LETTERS TO NY TIMES MAGAZINE

NO, ISRAEL HAS NOT BECOME "THE LARGEST GHETTO IN MODERN JEWISH HISTORY"

Published Letters on Sharon's Wars
New York Times magazine
August 29, 2004

James Bennet (Aug. 15) suggests that Ariel Sharon is blind to the "rising anti-Israeli-ism in what he sees as anti-Semitism." What is anti-Israeli-ism? Was there ever a parallel anti-Britishism? Anti-Italianism? Do people opposing Chinese policies define themselves as anti-Chinese? Doesn't this phenomenon of opposing the expression of Jewish self-determination require further examination, owing to its singularity?

Bennet blames Sharon for "bequeathing Israel an image that unsettles and distances Jews and non-Jews," for driving Israel to become "the largest ghetto in modern Jewish history. "Israelis have been living in a ghetto since the country was founded and repeatedly invaded by its neighboring countries. Inside the ghetto there is a vibrant democratic society, which maintains openness and tolerance in the face of an endless challenge, which no other democracy ever had to sustain.

Alon Ben-David
Tel Aviv

 

"Where Is Ariel Sharon Leading Israel?" Who knows? But as an old Zionist, I believe I know what his ultimate goal is. Growing up in Germany in the 1920's, I joined Kadima, a Zionist youth organization. Our goal, and the ultimate goal of every Zionist (including, no doubt, Ariel Sharon), has always been "Eretz Israel." This meant all of what was known as Palestine. What we Zionists did not foresee was the tenacity of the Palestinians to hold on to their land and not be subjugated.

In retrospect, I am no longer sure that our attempt in trying to resurrect an ancient utopian dream has been worth the carnage, the bulldozed homes, the homeless refugees, the uprooted orchards and now those concrete walls slicing through the Holy Land. Possibly the worst has been the loss of human dignity — for the conquered as well as the conqueror.

Si Lewen
New Paltz, N.Y.

 

In discussing the contentious issue of the wall/ fence, not a single sentence was dedicated to giving the statistics of pre- and post- numbers on suicide bombers in areas where it has been completed. Sharon is tough? Yeah. Does he get results? Yeah.

Sara Laor
Little Neck, N.Y.

 

Under a photograph of the barrier, a caption reads, "Good fences don't always make good neighbors.'' What it fails to say is that there were no good neighbors before the fence was built. The fence was intended to protect Israelis from suicide bombers, who, by most definitions, do not make good neighbors.

Ellen Schneider
Fort Lauderdale, Fla

 

SUMMARIZED EXTRACTS OF "SHARON'S WARS"

(Prepared by Tom Gross)

"SHAPING HIS STATE'S GEOGRAPHIC AND MORAL TERRAIN AND INTERNATIONAL IMAGE -- FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE -- HIS STORY HAS BECOME ISRAEL'S STORY"

"Sharon's Wars", (By James Bennet, New York Times magazine, August 15, 2004)

"... I was struck by an impression I had when I first passed through the layers of security and rounded the door into Sharon's living room. After all the anxious guards with guns, I found him sitting there quietly by himself, an overstuffed man in an overstuffed chair, an old man alone with his many memories.

So he might have been. It was not so long ago that Sharon and his memories of blood were the stuff of history and hysterical opposition to everything that seemed hopeful -- to the Oslo peace process, to the negotiations that brought Palestinians to the verge of statehood and Israelis to the verge of the safe, welcomed society they dreamed of.

When the Palestinian uprising brought his view of reality back into fashion, Sharon was ready. It was his chance to further, if not finish, the job he began after Latrun [56 years ago]: defining Israel's boundaries and its very identity.

... Today, his story has become Israel's story, and today's Israel -- with its won't-be-fooled-again attitude about any warm peace with Arabs -- is Sharon's Israel.

Now 76, Sharon can plausibly lay claim to having shaped his state's geographic and moral terrain and international image -- for better or for worse -- more than any other Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion. There is no single American figure to compare him with. He is Andrew Jackson, George Patton, Robert Moses.

... I asked him if he thought Israel's war of independence had ever ended... Sharon noted that unlike in 1948, Israel now has peace agreements with two of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. "But these are agreements between leaders,"' he said. "There is no peace between nations or peoples. And the main problem is that the Arabs are not ready yet -- I don't know if it will be in the future, I don't know -- but they are not ready to recognize the birthright of the Jewish people to have an independent Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people."

"On this issue," he said, "I don't see yet any change whatsoever." ... Sharon is not a religious man. Outside of his own experiences, his points of reference tend to be biblical, but their applications are territorial and tribal rather than spiritual. When I asked what it meant to him to live as a Jew, he spoke not about God but about history and place names: Jerusalem, Hebron, Mount Tabor -- names from the Bible still used for the same places today. "It's an unbelievable story," he said. "Because I think all of those old nations that were then, disappeared. Don't exist anymore. The Jews exist."

... The last Labor politician to take on Sharon and his vision of the conflict was Amram Mitzna, a former general and successful mayor of Haifa. A week before Sharon dealt Labor its most humbling defeat ever in national elections, in January of last year, I heard Mitzna outline his program in Haifa to a crowd of thousands of soldiers preparing to muster out of the army. Mitzna's agenda was quite close to the one Sharon is pursuing now, with two crucial differences: he favored immediate negotiations with the Palestinian leadership -- meaning Arafat -- along with an immediate withdrawal from Gaza. The second crucial difference was that Mitzna is not Sharon. As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi once told me, one reason Israelis elected Sharon initially was their faith that he would make concessions out of only absolute necessity, not out of ideology. "When Sharon budges, that means no one can stand against it," Ezrahi said.

... As Oslo fell apart, Gilady was studying the essence of the conflict in a search for a way out. He came to the conclusion that there might not be one. "This is an inconclusive conflict," he said. "It's a totally different phenomenon. And it's not just an Israeli problem." Looking at the second half of the 20th century, Gilady counted 160 wars. Fully 131 of them, he said, were not classic wars between states but conflagrations like those that consumed Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya. "Is it religious?" he asked. "Economic? Ethnic? I don't know. But there is a strong element of ideology, and you cannot bring them to an end quickly like a war you end with an army. It's a conflict you have to manage for a long time." To do that, he said, "you need legitimacy." First and foremost, the public must see the army as acting in a legitimate way, but the world must also back it up. The question was how to preserve that legitimacy while protecting Israel.

... Israel is trying to draw in Egypt and Jordan to serve as proxy states and, in effect, as guardians for the Palestinians. The plan drawn up by the security men -- though not endorsed by Sharon or his government -- even calls for Egypt eventually to cede land in the Sinai to the Palestinians in exchange for the territory Israel would gain in the West Bank. Egypt would gain a tunnel linking it by land to Jordan. That is a sign of how advanced, or maybe how wistful and abstract, the military establishment's thinking has become.

At its core, what the plan reveals is how utterly the army has come to reject the logic of Oslo. Oslo posited a peace agreement as the surest route to Israeli security. Peace would encourage joint ventures between the two peoples; it would give the Palestinians a path to a state and turn them against the militants who jeopardized it. Palestinians say that that proposition was never really tested. But Gilady does not see it that way. "It turned out to be the other way around," he said. "Not that peace will bring security but that security will bring peace."

... To be in Sharon's home is to be reminded -- not unintentionally -- that this most polarizing of world figures, this cartoon of Jewish strength or Jewish cruelty, is, after all, a person, a work of depth and complexity, satisfactions and sorrows, maybe more than his share. Sharon's first wife, Gali, died in a car crash in 1962. Five years later, just after the Six-Day War, their 10-year-old son, Gur, was accidentally killed.

... By then, Sharon had married his first wife's sister, Lily, and had two more sons. Lily Sharon died of cancer in March 2000, before Sharon was elected prime minister. Her influence lingers at the ranch. In the hallway, bridles for horses are arranged along the banister. In the living room, a bronze statue of a bull stands on one table and two bronze dancers pivot on another... In another room, one of Sharon's grandchildren wailed while he spoke. An armed Shin Bet guard stood just out of Sharon's line of sight in the hallway, watching me through the interview.

Sharon also understood, but did not mention to me, the political reality: Israelis might not believe they could negotiate a peace, but they also did not want their children to continue dying to protect a few settlers in Gaza. Sharon initially opposed a West Bank barrier, but he embraced it and turned it to his advantage when it became politically unstoppable.

... There was no plan under which Gaza would remain part of Israel, Sharon said. "I do not see a future for Jewish life there," he said.

... Sharon does want a peace agreement. But he wants the agreement that he wants -- a so-called long-term interim agreement. It is a kind of standstill arrangement. He wants the two sides to go to separate corners, cool off over many years and only then begin talking about the big issues, like Jerusalem. No credible Palestinian leader could agree to such a deferral of the Palestinian national dream. But Sharon may have picked his historical moment well enough, and maneuvered his allies and enemies skillfully enough, to impose it.

... "I think that if Israel will show weakness, it will be endless war... Sharon may be right. This could be the only way to secure Israel's survival as a Jewish haven. But it may mean a poignant legacy for this indomitable, secular Jew born into the Middle East: an Israel that is increasingly religious, walled off from its neighbors, simultaneously yearning after and fearing a Western community of nations that sees it as more and more foreign.

 

FULL ARTICLE

Sharon's Wars
By James Bennet
New York Times magazine
August 15, 2004

At the point where the twisting road from Jerusalem leaves the hills and straightens out on Israel's coastal plain, you turn south at Latrun junction for the drive to Ariel Sharon's ranch. On a rise to your left, set in olive groves, is the red-roofed Trappist monastery of Latrun. It has always been something of a surprise to me how lightly Israel's landscape, if not its people, wears its heavy past. From a car rushing along this modern highway, the only clue to the centuries of violence that envelop the Latrun hill is a limestone ruin on the crest, above the monastery. It is the remnant of a 12th-century Crusader fort. From that height, Christian soldiers, like the Romans long before them and the Arab Legion long after, controlled the routes from the Mediterranean coast and from Egypt to Jerusalem.

