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CounterPunch
March 4,
2003
Pick a Card
Sharon's Sleight of Hand
By URI AVNERY
Ariel Sharon is like one of those sleight-of-hand
tricksters you see on the pavements of European cities. They
mix three cards before your eyes, ask you to pick on of them,
turn them upside down and ask you to guess which one is the card
you have chosen. You are absolutely sure that 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 diverts your attention
for the fraction of a second and at this moment he changes
the layout of the cards.
Therefore, never (but never!) pay attention
to what Sharon says. The sole object of all his utterances is
to divert your attention. One has to watch his hands and not
avert one's eyes from them for a second.
If Sharon had been a contemporary of
Voltaire, one could have thought that the great French philosopher
meant him when he said: "Men use thought only to justify
their wrong-doings, and words only to conceal their thoughts."
This has not changed since Ben-Gurion,
the first patron of Sharon's career, wrote in his diary that
Sharon is a habitual liar. But the word "liar" is out
of place. The sleight-of-hand artist on the pavement is not a
liar. He uses words as an instrument of his craft, the way a
soldier uses smoke bombs.
For three months Sharon prattled about
his strong desire to set up a National Unity Government, in which
the Labor Party would serve as a cornerstone. This is necessary,
he repeated again and again, in order to allow him to set out
on the road to peace. This slogan was the centerpiece of his
election campaign. Many voted for him in order to have him as
the head of a government 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:
a government of the radical right that will do the things the
words were designed to hide. At most he was ready to imprison
the Labor party in this government, shackled hand and foot, to
act as a fig-leaf.
Amram Mitzna has to be commended for
refusing to fall into this trap. When Sharon tried to divert
his attention by his prattle about peace, Mitzna demanded that
he put his words in writing and sign them. Sharon threw him out.
If there had been a competition for the
nomination of the four most extreme anti-Palestinian chauvinists
in Israel, the winners would surely have been Ariel Sharon, Effy
Eytam, Avigdor Liberman and Tommy Lapid. And here they are, wonder
of wonders, by sheer accident, the four senior partners in the
new government. (Other candidates for the title would have been
Benny Eilon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tsachi Hanegbi
and Uzi Landau, all of them ministers in the new government.)
The story does not end with the launching
of the government. It is only starting. Witness his speech in
the Knesset, introducing his new government to the Knesset. He
concluded with a touching personal confession: entering the 76th
year of his life (it was the day after his birthday), he has
no greater desire than to bring tranquility and peace to our
people. When Sharon 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 in Israel
and the world realize that their guesses were wrong again. Because
this is the most rightwing, the most nationalistic, the most
extreme, the most war-like government Israel has 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 would have looked like a bunch
of bleeding-heart liberals compared to this one. The Europeans
can only 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 ministry that is the most important for the settlers:
housing. He will build thousands of new homes in the settlements.
Sharon will neither "freeze" the settlements nor dismantle
them. Quite to the contrary, the settlement campaign will get
new impetus.
Some people compare the settlers to the
"tail wagging the dog", they believe that this small
minority 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 are the
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 a vision
it is! He does indeed want to enter history as the man who realized
the dream of generations. But this is not the dream of peace,
about which he prattles day and night. Peace interests him as
last year's snow. He strives for an aim that seems to him vastly
more important: to fulfil the aim of Zionism as he understands
it: to create a Jewish state that will comprise (at least) all
the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and
if possible 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 brutal Arab-fighter of them all. The police in charge of
Tsachi Hanegby, a rowdy whose career began with pogroms against
Arab students at the university. Eytam building housing units
in the settlements. Liberman, himself a settler, responsible
for the roads. The treasury, that must finance all this, in the
hands of Netanyahu.
In his maiden speech, Mitzna asked of
Sharon to stop comparing himself to de Gaulle. For decades, Sharon
has encouraged commentators at home and abroad to spread the
legend that at any moment this tough, battle-scared general will
turn out to be the Israeli edition of the great Frenchman who
ceded all of Algeria to the "terrorists", while evacuating
a million French settlers.
Sharon a de Gaulle? Stop listening
to the prattle. Just look at his hands!
Uri Avnery
has closely followed the career of Sharon for four decades. Over
the years, he has written three extensive biographical essays
about him, two (1973, 1981) with his cooperation. Avnery is featured
in the new book, The
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.
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