Israel Matzav

The myth of Sharon and his leadership is that over the past two years he redefined the center of Israeli politics. In The Washington Post Charles Krauthammer claimed: "Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way" (see below). Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Oren argued that Sharon "began his political career on the left, swung keenly right, and concluded in the center." Other conservative commentators, like Peter Berkowitz at The Weekly Standard and James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal's online publication, have made identical and equally false arguments.

It is true that Sharon restructured the political map of Israel over the past two years. But he did not do so by blazing a new path, with a new vision for Israeli politics, society and security. Sharon redefined Israel's political map by embracing the Israeli Left. And in so doing, as one top military official dolefully put it to me in November, "Sharon brought post-Zionism into the mainstream of Israeli public discourse."

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WHILE THE myth of Sharon as a centrist is being propagated by conservative analysts whose sympathies until Sharon's political transformation lay consistently with the Israeli Right, the people who seem most ready to acknowledge the truth are the Leftist commentators. Radical leftist Israeli novelists David Grossman and Amos Oz both embraced Sharon as a man of the Left in commentaries in The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian newspapers over the weekend. Oz wrote, "Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals."

Sharon's rhetorical shift to the Left was followed by his policy shift in the same direction when, against the backdrop of ever-increasing Palestinian radicalization, he called for and carried out its reconfigured policy of appeasement by unilaterally surrendering Gaza and northern Samaria to Palestinian terrorists. As Oz noted approvingly, "They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements, and indeed he acted like a bulldozer when he uprooted them. The evacuation of the Israeli settlers from Gaza was a military operation. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he won his many wars."

Like Rabin's leftward shift of a decade ago and its attendant handover of territory and power to Palestinian terrorist organizations, Sharon's policies have wrought terrible consequences for Israel's security. Last Friday, even Haaretz's leftist military commentator Amir Oren acknowledged that "the disengagement looked like a failed initiative in most of its aspects."

As IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz acknowledged last week, the army today is at a loss to find adequate responses to the post-withdrawal transformation of Gaza into the largest terrorist base in the Arab world. As well, with the acquisition of an arsenal of missiles and mortars, including Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles by the Palestinians, the security fences around both Gaza and Judea and Samaria, which have long been the Left's ultimate answer to Palestinian terrorism, have been proven to be colossally misguided.

Even as it acknowledges this failure, the Left embraces Sharon, as Amir Oren put it, because of "hatred of the settlers... more than from any belief in the wisdom of Sharon." [This is what those of you who live outside Israel cannot fathom. I don't pretend to understand why either - I don't. But hatred of the settlers - like hatred of Haredim - is a fact of life for the vast majority of Jewish Israelis. CiJ]

... The large "centrist" faction Sharon is so hailed for having discovered is little more than a collection of leftists like Shimon Peres and Haim Ramon on the one hand, and opportunistic and non-ideological Likud members like acting premier Ehud Olmert and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni on the other. Sharon has left no coherent vision for the state other than Peres's: further surrender to Palestinian terrorism based on the expulsion of thousands upon thousands of Jews from their homes, in the vain hope that strengthening the enemy will lessen the costs of its war on Israel.

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