emphasize, Mrs. Secretary, that Prime Minister Barak has already
stated very clearly that every Israeli citizen, be it Arab or Jew, has a
right to visit any place which is under Israeli sovereignty. The united city
of Jerusalem, which you are all very familiar with, as well as The Temple
Mount, are under full Israeli sovereignty. Neither I, nor any Israeli
citizen, need to seek permission from the PA or from any foreign entity to
visit there or any other site which is sovereign territory of the State of
Israel."
I PAID FOR THAT COUNTRY!
Who are you Americans to tell us what to do in our own country? A reasonable
enough question for anyone to ask – except when it comes from a citizen of
Israel. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the answer is: we paid for that country!
From 1949 through October 31, 1999, American taxpayers have subsidized
Israel's socialist economy to the tune of nearly $92 billion – and, in spite
of phony promises that Israel is reducing its dependence on US aid, aid to
Israel is steadily increasing if you count the hidden subsidies.
ISRAEL VERSUS AMERICA
In any superpower-client state relationship there is bound to be a certain
amount of resentment, slowly building up over time, and in the case of the US
and Israel these tensions will have reached the breaking point with the
ascension of Sharon to power. During the campaign, he denounced Barak for
accepting "the American idea of handing over sovereignty of a large part of
the Old City to the Palestinians, offering them control of the Temple Mount,
an office for Arafat and free access without Israeli inspe