Sharon nearly died here. As a 20-year-old platoon leader, he joined in an ill-planned assault to take the hill and open the road to Jerusalem during the Arab-Israel war of 1948, the Israeli War of Independence. In a wadi barely visible from the road, where rushes now separate bright green vineyards from golden-brown fields of grain, he was pinned down for hours with his men. He was shot in the stomach and thigh. His radio was destroyed, and he did not hear the order to withdraw. It was only when he saw Arab soldiers on the hills behind him that he realized he and his remaining men had been left behind, alone.

Speaking with Sharon at his ranch one Sunday evening last month, I asked him if, when his motorcade passed by Latrun these days, he saw the wheat fields or the battle. He thought about the battle, he replied. "It was not wheat, it was barley," he said. "And it was a very hot day. And all around, it was burning." The fields were on fire. When he realized the predicament and gave the order to retreat -- to flee -- only 4 of 35 men were alive and unwounded. Sharon, bleeding from his own wounds, felt too weak to make it out.

"I was dead thirsty," he said. He was speaking English, a language in which he is not perfect but makes himself pungently clear. "I was so thirsty that I felt I'll not have power to, let's say, make this effort. Let's say it was the major effort that I've ever done."

Sharon dragged himself to the bottom of the gully, where the blood of the wounded mingled with the green scum on the muck. "I hesitated for one minute," he said. "Then I put my mouth into this mud there, and I drank -- I don't know -- I would say a very big quantity of this red-green mud."

He began to chuckle, not bitterly but warmly, with real mirth, as he did at other points in our conversation when speaking of something particularly dire. He was leaning back in a cushioned yellow armchair, dressed casually in sandals with Velcro straps, slacks and a blue shirt with the top two buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. "When I pass there, first of all, when I say I look at that, I remember what happened there -- this small story. I know it's a terrible thing. Because people will read it and they will say, 'Look, he drinks also blood.'" He began to laugh outright, shaking in his chair. "But I felt that I'll not be able to overcome that if I'll not drink this water there -- if I may call it water."

I was struck again by an impression I had when I first passed through the layers of security and rounded the door into Sharon's living room. After all the anxious guards with guns, I found him sitting there quietly by himself, an overstuffed man in an overstuffed chair, an old man alone with his many memories.

So he might have been. It was not so long ago that Sharon and his memories of blood were the stuff of history and hysterical opposition to everything that seemed hopeful -- to the Oslo peace process, to the negotiations that brought Palestinians to the verge of statehood and Israelis to the verge of the safe, welcomed society they dreamed of.

When the Palestinian uprising brought his view of reality back into fashion, Sharon was ready. It was his chance to further, if not finish, the job he began after Latrun: defining Israel's boundaries and its very identity.

It may be that nations need illusions to make peace. It may be, indeed, that illusions are among the most precious things we have. But Sharon does not believe a Jewish state can afford them. Today, his story has become Israel's story, and today's Israel -- with its won't-be-fooled-again attitude about any warm peace with Arabs -- is Sharon's Israel.

Now 76, Sharon can plausibly lay claim to having shaped his state's geographic and moral terrain and international image -- for better or for worse -- more than any other Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion. There is no single American figure to compare him with. He is Andrew Jackson, George Patton, Robert Moses.

In the 1950's, Sharon trained and led the commandos who established Israel's reputation for ruthless reprisals; in 1967, he won one of the most sensational battles of the Six-Day War; and in 1973, he envisioned and led the crossing of the Suez Canal that helped end the Yom Kippur War. He created, in 1973, the rightist Likud Party he now leads, which broke Labor's grip on Israel's governments; he led Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which formed and scarred a generation; he masterminded Israel's settlement movement, systematically planting enclaves of Jews among the Palestinians of the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Now, as prime minister, he is building a barrier against West Bank Palestinians that is the single biggest change in the land since the Six-Day War. And he is trying to tear down some of the Israeli settlements he built in Gaza and the West Bank -- something no Israeli prime minister has ever done. He is not doing this because he sees a path to imminent peace. Capitalizing on a White House that has chosen to view the world much as he does, he is trying to gird Israel for a conflict -- not merely with the Palestinians -- whose end he cannot foresee.

I asked him if he thought Israel's war of independence had ever ended. After all, I said, the world's attitude toward terrorism had changed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the American Army was now parked on the other side of Jordan in Iraq. More than half a century after Latrun, Israel, now a nuclear power, did not seem in danger of being driven into the sea.

Sharon noted that unlike in 1948, Israel now has peace agreements with two of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. "But these are agreements between leaders," he said. "There is no peace between nations or peoples. And the main problem is that the Arabs are not ready yet -- I don't know if it will be in the future, I don't know -- but they are not ready to recognize the birthright of the Jewish people to have an independent Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people." His voice rose as he delivered that last thought.

"On this issue," he said, "I don't see yet any change whatsoever."

As much or more than his predecessors, Sharon shucked the traditions of the Jewish Diaspora to develop a new Jewish warrior culture. In place of fear and the ghettos of Europe, he worked to substitute military power and an almost mythic territorial ambition. In place of religion and the prayerful dream of Jerusalem, he posited ethnic pride and possession of the land.

Sharon is not a religious man. Outside of his own experiences, his points of reference tend to be biblical, but their applications are territorial and tribal rather than spiritual. When I asked what it meant to him to live as a Jew, he spoke not about God but about history and place names: Jerusalem, Hebron, Mount Tabor -- names from the Bible still used for the same places today.

"It's an unbelievable story," he said. "Because I think all of those old nations that were then, disappeared. Don't exist anymore. The Jews exist."

Then he gave me an idea of what he sees in the landscape beyond his own battles. Referring to one of the ancient tribes of Israel, he said, "When I travel in, let's say, the mountains of the tribe Binyamin -- say the area of Ramallah or west of Ramallah -- you know, I used to close my eyes a little bit, so you don't see the electrical grids and all these things." He chuckled, this time at an obviously pleasant thought. "In my imagination, I always felt that I see those warriors of the tribe of Binyamin, you know, with spears, running there on those terraces."

He added: "And you know, those terraces that you see there -- terraces were not built by Arabs. These terraces are old Jewish terraces."

Sometimes it feels as if this conflict eludes capture by journalism, which must, more or less, grapple with reality as it finds it and enter earnestly into the logic of its subjects. There are days and places in Israel and the occupied territories that seem to warrant a more arch sensibility, an eyebrow cocked at the premises: satire could do it, maybe, or a Broadway musical. The thought -- maybe the rationalization -- occurred to me over lunch on a warm, sunny day in February. I was eating pizza at a plastic table on the brick patio of the Home Pizza Express restaurant. Home Pizza is in Ariel, a town of nearly 18,000 that would not look out of place in Southern California. It is a giant settlement smack in the center of the northern West Bank. (It was not named after Sharon; their common name means "lion of God.")

The restaurant had a mural of bygone American celebrities: Bogart, Elvis, Laurel and Hardy. The woman at the next table had a purse embroidered with roses and the message "Things grow with love." On the patio beneath my table glinted a stray, shiny bullet. Pinned to a nearby bulletin board was an advertisement that used a likeness of Abraham Lincoln to flog a 2,700-square-foot home. Sharon may have been planning to dismantle settlements in Gaza, but up the hill the cranes were working away, building new houses. The new development was called Ariel Heights.

Beyond Ariel's fence, just a couple of hundred yards and a galaxy away, was the Palestinian town of Salfit. I once cowered behind a gravestone there when Israeli soldiers at a post beside Ariel opened fire over the heads of mourners at a funeral.

"Can you imagine Israel without fear?" my lunch companion, Dror Etkes, asked. He wondered why a country with nuclear weapons could see its morale collapse "every time a bus explodes." He marveled that Israel could feel so powerful and so vulnerable at the same time, but he knew the reasons, the history of pogroms and genocide, well enough.

That was the key to understanding Sharon's appeal, Etkes said. "He recognized the deepest pathology of the Israeli people," he went on to say. "He understands the fears."

Etkes, who is 36 and wears a small gold loop through one ear, may be Ariel Sharon's worst nightmare. He is an Israeli, a Jew and a former paratrooper, and he knows the hills and wadis of the West Bank maybe as well as Sharon. But he concluded from his military service that the occupation was destroying Zionism and Israel, and now he bird-dogs the growth of settlements for the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now.

Sulfurous redoubts like the tiny Jewish settlement in Hebron and the ragged hilltop outposts are the soul of the settlement movement. But its body and brain are in sunny Ariel. The zealots get most of the media attention, and they draw far more of the Palestinian attacks. They distract the world, in other words. Meanwhile, Ariel, with its college and its emerald soccer field, its police headquarters and its commuters to Tel Aviv, expands steadily, with little notice paid. It is Ariel and the other giant settlements like it that Sharon is bidding to retain forever by giving up Gaza. The big blocks protect the strategic heights and the priceless aquifers beneath them that he most cares about, and they wall off Jerusalem. They also would break up any Palestinian state into pieces that could be easily monitored, and if necessary controlled, by Israel. From Ariel Heights, you can look to the east and see the pattern. Outposts are growing on each hilltop to link a zigzagging chain of Israeli settlement across the West Bank to the Jordan Valley. Sharon would like to hold onto half the West Bank, one of his top aides said, but does not expect to be able to keep that much in the end.

Etkes maintains that Israel is creating apartheid in the West Bank. Jews and Arabs live in parallel communities there now, with separate and unequal road networks, legal systems, opportunities and rights and with little contact with each other. "Ariel is the most Israeli town in Israel," he said with considerable asperity. When I asked what he meant, he leaned back in his chair and spread his arms to point in each direction. "The ignorance of people -- the full ignorance of what's going on 150 or 200 meters away on either side, living in a mental, cultural ghetto in the Middle East, not knowing who your neighbors are."

But for most Israelis now -- as always for Sharon -- Etkes has it backward. It is not that they do not know their neighbors; it is that they know them all too well. Now the typical Israeli response to any suggestion of a negotiated solution is a verbal roll of the eyes: you don't understand, they say; this is the Middle East.

