Sharon left the right

A tremendously poignant column by Caroline B. Glick points out beautifully how Sharon did not at all redefine the political center in Israel (as so many pundits have suggested), rather he simply abandoned the right for the left sometime in late 2003 for reasons that still remain unknown. The folly of his leftwing slide to appeasement is already becoming obvious, even to those on the left (albeit begrudgingly).

JewishWorldReview:

"The myth of Sharon and his leadership is that over the past two years he redefined the center of Israeli politics. 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."

"Until September 2000, when PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat began the Palestinian terror war against Israel, the Israeli Left claimed that the appeasement of the Palestinians had to be conducted in the course of negotiations with the PLO. After its resounding electoral defeat in 2001, the Left updated its policy. The new policy of the Left was the unilateral surrender of territory to the Palestinians."

"Like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak before him, Sharon's political cachet was based on the public's perception of him as a security hawk and a patriot. What differentiated Sharon from Rabin and Barak was not so much his policies, but rather the fact that he came from the rightist Likud rather than the leftist Labor party."

"Rabin's adoption of the strategically catastrophic Oslo peace process with the PLO, and Barak's cataclysmically misguided peace offers to Arafat at Camp David and Taba, paved the way for the Palestinian terror war against Israel. These policies provided Israel's enemies with the military means, the territory and the political legitimacy necessary to carry out their war."

"Yet the demise of these policies did not leave Israelis without other options. In the 1996 elections, as in 2001 and 2003, Israelis turned to the Likud and the political Right for remedies. Indeed, in 2003 Sharon won his smashing victory for the Likud after militarily reentering the cities of Judea and Samaria to fight terror, and ridiculing the irresponsibility of Labor's proposed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza."

"And then Sharon — for reasons still unknown because Sharon himself refused to explain them — took a sharp leftward turn and adopted the very policies the Israeli electorate had just so resoundingly rejected."

"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."

"WHATEVER the results of the coming post-Sharon elections may be, one thing is all but certain. Sharon's legacy of adopting the Left's vision of Israeli policy will eventually be abandoned. As was the case with Rabin and Barak before him, Sharon's adoption of the Left's view of Israel's security predicament, based as it is on false assumptions, will reach a point where its failure will no longer be deniable. When this occurs, Israeli voters will elect a rightist government. Hopefully when that happens, the Right will not be induced to repeat Sharon's mistakes."

Read it all.