"WE WIN," HE SURRENDERED:

Center Right: ISRAEL'S UNEXPECTED VICTORY OVER TERRORISM. (Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren, 09.16.04, New Republic)

Four years ago this Rosh Hashanah, when the Palestinian leadership launched this war, Israelis were caught by surprise and demoralized by the violent collapse of a peace process whose success many had assumed was imminent. Prime Minister Ehud Barak was not only negotiating under fire, but offering additional concessions. Cabinet ministers and security figures were insisting that the war against terrorism couldn't be won by military means alone. The Israeli army seemed as disoriented as the politicians: When two reservists were lynched and mutilated by a Palestinian mob inside a police station in October 2000, Israel's initial response was to bomb mostly empty buildings belonging to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). And, when a French TV crew filmed the death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Al Dura, killed in crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen, Israel apologized even before thoroughly investigating whether it was responsible for Al Dura's death. (James Fallows, in an exhaustively researched article for The Atlantic Monthly, concluded it wasn't, as did the reporting of a German TV station.) Rather than calling the terrorism assault a war, Israelis reflexively adopted the misleading Palestinian term intifada--implying an unarmed civilian uprising against an armed occupation. In fact, this was a war by armed Palestinians aimed mostly at Israeli civilians and launched after Israel had agreed to end the occupation--an anti-intifada.

Meanwhile, European and even American leaders were still passionately courting Arafat. In one particularly degrading episode, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright literally ran after Arafat as he stormed out of cease-fire talks in Paris in October 2000 and begged him to return to the table. Washington didn't even place Hamas and Hezbollah on its list of terrorist organizations until November 2001. Rather, most of the international community held Israel responsible for weakening Arafat and his ability to restrain terrorism. Conventional wisdom insisted that the Fatah movement was different from Hamas and that "political" Hamas was different from "military" Hamas.

This is the disaster Sharon faced when he assumed the premiership in March 2001. To respond effectively, he first had to convince Israelis that negotiating under fire would only encourage terrorism and that a military solution for terrorism did indeed exist. And so, one of Sharon's first acts in office was to meet with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) general staff and demand a plan for victory. Still, he didn't immediately go to war. The Lebanon fiasco of the early '80s had taught him the danger of initiating a military campaign without the support of both the mainstream left and the U.S. administration. (By contrast, Sharon didn't waste time wooing France and other European Union countries that wouldn't support the war on terrorism no matter what Israel did.) This is the first lesson Sharon could teach democratic leaders facing a war against terrorism: Insure domestic consensus and the support of vital allies.

Sharon imposed on himself a regimen of single-mindedness and patience. He concentrated almost exclusively on security, leaving the country's economy and its foreign relations--with the exception of relations with the Bush administration--to other ministers. Nor did he allow himself to be distracted by divisive domestic issues like the secular-religious divide. By becoming the first Likud leader to endorse a Palestinian state, Sharon broke with his own party's ideology and recast himself as a consensus politician. And he established a national unity government with the Labor Party. He acted liked the leader of a nation at war, not a party at war.

The authors ignore the 800 lb. guerilla in the room: through all of these actions, Ariel Sharon has effectively replaced Yasar Arafat with himself and is midwifing the birth of the very Palestinian nation that he'd opposed his whole professional life. The main lesson then would seem to be that we in the West can sometimes exploit nationalist tendencies--giving terrorists what they claim to want and turning the energies of restive populations towards self-governance. But this requires an unusual balancing act--the leader who utilizes this policy must make apparent the counterintuitive fact that his concession to terrorists' demands thwarts terrorist purposes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2004 12:35 PM