Has Ariel Sharon undergone a remarkable conversion on the road map to peace - or is he just trying to keep George Bush on side until the next suicide bomb, asks David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
The speaker set out all the traditional left-wing arguments. The demographics, he noted, were not working to Israel's advantage. The economy was being destroyed. Israel simply did not have the resources required to maintain control over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The bottom line: Israel had to put an end to "the occupation" - he repeated the word a few times for additional effect. It was not in the national interest to continue to rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. Israel could not stay forever in Jenin and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem.
Had this been Ehud Barak speaking, or Barak's successor as head of the Labour Party, Amram Mitzna, or Labour's leading statesman, Shimon Peres, none of this would have caused a stir. No-one would have batted an eyelid.
But the man who espoused these positions at a televised political gathering last Monday was no Labour pol. Quite the reverse. He had always stood firmly to the right of centre on the Israeli political spectrum. He had long asserted that Jordan was the appropriate location for any future Palestinian state, and that there could be no new independent entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. He had always refused so much as to shake hands with the Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat. And as recently as the late 1990s, he had been urging Israelis to "seize the hilltops" in the West Bank - to build as many settlements there as they could, thus creating facts on the ground that would render a viable Palestinian state physically impossible.
He was, indeed, none other than Ariel Sharon, architect of the settlement movement, chairman of the right-wing Likud party, and current prime minister of Israel. And his remarks about the need to end the occupation, delivered at a meeting of his party's Knesset members, represent a veritable political earthquake. In short, Sharon is now spouting the energetically pro-compromise positions of the likes of the late Labour prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Does he mean what he's saying? Or is he merely employing the language of viable reconciliation in order to gain brownie points with his most crucial ally, President George Bush, who flies to the Middle East this coming week to spearhead the US's newly energised foreign policy?
Last Sunday, when Sharon persuaded his somewhat reluctant cabinet colleagues to approve the US-backed "road map" to Palestinian statehood and Israeli-Palestinian peace, that question remained unresolved. Analysts, political adversaries and Sharon's own party colleagues were divided as to whether the indomitable former general had now genuinely set his heart on peace, or whether he was merely seeking to avoid conflict with Bush. There were many who believed Sharon was playing shrewd politics: pleasing Bush by approving the "road map" while remaining quietly confident that the new Palestinian Authority prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, would not act decisively against Hamas and other extremist groups, thus ensuring that the "road map" wouldn't lead anywhere.
Monday's "occupation" speech changed all that, although one Meretz party Knesset member, Yossi Sarid, in line with many of Sharon's long-time leftist critics, is still convinced that the shift is solely rhetorical, and has been giving sceptical interviews peppered with references to leopards and their unchanging spots. In the prime minister's Likud party, however, and most especially among the leaders of the settlement movement - who hitherto regarded Sharon as their most valuable advocate - there is little doubt that something cataclysmic has happened.
Effi Eitam, another former general who leads the pro-settler National Religious Party in the Sharon coalition government, sounded a note of profound despair in wondering why Sharon had suddenly adopted the language of Israel's international critics. The West Bank was not "occupied" territory, Eitam insisted, since there had not been a sovereign Palestinian entity there when Israel captured it in the 1967 war. While Eitam said he supported Sharon's acknowledgement of the need to find some means by which the Palestinians could "express their nationality", there were other ways to achieve this short of an independent state, which, he asserted, would constitute a threat to Israel.
Echoing the despair on the right, Yisrael Harel, an eloquent and passionate former head of the Council of Jewish Settlements, the settlers' umbrella organisation, compared Sharon's occupation comments, in terms of the grim period he fears they will preface, to the dramatic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993 at the start of the failed Oslo peace process. The prime minister, Harel declared, appeared to have undergone something akin to a "religious conversion".
If Sharon has indeed changed his spots, the next question is why? This, after all, is a man who has always seemed to believe in his country's right to a greater Israel, extending from river to sea. At the turn of the 1990s, he tried to prevent the then Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, from attending the Madrid peace conference that led to the Oslo process. He castigated Rabin over the partnership with Arafat. He undermined the mid-1990s Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whenever "Bibi" made any move to implement the Oslo accords.