For Palestinians, Oslo failed because Israel dragged its feet in ceding authority in the West Bank, while settlements there doubled in population to more than 200,000. For them, the Israeli offer in the Camp David talks of the summer of 2000 was a ploy, a stinting proposal to make the Palestinians look rejectionist. (The Palestinian leadership, of course, obliged.) For Palestinians, Sharon detonated this uprising with the provocative visit he made on Sept. 28, 2000, in the company of hundreds of policemen and soldiers, to the man-made plateau in Jerusalem that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount.

The Israeli version is, if anything, engraved more deeply: the Palestinians -- the Arabs -- never wanted peace. The conflict is not about Oslo, not about settlements, not even about the occupation that began in 1967. It is about any Jewish state in the region. To Israelis, Yasir Arafat walked away from Camp David because he wanted, and wants, to destroy Israel, not build a state beside it. Not only the suicide bombers but also the enduring chill of the quarter-century peace with Egypt undermined the premises of Israel's left, enabling Sharon to seize the political center and, through constant maneuvering, to hold it. Even a dove like Etkes has doubts that a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would necessarily mean peace. "If it turns out to be a zero-sum game," he said after we left Home Pizza for Jerusalem, "I prefer war from two sides of a wall to intensive occupation."

The last Labor politician to take on Sharon and his vision of the conflict was Amram Mitzna, a former general and successful mayor of Haifa. A week before Sharon dealt Labor its most humbling defeat ever in national elections, in January of last year, I heard Mitzna outline his program in Haifa to a crowd of thousands of soldiers preparing to muster out of the army. Mitzna's agenda was quite close to the one Sharon is pursuing now, with two crucial differences: he favored immediate negotiations with the Palestinian leadership -- meaning Arafat -- along with an immediate withdrawal from Gaza. The second crucial difference was that Mitzna is not Sharon. As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi once told me, one reason Israelis elected Sharon initially was their faith that he would make concessions out of only absolute necessity, not out of ideology. "When Sharon budges, that means no one can stand against it," Ezrahi said.

That night in Haifa when Mitzna made his case, the soldiers were not impressed. In Sharon's Israel, the young accuse the old of being dreamers. "He has a vision," a soldier named Asaf Mentzer, then 22, told me, "but it's not realistic in the Middle East. The political history of Israel shows that everyone who wants to take a step toward peace -- like Mitzna -- fails."

The failure of Oslo sent shock waves through the army, which is Israel's most politically and socially important institution, and prompted it to overhaul its own approach to the Palestinians. Like the rest of the society, the Israel Defense Forces are changing anyway, drawing their leadership less from the evaporating pool of secular kibbutz members and more from the rightist national religious community. But the army had bought into Oslo, and some generals later concluded that they had failed in their most basic mission, protecting Israel. It is a mistake they will not make again.

"I was one of those stupid guys," Brig. Gen. Eival Gilady said with a wry grin over dinner in May in Tel Aviv. Gilady, until recently the head of the Israel Defense Forces' strategic planning division, now advises the government on security and international matters. He still lives on his kibbutz, Cabri, in the Galilee. He has a boyish face and an easy smile beneath iron gray hair. The army considered him one of its most visionary thinkers. He is the intellectual father of the details of Sharon's disengagement plan.

As Oslo fell apart, Gilady was studying the essence of the conflict in a search for a way out. He came to the conclusion that there might not be one. "This is an inconclusive conflict," he said. "It's a totally different phenomenon. And it's not just an Israeli problem." Looking at the second half of the 20th century, Gilady counted 160 wars. Fully 131 of them, he said, were not classic wars between states but conflagrations like those that consumed Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya. "Is it religious?" he asked. "Economic? Ethnic? I don't know. But there is a strong element of ideology, and you cannot bring them to an end quickly like a war you end with an army. It's a conflict you have to manage for a long time." To do that, he said, "you need legitimacy." First and foremost, the public must see the army as acting in a legitimate way, but the world must also back it up. The question was how to preserve that legitimacy while protecting Israel.

A negotiated peace with Arafat had come to seem impossible to Gilady, but leaving things as they were seemed untenable. "I didn't think time was on our side," he said. The Palestinian population was growing at more than 5 percent a year, meaning Arabs would be the majority in Israel and the occupied territories within a few years. Israel might have to choose between its Jewish identity or its democracy. Further, the army's tactics -- forced upon it, in Gilady's view -- were only exacerbating the conflict. "The more we fight, the worse it is," he said. "The anger, the frustration, increases."

Gilady saw disengagement without an agreement as a way out of the trap for both peoples. As he helped map the route of the Israeli barrier, he found a way to keep around 75 percent of the settlers on the Israeli side while holding on to what he estimates to be about 11 percent of the West Bank. He insisted that the barrier was a reversible security measure, but he sees it as sending political messages: one, to the Palestinians, that there is a price in land to continuing the conflict; two, to the settlers, that there is less of a future for them on the Palestinian side of the line.

The army has mapped out Jewish and Arab enclaves on the West Bank, and the map is starting to come into focus on the ground. Israel has begun digging tunnels beneath Israeli-controlled zones to connect Palestinian areas with one another. The West Bank is shaping up as a Habitrail landscape of flyovers, underpasses and fenced enclosures teasing apart knotted populations in a cage slightly smaller than Delaware. Yet Gilady says he hopes that as Israeli checkpoints disappear from between the Palestinian areas, the anger will begin to ease and, eventually, peace will become possible. He calls this approach "transportation contiguity" or, in a koan for a region that generates very few of them, "everything flows."

There is a deeper game. Resolving the basic asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians -- one side has a state; the other does not -- may be a goal of Middle East peacemakers, but it is also one of the greatest obstacles to achieving it. The Israelis have a government capable of enforcing an agreement, but the Palestinian Authority, created by Oslo to do that job, has not proved strong enough. Israel is trying to draw in Egypt and Jordan to serve as proxy states and, in effect, as guardians for the Palestinians. The plan drawn up by the security men -- though not endorsed by Sharon or his government -- even calls for Egypt eventually to cede land in the Sinai to the Palestinians in exchange for the territory Israel would gain in the West Bank. Egypt would gain a tunnel linking it by land to Jordan. That is a sign of how advanced, or maybe how wistful and abstract, the military establishment's thinking has become.

At its core, what the plan reveals is how utterly the army has come to reject the logic of Oslo. Oslo posited a peace agreement as the surest route to Israeli security. Peace would encourage joint ventures between the two peoples; it would give the Palestinians a path to a state and turn them against the militants who jeopardized it. Palestinians say that that proposition was never really tested. But Gilady does not see it that way. "It turned out to be the other way around," he said. "Not that peace will bring security but that security will bring peace."

With that, the army had come to the same conclusion that one of its most storied generals reached many years ago.

My interview with Sharon was initially scheduled for a Thursday afternoon in Jerusalem at his official residence. As I arrived, Sharon was still at his office half a mile away. But the security men in blue smocks were dashing about with their compact submachine guns. There was something suspicious about the motor scooter parked across the street. The bomb squad had been called in.

I did not think much of it. False alarms happen all the time in Jerusalem. The previous Sunday night, outside my own home, the bomb squad had pulled up and used a remote-controlled robot to fire several shotgun blasts into what proved an innocent object.

But this alarm was very different. Sharon was delayed. Then the interview was canceled. Raanan Gissin, Sharon's spokesman, told me that a bomb had been found in the scooter, primed to be detonated remotely when Sharon's convoy passed. Later, I learned that the streets around the residence had been blocked off and that the Shin Bet security service, in a highly unusual move, had also thrown a security cordon around the prime minister's office. Sharon was spirited away in a helicopter to a secret refuge.

Yet there was not a word about the incident later in the Israeli media, which would normally cover such a disruptive alarm even if it was false. Four days later, as we drove together to the rescheduled interview, Gissin insisted that it was a false alarm after all, caused by a bicycle and not the scooter I saw the security men examining through binoculars.

The head of Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, says that Sharon now faces a very real threat from extremist Jews. Shin Bet has tightened security around him. Like the army, Shin Bet is trying to learn the lessons of what it sees as a terrible institutional failure: the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally by an Israeli Jew.

I was thoroughly searched before our car was permitted to pass the first steel gate into Sharon's Sycamore ranch, named for a thick stand of the trees, dark green in the dusk. The entrance is like an air lock: the first gate must close behind you before a second inner steel gate rises. "They've made him more a prisoner than ever," Gissin murmured as we pulled forward. Just ahead of us was a large pen holding hundreds of sheep, maybe the safest sheep in the world. A few geese wandered across our path.

The ranch is said to be the largest in Israel, but the house itself is a simple, homey affair. To be in Sharon's home is to be reminded -- not unintentionally -- that this most polarizing of world figures, this cartoon of Jewish strength or Jewish cruelty, is, after all, a person, a work of depth and complexity, satisfactions and sorrows, maybe more than his share. Sharon's first wife, Gali, died in a car crash in 1962. Five years later, just after the Six-Day War, their 10-year-old son, Gur, was accidentally killed. He was playing with an antique shotgun that a friend had brought Sharon from the newly occupied West Bank. No one knew it was loaded. Sharon heard the shot and found the boy, who died in his arms.

By then, Sharon had married his first wife's sister, Lily, and had two more sons. Lily Sharon died of cancer in March 2000, before Sharon was elected prime minister. Her influence lingers at the ranch. In the hallway, bridles for horses are arranged along the banister. In the living room, a bronze statue of a bull stands on one table and two bronze dancers pivot on another. The only nod to martial life that I noticed was a charcoal drawing on one wall of a line of weary-looking soldiers on patrol. "What a mensch" read an embroidered pillow on one couch. In another room, one of Sharon's grandchildren wailed while he spoke. An armed Shin Bet guard stood just out of Sharon's line of sight in the hallway, watching me through the interview.

"All my life, I defended Jews, and suddenly I find myself, you know, being defended against Jews," Sharon said. "I have been under the security organizations', I would say, protection, but that was against Arabs."

Sharon was preparing to meet the next day with his old ally Shimon Peres, the inevitable, indefatigable Labor Party leader, for talks about forming a new coalition government. His rightist coalition was cracking under the strain of his disengagement plan. Far-right ministers who hoped Sharon was bluffing or who thought they could restrain him were realizing he would not be stopped, and they were starting to bolt.

