In his epic “War and Peace”, Tolstoy describes the battle of Borodino, one of the cruelest inhistory, in which Napoleon opened the way to Moscow. In the middle of the terrible battle, thehero of the book looks for the Russian commander, Kutusov. He finds him sitting on a chair on thetop of a hill, looking calmly at the battle and doing nothing.
The hero is, of course, amazed by this inactivity, until the Russian general explains that atthis stage he has nothing more to do. The battle is a clash between two great human masses, andthe stronger and more determined mass will win.
I was reminded of the scene from the book this week when I visited Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Hisoffice was quiet, activity low-key. The Palestinian leader was calm, more so than I have seenhim for a long time. The trembling of his limbs has disappeared, and so had the tired look. Hereminded me of our first meeting in besieged Beirut, July 1982, in the middle of the battle. Hewas in a jovial mood when he led us to the window and showed us the Israeli tanks which arestationed a hundred meters away, their cannons targeted on him.
Some of the dozen senior journalists who accompanied our Gush Shalom delegation got theimpression that he has given up, that he “has resigned himself to his fate”. If they had metKutusov in that battle, they would probably also have said that the he was finished, a beatengeneral resigned to defeat.
The Israeli-Palestinian war, now 120 years old, is reaching one of its decisive stages. Twogreat masses are confronting each other: an irresistible force and an immovable object.
The Israeli commander, Ariel Sharon, knows exactly what he wants. All the columnists who tellthe public that he is temporizing, that he doesn’t know what he wants, that he has no plan etc.just do not know the man. A normal person like Yossi Beilin is quite unable to grasp his way ofthinking.
Sharon is acting in a consistent, determined and logical way to execute his master-plan. Fordecades now he has thought that he is ordained by history to implement real Zionism – one thataims to conquer all of Eretz-Israel, to cleanse it of the local population and to cover it withsettlements.
In pursuing this historic mission Sharon is ruthless and merciless. Rivers of blood do notdeter him, the number of casualties (theirs and ours) is just one item in his calculations. Heacts cautiously, uses ruses and does not shrink from committing war crimes.
He knows that he does not have much time left, and that he must use the remaining time in order todestroy the Palestinian people as a political factor. To achieve this, he has to break thirleadership, defeat their armed forces, smash their will and ability to resist.
What is the final aim?
The minimum: To imprison the Palestinians in several enclaves, each one cut off from theothers and from the world at large, each one surrounded by settlements, by-pass roads and thearmy. In these big prison camps, the Palestinians will be allowed to “manage their ownaffaires,” supplying cheap labor and a captive market. He does not care if they are called “aPalestinian state”.
The maximum: To exploit a war situation or a world crisis to expel all Palestinians (includingthose who are Israeli citizens) from the country. Sharon is quite capable of instigating a warto create such an opportunity. He has only contempt for the people around him, who are unable tothink in such historic terms.
Under the leadership of Sharon this great mass is confronting the opposing mass – thePalestinians. They cannot compete with the attacking force in any field but one: thecapability to absorb punches. The Palestinian national strategy is summarized by one word:Summud, steadfastness. After the terrible lesson of 1948, the Palestinians know that this isa fight for their life – the life of the Palestinian people and the life of every singlePalestinian man and woman. This generates a force of resistance that amazes Sharon’sgenerals, as the Russian resistance amazed Napoleon’s marshals.
Yasser Arafat symbolizes this ability more than anyone else. Even those Palestinians(mainly Western educated members of the intelligentsia) who used to criticize his style ofmanagement know that there is nobody like him in an existential crisis. The man sitting inRamallah facing the tanks is the personification of the Palestinian determination to defendtheir national existence in their homeland, whatever the price.
The Israeli Napoleon does not understand the Palestinians, as the original Napoleon did notunderstand the Russians. He and his followers believe that Arafat is an isolated, crippled,”irrelevant” figure. They cannot understand that precisely in such a situation, Arafat isstronger and more influential than ever.
A propos the original Napoleon: he won the battle of Borodino and entered Moscow as a gloriousvictor. But a few weeks later the same Kutusov defeated him decisively. Napoleon had to fleeback home, leaving behind him the remnants of a beaten army, dying of hunger and cold.
[The author has closely followed the career of Sharon for four decades. Over the years, he haswritten three extensive biographical essays about him, two (1973, 1981) with hiscooperation.]