Sharon seeks to impose solution

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hounded by failing health, political enemies and corruption probes spelled out Thursday his determination to create a "fortress Israel" that would enrage most Palestinians and hard-liners in his own Likud Party alike.

The 75-year-old Israeli leader, speaking at the Herzliya Security Conference in the prosperous resort town north of Tel Aviv described his plan to impose a unilateral re-partitioning of the land if the Palestinians did not agree to negotiate one with him following the guidelines of President George W. Bush's road map.

"If in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the road map, then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians," Sharon said. "... We will not wait for them indefinitely."

The security fence to wall off the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank from Israel is being thrown up at breakneck speed. It includes key areas of pre-1967 Israel where the largest, government approved settlements, several of them large-sized towns have been built. Indeed, it would leave the Palestinians holding on to less land than if the borders of pre-June 4th, 1967 were respected.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia reacted with a cautious approval to Sharon's declared intention of pulling the Israeli army out of Palestinian areas. "(If) the unilateral actions that Prime Minister Sharon spoke about mean an Israeli army withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories (then) we of course welcome it," he said.

But Qureia made clear the Palestinians would not accept an Israel dictat that left them crammed into little more than a ghetto or virtual Banutustan. "If it means to create new facts on the ground that (conflict) with Palestinian national rights and the legal international resolutions, no one of course would accept it," he said.

Sharon's threat to impose a unilateral solution whether the Palestinians are ready to accept it or not also outraged members of his own deeply divided party. For the fence leaves out a number of small settlements that are not in strategic sites, but many of which are on sites identified in the Bible.

This retreat, or concession reflects the consensus of senior Israeli army commanders that such settlements are useless strategically and cannot be defended forever. But it has outraged Likud and settler movement hard-liners. Benzi Liberman, chairman of the Council of Settlers in Judea, Samaria and Gaza pledged they would do "everything to replace" Sharon if he ordered the army to forcibly dismantle any of their settlements.

Sharon's willingness to ignore friends and foes alike and impose his own solution on the situation is reminiscent of the highly controversial command decisions he repeatedly took during his long years of service in the Israeli army. And, ironically, it puts him in the position of possibly ordering the tearing down of some of the very settlements that he defied U.S. presidents to build as Israel's defense and agriculture minister 20 and 25 years ago.

In those days Sharon was nicknamed "the bulldozer" for his implacable determination to get things done his way and to create facts on the ground, whatever problems they would cause in the future. Then, he was the darling of the Likud party's right wing that today reviles him. And he used their power base to continually challenge and undermine then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, just as his own arch-rival, former prime minister and current finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today uses the party zealots to challenge him.

But Sharon is an old man in a hurry who cannot afford to wait. At 75 and heavily overweight, his health is uncertain at best. And his two sons are being investigated in a far-reaching police corruption probe that many in Israel believe could come to envelope the prime minister himself.

Faced with all this, his determination to complete the security fence takes on a far wider significance than just a tactical move to defeat the Palestinian suicide bombers who have slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians in recent years.

As one of the last survivors in Israeli life of the heroic "founding generation" that fought to establish the state in 1947-48 and then defend it against massive threats, he has always been wedded to the old Zionist ideology of "creating facts" on the ground. And with the security fence, he now appears to be seeking to impose a lasting solution, complete with lines on the map, to forcibly separate Israelis and Palestinians at least for the next generation.

If he succeeds, he may well end, at least for the moment, the scourge of the suicide bombers. But it would be at the price of giving up the Likud's ever-cherished dream of retaining total control of the entire land west of the Jordan River.

However, Sharon also reflects a paradoxical new consensus among the Israeli public and security establishment that is simultaneously pessimistic and hopeful, ruthless and pragmatic. His own army chief of staff and four former commanders of Shin Bet or Shabak, the Israeli security service have all recently publicly expressed their conviction that total occupation of the Palestinian territories cannot continue. And even his own top party ally, Deputy Prime Minister and former Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, startled the country and outraged hard-liners by publicly expressing similar views earlier this month.

Sharon's biggest political problem is that although he continues to ride high with the Israeli public, terror attacks and corruption probes notwithstanding, he is on far less certain ground within his own party, which he helped to found back in 1973. The prime minister wants Olmert as his successor, Likud insiders say, but the party grassroots led by the hard-liners and the settler movement is far more likely to go for Netanyahu.

Still, Netanyahu and his allies face a formidable opponent. Sharon was always a man in a hurry. Today he is an old man in a hurry. But he is still determined to get his way.