News Analysis: Veteran Likud Hawk Ariel Sharon Aspires to Key Peacemaking Role

Is Israel’s grizzly warrior, Ariel Sharon, staging a comeback as the country’s peacemaker?

The revelation that Sharon met recently with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Abu-Mazen, has sent shockwaves through Israel’s right wing.

Only two weeks ago, Sharon proclaimed that he would never negotiate with Arafat. The man was a war criminal “by every law.” He had more Jewish blood on his hands than any man since Hitler, he added.

Suddenly, the far right finds itself bereft of its longtime leader, the man whose unchallenged military expertise, and whose ability to unite religious and secular nationalists, gave that camp legitimacy perhaps in excess of its actual numbers.

News of the June 16 meeting also provoked the fury of Foreign Minister David Levy, who learned about it, as did the Israeli public, in an Israel Television report last Friday.

Levy was considering resigning this week over Sharon’s expanding role in the Netanyahu government.

The foreign minister said he would not have objected to Sharon’s meeting with Abu-Mazen, the veteran Palestine Liberation Organization official who was directly responsible for negotiating the peace accords with the Rabin and Peres governments.

But Levy said it was unacceptable that he should learn of such contacts through the media.

Disclosure of the meeting came amid a deepening crisis in relations between Netanyahu and Levy, who has complained that the premier has excluded him from decision-making.

The ongoing crisis spurred talk in two coalition parties, Tsomet and the Third Way, of a possible need to prepare for early elections.

But the government’s fall seemed unlikely, as it would still maintain a 61-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset even if Levy’s five-member Gesher bloc left the coalition.

Strict opposition to dealing with the PLO, personified by Sharon, was once the firm policy of the entire Israeli establishment.

That policy began unravelling in the 1980s, as dovish Laborites challenged the law forbidding contacts with the PLO.

It came crashing down with the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian accords.

It was further discredited when Netanyahu and his two senior ministers, Levy and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, each shook the former terrorist’s hand in separate meetings.

Now, to the profound consternation of Israel’s far right, including the Gush Emunim settler movement and the Land of Israel lobby in the Knesset, Sharon too has declared that the Israeli-Palestinian accords cannot be rolled back.

Arafat confirmed Sunday that the Sharon-Abu Mazen meeting was a calculated effort by the Palestinian Authority to open a new path to Israel’s power center.

News of the meeting was leaked as part of Sharon’s effort to “moderate” his image, at home and abroad, as someone who could be involved in negotiations with the Palestinians, which have been stalled since March.

Sharon is Netanyahu’s choice for finance minister, a key post vacated by Likud Knesset member Dan Meridor.

But Sharon has made his appointment conditional upon his winning a seat in the innermost sanctum of policy-making — the prime minister’s “kitchen cabinet” that has included only Netanyahu, Mordechai and Levy.

Mordechai and Levy — both relative moderates in the Cabinet — objected last week to elevating Sharon because of the negative message it would inevitably send to the Palestinians and to the wider Arab world.

This week, Levy was opposing Sharon’s appointment simply because he threatens to nudge aside the foreign minister in the conduct of the peace negotiations.

Does Sharon intend to change not just his image, but the substance of his policy positions?

Israel has seen this paradigm before.

Moshe Dayan, the Jewish state’s greatest military hero, found his reputation shattered in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur debacle. Though cleared of direct responsibility for the army’s failure to detect the surprise attack, Dayan was driven by popular outcry from his position as defense minister and spent four years in the political wilderness.

It was Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, another political outcast seeking legitimation as a peacemaker, who brought Dayan back as his foreign minister.

Dayan, more than any other Israeli, engineered the Israeli-Egyptian breakthrough that led to the 1978 Camp David accords.

Ten years of distinctly hawkish positions on the future of the territories captured in 1967 were discarded in Dayan’s dramatic turnabout on the Sinai.

The general-turned-statesman adopted a more moderate stance on the Palestinian issue, too. Indeed, he resigned in 1980 after concluding that Begin was reneging on the commitment to Palestinian self-rule that Israel had given at Camp David.

Camp David also was one of the few instances of Sharon going against his usual hawkish stance and suddenly adopting pragmatic positions.

As Begin wrestled at the U.S. presidential retreat with the need to relinquish all the settlements and military bases that Israel had built in Sinai, Sharon telephoned from home to urge the premier to make the historic deal.

Sharon’s position took much of the wind out of the sails of the hard-line rightist opposition to Camp David.

But it was not the first time that Sharon had dismayed the hard right, and won kudos from the left and center.

A year earlier, before Israel’s 1977 elections, Sharon, then leader of the small Shlomzion Party, had negotiated with the dovish Independent Liberals over a joint platform.

According to persons involved in the negotiation, which did not lead to an agreement, both sides endorsed a provision calling for a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

Sharon’s many political foes cite these as examples not of pragmatism, but rather of unprincipled opportunism.

But, in the wake of the revelation that he hosted Abu-Mazen at his Negev ranch, less hostile observers suggested that Sharon was acting with his place in history in mind.

Sharon, 65, is making a determined bid to be remembered as a man of peace, not only as a general who, despite huge successes to his credit, also carries the bitter burden of the 1982 Lebanon War.

Sharon, as the minister of defense and the single most powerful figure in Begin’s second government, launched that war in order to smash the PLO, and drive it away from Israel’s northern border.

He was forced to resign as defense minister after a state commission concluded that Israeli leaders bore indirect responsibility for the September 1982 Christian Phalangist massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.

Some observers argued then, as do some historians now, that Sharon had a broader aim in launching the war: to flush the Palestinian fighters out of Lebanon altogether, forcing them to return to Jordan where they would depose the Hashemite kingdom and set up a Palestinian state.

This, in turn, would relieve the pressure on Israel to vacate the West Bank.

For years, the Jordanians believed this theory and viewed Sharon with intense suspicion.

The Palestinians, for their part, have long seen him as their more implacable foe.

Now, just as the right in Israel will have to reassess Sharon, so, too, the Palestinians will be reconsidering their view of the warrior and his possible role in future diplomacy.