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Dr. Aaron Lerner is co-founder of , Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
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By Dr. Aaron Lerner
October 8, 2004
Aaron Lerner Date: 7 October 2004
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is hardly the first Israeli prime minister who makes major policy moves because of orthopedic problems (the absence of a backbone). Thanks to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weissglas, the Israeli public knows that a lack of intestinal fortitude is the driving force by Sharon's retreat plan before it is actually implemented.
Here's how Weisglass put it in his controversial interview for the 8 October Haaretz Friday Magazine:
Sharon accepted the road map "because the road map stipulated that it was based on performance and not on sacrosanct dates."
And the Palestinians weren't performing.
So far so good. Israel accepted the American plan. The Palestinians failed to perform and the Americans recognized that the Palestinians were at fault.
Why then the retreat?
"What was the main factor that pushed you to the disengagement idea?" asks Haaretz reporter Ari Shavit.
Weisglass: "The concern was the fact that President Bush's formula was stuck and this would lead to its ruin. That the international community would say: You wanted the president's formula and you got it; you wanted to try Abu Mazen and you tried. It didn't work. And when a formula doesn't work in reality, you don't change reality, you change the formula. Therefore, Arik's realistic viewpoint said that it was possible that the principle that was our historic policy achievement would be annulled -- the principle that eradication of terrorism precedes a political process. And with the annulment of that principle, Israel would find itself negotiating with terrorism. And because once such negotiations start it's very difficult to stop them, the result would be a Palestinian state with terrorism. And all this within quite a short time. Not decades or even years, but a few months."
Plain and simple: there would be pressure and Ariel Sharon would collapse so quickly and completely under that pressure that a negotiated terror Palestinian state would already come into being within "a few months."
Mr. Weisglass, of course, claims that the retreat will relieve Israel from pressure for decades to come.
But months -- or less -- after a retreat, Weisglass could justify an additional retreat, explaining: "The concern was the fact that the peace process after the disengagement was stuck and this would lead to its ruin...."
Mr. Sharon apparently misunderstood Harry S. Truman's recommendation that "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."
The "you" is the politician -- not the nation the politician is leading.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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