Sharon shows his cards

by Caroline Glick
October 14, 2004

On Wednesday, Army Radio reported the contents of a secret Foreign 
Ministry report which forecast the state of Israel's relations 
with Europe over the next decade. The picture it painted was bleak. 
Israel, the report's author claims, will be increasingly castigated 
by EU governments as a racist apartheid state. 

In the sense that the leaked report does nothing other than project 
current trends onto the future, it is fundamentally uninteresting. 
What is interesting about it is how it flies in the face of the 
bravado-filled forecasts that Prime Minister Sharon's Svengali 
and outgoing Bureau Chief Dov Weisglass fed us last week through 
his long interview with Haaretz. 

According to Weisglass, the downward trend in Europe's view of 
Israel will be halted by Sharon's withdrawal plan from the Gaza 
Strip and northern Samaria. By Weisglass's telling, the need to 
mollify and moderate Europe's view of Israel is one of the main 
reasons that Sharon chose the radical approach of withdrawal 
without an agreement and in the midst of war. In his words, 
the purpose of the withdrawal plan is to enable the US "to go to 
the seething and simmering international community and say to 
them, 'What do you want [from Israel]?'" 

So, according to Weisglass, who speaks for Sharon, transferring 
territory to the enemy in the midst of war, while perhaps 
tactically problematic or even dangerous, is the right thing 
to do because it strategically and politically empowers Israel. 
This, of course was the assumption of Yitzhak Rabin in Oslo. 
By reaching out to the PLO and giving it arms, territory and 
political legitimacy, Israel was gambling with security in order 
to buy itself a political insurance policy. If things went well, 
there would be peace. If Oslo failed, the Palestinians would be 
blamed. Of course this turned out to be false. Oslo failed, 
our security was squandered, and Israel was blamed. 

In speaking of the current plan, Weisglass echoes Rabin's mistaken 
assumption almost word for word as he says that the unilateral 
withdrawal plan "transfers the initiative to our hands. 
It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario 
we wrote. It places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure.
It thrusts them into a situation in which they have to prove 
their seriousness." 

Again, while he says this, as was the case throughout the Oslo 
years, we see on the ground that pressure on Israel since the 
announcement of the withdrawal plan has not abated. And we have 
the Foreign Ministry report - written with full awareness of 
the withdrawal plan - saying that pressure on Israel will 
increase and support for the Palestinians will remain constant 
throughout the coming decade. 

Why is this? Although the leaked accounts of the report did not 
say, common sense has it that Israel, with all due respect, 
does not determine how the EU defines its interests. With oil 
now selling for $54 per barrel, and with the demographic 
challenges of growing Muslim and shrinking Christian populations 
in Europe motivating Bernard Lewis to say matter-of-factly that 
Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century, it should be 
fairly obvious that something other than the presence or absence 
of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is motivating 
Europe. 

Given this, we must ask, why would the Israeli leadership build 
its central policy initiative around the goal of influencing 
Europe? 

Since Sharon unveiled his withdrawal plan last winter, we have 
heard a constant chatter of commentary - sometimes whispered, 
sometimes shouted - that things can't be as they appear; 
that Sharon must have something up his sleeve. Such talk also 
accompanied Ehud Barak to Camp David. The idea is that by 
pushing a radical leftist agenda, Barak then and Sharon today 
have both been pulling the wool over our eyes - forcing the 
Palestinians to show their cards and in so doing, pointing to 
the emptiness of the Left's ideology of appeasement, thereby, 
indirectly, advancing the platform of the Right. 

Weisglass's interview serves to demystify Sharon. In it he 
proves definitively that no, there is no hidden agenda. 
Disturbingly, Weisglass not only shows that there is no secret 
plan, he also admits that Israel under Sharon has had no influence 
on US policy, while he exposes the vacuousness of the prime 
minister's thinking and Weisglass's own vanity and inanity. 

The Weisglass interview focuses on two separate issues. 
The first is Weisglass's personal relationship with US National 
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The second is his influence 
over Sharon's policymaking and the rationale for the decisions 
that have emerged from the Weisglass-Sharon duo. 

In the first instance, Weisglass cannot stop congratulating 
himself for his friendly relations and constant communications 
with Rice. Yet what has Israel accomplished through this direct 
channel to the White House? The answer, according to Weisglass, 
is absolutely nothing. By his telling, Israel had nothing to do 
with the Bush administration's formulation of its policy toward 
the Palestinian Authority. 

