Now, Forward

Israelis Must Continue What Sharon Began

JERUSALEM

When Ariel Sharon was hospitalized nearly two weeks ago, I found myself bereft. Like so many others here, I grieved for the most hated man in Israel who in the past five years had become the most beloved.

I grieved, too, for a nation that had just lost the only man it trusted to keep it safe. How could the general who taught the Israeli army never to leave its wounded on the battlefield abandon us now, with missiles from Gaza falling on Israeli towns and Iran about to go nuclear?

My love for Sharon was hardly a given. Indeed, until I voted for him in the 2001 elections that brought him to power, he represented, for me, the tendency for excess in our national character. He was one of the most heroic Israelis of a heroic generation, who had repeatedly helped save Israel on the battlefield; yet he had also led us into adventures that turned into disasters.

I immigrated to Israel from the United States in 1982, just as Sharon's most ambitious initiative, the invasion of Lebanon, veered out of control with the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in Sabra and Shatilla. I found myself joining a tormented nation. For the first time, Israelis had not only failed to rally during war but were actually divided because of war. Sharon had jeopardized Israel's greatest strategic asset: its ability to unite during crisis.

What changed for me, and for most Israelis starting in 2000, was, of course, the Palestinian terrorism war, which vindicated Sharon's warnings over the years against empowering Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

By the time Sharon was elected in 2001, the Israeli majority had reached two conclusions about its conflict with the Palestinians. The first was that the left had been correct in warning against the illusion that Israel could occupy another people and still remain a worthy Jewish and democratic state. The second was that the right had been no less correct in warning against the illusion that Israel could make peace with an organization committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

With the fading away of the two ideologies that had determined Israeli politics for several decades -- "greater Israel" on the right, and "peace now" on the left -- the public found itself with an ideological hangover. Out of the wreckage of Israel's dreams, Sharon fashioned a new political center: hard-line on security, flexible on territory. The emergence of this center marked the end of the era of our romantic politics, the politics of wishful thinking.

Sharon, though, did more than merely define a sensibility: He turned a mood into a policy. If we can't occupy the Palestinians and we can't make peace with them, he argued, the only option left for Israel was to determine its own borders. The result was last summer's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza -- in effect, a withdrawal from the failed policies of the right and left.

The withdrawal lessened the threat of Jews becoming a demographic minority in their own country, even as it posed new challenges for keeping Israeli towns safe from Palestinian rocket attacks. Most of all, though, the withdrawal exposed the asymmetry of Israeli and Palestinian efforts for peace.

According to the American-initiated "road map" for resuming peace talks, the Palestinian Authority's first step would be disarming terrorists, while Israel's final step would be dismantling settlements. In Gaza, Sharon took Israel to the very end of the road map -- a typical Sharon short cut. While the more intractable issue of West Bank settlements remain, Palestinian leaders, by contrast, haven't even begun fulfilling their first road map responsibility.

The Gaza withdrawal confirmed Sharon as our great builder and destroyer, even of what he himself created. The withdrawal also confirmed that the man who once symbolized our excesses had become, in his old age, the measured leader that Israel needed in its most desperate time. The wise guy had become the wise elder.