U.S. May Have to Adjust Stance on Israel

Administration Faces Myriad of Tough Choices

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 7, 2006

WASHINGTON -- To a striking degree, Ariel Sharon's vision for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become the Bush administration's vision. So Mr. Sharon's dire medical condition forces the U.S. to confront an immediate question: Where does that vision for Middle East peace go now?

Mr. Sharon's near-certain departure from the Israeli political scene has sparked immediate concern among senior Bush administration officials. They fear that Mr. Sharon's successor will be unable, or unwilling, to make territorial compromises necessary to create the viable Palestinian state that the Bush administration sees as vital.

One of the hardest choices the administration faces is deciding how hard to push the next Israeli leader to slow growth of outposts on disputed lands or plan unilateral West Bank withdrawals. The U.S. fears that Mr. Sharon may be the only Israeli leader with the security credentials capable of convincing the Israeli public that such steps -- very contentious inside Israel -- could be carried out safely.

The U.S. also is weighing whether to offer tacit public support before elections, scheduled for March, to Ehud Olmert, who joined Mr. Sharon in leaving the Likud Party for the new, centrist Kadima movement. Mr. Olmert is the ailing premier's chosen successor, and the Bush administration prefers him to the other top candidates in the election: the Labor Party's Amir Peretz and the Likud Party's Benyamin Netanyahu. But the U.S. also is anxious not to appear to be meddling. In 1996, then-President Clinton angered many Israelis by essentially endorsing then-Labor leader Shimon Peres, who went on to be defeated by Mr. Netanyahu.

For the moment, administration officials are limiting public comments to expressions of concern for Mr. Sharon, 77 years old, who is in a medically induced coma at a Jerusalem hospital. (See related article.) But the administration is operating under the assumption that Mr. Sharon's era has ended. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Friday canceled a planned trip to Asia, and officials say privately that they are pondering the difficult choices they face in the post-Sharon era.

The challenges confronting the administration stem from Mr. Bush's decision in recent years to place his approach to the Israel-Palestinian question almost entirely on Mr. Sharon's broad shoulders. Public comments notwithstanding, Mr. Sharon's policies have fully supplanted Mr. Bush's "road map" as the blueprint for the region.

Outlined by Mr. Bush in June 2002, the road map -- formally backed by the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- calls for specific steps by Israel and the Palestinians toward creating a Palestinian state adjacent to a secure Israel. The plan's 2005 deadline for Palestinian statehood passed with the target unmet.

And the signature events of the past few years, from the Gaza pullout to Mr. Sharon's construction of a West Bank security barrier (widely seen as the country's future border with an independent Palestine), took place outside the parameters of the road map, rather than within them.

"U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians has become personalized in Ariel Sharon," says Edward S. Walker Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt and now president of the Middle East Institute think tank here. "Sharon gave lip service to the road map but largely as a way of not embarrassing the president. He didn't believe in it, and his actions reflected that."

The relationship between the two men dates back to 1998, when then-Foreign Minister Sharon took then-Texas Gov. Bush on a helicopter tour of Israel designed to highlight the country's small size and vulnerability. The short trip, a standard feature of Israeli tours for visiting dignitaries, made such a strong impression on Mr. Bush that he mentioned it to aides at his first National Security Council meeting after being elected president, according to Mr. Walker, who attended.

When Mr. Sharon took office as prime minister in 2001, he and Mr. Bush formed a partnership that ultimately reshaped the political contours of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Although never personally close, the two worked together to marginalize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, to undertake the withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip and to strengthen Israeli control over major West Bank settlements.

The relationship paid clear political dividends to each leader. Mr. Bush is the first American president to explicitly endorse the creation of a Palestinian state, but his determination to avoid what he saw as President Clinton's intense -- and ultimately fruitless -- immersion in the Mideast peace process has meant that the administration has expended little political capital in pursuit of the elusive goal. The hands-off approach infuriated major U.S. allies like Britain and much of the Arab world, making Mr. Sharon's Gaza withdrawal -- the first time Israel demolished settlements on disputed land -- an especially valuable public-relations win for the White House.

Mr. Sharon calibrated his approach to foreign policy around maintaining close ties with the U.S. Mr. Bush's unstinting support allowed Mr. Sharon to weather international condemnation that followed Israel's use of targeted assassinations and a large-scale reoccupation of the West Bank to crush a bloody campaign by Palestinian militants. It also allowed Mr. Sharon to marginalize his nemesis, Mr. Arafat. The Israeli premier refused to meet with the Palestinian leader and effectively imprisoned him in the rubble of a Ramallah presidential compound until he died in November 2004.

Mr. Bush's most valuable gift to Mr. Sharon was an April 2004 letter that jettisoned decades of American foreign policy by explicitly endorsing continued Israeli control of portions of the disputed West Bank. "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949," Mr. Bush wrote. The vague language was widely seen as blessing Israel's annexation of settlement blocks in the West Bank that house the vast majority of Israel's settlers there.

Mr. Sharon's most valuable gift to Mr. Bush, by contrast, would have been the unilateral withdrawal from the rest of the West Bank, expected to be the cornerstone of Mr. Sharon's next term in office. The Bush administration hoped that such a pullout could lead to "final-status" negotiations on hot-button issues like the future of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees' ability to settle in Israel and the exact borders of the two states.

But Mr. Sharon's stroke clouds the prospects that such a withdrawal will take place. His successor, at least until the March elections, is Vice Premier Olmert, 60, who travels frequently to Washington and retains strong ties with influential Jewish-Americans, forged during his tenure as mayor of Jerusalem. He shares Mr. Sharon's core political and security beliefs and was frequently sent to Washington to raise trial balloons on policy moves that Mr. Sharon was considering quietly. "Olmert was the kite flier for Sharon," says Ephraim Halevy, a former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence service who now heads a security think tank at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "They shared a common vision, and in this respect, there will be continuity."

Still, U.S. and Israeli officials acknowledge that it will be harder for Mr. Olmert to sell difficult moves like a West Bank withdrawal. Although he is a savvy politician, he lacks Mr. Sharon's credentials as a general who fought in all of Israel's wars and more than once saved the country from apparent defeat. And neither Mr. Olmert nor any other candidate who would succeed Mr. Sharon has the unusual combination of history and personality that has come to embody the contradictions and tensions of the Israeli public.

"The most substantive difference between Sharon and Olmert are not of view but of background," says Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Olmert is from the new generation of Israeli politicians and doesn't stand out from that crowd in any particular way. Sharon was the only person of his ilk left in Israeli politics. He was singular."

---- Karby Leggett in Jerusalem contributed to this article.

Source

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.