Weisglass states: "The Americans were here for four months in 
2003 They saw the Palestinians' detailed working plans and 
their splendid diagrams and they saw how nothing came of it 
When you add to that the trauma of September 11 and their 
understanding that Islamic terrorism is indivisible, you 
understand that they reached their conclusions by themselves. 
They didn't need us to understand what it was all about." 

So, rather than enjoying a near-symbiotic relationship with 
the Bush administration - as Sharon likes to characterize his 
relationship with the Bush White House - what we have in the 
Weisglass-Rice camaraderie is an Israeli gasbag who mistakes 
access for influence. 

Weisglass's descriptions of Sharon's motivations for making 
the decisions he has made provide ample room for worry. 
According to Sharon's right-hand man, "When Arafat undermined 
[PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas aka] Abu Mazen at the end of 
the summer of 2003, we reached the sad conclusion that there 
is no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with. Hence the 
disengagement plan. Because when you're playing solitaire, 
when there is no one sitting across from you at the table, 
you have no choice but to deal the cards yourself." 

Yet, if Israel is playing cards by itself, why would it give 
its aces (or any cards for that matter) to someone who isn't 
even playing - to someone who blew up the card table? 
Barry Rubin pointed out in The Jerusalem Post this week that 
PLO legal adviser Michael Tarazi's recent op-ed in The New York 
Times calling for the destruction of Israel and a one-state 
solution marks a fundamental admission by the PLO that it is 
interested not in Palestinian statehood, but in the destruction 
of Israel. And yet, with this state of affairs self-evident, 
the prime minister has still decided to destroy Jewish 
communities in Gaza and northern Samaria and hand over land 
to PLO militias. 

Weisglass said that by moving to the withdrawal plan, Israel 
would be ensuring that the US would continue to support Israel 
in spite of the absence of a peace process. In his words, 
"The Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been 
removed from our agenda indefinitely. And this with authority 
and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the 
ratification of both houses of Congress." 

Actually, the withdrawal plan, like Sharon's decision to accept 
the Quartet's road map, has not cemented the administration's 
pro-Israel position; it has served to exacerbate its anti-Israel 
position. The Bush administration is the first American 
administration to support Palestinian statehood. And Bush's 
support for the road map and for Sharon's withdrawal plan 
has not attenuated US pressure on Israel to build the separation 
fence more or less along the 1949 armistice lines. Nor has the 
administration's support for his plans lessened American 
pressure on Israel to freeze construction in Israeli towns 
in Judea and Samaria with an eye towards eventually dismantling 
them all, down to Ma'aleh Adumim. 

Finally, Weisglass argues that Sharon's withdrawal plan was 
necessary because public support for the conduct of the war 
against Palestinian terror was waning at the end of 2003. 
In his words, "Domestically everything was collapsing The Geneva 
Initiative garnered broad support. And then we were hit with 
the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of 
commandos [letters of refusal to serve in the territories]." 

The problem with the extreme Left is both real and manufactured. 
It is true that there are those on the leftist fringe of 
Israel's political spectrum who have sided with the Palestinians. 
But they are few in number and not growing. Almost three years 
after their first public appearance on the cover of Yediot 
Aharonot's weekend features magazine, the pacifist soldiers and 
officers club has only garnered 628 signatures on their manifesto. 
And Yossi Beilin is so despised that he couldn't get himself 
elected to Knesset even though he ran on two separate lists. 

The importance of fringe movements is largely determined by the 
agenda-setters. Yediot and Haaretz have adopted the pacifist 
reservists as their cause celebre and so they have received 
notice. 

But the prime minister is also a major agenda-setter. Weisglass 
is right: Sharon's adoption of the plan to withdraw unilaterally 
from territory in the midst of war did take the microphone 
away from the likes of Beilin and David Zonshein of the pacifist 
reservists' club. But he could have taken away their microphone 
with any plan. Why did he have to choose theirs? Why did he feel 
that he had to move Israel backwards rather than lead it forward? 

Weisglass no doubt gave the interview in a bid to mollify the 
right-wing critics of Sharon's withdrawal plan with his claim 
that unilateral withdrawal effectively ends US pressure for 
Palestinian statehood. Yet his own words belie the wisdom of 
those who oppose Sharon's policy. The rationale Weisglass 
provides for Sharon's decisions cannot stand up to scrutiny. 
Moreover, the great chemistry that Weisglass has cultivated 
with the Bush administration has made Weisglass personally 
popular, while rendering Israel effectively without advocate. 
No wonder Sharon has insisted for so long on holding his hand 
close to his chest. It turns out that he's not holding any cards.