Sharon was looking to form at least a temporary coalition government anchored by Likud, Labor and Shinui, the centrist, antireligious party led by the 72-year-old Tommy Lapid. It would be a government of old lions -- Peres turns 81 today -- members of the generation that founded the state making a last attempt to secure it. But Sharon does not expect that coalition to last. A bloc of Likud, a party that officially opposes any Palestinian state, is in growing revolt. His aides say he expects to have to go to elections in the next year, before he can embark on his plan and begin uprooting the Israeli settlements in Gaza. Even if he fails in his plan or falls from office, Sharon has already taken a sledgehammer to a cornerstone rationale of the settlement movement. The father of the settlements has declared that remaining in Gaza weakens Israel. Now he is contemplating nothing less than an Israeli political realignment, one that would give political expression to the chastening of both the left and the right: it would accept the possibility of some limited form of Palestinian state but also the improbability of any peace with the Palestinians. This might mean a redefinition of Likud or the creation of a new centrist party. It does not matter to Sharon. He does not confuse means with ends. Armies, political parties and even settlements are merely tools.

As a young officer, Sharon was used by men like Moshe Dayan, who wanted to shield themselves politically and diplomatically from the consequences of their own vague orders, orders of the who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-archbishop variety. Sharon understood and accepted his role, and he learned from it. He is an instrumentalist, a user, and ruthless. He is accustomed, after all, to the necessity of sending men to their deaths. He admired, but never shared, the religious, totalizing zeal of the settlers he dispatched to the West Bank and Gaza. He seized on these zealots because he saw that the pioneering, secular Zionist tradition that had brought his own parents to settle the land of Israel was fading. Now he is quite willing to disappoint some of these religious settlers to hold onto the land he really cares about. When I asked if it pained him to hear himself condemned by Jewish settlers in Gaza, he said: "Look, it's not an easy thing. But I decided that is the right step that should be taken. I thought about that solely. I evaluated the situation. I believe that I found the right way, how to serve the interests of Israel."

The why of it -- the reason Sharon is taking these personal and political chances -- is a mystery only to those who have not bothered to listen to him. He is quite clear about his reasons.

In the 1950's, when Sharon was training Israel's first paratroopers, he made a study of ambushes. What was the best way to react? The answer was characteristic of Sharon: attack immediately -- regain, and retain, the initiative. As the cruel stalemate with the Palestinians wore on, Sharon feared that Israel risked losing the initiative. "I worried about the vacuum here," he said. Israeli and Palestinian doves were drawing up plans for deep concessions on both sides to demonstrate that there were pragmatists, potential partners, seeking a way out of the conflict. Sharon says he does not believe any partner exists. But he feared that if Israel was not moving on its own by pulling back from Gaza, the world would impose its own solution. "I saw that the pressures will be hard pressures on Israel," he said. "And I felt that even the United States will not be able, I would say, not to impose a plan on Israel if Israel is not making even the slightest step forward."

Sharon also feared the consequences of what had been, in fact, one of his own policies, Israel's attacks on the governing Palestinian Authority. With the help of foreign governments, the Palestinian Authority had taken over some tasks, like providing schooling, once performed by the occupying power -- and Sharon does not want those tasks back. "I did not think Israel should take upon itself the health and education and welfare and labor of three million Palestinians," he said. There are about 3.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Sharon also understood, but did not mention to me, the political reality: Israelis might not believe they could negotiate a peace, but they also did not want their children to continue dying to protect a few settlers in Gaza. Sharon initially opposed a West Bank barrier, but he embraced it and turned it to his advantage when it became politically unstoppable. Sharon has fixed goals, but he freely changes tactics. "You cannot defeat Jews," Sharon told me while speaking of the settlers. "You can maneuver them. You maneuver them; they maneuver you. I would say it's endless maneuvers."

There was no plan under which Gaza would remain part of Israel, Sharon said. "I do not see a future for Jewish life there," he said.

Last, and crucially, Sharon glimpsed an opportunity: to perpetuate Israel's hold on the parts of the West Bank that mean the most to him.

As he told the newspaper Ha'aretz in early April, he saw a chance to "do the things I want and to get an American commitment." Sharon did not want to negotiate concessions from the Palestinians. He wanted concessions from the Americans, in the form of a reversal of decades of policy in the Middle East. In exchange for Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan and evidence of some movement in the Middle East, President Bush promised that in any eventual peace deal Israel would be able to keep its large West Bank settlement blocks, like Ariel and its satellites. He also said that the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war, and their descendants, would never be able to live in what is now Israel.

Whether arising from hubris, hard experience or superior judgment, Sharon's ferocious pursuit of his own visions for Israel and the region previously brought him into collision with American administrations. While struggling to negotiate an end to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan's special envoy, concluded that Sharon was "the biggest liar this side of the Mediterranean" and a man whose "word was worth nothing." For his part, Sharon saw the Americans as pursuing an overly ambitious agenda, seeking to use Lebanon to solve problems throughout the Middle East.

It is not that Sharon objects to complex plans; he just prefers his own. As a general, Sharon clashed constantly with his superiors, but he drew up complicated battle plans that limited the flexibility of his commanders in the field and centralized authority in himself. That pattern reappeared in Lebanon, and it is playing out again today. In Lebanon, Sharon set a vaulting plan in motion with an invasion he sold to the Israeli public as limited, intended to clear the P.L.O. away from Israel's northern border. Then as now, he had several aims in mind. He wanted to crush the P.L.O, install a Christian-dominated government that he believed would make peace with Israel and bring forth what he envisioned as a tractable Palestinian leadership in the West Bank that would accept Israeli rule. The plan blew up in his face with the assassination of his chosen Lebanese president and then the massacre by Christian militiamen of Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli commission of inquiry later assigned Sharon indirect responsibility for the massacres.

In Bush, Sharon has occasionally feared he faced another president with an overambitious plan for the Middle East that might conflict with his own agenda. Three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Sharon gave a speech warning that the United States risked appeasing terrorists at Israel's expense the way Europe appeased Hitler by sacrificing Czechoslovakia in 1938. It was meant as a shot across Bush's bows. "What worried me was what might be," Sharon said when he called me two days later for a brief interview in which he expressed regret five times. It was my first clue that for Sharon words are also tactics, with regret deployed as easily as bluster.

A few months later, Sharon demonstrated to Bush that he did mean what he said when he declared he would never compromise what he considered Israeli security. As a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings reached a crest in March 2002, Sharon began Israel's largest offensive since Lebanon, sending ground forces sweeping through the West Bank. Bush demanded an immediate halt, but the army kept going. It was Bush, not Sharon, who gave way.

To Bush's most ambitious attempt to solve the conflict, the so-called road map to peace, Sharon applied what Israelis know well as his "yes, but" strategy. He did not rebuff the administration. He agreed to the plan, but then interpreted it in his own way. He attached conditions that changed it substantively. There was a lot that Sharon liked in the plan, including its endorsement of his demands for thoroughgoing Palestinian reform. But its timetable -- three years to a state of Palestine and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace -- was nowhere near Sharon's. Sharon's aides also did not think that the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, could succeed in curtailing Arafat's power and stopping the intifada. Israel, it should be said, took no real risks to help him. When Abbas failed and quit last fall, he blamed both Sharon and Arafat for undermining him. Sharon still has not removed the settlement outposts that he promised Bush more than a year ago he would dismantle under the road map.

Sharon built settlements in the first place because he rejected the idea of any quick solution to the conflict and wanted to make one impossible to achieve. "I thought it had to become impossible to give a fast, easy, clear-cut solution, because no solution of this sort could accord with the reality," he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, "Warrior."

It is not that Sharon does not want peace. He often says he wants peace more than other politicians who have not seen so much suffering and death. But Sharon does not put his trust in treaties. He still likes to quote words of advice he received from his mother in the early 80's, when he was negotiating with the Egyptians: "Do not trust them! You cannot trust a piece of paper!" When I asked him how he described Arabs as a nation, he asked me how long I had lived in the region. I replied three years. "I tell you it will be hard for you to understand that, and I must tell you that even for me -- and I was born here -- it's hard to understand," he said before pausing, evidently for emphasis. His voice rose: "This area here, it's an empire of lies. It's an empire of lies. They look into your eyes and lie. It's very hard for you to understand. It's very hard for us to understand. But that is the situation here. Therefore, you have to be careful. Here, in this region here, declarations, speeches, words, are worthless."

Sharon does want a peace agreement. But he wants the agreement that he wants -- a so-called long-term interim agreement. It is a kind of standstill arrangement. He wants the two sides to go to separate corners, cool off over many years and only then begin talking about the big issues, like Jerusalem. No credible Palestinian leader could agree to such a deferral of the Palestinian national dream. But Sharon may have picked his historical moment well enough, and maneuvered his allies and enemies skillfully enough, to impose it.

In the 50's and 60's, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, took a shine to the brash leader of Israel's commandos. Much to the irritation of Sharon's superior officers, Ben-Gurion would invite him for private chats in his office or even his home. Ben-Gurion's papers reflect a fatherly interest in Sharon, whom he referred to as Arik and whose roguishness both charmed and worried him. During this period, Ben-Gurion was in his 60's and then 70's, Sharon in his 20's and then 30's. Their chats followed a tender pattern. Sharon would describe and sometimes defend his exploits. He would complain about his superiors. While lending a sympathetic ear, Ben-Gurion would gently relay to Sharon some of those officers' concerns, and his own, about Sharon's behavior. Prodded by Israel's white-haired founder, Sharon would admit that he lacked discipline and even that he lied, sometimes to Ben-Gurion himself.

"An original, visionary young man," Ben-Gurion noted on Jan. 29, 1960. "Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional military leader."

On Nov. 24, 1958, Ben-Gurion recorded an unusual encounter with Sharon. Sharon was just back from 13 months of military study in England. "This was the first time he met with Jews, and he is anxious about the future of our relations with them," Ben-Gurion wrote in his journal. By "Jews," he meant non-Israeli Jews living in the Diaspora. Born and raised in what is now Israel, Sharon had not encountered such Jews before.

