Looking Ahead

For Sharon, the Gaza withdrawal may determine
his place in history.

LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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8/25
2005

68

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Rise Of Begin

Golda Meir is associated with two fail-
ures: the inability to read the signals
leading to the 1973 Yom Kippur War
and insensitivity toward Israel's
Sephardi underclass. Together, these
shortcomings generated a process that
led to the emergence of Menachem
Begin in 1977 as Israel's first
prime minister from the
right-leaning Likud Party.
Begin is remembered pri-
marily for the land-for-peace
deal he struck with then
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat soon
after coming to power. He also was
able to build an abiding alliance
between his Likud Party and the
Sephardim. And it was Begin who
made the decision to bomb Iraq's
nuclear reactor in 1981, a move that
at first was criticized around the world
but which, in retrospect, was praised
by Western officials as far-sighted.
But Begin, too, had his failures.
The 1982 Lebanon War that was
meant to crush the PLO turned sour
as Israel got sucked into an occupa-
tion that lasted 18 years, at a high
cost of soldiers' lives and internation-
al support. Begin resigned as prime
minister and remained a recluse until
his death in 1992.
His successor, Yitzhak Shamir —
who voted against the peace treaty
with Egypt — is remembered for his
reluctance to take the peace process
forward. The sea is the same sea and
the Arabs are the same Arabs" was his
dictum.
But when Shamir started a peace
process with the 1991 Madrid confer-
ence that the Israeli public felt he
would never complete, they turned
again to the left, bringing Yitzhak
Rabin to power.
Rabin, the general who led the
Israeli Defense Forces to victory in the
Six-Day War, is remembered for the
Oslo peace process that led to his
assassination by a right-wing oppo-
nent. He was the first Israeli leader to
negotiate with the PLO, beginning an

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Jerusalem
or better or for worse, Israel's
withdrawal from Gaza and the
northern West Bank is certain
to be one of the defining moments of
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's political
career.
Sharon will be remembered as the
Israeli leader who did the most to
build settlements and then, when he
became prime minister, tore them
down. But when the history
books are written, will the
pullout be seen as a bold
move that saved Israel —
allowing it to remain both
Jewish and democratic — or as a
wrong turn that divided the nation
and exacerbated Palestinian terrorism?
Most Israeli leaders have defining
moments associated with them. For
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime
minister, the most memorable was his
decision to proclaim the establishment
of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948,
even though he knew it would lead to
a war — one his generals said the Jews
had only a 50-50 chance of winning.
Ben-Gurion was active before 1967,
the watershed year in Israel's political
history. Since then, Israeli history
largely has been the story of a debate
over how to use the territorial and
psychological gains of the Six-Day
War to win Arab recognition of
Israel's right to exist and achieve
peaceful coexistence.
The right wing argued for holding
on to conquered territories to main-
tain deterrence and to go for peace
only after the Arab states recognized
Israel. The left favored offering to
return most of the territories to spark
a peace dynamic. Subsequent prime
ministers are remembered largely for
their contributions to this dialectic.
Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol,
is remembered for stammering in a
key address to a frightened nation days
before the outbreak of the Six-Day
War. For years, the perceived nervous-
ness tarred Eshkol as a weak leader.
Though later research did much to
rehabilitate Eshkol, a new book by the
historian Tom Segev restores his image
as a ditherer and blames him for miss-

ing a chance for peace with Jordan's
King Hussein that might have side-
lined Yasser Arafat's Palestine
Liberation Organization decades ago.

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