Since becoming prime minister in 2001, however, Sharon has striven to become a consensual figure. Though he may be lambasted overseas for perceived excessive use of force in countering the armed Intifada, at home he romped to a second election victory four months ago because most Israelis feel he has exercised relative restraint and good judgment in trying to confront the bombers and rendering the reviled Arafat politically impotent. He rebuffed his own party when it passed a resolution outlawing Palestinian statehood. And having internalised the demographic projections that envisage more Jews than Arabs in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean by 2020 at latest, he appears to have come to the conclusion, long held on the centre-left, that only a territorial compromise with the Palestinians will enable Israel to remain both democratic and overwhelmingly Jewish in character.
In private conversation, Sharon is now said to talk of a Palestinian state in Gaza and two-thirds of the West Bank - terms far short of what Barak offered, but far more generous than he had previously been perceived as willing to consider.
Twice widowed and now in his mid-70s, Sharon may also be making the switch not uncommon to politicians of advancing years - away from the preoccupation with the daily flux of governance, and toward a desire to make a lasting, decisive impact on the destiny of his people. In personal terms, Sharon has not had an easy time of it lately. He is under the magnifying glass for alleged financial corruption in past election campaigns. His two sons - one of whom, Omri, is now a fast-rising Likud Knesset member - are also facing allegations of financial wrongdoing.
As well as this, Sharon has been pursued in various international legal forums by victims and families of the hundreds of Palestinian refugees killed in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres - killings carried out by Christian Phalangist gunmen under Sharon's watch as defence minister. And he has been vilified in large parts of the international media as the alleged provocateur of this second Intifada. It was his visit, as opposition leader, to Jerusalem's Temple Mount in September 2000, they argue, that prompted the eruption of the violence. (Most Israelis, of course, reject this narrative, viewing Sharon's visit, rather, as the pretext employed by Arafat and his loyalists to launch an orchestrated terrorist assault on Israel, in the hope of ultimately extracting more concessions than Barak was prepared to offer at the Camp David peace table earlier that summer.)
So shell-shocked is the Israeli right by the emergence of the new Sharon that, to date, it has mustered only the faintest public protests. But right-wing ideologues say they regard the "road map" framework as being "even more dangerous" than the Oslo process they so loathed, because they see it as a capitulation to Palestinian terrorism and a path to independent Palestinian statehood that will be travelled even if Arafat and Abbas prove unwilling or unable to dismantle Hamas and the other extremist groups.
If Sharon now sticks to his professed new moderation, he may well have to brace himself for internal opposition even more heated than that faced by the likes of Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, who was, of course, assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Orthodox Jewish extremist. Unlike them, Sharon is a man of the political right, and his embrace of centre-left positions is thus all the more galling.
His best safeguard would be a genuine change for the better on the ground: a true effort by Abbas to put the gangs of bombers and gunmen out of business, bringing a long-term halt to such attacks; an Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank, and concrete progress at the negotiating table. These would create a sense among the mainstream on both sides that pragmatism was overcoming extremism.
Abbas says this is precisely the scenario he is striving for. So, too, does Bush. And most remarkably of all, so does Ariel Sharon.
The SharonFile
Who is he? Ariel Sharon (75), prime minister of Israel.
Why is he in the news? Because, rhetorically at last, he appears to be undergoing a radical conversion from adamant defender of Jewish settlement throughout 'greater Israel', including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to pragmetic advocate of a two-stat solution to the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Most likely to say (until this week): There will always be a Jewish presence in the historic lands of Judea and Samaria.
Least likely to say (even this week): I was wrong about Yasser Arafat.
Most appealing characteristic: His determination, as prime minister, to foster a sense of unity among Israel's usually bickering Jewish populace.
Least appealing characteristic: Outsiders might say his ever-reliance on military force in confronting the current intifada (though most Israelis would disagree). Israelis might say his alleged disrespect for the law when it comes to his election finances and his Likud party's entire election process (outsiders wouldn't care).