"The Jews in England are not accepted in the English clubs and golf courses, and they have to situate themselves in Jewish institutions," Ben-Gurion wrote, recounting Sharon's impressions. Sharon, he continued, was astonished that these Jews nevertheless did not feel "any personal connection of any kind with Israel."

It was an insight with a great impact on Sharon. He still speaks about it. When I quoted the passage from Ben-Gurion, it triggered an 18-minute monologue about his fears for the survival of the Jews. "I have many worries, but something that really bothers me is what will happen with the Jews in the future -- what will happen to them in 30 years' time, in 300 years' time, and with God's help, 3,000 years' time." He laughed. "But I don't think that then I'll have to take care of that."

Returning to his stay in England, he recalled how British officers aimed their anti-Semitism at British Jews but not at Israelis. "It was a kind of an attempt to draw a distinction between Israel and Israelis and 'their own Jews,' I would say -- Jews in the Diaspora," he said.

"That worried me," he continued. "It worried me. I didn't like it." He added, "I felt it's going to be a danger."

That is classic Sharon: the sweep of the sense of duty, the depth of the tribal consciousness, the sensitivity of the antennae to any threat, maybe real, maybe merely perceived. He regards Israel as a worldwide Jewish project, and he did not want to see any divergence in the Israeli and Jewish identities.

After a few years, Sharon thought the problem went away. "I would say the European countries -- maybe others as well -they started to treat us as Jews," he said. In other words, the danger receded as European Christians began treating Israeli Jews with the same prejudice with which they treated Jews at home. It seemed an odd source of comfort.

Sharon plowed on. A Jew, he said, can only "live as a Jew" in Israel. There were many fewer mixed marriages, he said. "All the time I worry -- and I check it all the time -- that Jews, I would say, might disappear," he said. That is, the threat to Jews' survival exists if they are physically in danger or not. If they are safe and welcomed where they are, they are threatened with assimilation.

Sharon explained that he regularly told Jews in the Diaspora that if Israel were to grow weaker or disappear, "the Jews around the world will not be able to have the lives that they are having now."

Then he summed up: "So, all that, I would say, brings me to think that the main goal of the state of Israel is immigration." He wants to bring another million Jews to Israel in the next 15 years.

Sharon views Jews around the world and in Israel as under threat from rising anti-Semitism. Two days before I saw him, the World Court in The Hague condemned as illegal those segments of Israel's new barrier that stand inside the West Bank. Sharon saw the decision as pure evil. I asked what he thought it would take for Israel to be fully accepted in the world. "Not to exist as an independent state, maybe," he shot back. "Look, it's a Jewish state inhabited by Jews. Not patronized. Maybe the world would have accepted patronized Jews." A week later, he declared that the "wildest anti-Semitism" was on the rise in France, and he urged French Jews to move immediately to Israel.

It may be that the world is blind to the anti-Semitism that feeds its criticism of Israel. But Sharon appears blind -- maybe willfully so -- to the rising anti-Israeli-ism in what he sees as anti-Semitism. The World Court did not rule against Jews. It ruled against Israel, and the fact is that the barrier is built partly on occupied land.

Despite the danger Sharon sees for Jews abroad, new immigrants are barely trickling to Israel -- 24,652 came last year. And more may be leaving Israel each year. (There are no hard numbers.) Sharon's associates point out that no one predicted in the 1980's that nearly a million Jews from the former Soviet Union would arrive in the 1990's. But to reach those levels Israel will need a large contribution from the only country other than itself with five million Jews -- the United States -- and there is little hint of that.

The divergence Sharon glimpsed in England and came to fear half a century ago is becoming obvious. A clear Israeli identity has emerged, and it is steadily drifting from the identity of Jews in the United States and Europe. "We're moving from being brothers to being cousins," one of Sharon's close advisers acknowledged, speaking about the Americans. "And in the next generation we will be distant cousins with some sense of shared history."

Sharon bears much of the responsibility for bequeathing Israel an image that unsettles and distances Jews and non-Jews overseas. As with so much else, this was a pattern he set early. One raid that Ben-Gurion called him in to explain was his attack in 1953 on the village of Qibbiya in the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan. Sharon was retaliating for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers. He later said that he and his men believed that the 45 houses they blew up over several hours were empty. But 69 Arabs were killed, about half of them women and children. The killings brought Israel its first condemnation from the United Nations Security Council. (In his autobiography, Sharon wrote that Ben-Gurion told him that the raid would serve as a warning to other Arabs.)

Then and now, Sharon's use of force may have stirred some who longed for Jewish power and reassured many that Israel would remain a shelter in an unpredictable world -- the only place, as Sharon puts it, where "Jews can defend themselves by themselves." But it also dismayed those who hoped Israel might be a moral beacon, or just that it would become a normal nation accepted like any other.

At the same time, the West is where Israel sees its future. This is the ultimate meaning of the withdrawal from Gaza and the barrier. The disengagement plan is an attempt to turn Israel's back on its region and reach westward toward the European Union and the United States. From long before Oslo, Israelis dreamed of integration with their neighbors into a new Middle East. Now they are willing to wait. Maybe the Palestinians will eventually come around and form a democratic, pacifist government. Maybe not. It does not matter.

This same Sharon adviser said the barrier was both "a physical and a mental wall" and that the mental component was more important. "What we really want is to turn our backs on the Arabs and never deal with them again," he said, summarizing what he considers the prevailing Israeli view. "We don't want to be accepted into the Middle East anymore." Another top adviser said of Sharon's plan: "It could help the Palestinians. It could hurt them. We don't care."

When both sides can sustain their finest illusions about each other, as the Israelis and Palestinians could for a while under Oslo, reality has a way of rising to meet them. There was a day when Israeli Jews went to Palestinian jazz clubs in Ramallah. Fear follows a more certain road to fulfilling itself. The extremists who kill off illusions will staunchly protect this route. If you believe you have no peace partner and act as if you do not, you will have no peace partner.

When I asked Sharon if he still believed, as he once wrote, that it was possible to instill a "psychology of defeat" in the Arabs, he turned his head to me and stared. "No," he said after a silence, speaking slowly for emphasis. "I think that if Israel will show weakness, it will be endless war."

Sharon's methods of demonstrating strength -- the invasions and blockades of entire cities, the plotted killings of militants, the mass arrests and detention of young men -- have devastated the Palestinians. Rabin believed in fighting terror as if there were no negotiations and negotiating as if there were no terror; by doing away with that second thought -- with, it sometimes seems, any second thoughts -- Sharon has reassured Israelis that they can rebuff the blows of terrorists. But he has left the Palestinians with no dignified exit from the conflict, weakening their pragmatic leaders. It is not only Israelis who say they have no peace partner.

And it is not only Palestinians whose hopes have dimmed. Sharon has largely transferred the conflict from Israeli cities to the occupied territories. But even if he manages to withdraw from Gaza, Israel will remain a nation always on guard and often on offense. It will remain a nation with support groups for parents whose children are enforcing an occupation they would rather not think about. When a soldier forces a Palestinian to strip at a checkpoint or when a soldier demolishes a Palestinian's home, not only the Palestinian suffers and not only the Palestinian may harden.

Sharon told me that "if circumstances would have been different," he would probably have chosen farming rather than a military career. Drawing his nation into implicit parallel, he added that he would have preferred that Israel be known as one of the world's leaders in in-vitro fertilization, that is, as a giver of life. "I would have liked that Israel will be known not for being warriors," he said.

That is a sentiment Sharon expresses fairly often. It is hard to know, as the words come out, how deeply he feels them. He had good reason to accept and even embrace a garrison society as Israel's fate long ago. It is harder for other Israelis to come to terms with it now. They still dream of an Israel that is more about the blithe spirits of Tel Aviv than the ghosts of Jerusalem, more about the dancers on the table in Sharon's living room than the weary soldiers patrolling along his wall.

Because it scorns negotiation and agreement, Sharon's long-term interim arrangement is an acceptance of, and maybe a goad to, enduring conflict -- almost surely at a lower level, but sustained. As this conflict grinds on, Israel will no doubt remain morally alert -- morally conflicted, as demonstrated by the soldiers who refuse to serve in the territories -- but it will also remain morally compromised in the eyes of the world. Its back to the rest of the Middle East, its face to the Mediterranean, Israel could become "the largest ghetto in modern Jewish history," in the words of Ezrahi.

Sharon may be right. This could be the only way to secure Israel's survival as a Jewish haven. But it may mean a poignant legacy for this indomitable, secular Jew born into the Middle East: an Israel that is increasingly religious, walled off from its neighbors, simultaneously yearning after and fearing a Western community of nations that sees it as more and more foreign.

FULL STORIES

WAVES OF JOY

Waves of joy
By Joe Posnanski
The Kansas City Star
August 26, 2004

First-ever gold medal gives Israel something to celebrate, a positive Olympic memory in the face of '72 tragedy

ATHENS, Greece — Wednesday evening, under a golden Greek sunset, in an amphitheater by the Saronic Gulf, the Israeli flag was raised in triumph for the first time at the Olympics. Gal Fridman had won a gold medal in windsurfing mistral. All around him, people waved Israeli flags and chanted "Hail, Hail, Israel." In Israel, people cried.

It was the first-ever Olympic gold medal for Israel.

"What does it mean?" asked Israel's IOC member, Alex Gilady, the man who wrapped the gold medal around Fridman's neck. "It means everything."

Moshe Weinberg was an Israeli wrestling coach. He was 33 years old and had just been married. On Sept. 5, 1972, at the Munich Olympics, terrorists from a group called "Black September" knocked on his door. He shouted for others to run and was shot in the cheek. A few moments later, he jumped on the back of a terrorist who was shooting at wrestler Gad Tsabari. Weinberg was then shot and killed. His body was dumped out on the sidewalk as proof that Black September meant business.

They cut into regular television programming Wednesday in Israel. "We won!" newscasters shouted out on every channel. On the radio, there was no music playing. There were only disc jockeys trying their best to describe what Gal Fridman had done, what he had accomplished, how it made them feel.

At Yediot Ahronoth, the biggest newspaper in Israel, they planned to dedicate the first seven pages of the paper to the gold medal.

