[Mb-civic] A Calamity for Israel - Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Calamity for Israel

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 6, 2006; A19

The stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could prove 
to be one of the great disasters in the country's nearly 60-year 
history. As I write this, Sharon's condition remains uncertain, but the 
severity of his stroke makes it unlikely that he will survive, let alone 
return to power. That could be disastrous because Sharon represented, 
indeed embodied, the emergence of a rational, farsighted national idea 
that seemed poised in the coming elections to create a stable governing 
political center for the first time in decades.

For a generation, Israeli politics have offered two alternatives. The 
left said: We have to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. The right 
said: There's no one to talk to because they don't want to make peace; 
they want to destroy us, so we stay in the occupied territories and try 
to integrate them into Israel.

The left was given its chance with the 1993 Oslo peace accords. They 
proved a fraud and a deception. The PLO used Israeli concessions to 
create an armed and militant Palestinian terrorist apparatus right in 
the heart of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel's offer of an 
extremely generous peace at Camp David in the summer of 2000 was met 
with a savage terrorism campaign, the second intifada, that killed a 
thousand Jews. (Given Israel's tiny size, the American equivalent would 
be 50,000 dead.)

With the left then discredited, Israel turned to the right, electing 
Sharon in 2001. But the right's idea of hanging on to the territories 
indefinitely was untenable. Ruling a young, radicalized, growing Arab 
population committed to Palestinian independence was not only too costly 
but ultimately futile.

Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way. 
With a negotiated peace illusory and a Greater Israel untenable, he 
argued that the only way to security was a unilateral redrawing of 
Israel's boundaries by building a fence around a new Israel and 
withdrawing Israeli soldiers and settlers from the other side. The other 
side would become independent Palestine.

Accordingly, Sharon withdrew Israel entirely from Gaza. On the other 
front, the West Bank, the separation fence under construction will give 
the new Palestine about 93 percent of the West Bank. Israel's 7 percent 
share will encompass a sizable majority of Israelis who live on the West 
Bank. The rest, everyone understands, will have to evacuate back to Israel.

The success of this fence-plus-unilateral-withdrawal strategy is easily 
seen in the collapse of the intifada. Palestinian terrorist attacks are 
down 90 percent. Israel's economy has revived. In 2005, it grew at the 
fastest rate of the developed countries. Tourists are back, and the 
country has regained its confidence. The Sharon idea of a smaller but 
secure and demographically Jewish Israel garnered broad public support, 
marginalized the old parties of the left and right, and was on the verge 
of electoral success that would establish a new political center to 
carry on this strategy.

The problem is that the vehicle for this Sharonist centrism, his new 
Kadima Party, is only a few weeks old, has no institutional structure 
and is hugely dependent on the charisma of and public trust in Sharon.

To be sure, Kadima is not a one-man party. It immediately drew large 
numbers of defectors from the old left and right parties (Labor and 
Likud), including cabinet members and members of parliament. It will not 
collapse overnight. But Sharon's passing from the scene will weaken it 
in the coming March elections and will jeopardize its future. Sharon 
needed time, perhaps just a year or two, to rule the country as Kadima 
leader, lay down its institutional roots and groom a new generation of 
party leaders to take over after him.

This will not happen. There is no one in the country, let alone in his 
party, with his prestige and standing. Ehud Olmert, his deputy and now 
acting prime minister, is far less likely to score the kind of electoral 
victory that would allow a stable governing majority.

Kadima represents an idea whose time has come. But not all ideas whose 
time has come realize themselves. They need real historical actors to 
carry them through. Sharon was a historical actor of enormous 
proportion, having served in every one of Israel's wars since its 
founding in 1948, having almost single-handedly saved Israel with his 
daring crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and now 
having broken Israel's left-right political duopoly that had left the 
country bereft of any strategic ideas to navigate the post-Oslo world. 
Sharon put Israel on the only rational strategic path out of that 
wreckage. But, alas, he had taken his country only halfway there when he 
himself was taken away. And he left no Joshua.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/05/AR2006010501901.html?nav=hcmodule
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