Sharon successor will share hawkish pragmatism

World View: Interviewed on RTÉ yesterday about Ariel Sharon, the Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti said his departure would not make much difference. Whoever succeeded him would have much the same policies, determined by the military establishment which controls Israeli policy.

It was not possible to do business with Sharon, who relied on a violent, unilateral approach, which would in the long- term only endanger Israelis' security.

It is interesting to reflect on these remarks in the light of Israeli commentary on Sharon's departure. Writing in the right-wing Jerusalem Post about his legacy yesterday, Herb Keinan said he broke the connection between peacemaking and security that had dominated Israeli public perceptions during the Oslo process.

"By insisting in the early days of his term on an end to terrorism before continuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, Sharon ushered in a new formula that posited not peace first and then security, but rather first security and then peace. Not first shake hands with Yasser Arafat and then the killing would stop, but rather first stop blowing up our children, and then we can negotiate."

Keinan points out how Sharon harnessed this policy to George Bush's after 9/11 and saw it bear fruit when Bush endorsed it in 2002. (It was already popular with an Israeli public disillusioned with Oslo after the outbreak of the second intifada - which Sharon had helped ignite by his visit to the Wailing Wall in September 2000.) Sharon also abandoned the land-for-peace formula which had dominated the 1990s, on the grounds that the while Palestinians sought much more than land, Israelis realised that what was available was much less than peace.

Such a reading of Sharon is quite compatible with Barghouti's. It helps to explain why Sharon could carry so many Israelis with him last year when he withdrew from Gaza. This was done unilaterally, not by negotiation. It was presented prudentially to the Israeli electorate, the better to secure the West Bank, rather than as a first step on the road to a peace agreement.

He gave similar prudential reasons for abandoning the Greater Israel vision which sustained his militarist expansionism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Given the higher growth of the Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and the falling away of Jewish immigration, long-term occupation became unrealistic. A two-state settlement would be necessary to guarantee the future of Zionism.

But Sharon was far from accepting an Oslo-type formula for such a settlement. Rather did he move to endorse and accelerate the separation barrier originally begun by the previous Labour government, to reinforce West Bank settlements and to copperfasten Israeli control of the territories and East Jerusalem by an elaborate series of roads between them which radically restricts Palestinians' freedom of movement.

All this was accompanied by continuing strong military policies. As Akive Eldar, put it in the centre-left Haaretz yesterday: "There is no sign that he turned his back on the approach of 'searing the consciousness' of the neighbours, or of the 'constructive destruction' of the infrastructure and economy in the territories. Defence minister Shaul Mofaz and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter interpreted Sharon's winks as a fundamental directive to continue their strong-arm policy over the civil population and ignore the increasing violence by the young generation of settlers. The pressure of the closures, checkpoints, arrests and assassinations brought about the collapse of the central government in the territories. But instead of waving the white flag, the Palestinian public is waving the green flag of Hamas."

On this reading Sharon leaves not just a leadership vacuum, "but an ideological and strategic void as well". The best that can be said for his strategy is that it aims at an indefinite interim deal dictated by Israel's unilateral moves and its strong military.

This political achievement should not be underestimated, Eldar argues, since it involved harnessing "the help of the United States' war on terror in 2001, the war in Iraq, the Christian right, suicide bombings and the lies of Yasser Arafat", and convincing the international community that "political progress is not an incentive to get the occupying side to stop violence, but a reward for the good behaviour of the occupied side".

Barghouti's reference to military control of Israeli policy is also echoed in Israeli commentary. Sharon was in a long tradition of soldiers-turned- statesmen there. This reflects a highly militarised society which has been at war nearly every year since 1948. Yoram Peri, director of the Chaim Herzog Institute in Tel Aviv University, worked with the former soldier Yitzhak Rabin when he was prime minister in the mid-1990s and is a specialist in the military's role in Israeli policy-making.

He argues in the journal Israel Affairs (April 2005) that it "intensified since the 1990s when it advocated reconciliation with Israel's adversaries.

However, the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 transformed the military's position into a militant and hawkish one."

Political leaders depend heavily on the intelligence and planning section of the Israeli defence forces for information. Military leaders are closely involved in cabinet policy-making. Weak mechanisms for civilian control and institutional co-ordination reinforce military involvement.

It takes ex-military leaders such as Sharon to control this system - and he was by no means always in the military's pocket, since they tend to have a narrow vision of security, Peri writes. But Sharon certainly went with the grain of the military after 2000. And this military dominance is a genuine problem for Israeli democracy.

One of Sharon's potential successors as leader of the Kadima party is defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who was military chief of staff before he was appointed two years ago.

He shares the hawkish pragmatism typical of the breed - and it would be foolish for any observer of Israeli affairs to underestimate its appeal for voters there. They vote on security at election time. Tough personalities with a military and security record are trusted with leadership. That helps explain the weakness of Shimon Peres or Ehud Olmert, and could boost Benjamin Netanyahu. But that would probably confirm Barghouti's observations - and strengthen Hamas.