Uncertainty is strategy for Israel’s Sharon

? Somewhere along the way, the blunt instrument known as Ariel Sharon has learned to live with ambiguity. The Israeli prime minister has made uncertainty a friend and a tool in his high-risk, high-reward strategy of smashing Palestinian resistance to Israeli control for a long time to come.

The once gruff and impetuous general has skillfully deployed a string of maybes and ifs and we-will-sees to checkmate Yasser Arafat and, more crucially, to bind the Bush administration firmly to Sharon’s bid to bury a generation of failed Palestinian leadership in the rubble of the West Bank and Gaza. He has done this while accepting — in principle — a “road map” to peace that, as he certainly anticipated, has led nowhere.

But Sharon still has to answer one lingering and deadly serious question: Has he also learned not to overplay his hand when he is dominating the enemy? That is, can he stop short of inadvertently giving Arafat an undeserved halo of martyrdom and a lasting place in Arab history? And can he resist turning a potentially useful defensive fence of separation into a new land-grab for Israeli settlers?

In discussions in Washington and New York last week, Sharon aides indicated to U.S. officials that Israel will continue as long as it can to avoid dramatic and final steps that would complicate President Bush’s determined rhetorical commitment to pursuing the road map.

The decision — in principle — by Sharon’s Cabinet two weeks ago to “remove” Arafat from his isolated West Bank headquarters would be applied narrowly, the Israeli side indicated. A new outrage by terrorists linked directly to Arafat would automatically trigger the Palestinian leader’s expulsion to a foreign country. More ambiguous attacks would be judged by the circumstances.

“This should be considered as a last warning to Arafat to give up terrorism,” a senior Israeli official said last week in the wake of talks between Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s chief of staff, and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. They have reportedly worked out a series of unannounced “understandings” that would avoid clashes over the road map, Israeli settlements and the system of security barriers, or “fence,” now being built across the West Bank.

Sharon has responded to indirect threats from Washington to withhold aid that would be spent on the fence with soft words rather than with the bluster and the appeals to Congress that were employed at times by his Likud predecessors. He agreed last week to delay indefinitely construction “in three or four places, very small areas that amount to 1 to 2 percent of the entire project, that the Americans are most concerned about,” the senior Israeli official told me.

“Look, the Americans would prefer that the fence not be there, that is clear,” he continued. “But they have listened carefully and with what we see as growing understanding as we have explained that the route of the fence is not a political design but a matter of topography and of obstructing infiltration. This is not about a final territorial arrangement.”

Buying time is a useful tactic for Sharon, who is unenthusiastic about a fence that could foreclose his options on future settlements and defensive positions in the Jordan Valley. He has gone ahead with the construction of about 100 miles of walls, buffer zones, fencing and other barriers to stop suicide bombers infiltrating from the West Bank.

But Sharon fears the political logic of a fence that would roughly follow the 215-mile Green Line boundary that separated Israel and the pre-1967 West Bank territory. That option could provide the geographical basis of a true physical separation for the two warring populations — probably the best outcome now available to them — and the de facto frontier could harden into a final border.

For Sharon, the central reality is that he has had to rule out nothing while appearing to accommodate Bush’s stated policy of encouraging “two states living side by side in peace.” The road map has predictably turned out to be a set of laudable principles that remain abstract and unimplemented as Arafat undermines the peace plan’s requirement of Palestinian reform, especially in the security area.

The real question about the road map always was whether the leaders who signed on to it had fallback plans once its limitations became obvious. Sharon clearly did, while the Bush administration, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations seem not to have thought about Plan B.

As a general and an opposition leader, Sharon tended to overreach in moments of great success. He inflicted more damage on himself than his enemies ever did. That is a lesson he needs to keep in mind in the complex maneuvering that lies just ahead.


Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.