When, in 2001, Ariel Sharon first took office, there was no great contrast between Arab governments and their publics in what they had to say about it. But now he is departing, at least from office, the difference between popular and the official Arab reactions has been much remarked upon.
The popular reaction is most pronounced in the Palestinian refugee camps. In Gaza, children hand out sweets to celebrate what they hope is his impending demise. In the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon, they have invented a game called ”the dead Sharon”. Indeed, if there are any regrets, they are mainly that he may be dying the natural death they believe he didn’t deserve.
Egyptian businessman Saaduddin al-Marakby no doubt spoke for the Arab ”street” when he said: ”I don’t want him to die, I want him to live, paralysed and suffering.” Only one government in the region has made such grassroot sentiments explicitly its own, and that, not surprisingly, is Iran’s leadership.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, adding to his rapidly expanding repertoire of venomous anti-Israeli pronouncements, said: ”Hopefully, the news of the criminal of Sabra and Shatila joining his ancestors is final.”
But governments such as Egypt and Jordan have struck a note of measured regret and solicitude. The basic explanation for this, say Arab critics, is that when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Arab governments always cling to anything positive, however meagre. And they did find something positive in Sharon. He did, in the end, turn out to be less bad than expected. He did apparently undergo what, for him, amounted to a radical conversion.
He appeared to renounce the idea of a greater Israel stretching from Jordan to the sea. He who had been the great patron of settlements suddenly became the dismantler of them. He had a peace plan of sorts, and, as one of the strongest leaders Israel ever had, he went about implementing it with all the ruthlessness and cunning he once reserved for the battlefield.
To achieve all this, he had to betray his once adoring followers. Could there be a more eloquent measure of the distance he had travelled than the fact that, as he lay in a coma, some of these former followers were no less gratified about his illness than Palestinians in the misery of their camps?
But ”in reality”, said Ahmad Khalifa, a Palestinian specialist in Israeli affairs, ”the Arab governments’ idea that Sharon was remotely serious about peace was a delusion in which they wanted, or pretended, to believe because, in their weakness and their fear of offending America or Israel, they have no choice”.
His ”peace plan”, realistically, was no such thing. That dramatic and much-praised beginning of it, the disengagement from Gaza, was a subterfuge that, in his conception, would enable him better to prosecute his real designs, which lay in the heartlands of the Zionist idea, the West Bank. Not the whole of it, but so much that — along with continued settlement and land confiscation, the renewed ”Judaisation” of East Jerusalem, the ”apartheid wall” and the proliferating network of Israeli controls — it would make a mockery of the Oslo accords, and the two-state settlement.
What the Arab leaders fear, said Khalifa, is that, with the strong man gone, ”Israel will revert to the political instability that preceded him”. In that condition there will be nothing that can be called a serious peace process, because whoever wins the next elections — Sharon’s ad hoc, ”centrist” creation, the Kadima party, Labour, or Likud — none will be strong enough to conduct one.
Drift and dissension in Israel will intensify the turmoil in the occupied territories, and if anyone is likely to profit from that, it is Hamas and the Islamists — believers in ”complete liberation” who are already close to overturning the political and institutional dominance of the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, secular upholders of the two-state solution.
Thus, the oldest and most irrepressible of Middle East crises is at risk of reigniting in all its potential virulence at a time when, with Iran and its nuclear menace, the relentless mayhem in Iraq, the threat to President Assad’s Syria, more recent, interconnected crises are flourishing rankly on all hands. — Â