LAST OF HIS GENERATION

Sharon: I'll solve the Palestinian problem in four years: The Israeli leader, who flies into London tonight, is the last man standing from the 1948 generation who assisted at the country's bloody birth. He spoke to Peter Beaumont in a rare interview (Peter Beaumont, July 13, 2003, The Observer)

He is the last of the generation that made Israel, an endangered species. And with men around him all half his age, Sharon insists it is only he who can solve the Palestinian problem. He says he is optimistic and that in his next four years in office he will bring it about. But his ideas have become thickets through which sometimes he seems to grope.

'The right thing will be if someone from our generation who has seen everything we saw. You remember well now ... I remember well. From the age of five ... I remember those years well now, everything that happened here. And ... it is our generation's role to try to achieve this peace. It is a result of things we have seen. I think that makes it ... easier to do, that we will make that, and we will make less mistakes knowing what really happened here. And that is how I see. How I see it. There are many things I would like to do, but it was something I had to try to solve.'

It is a constant thread in the Sharon story, this history. A favourite theme is of his responsibility to 3,000 years of Jewish history, and the responsibility for the next three centuries. The present, he has said, is important only in the way it guarantees a Jewish future in a Jewish state in the cradle of the Jewish people's birth. He reminds us this is the Promised Land. Promised to the Jews - no one else. [...]

If there is another absolute constant in Sharon's universe, beyond his identification of his own and Israel's destiny, then it is in his obsession with his great enemy - Yasser Arafat - whose physical decline has hurried on before his own.

'The problem is that Arafat is undermining the new government. It is a good thing Mahmoud Abbas was nominated as Prime Minister. I met him several times. He is one of those who has understood that Israel cannot be defeated by terror and that he understood very early that the suffering of the Palestinians was caused by Arafat and his strategy.'

He is scathing, too, about the continued contact with Arafat by European governments, including Britain, calling it a brake on progress. But, in the end, it seems Sharon believes that, despite the partnership with Abbas, this is a process that will fail despite his alleged desire for a deal. And then what?

'I'll tell you what we will be doing, what we are doing now, what my grandfather and my parents have done, myself, my sons, and families here facing Arab terror for five, six generations, I tell you what they're going to do. First, they are going to hold the sword in one hand, and they're going to carry on, that's what we've been doing up to now.'

Israel will never be able to put the sword down, but perhaps it can switch it to its off-hand in a few years. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 12:05 PM