"I can't believe he won," Gal's mother Dganit told reporters in the moments after people surrounded her house. "I am still waiting for him to tell me."

Joseph Romano was a weightlifter born in Libya. He was coach and manager of the Israeli team. On that fateful day in September, he tried to hold the door so others could escape. He was shot, and he later died from the wounds.

On Wednesday, Gal Fridman was whisked from interview to interview, camera to camera, and he seemed overwhelmed by it all. He was asked, more than once, to comment on the quirky fact that his name "Gal" is Hebrew for "Wave."

"That's some name for a windsurfer," he was told time and again.

"Yes," he said.

Then, when asked what this gold medal meant to his country, he said simply: "I'm very proud to do this for Israel. Very proud."

David Berger was a lawyer, born in America, who moved to Israel so he could become an Olympic weightlifter. Eliezer Halffin was a 24-year-old wrestler born in the Soviet Union. Ze'ev Friedman was a gymnast first, then a weightlifter. Andrei Schpitzer was 27 and was spending his life teaching fencing in Israel. Amitsur Shapira, 40, was perhaps the country's greatest ever short-distance runner in his youth, and then the track and field coach. Yaakov Springer was a weightlifting referee. Joseph Gottfreund was a weightlifting referee. Kahat Shor was the oldest at 53 years old. He was the shooting coach.

All of them were killed on that day in September.

After the flag was raised, and the Israeli national anthem "Hatikvah" ("The Hope") played, Israelis rushed the medal stand. They wanted to have their photos taken with Gal Fridman. They wanted to hug him. They shouted "Yofi" meaning "Wonderful," and "Mazel Tov," which does not translate well to English. It means something deeper than "Congratulations."

Their joy overpowered the amphitheater. In a corner, there were several serious-looking security guards who were looking for a way to get Gal Fridman out. Not far away, were soldiers ready to seal off the area. When it comes to Israel, nothing is safe.

"This is very special," Gilady would say. "But we know this cannot change the big things. It is still very difficult in Israel. This only brings a little bit of joy."

Mark Slavin was 18 years old. He was the best athlete of them all. Just that year, he had won the Soviet Greco-Roman Wrestling Championships. He had come to Munich with dreams of winning a medal. They told him he was young and would have other chances. He died at the airport along with the eight other Israelis taken hostage. In all, 11 Israelis died. Three members of Black September survived. They never faced trial.

On the first day of these Olympics, the Israeli Olympic team walked into the Olympic Stadium to icy silence. On the third day, an Iranian judo star named Arash Miresmaeili did not make weight rather than fight an Israeli, Ehud Vaks. Miresmaeili was suspended, but no other disciplinary action was taken against either Miresmaeili or the Iranian Olympic Committee. On the sixth day, Ankie Spitzer — widow of Andrei, the fencer, spoke at a ceremony honoring the 11 who died in Munich. Only about 200 people showed up, many of them Israeli athletes.

"For families of innocent victims," Spitzer said. "it seems like only yesterday."

On the 12th day, Gal Fridman became the first Israeli to ever win an Olympic gold. The anthem played, and Israelis waved flags, and soldiers made certain no one got too close. Fridman then dedicated his medal to the 11 athletes who were murdered in Munich 32 years ago. He said he would go to the athletes' memorial in Tel Aviv.

"I'll go," he said, "to show them the gold medal."

 

OLYMPICS FINALLY A SOURCE OF GREAT JOY FOR ISRAEL

Olympics finally a source of great joy for Israel
By Ian O'Connor
USA Today
August 26, 2004

sports.yahoo.com/oly/news;_ylc=X3oDMTBpcmc2NWVyBF9TAzI1NjY0ODI1BHNlYwNvZQ--?slug=usatoday-olympicsfinallyasourceo&prov=usatoday&type=lgns

With a half moon rising behind him, and an orange sun plunging beneath the Saronic Gulf before him, Gal Fridman stood where no Israeli man or woman had ever set foot. He was on top of an Olympic platform, on top of the world, when the anthem started playing and the people started crying and the 32-year-old memory of 11 murdered athletes and coaches finally climbed up a Summer Games flagpole for everyone to see.

It was 8:04 p.m. in the small amphitheater when the public address announcer read these historic words: "Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem of Israel." On cue, two young Athenians dressed in white, Panayiotis Mitrou and Kostas Leontaritis, sent up Israel's flag to the sounds of Hatikvah, the Hebrew word for hope.

"We're very proud to do this for Israel," Leontaritis would say. "Every country should be treated the same."

Yes, the same. What the Israelis would give to be treated the same. What they would give for Iranian athletes to compete against theirs, fair and square, rather than forfeit as a means of declaring Israel a counterfeit state.

What the Israelis would give to negotiate their compound without the top-secret agents, the extra fencing, the heavier legacy of blood spilled and dreams stolen in the night.

"When you come to the Olympics," said Zvi Varshaviak, president of Israel's Olympic Committee, "you remember the 11 that the terrorists killed (in Munich). Now they want to kill us, and we show that we are here, and we have the gold medal."

Israel's first gold medal in any Olympic sport. Fridman won it Wednesday in windsurfing, the men's mistral, before jumping into the water and emerging to say that he won the race for countrymen who died before he was born, countrymen taken by hooded and masked Palestinian terrorists who would fly them out of the Games and into their graves.

"I hope that they are happy up there," Fridman said. "When I return to Israel, I'll go to the memorial place to show them the gold medal."

Fridman didn't weep on the highest Olympic stand. He was too busy smiling, scanning the crowd, and singing the anthem while wearing his nation's blue and white flag as a cape, the Star of David resting against his back.

Hundreds of Israeli witnesses weren't nearly as composed. Men and women waving their flags sobbed as they sang along with Fridman. The venue operators played the anthem at a faster pace than it was meant to be heard, leaving the Israelis struggling to keep up. A simple rookie mistake: Olympic officials had never before played this song.

The anthem ended at 8:06, and the party began. Horns blared in the stands. Delirious fans chanted, "Hey, hey, Is-ra-el." Greek fans had come to celebrate their silver medalist and caldron lighter, Nikolaos Kaklamanakis, but they were outdone by the Israelis bent on turning the ceremony into a bar mitzvah.

The fans couldn't remain in the stands with their cameras. No, they rushed the podium and joined Fridman on gold-medal ground. Somehow, some way, half of Tel Aviv danced with the champion on a platform meant to hold one stationary adult.

Security officials were powerless against this flood of fans. Their manic attempts to gain control around Fridman spoke to the sense of permanent crisis engulfing the Israelis, as did the ultra-thorough bag checks performed at the venue's gates. Uniformed Greek soldiers even marched in to form a protective wall between Fridman and the reporters armed with notebooks and microphones trying to interview him.

Ultimately, fear would strike out.

"An amazing event," said Yossi Shabi, a flag-waving Israeli fan. "This is a time for all of Israel to come together. With so much war going on, this is a time to celebrate history."

And a time to honor the past.

"This is a great way to make a tribute to the Munich victims," said Baruch Ingberg, a 48-year-old Tel Aviv resident. "But I don't believe Olympic officials will ever mention it in opening ceremonies. It's not fair, but they won't do enough for the victims' memories. This is the world. You have to be Israeli to understand."

Fridman understood. The Israeli team had made a pre-Games pilgrimage to the Tel Aviv monument to those slain in Munich. For too long, Olympic officials have tried to wish away their worst hour, refusing even to admit that the choice to resume the '72 Games was a horrible mistake.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, a member of the Belgian sailing team at the Munich Games, spoke at a memorial service here last week, finally showing the respect for the victims his predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch, never showed.

"I don't get into politics," Fridman said. "I don't understand that stuff. ... The only thing I can want is, I would love to bring peace to Israel. The fight (should) stop in the water.

"If you fight someone, fight him in sport to prove you are better, not in different ways. This is our job as athletes, to show the other side of the Israeli people. We want peace. All of my friends I know want peace."

Fridman talked of a Turkish friend he called "my Muslim brother," a friend who in turn called Fridman "my Jewish brother." The windsurfer whose first name means "wave" in Hebrew couldn't understand the decision by Iran's world judo champ, Arash Miresmaeili, to refuse to compete against Israel's Ehud Vaks. Fridman couldn't understand how Iranian president Mohammad Khatami could say Miresmaeili's forfeit should go down "in the history of Iranian glories."

"Only (Miresmaeili) is losing," Fridman said.

Israel was winning yesterday, its streets overflowing with first-place spoils. Israeli president Moshe Katsav and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon called Fridman about the mass hysteria he had inspired back home.

"(Sharon) said the whole country stopped for two hours at noon when the racing starts," Fridman said. "Everyone was watching everywhere - in the cafes, the restaurants, stores and houses. Everyone was just watching TV and waiting for the gold."

Fridman almost wasn't around to give it to them. A bronze medalist at the '96 Atlanta Games, he quit the sport for two years after failing to qualify for the 2000 Sydney Games.

He made a comeback just in time to give his 56-year-old nation its greatest sports achievement in a country known for its pro-Palestinian bent. As the Israeli delegation entered Olympic Stadium here during opening ceremonies, a cold hush swept over the crowd.

But Wednesday night, there was nothing cold or hushed about a ceremony on the shores of the Saronic Gulf.

"It's a gold medal for all the people of Israel," Fridman said. "We think about the people who were trying to do their best in sport and were murdered, and we hope that this will never happen again."

The Israelis sang and cried and danced. Thirty-two years too late, a proper Olympic tribute was paid to their dead.

 

AN OLYMPIC COMPETITOR BOYCOTTS ISRAEL WITH IMPUNITY

And Nobody Cries Foul: An Olympic competitor boycotts Israel, with impunity.
By Franklin Foer
The Wall Street Journal
August 20, 2004

The Olympic Games are, of course, more than just games. As Bob Costas and the event's organizers constantly remind the world, they are a festival of humanity, a great coming together, the one moment when the planet gathers in a friendly spirit of healthy competition. Dogging your viewing of pummel-horse routines and synchronized diving, there is ample talk of the "Olympic movement," a phrase intended to highlight these aspirations.

