Does Ariel Sharon have a plan? He claimed as much in a speech on Israeli television last week, following the killings of six Israeli soldiers and 23 Palestinians. There's been an unprecedented upsurge of violence in recent months, and Israelis understandably looked to Sharon's address for reassurance. Though Sharon offered some vague proposals — such as 'buffer zones' in the Occupied Territories to seal off Israeli cities and settlements from the threat of attack — the speech was devoid of any grand vision or reassuring master plan. Falling back on his reputation as Israel's most venerable soldier, Sharon urged his compatriots to renew their resolve and prepare for more of the same. In the context of the current instability, however, this prescription does little to belie the notion that, only a year into his term as prime minister, Ariel Sharon is flailing.
It would be easy to caricature Sharon as a blunt warmonger, the archetypal Israeli 'hawk' who has periodically wrested power from the 'doves' (folks like Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres) and proceeded to screw up hopes of peace. To read him this way, though, is to miss both his own shrewdness and some important continuities in Israeli politics. For three decades, Sharon has been in the vanguard of the settler movement in Israel. Before the Oslo peace process was conceived in 1993, Sharon had already presented several plans which envisaged annexing large parts of the West Bank to Israel. Sharon was a visionary, correctly maintaining that the best way for Israel to make its occupation permanent would be to create large blocs of settlement inside the Occupied Territories and to connect them to Israeli electricity, water and road networks. What's amazing is not only that these settlements were built in the late 1980s and 1990s, but that they were championed by the Labor party in Israel as well as Sharon's right-wing Likud. Thus Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and the other supposed 'doves' all played a crucial role in bringing Sharon's dream of an expanded Israel — a permanent occupation — to reality.
So far, so good. Sharon's greater Israel — consisting of more than 400,000 settlers, hundreds of towns and thousands of miles of by-pass roads accessible only to Israelis — had already been established in the Occupied Territories when he took power in February 2001. His principal problem, then, was that the Palestinians proved extremely reluctant to sign any peace agreement that formalized Israeli control over this land. Sharon, ever the pragmatist, is not the kind of man to wring his hands about such things. If the settlements couldn't be preserved through negotiation with Arafat, then Arafat would be sidelined and more amenable Palestinians would be sought out. The remarkable thing about the last year, however, is that it's become obvious that there's no Palestinian constituency prepared to do this particular deal. Having resigned themselves to the loss of nearly 78 percent of what had been Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948, Palestinians are extremely loath to part with the remaining 22 percent. And so Sharon has a new problem that doesn't seem to have a Palestinian solution.
If anything's clear, nearly nine disastrous years after the Oslo process began, it's that the settlements have to be removed in full if there's to be a two-state solution to this conflict. None of the 'peace' plans which preserve a core of Israeli settlements, even the settlement ring that surrounds East Jerusalem, will create a viable Palestinian state. The daily indignities of life in the Occupied Territories cluster around the enormously invasive settler presence — not only the settler towns and cities themselves, but the bypass roads, the checkpoints and the infrastructure necessary to maintain the occupation. It's long been clear to outside observers that Israel's expansion was doomed to failure — that the fact of Palestinian resistance would some day force the abandonment of the settlement project and a return to the borders of June 1967. The nightmare scenario, however, is that Sharon has one last plan that may yet keep the dream alive — the transfer of the nearly three million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to neighboring Arab states.
Though there would surely be an international outcry over such a massive expulsion, we'd do well to remember that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled by Israel in 1947-9 and in 1967; and that the international community, in spite of Israel's flagrant and prolonged violation of international law, has failed to force Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza despite 35 years of cruel occupation. Benny Elon, a member of Sharon's cabinet, has openly advocated transfer in public interviews; other prominent politicians have done the same. Is transfer unthinkable for Sharon? Or is it just unsayable? If the latter, let's hope that the prime minister's apparent flailing of the past few weeks is genuine. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.
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Patrick Jaojoco, Brandi Bushman, and Humza Gondal"We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color."
"We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color."
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“There are real power differentials on this campus, and we all have an obligation to be mindful of them. The students, postdocs, and faculty who occupied Clio Hall seem to have abused their privileges in the ways they treated staff as an expression of protest. That is wrong.”
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Rishi Khanna“When Princeton administrators suppress mere disruptions tied to progressive speech, they effectively suppress a substantial portion of the speech itself.”
“When Princeton administrators suppress mere disruptions tied to progressive speech, they effectively suppress a substantial portion of the speech itself.”
