What Are They Thinking?

By Lisa Beyer

[Yasser Arafat]

It's fair to assume that there are places Yasser Arafat would rather be than imprisoned in his own compound with Israeli tank commanders as wardens. But it's not by mistake that he wound up there. Even if Arafat didn't anticipate exactly how the situation would unfold, this is a war he wanted.

For some time after the first Oslo peace accord in 1993, Arafat appeared to have genuinely embraced the idea of pursuing his political goal--an independent Palestinian state--through negotiations alone. But something flipped. That became evident two summers ago when, at talks at Camp David, the Israelis offered him their best deal yet on a state. By objective measure, the offer still wasn't good enough, but Arafat didn't merely reject it. He could have asked for more or counter-proposed; instead he left the table, went home and fueled a new uprising, which led to this war.

Why? Arafat is old, ailing and preoccupied with how he'll be remembered when he's gone. The only way for him to be Arafat the dealmaker, founder of Palestine, would be to sell short the Palestinian dream. No Israeli leader will give him a state unless he relinquishes claim to all or most of East Jerusalem, allows Israel to gobble up parts of the West Bank to accommodate the Israelis who have moved there and tells the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that they can forget about their U.N.-sanctioned right to go back to homes that are now part of Israel proper. On some level, Arafat may understand that all these compromises must be made before Palestine is born, but they won't happen on his watch. At this point he's much more interested in being a hero than in being a leader.

What to do in the meantime? Arafat can't have failed to notice that his approval ratings go up when his people are battling Israel; when things are relatively calm, they have time to notice what a corrupt, incompetent government he heads. Plus, Arafat figures the violence will demoralize the Israelis and soften their positions at the negotiating table. Violence has worked before. The hijackings of the 1970s kept the Palestinian cause alive in a way that Kurds and Basques can only envy. The first intifadeh, though far less brutal than this one, brought the Palestinians the Oslo peace talks. And, most relevant to Arafat today, Lebanon's Hizballah militia compelled Israel to withdraw unconditionally from south Lebanon two years ago--just before the fateful Camp David talks--by bloodying Israeli troops in the field and Israeli civilians along the border. What Hizballah got, Arafat wants too. He can't fight a conventional war with Israel because he has no real military. And so the suicide bombers are his army.

[Ariel Sharon]

Ariel Sharon isn't all that interested in peace. He would take it if it came his way, but he doesn't actually believe in it. And so he doesn't indulge in dreams of it, isn't inclined to take risks for it on the chance that it might be real.

Sharon does believe in fighting. It is what he has known his entire life. He has participated in each of Israel's wars, starting with the 1948 War of Independence. As far as he's concerned, that battle is still going on. Israel is still fighting for its very life, he believes, because the Arabs cannot be trusted to forego their hostility, let alone to accept that a Jewish state within their midst is an irreversible fact. Perhaps they never will, but a campaign to win their hearts and minds is not the kind of mission he considers his responsibility. The matter doesn't interest him much. Sharon is not much of a global thinker. He is not informed by theory but by what has produced results.

Sharon sees what's before him and what he has already seen, which is lots of fighting, all of it ending with Israel victorious. All but, perhaps, the Lebanon war Israel launched when Sharon was Minister of Defense in 1982. And that wasn't a total loss. Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization were run out of Lebanon and off to a more distant exile in Tunisia.

Even if Israel didn't lose in Lebanon, Sharon did. The country blamed him for the terrible casualties suffered by Israeli soldiers. A government commission judged that he bore indirect responsibility for massacres in two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, by Israel's proxy militia in Lebanon. Sharon was compelled to give up his beloved defense ministry. His ethic of aggressive vigilance seemed to be discredited, his self-sought image as Israel's superdefender was in shambles. He stood accused of leading the country to excess and to shame. For nearly 16 years, until he became Foreign Minister in 1998, he was shut out of the topflight ministerial posts.

Now is the chance he has been waiting for to say, I was not wrong; it is right to fight. Arafat has shown who he is and his Arab allies have too. They are enemies. Everyone sees that now. They won't make peace. All Israel can do is beat them into a periodic quiet, as it beat its enemies in 1948, again in 1967, again in 1973.

The battle won't stop for good. There will be no ultimate victory. So what? Life is hard. The Palestinians want a state? That is not my problem, Sharon believes. They are Palestinians, he is not.

Already, by fighting, Sharon, whose aspiration to national leadership was so recently a joke, has turned himself into a consensus figure among Israelis. Come to think of it, he does believe in peace. Peace between himself and his domestic detractors.