Last week, however, as the Athens Games got under way, an Iranian judo champion exposed the hollowness of this rhetoric. Rather than compete against an Israeli, Arash Miresmaeili quit the Olympics entirely. As the jukoda told the Iranian government's official news service: "I refuse to fight my Israeli opponent to sympathize with the suffering of the people of Palestine, and I do not feel upset at all." His one-man boycott earned him encomiums from President Mohammad Khatami. According to reports, the Iranians planned on rewarding Mr. Miresmaeili with $115,000, the purse handed out to gold medalists.

Under Olympic protocol, such ad hoc political boycotts are forbidden. (The prohibitions placed on South Africa's apartheid-era teams, by contrast, were official and the product of international consensus.) They fly in the face of everything the Olympic movement proclaims about sportsmanship and fellowship. Indeed, if the Iranians had owned up to their intentions and the Olympics officials had felt inclined to follow their own rules, the country would have been subject to stiff sanctions.

But facing the prospects of punishment, Mr. Miresmaeili turned coward. Just before his match against the Israeli, he seems to have binged on food, stuffing himself to the point that he no longer fit his weight class, earning an automatic disqualification. Rather than taking Mr. Miresmaeili to task for his stated political stunt, Olympics officials have accepted his highly contrived alibi. The Iranians will apparently pay no price for their transgression.

Unfortunately, this is a typical tale. Israel continually suffers sporting boycotts, and officials, Olympic and otherwise, continually turn a blind eye toward this injection of politics into sport.

Ever since Israel's founding, some Muslim nations have refused to compete against the Jewish state. In 1962, when Indonesia hosted the Asian Games, it chose to officially cancel the event rather than permit Israeli participation. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the boycott intensified and has come to permeate almost every venue. Earlier this year, for instance, Israeli fencers were initially not allowed to attend that sport's world cup in Jordan. Organizers feared that the mere presence of Israelis would cause the entire Muslim world to drop out. (Jordan ultimately caved in to international pressure and invited Israelis.) Even the mentally impaired have suffered this exclusion. At last year's Special Olympics in Ireland, both Saudi Arabia and Algeria refused to play Israel in soccer and table tennis.

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia has been one of the leading proponents of the boycott. In 2002, Prince Sultan signed a letter endorsing an Arab Football Federation proposal to ban Israeli competition in all international soccer matches. And when the Saudi Nabeel Al-Magahwi refused to play an Israeli at the 2003 world table-tennis championship in Paris, he became a cause célèbre. "In addition to the great support I received from government officials, residents and expatriates, I have received a special certificate from the Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that I'm very proud of," Mr. Al-Magahwi told a news conference.

Even as the Bush administration has applauded Libya's baby steps toward reform, the Gadhafi family has been another boycott stalwart. Earlier this summer, it refused to let Israeli chess players attend the world championship in Tripoli. (Chess's governing body is affiliated with the International Olympic Committee.) Because the colonel's sons are sports fanatics, the country has aggressively lobbied to host other major events. But it dropped its bid to bring the 2010 soccer World Cup to Libya rather than provide the International Soccer Federation with assurances that Israeli players and fans would be granted visas.

This boycott has created a garbled sporting geography. In soccer, for instance, Israel doesn't compete against other Asian teams for a World Cup berth. International soccer officials have placed Israel in the European federation. (For a time, Israel was forced to compete even further afield, in the Oceania division against Australia and New Zealand.) Unfortunately, this means that Israel must beat the likes of Italy and France to make its way to the World Cup--a far fiercer set of opponents than it would face in Asia. Despite having some great players and solid teams, Israel hasn't qualified for the quadrennial tournament since 1970.

But there are good reasons for Israel to play against its Mideast neighbors. On the one hand, the high-toned Olympic rhetoric has truth to it. Sport can bring nations closer. The soccer player Haim Revivo, one of the best Israeli athletes of his generation, has starred for the clubs Galatasaray and Fenerbahce in Turkey. He has become nearly as beloved a figure in that Muslim nation as the Jewish one. That's not to mention the Arabs who play for Israeli clubs like Maccabi Haifa and even represent Israel in international competitions.

On the other hand, sports can provide a relatively harmless vehicle for letting off political steam. During the shah's reign, Iran was the one Muslim nation that bucked the boycott. For a time, the masses could go into the stadium and root hard against Israeli teams and athletes. Naturally, nasty slurs echoed through the crowds. But the events may have also helped buy the government leeway to pursue a friendlier policy toward Israel. According to one strand of folklore, the Israelis aided their friend the shah by intentionally losing soccer matches against his teams.

Of course, if international sports officials wanted to, they could easily stamp out the anti-Israel boycott. As punishment, athletes could suffer long bans from competition. In the context of the Olympic movement's gentle treatment of genuine dictatorships, this inaction becomes even more obscene.

International sports bureaucrats, it should be remembered, turned a blind eye to Uday Hussein's treatment of his athletes. During his tenure as head of Iraq's soccer federation, Saddam's son subjected losing players to the worst torture. His goons would drag players across pavement until their bare feet turned raw. Then the players were forced to jump in raw sewage. Even though these human-rights abuses were amply documented, Olympic and soccer officials never really voiced a substantial complaint against them.

Olympic officials, however, have sent Israel a clear message. Two years ago, representatives from various Olympic federations gathered in Kuala Lumpur to prepare for Athens. There were 199 flags, including the Palestinian standard, hanging in the hotel ballroom. Sadly, one was missing.

(Mr. Foer, a senior editor at the New Republic and a contributing editor at New York, is the author of "How Soccer Explains the World.")

FULL ARTICLES

MARK STEYN: BLAME THE UN CHEERLEADERS

Mark Steyn: Blame the UN cheerleaders
The Australian
July 26, 2004

I see the next decade's "Never again" story is here. Just as we all agreed the 1994 Rwandan genocide should never be allowed to happen again, so - in a year or two - we'll all be agreed that another 2004 Sudanese genocide should never be allowed to happen again.

But right now it is happening, and you can't help wondering where all the great humanitarians are. Alas, Sudan doesn't seem to have much appeal to them, lacking as it does the crucial Bush angle and affording little opportunity for use of words such as "neocons" and "Halliburton".

In the Fairfax press, Robert Manne is still too busy fighting the last war - "Iraq is the greatest disaster in the recent history of US foreign policy. Nothing is more important than to try to understand how this catastrophe occurred." And if that means rehashing the same old column backwards and sideways for another two years - WMD, Andrew Wilkie, neocons, Cheney - he's prepared to do it.

There's an old, cynical formula for the prominence accorded different disasters by American editors. It runs something like: one dead American equals 10 dead Israelis equals 100 dead Russians equals 1000 dead Africans. But, to the average progressive columnist in the Western world, what matters is who killed you. 30,000 dead Sudanese don't equal one Iraqi prisoner being led around Abu Ghraib on a dog collar. But the minute the Yanks go in and accidentally blow up a schoolhouse, injuring an eight-year-old girl, the Mannes of the world will discover a sudden interest in Africa.

Manne's big gripe about Iraq seems to be that it was an "unnecessary, unlawful and unjust war". Each to his own. The Steyn Doctrine, such as it is, is that there's never a bad reason to take out a thug regime. Unfortunately for the beleaguered villagers of Darfur, the Americans so far are playing by Manne's rules. The USAF could target and bomb the Janjaweed as effectively as they did the Taliban.

But then the Not In Our Name crowd would get their knickers in a twist and everyone would complain that it's unlawful unless it's authorised by the UN. The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead.

The UN system is broken beyond repair. The Security Council was unable to agree even on a resolution merely expressing some criticism of the Sudanese Government - China, Pakistan and Algeria scuppered that. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the UN, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency. The Sudanese representative immediately professed himself concerned by human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

As the Canadian columnist George Jonas put it, the UN enables dictators to punch above their weight. All Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese Government's man in New York, has to do is string things out long enough to bog down the US call for sanctions in the Gauloise-filled rooms. "Let's not be hasty", Erwa told The Los Angeles Times. And, fortunately, not being hasty is something the UN's happy to do in its own leisurely way until everyone's in the mass grave and the point is moot.

A few days ago, the Australian Red Cross announced that three nurses from NSW were among those trying to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Good for them. But, if we were really serious about alleviating it, we'd stop using that pathetically evasive word "humanitarian". "Humanitarian crisis" is fine for a hurricane or a drought, but not a genocide.

The death and dislocation in Sudan is a political crisis, worsened by political decisions every step up the chain - from the blood-drenched militia to their patrons in Khartoum to their buddies in the African Union to the schemers and cynics at the UN. It's "multilateralism" that magnifies some nickel and dime murder gangs into a global player. As for the West, if it's only "lawful" when it's sanctioned by the UN, then the almost inevitable "failure to get agreement in the Security Council" is the perfect cover for governments who would rather sit things out.

Here's another line for "multilateralists" to ponder, from a report by W.F. Deedes from Darfur in Britain's Daily Telegraph: "Aid agencies have found it difficult to get visas."

The UN confers on its most dysfunctional members a surreal, postmodern sovereignty: a state that claims it can't do anything about groups committing genocide across huge tracts of its territory nevertheless expects the world to respect its immigration paperwork as inviolable. Why should the West's ability to help Darfur be dependent on the visa section of the Sudanese embassy? The world would be a better place if the UN, or the democratic members thereof, declared that thug states forfeit the automatic deference to sovereignty. But, since that won't happen, it would be preferable if free nations had a forum of their own in which decisions could be reached before every last peasant has been hacked to death. The "coalition of the willing" has a nice ring to it.

One day historians will wonder why the most militarily advanced nations could do nothing to halt men with machetes and a few rusting rifles. Just over a century ago, after Kitchener's victory over the dervishes at Omdurman, Belloc wrote:

"Whatever happens

We have got

The Maxim gun

And they have not."

We've tossed out the Maxim gun for Daisycutters and Cruise missiles. In Darfur, meanwhile, the Janjaweed on their horses are no better armed than the dervishes were. But we're powerless against them because we have fetishised the poseur-multilateralism of the UN as the only legitimate form of intervention. And, because of it, in Sudan as in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands will die.

