Now Sharon can do just what he likes
'The bulldozer' is all-powerful, so why does he seem so reticent?
Jonathan Freedland Thursday January 30, 2003 The Guardian
Now we may get to see the true face of Ariel Sharon. His crushing victory in the early hours of yesterday morning has given the Israeli people, and the wider world, a chance at last to see what this man really wants.
For not only has Sharon become the first incumbent Israeli prime minister since the 1980s to be re-elected, he has been handed a triple mandate: he, his Likud party and the wider "national camp" have all triumphed. Commanding nearly 70 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the Israeli right is now free to do what it likes, unfettered by the need to compromise with the dovish left. For two years it had to share power in a "national unity" government with Labour; now it can be true to itself.
Except Sharon seems oddly bashful about seizing his moment to break free. "Today is not the time for celebrations - no celebrations," he insisted, as he sought to hush cheering supporters at Likud headquarters. It turns out the man they once called "the bulldozer" is fearful of his newly acquired might.
The PM wants instead to return to the previous set-up, ruling jointly with Labour. The Likud faithful booed that idea when Sharon mentioned it, while loyalists of the former, and would-be future, premier, Binyamin Netanyahu, are also in no hurry to reach out. "There is nothing illegitimate about a nationalist government," said one.
So why is Sharon so anxious to cooperate rather than rule alone? Has he genuinely become more moderate than his party, growing into the wise, calm grandfather of his TV commercials? Was the outgoing leftist Yossi Sarid right when he said that the Likud always get frightened and "look for partners to save them from themselves"? Or, a tad more cynically, does Sharon simply want a Labour fig leaf to cover his still-hawkish intentions? The coalition negotiations now under way should give us the answer.
For a national unity government will not come easy this time. Labour's defeated leader, Amram Mitzna, has vowed not to take his party into a coalition with Sharon. But several of his colleagues, chiefly former leaders Shimon Peres and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, would love to return to the ministerial chairs they held before. Sharon would not have to strain too hard to woo them individually - but to persuade Labour to dump Mitzna and come with them will take a lot more. The last national unity government came for free; this one will exact a far higher price.
How much is the PM prepared to pay? Would he agree, say, to a withdrawal from Gaza? If yes, then the cynics are wrong: Sharon would clearly be to the left of his fellow Likudniks and a genuine peace-seeker. But if, as is more likely, he could not bear such a concession then we will know the truth: he only wants Labour for the veneer of pro-peace legitimacy it gives him in the eyes of the world. He knows that Peres' mere presence gives an international kosher stamp to his government. It would certainly keep Washington happy: the last thing George Bush needs now is Arab opinion inflamed by a full-bloodedly rightwing government in Israel.
No wonder Sharon was in no mood to celebrate yesterday. The government he's got he doesn't want; the government he wants he can't have - not easily anyway.
At least Labour is spared this problem, but that is small comfort for the worst result in the party's history. It has two immediate tasks. First, it must realise why it lost. There were a few campaign missteps by Mitzna, and the conspicuous infighting of inveterate plotters such as Peres did not help, but the chief explanation remains stubbornly clear. Israelis have still not recovered from what one analyst calls "the trauma of Camp David", the failure of Israel's land-for-peace offer to the Palestinians in July 2000. That has fatally undermined Israelis' faith in Labour's core political programme: progress towards peace. The party cannot merely repeat the 1990s slogans from the glory days of the Oslo period. They have to craft a new message, one that no longer seems to rely on the possibility of cutting a deal with Yasser Arafat. Two years of violence have shattered Israeli trust in the Palestinian leader completely; the Israeli left now has to work around that fact.
But the second explanation for defeat is surely Labour's participation in the last Sharon government. Peaceniks condemned it as treachery, while no rightists were won over: why vote for Likud lite when they could have the real thing? Result: Labour lost votes to the left and right.
Now it must follow Mitzna's lead and rebuild in opposition, persuading Israelis that - despite the current, besieged mood - there is an alternative. One veteran Labour activist told me this week that Mitzna's model should be the British Labour party: "It took them 18 years, but they won power again." For the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, let's hope it does not take that long.