Sharing the Burden
The Hidden Columnists--Tom Friedman Edition (11 Jan 06)

In which Mr. Friedman pontificates: "Is there an Arab successor to Mr. Sharon? Or, better yet, is there an Arab Sharon?" (Here's the link to the full column for Times Select subscribers.)

So when I ask whether there is an Arab Sharon, I am really asking whether among the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Saudis - the key Middle East nations that have still not reconciled with Israel - there are leaders who are also ready to acknowledge that their lifelong efforts to keep their societies in a state of hostility against Israel, and to demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, has been a huge waste and, if not reversed, poses a dire threat to the future of their own societies?

I raise this question with no illusions about Mr. Sharon. The Haaretz newspaper editorialist Gideon Levy summed him up best: "The belated enthusiasm for Sharon is enthusiasm for a clever leader who tried toward the end of his life to extricate himself somehow from situations that a wise leader would never have gotten into in the first place. The old Sharon was one who led the country into the most superfluous and harmful of Israel's wars, the Lebanon War, and would not even raise his hand in favor of the peace agreement with Jordan." He was also most responsible for building a network of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that became an unsustainable burden.

So Sharon the prime minister had a lot of problems to clean up from Sharon the defense minister and the agriculture minister. Indeed, when Mr. Sharon was asked why he'd reversed himself and uprooted the Jewish settlements in Gaza and a few in the West Bank, he famously referred to the prime minister's chair: "You see things from here that you don't see from there." He could finally see that overbuilding settlements imperiled Israel's Jewish and democratic character. So he promptly destroyed the very right-wing party he'd built - Likud - to spread those settlements.

[...]

But Mr. Sharon's change of heart will end this conflict only if there is among Israel's remaining Arab foes an Arab Sharon (another Anwar Sadat or King Hussein) ready to act the same. Yasir Arafat and Hafez al-Assad of Syria were never ready to definitively look their peoples in the eye and tell them the campaign to destroy Israel was over. The old Arafat and the old Assad were just like the young Arafat and the young Assad. No matter how high they rose, they could not see any further for their people.

Mr. Sharon's legacy will be a mixed one. Arafat and Assad's will be pure - pure mediocrity, and both their nations are now paying the price.

Mr. Sharon is gone from the scene, but because of the new Israeli center he built, "he left Israel capable of making a decision on the future of the West Bank," said the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen. Assad and Arafat are gone, and because they never built "a new center or pathway to a new future, both their nations are now in turmoil after they are gone."

I don't know who will succeed Mr. Sharon. I only know that it will be much easier for Israel's next leader to carry out the positive side of his legacy - if a few more Arab Sharons show up in the neighborhood.