 

GENOCIDE IS ALIVE AND WELL IN SUDAN

Genocide is alive and well in Sudan
By Yaakov Ahimeir
Ma'ariv (Israel)
July 26, 2004

Perhaps the world's timid reaction to the genocide in Sudan is because there is no Israeli angle, both the perpetrators and the victims are Moslems. Arabs killing blacks is less spicy than Israel building a barrier

A New York organization presented documents proving the connection between the genocidal Arab Janjanin militia and the Sudanese government, which is using the militia to ethnically cleanse Darfur province from non-Arab inhabitants.

Thousands Moslem Africans are fleeing in the desert heat from Sudan into neighboring Chad. Every single man, woman, child and grandparent, scarred and hungry, has a personal tale of horror suffered at the hands of Arab oppression in Darfur.

Tens of thousands of people have died in Darfur and in refugee camps in Chad, and the general impression seems to be "And the world remains silent". Yet, in truth, this is not the case. Bush, Blair, Joschke Fischer and Colin Powell have all spoken out. "Yad Vashem" has also published notices in the written media.

Norwegian and other volunteers are not able to save the lives of skeletal babies, as food is not getting to them and they are starving.

In New York the UN General Assembly convened to discuss the Palestinian issue, and Sudan is a member of the UN Human Rights Committee. EU Foreign Minister, Senor Xavier Solana, has just finished sparring with Ariel Sharon and Silvan Shalom in Jerusalem.

When one observes the tireless efforts invested in solving the conflict here, one needs to ask the following, almost inevitable question, "Where are the proportions? We hear that in Darfur alone, more Moslems have died over the last two months than have died in the "100-year conflict" in this region. Where are all the solutions and road maps, not those exclusively regarding the land of Israel between desert and sea, but regarding a million refugees and tens of thousands of victims murdered by the Arab militia that goes by the name of Janjaweed.

The international community is currently enjoying its summer recess. Anti-globalization protestors (not to mention those against fur coats) also deserve their well-earned rest. The Khartoum mountains are not as conducive to demonstrations and vandalizing fast food restaurants as are Seattle or Venice, two of the venues that hosted representatives of industrialized countries that in fact assist the refugees, to a certain extent.

Air transports and water carriers are not able to land in the Chad desert. The situation in neighboring Darfur is extremely grave. There is no summer recess for terror and suffering. When light-skinned Moslems terrorize and murder dark-skinned Moslems, as their slave trading forbears did, Arab spiritual leaders, poets, co-religionists and the general Arab public sees nothing and hears nothing. And there is no one to cry out, "End the slaughter! End the burning of villages!"

Who knows? Perhaps there should be a demonstration outside the Sudanese embassies in Cairo and in Damascus, led by Arab League Secretary-General and former Egyptian foreign minister Amru Moussa, one of the most virulent haters of Israel.

I apologize. I wanted to end off with a bottom line. But there is no bottom line to those written above. This is simply the situation as seen by the writer of this article.

FULL ARTICLES

SUDAN FOREIGN MINISTER BLAMES ISRAEL FOR ESCALATION OF DARFUR

Sudan foreign minister blames Israel for escalation of Darfur situation
Al Bawaba
August 8, 2004

Sudanese Foreign Minister Musstafa Osman Ismail said Israel was escalating the situation in the western area of Darfur, stressing that his country had information to confirm latest media reports that insurgents there were supported by Israel.

Ismail, in a statement to reporters upon arrival in Cairo Sunday to attend an extraordinary meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers to find a solution to the Darfur crisis, said, "I'm sure the next few days would reveal that there is lot of contacts between Israel and the rebels."

Moreover, he said that Israel had recently sought seriously to involve itself in the Darfur issue either through its extensive presence in Eritrea or activities of its missions in the hot regions that emerged lately.

The Sudanese Foreign Minister added that Khartoum was looking for political backing from Arab countries to block the way to any attempt to harm Sudan or to impose any sanctions on it.

 

SILENCE ON SUDAN

Silence on Sudan
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal Europe
August 6, 2004

As the killing in the western Sudanese region of Darfur unfolds, there is nothing but chilling silence from Europe's usually vociferous antiwar crowd.

The conspicuous silence vis-a-vis the killing fields in Sudan betrays more than just the usual selective concern for world peace. Yes, for the progressive left, it is only the participation of the U.S. that makes a war really objectionable. But when the self-declared champions of human rights don't speak up in the face of what the United Nations calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," then the movement's moral bankruptcy is fully exposed.

In Sudan, the progressive movement is trapped in the absurdities of its own ideology. Conflicts that involve the U.S. are usually squeezed into a Weltanschauung that sees "American imperialism" as the root of all ills and racism as an exclusively white phenomenon. But not even the most elastic post-colonialist theory can explain the war in Sudan, where Arabs are massacring black Africans.

What's more, in Sudan Muslims are ethnically cleansing fellow Muslims. How do you explain that if you believe in a conspiracy between a right-wing American President and Christian fundamentalists to launch a crusade against the Muslim world?

Progressives' usual allies are also only too happy to ignore events in Sudan. The many Islamic organizations that have been collaborating with Europe's peace movement in the anti-Iraq war demonstrations naturally have little interest in turning the spotlight on an Islamic regime.

Equally, anti-globalization activists have a hard time explaining the Darfur massacre under the template of their bizarre trade theories; nor can they blame it on the spread of U.S. capitalism. Unlike Europe, the U.S. long ago slapped an embargo on Khartoum for its 20-year campaign against African Christians and animists in the south.

So it's best to ignore the dying or -- even better -- rewrite history to make it fit the movement's ideology. And so what's happening in Darfur is simply the result of a "civil war," for which the regime in Khartoum can't be held responsible. The real reason for any potential military intervention by the U.S. or Britain would be -- you guessed it -- to grab Sudan's vast oil fields.

John Laughland, otherwise famous for defending Slobodan Milosevic and criticizing the revolution that restored democracy in Georgia, was allowed to present this theory Monday in the Guardian, Britain's flagship paper for opponents of the Iraq war.

"As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq," he writes, "the west not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely that." Mr. Laughland's article has been reprinted on many antiwar and Islamic Web sites.

The prominent "Not In Our Name" antiwar movement has already spoken out against any possible intervention in Sudan. It does not specifically mention oil, but calls on supporters to "resist the U.S. government's global grab for unlimited power."

"No Blood for Oil" was the antiwar crowd's rallying cry opposing the liberation of Kuwait during Desert Storm and during the recent Iraq war to dispose of the butcher of Baghdad. It looks like it could also become the slogan of the "peace movement" to prevent the end of a genocide.

 

SILENCE ON THE ARAB STREET

Silence on the Arab Street
By Kamel Labidi
July 2, 2004

CAIRO -- Colin Powell's visit this week to Sudan -- where he denounced the government-backed ethnic cleansing in the western region of Darfur and warned of a Rwanda-like genocide in the making -- made one thing perfectly clear: The present cycle of horror and devastation in Sudan continues to prompt more concern in Western countries than in the Arab world.

The victims of this new African tragedy of ethnic slaughter -- which erupted more than a year ago but until recently attracted little international attention -- are hundreds of thousands of civilians of the Muslim faith. Though Muslim, they are not of the same ethnic origin as their Arab oppressors in Sudan and the majority of their neighbors in North Africa and the Middle East.

Appalling scenes of torture and killing of civilians, including in mosques; the rape of women of all ages, often in front of relatives; the burning to the ground of scores of villages, and the destruction of water sources in the drought- and poverty-stricken region of Darfur, have for months now been reported by international human-rights groups.

So far, however, only a few Arab voices, most of them in the beleaguered human-rights community, have warned against these large-scale crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Sudanese military government and the Janjaweed militiamen whom it backs and arms. Unfortunately, these voices have little influence in a region where the media is still in the tight grip of entrenched autocrats and most people are mired in illiteracy, prejudice, poverty and injustice.

It is not the first time the state-run Arab media and even civil-society advocates have remained tight-lipped as death, devastation, and human-rights abuses unfold in a "brotherly" Arab country. Sudan is member of the Cairo-based club of Arab autocrats known as the Arab League of States. The immensity of the crimes committed under the watchful eye of Gen. Omar Al-Bashir, who toppled a democratically elected government in June 1989 with the backing of radical Islamists and offered refuge in the early 1990s to Osama bin Laden, led even the toothless Arab League to send, amid international pressure, a fact-finding mission to Darfur in May. The result was an unprecedented press release -- the first of its kind since the Arab League's establishment in 1945 -- acknowledging "gross human-rights violations" committed in a member state. Sadly, the League soon yielded to pressure from the Sudanese government and quietly turned its back on the press release.

Life in Darfur

But even the hint of a reprimand from another Arab state was enough to spark outrage within the Sudanese government. At the end of May, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Othman Ismail erupted in anger during a memorable news conference in Tunis following the Arab Summit, which Gen. Al-Bashir boycotted apparently to protest his counterparts' meddling in Sudan's business. Ismail said Sudan expected Western organizations to make "unfounded allegations," but not the Arab League.

Arab reaction to the plight of the hundreds of thousands dispossessed, abused and displaced Darfurians is reminiscent of the shocking silence both of the Arab media and civil society that followed the gassing of thousands of Kurds by Iraqi troops led by former dictator Saddam Hussein more than 15 years ago. Such atrocious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Iraq at the end of the last century and in Sudan today would have prompted deafening official and popular protests in Arab capitals had the victims been of Arab descent and the perpetrators non-Arabs.

The majority of Arabs will be inclined to continue to turn a blind eye to crimes against humanity and gross human-rights abuses against their non-Arab neighbors or other minority groups in the region as long as they live in police states where freedom of association, assembly and expression are still severely curtailed.

Human-rights education is badly needed in the Arab world to combat injustice, prejudice and tribalism. But it will have an insignificant impact in police states where schools and universities are still run by the cronies of Arab autocrats and where the most independent-minded intellectuals continue to be silenced by the political police and radical Islamists.

Mr. Labidi, a Tunisian journalist based in Cairo, is former Amnesty International Human Rights Education Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, and former director of Amnesty International-Tunisia.