Ariel Sharon is like one of those sleight-of-hand tricksters you see on the pavements ofEuropean cities. They mix three cards before your eyes, ask you to pick on of them, turn themupside down and ask you to guess which one is the card you have chosen. You are absolutely surethat you know where the card is – and you are wrong. Always.
How does the man do it? Elementary, dear Watson: he keeps up an incessant prattle and divertsyour attention for the fraction of a second – and at this moment he changes the layout of thecards.
Therefore, never (but never!) pay attention to what Sharon says. The sole object of all hisutterances is to divert your attention. One has to watch his hands and not avert one’s eyes fromthem for a second.
If Sharon had been a contemporary of Voltaire, one could have thought that the great Frenchphilosopher meant him when he said: “Men use thought only to justify their wrong-doings, andwords only to conceal their thoughts.”
This has not changed since Ben-Gurion, the first patron of Sharon’s career, wrote in his diarythat Sharon is a habitual liar. But the word “liar” is out of place. The sleight-of-hand artiston the pavement is not a liar. He uses words as an instrument of his craft, the way a soldier usessmoke bombs.
For three months Sharon prattled about his strong desire to set up a National UnityGovernment, in which the Labor Party would serve as a cornerstone. This is necessary, herepeated again and again, in order to allow him to set out on the road to peace. This slogan wasthe centerpiece of his election campaign. Many voted for him in order to have him as the head of agovernment in which Labor would be a major component. (Many others voted for the Shinui party,which also promised a “secular” government headed by Sharon and Labor.)
Now everybody can see that Sharon’s promises were nothing but a smoke-screen. At the end,Sharon has created exactly the government he intended to set up right from the beginning: agovernment of the radical right that will do the things the words were designed to hide. At mosthe was ready to imprison the Labor party in this government, shackled hand and foot, to act as afig-leaf.
Amram Mitzna has to be commended for refusing to fall into this trap. When Sharon tried todivert his attention by his prattle about peace, Mitzna demanded that he put his words inwriting and sign them. Sharon threw him out.
If there had been a competition for the nomination of the four most extreme anti-Palestinianchauvinists in Israel, the winners would surely have been Ariel Sharon, Effy Eytam, AvigdorLiberman and Tommy Lapid. And here they are, wonder of wonders, by sheer accident, the foursenior partners in the new government. (Other candidates for the title would have been BennyEilon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tsachi Hanegbi and Uzi Landau, all of them ministersin the new government.)
The story does not end with the launching of the government. It is only starting. Witness hisspeech in the Knesset, introducing his new government to the Knesset. He concluded with atouching personal confession: entering the 76 th year of his life (it was the day after hisbirthday), he has no greater desire than to bring tranquility and peace to our people. WhenSharon speaks about peace, it is time to run for cover.
Now, when the cards lie again on the pavement with their faces up, all the commentators inIsrael and the world realize that their guesses were wrong again. Because this is the mostrightwing, the most nationalistic, the most extreme, the most war-like government Israelhas ever had. If someone would set up a government consisting of the French Jean-Marie Le Pen,the Austrian Joerg Haider, the Russian Jirinowsky and the Dutch Fortuyn in Europe, it wouldhave looked like a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals compared to this one. The Europeans canonly incite, but Sharon and his partners can act.
This is a government of the settlers. The most prominent representative of the settlers,General Effy Eytam, a man so extreme that even the army could not stand him, got the ministrythat is the most important for the settlers: housing. He will build thousands of new homes inthe settlements. Sharon will neither “freeze” the settlements nor dismantle them. Quite tothe contrary, the settlement campaign will get new impetus.
Some people compare the settlers to the “tail wagging the dog”, they believe that this smallminority imposes its will on the government. That is an utterly false way of judging reality.In the Sharon era, the government views the settlers as its shock troops. The settlements arethe most important weapon in the war against the Palestinian people.
Also wrong are those who believe that Sharon has no vision. He certainly has one. And what avision it is! He does indeed want to enter history as the man who realized the dream ofgenerations. But this is not the dream of peace, about which he prattles day and night. Peaceinterests him as last year’s snow. He strives for an aim that seems to him vastly moreimportant: to fulfil the aim of Zionism as he understands it: to create a Jewish state that willcomprise (at least) all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and ifpossible without Arabs.
When one understands the aim, the composition of the new government is eminently reasonable.It is custom-made. Sharon at the helm. The army in the hands of Shaul Mofaz, the most brutalArab-fighter of them all. The police in charge of Tsachi Hanegby, a rowdy whose career beganwith pogroms against Arab students at the university. Eytam building housing units in thesettlements. Liberman, himself a settler, responsible for the roads. The treasury, thatmust finance all this, in the hands of Netanyahu.
In his maiden speech, Mitzna asked of Sharon to stop comparing himself to de Gaulle. Fordecades, Sharon has encouraged commentators at home and abroad to spread the legend that atany moment this tough, battle-scared general will turn out to be the Israeli edition of thegreat Frenchman who ceded all of Algeria to the “terrorists”, while evacuating a millionFrench settlers.
Sharon – a de Gaulle? Stop listening to the prattle. Just look at his hands!