Sharon's last stand

In Jerusalem one day last summer, a Palestinian chauffeur drove me past the infamous security fence that divides Israel proper from the West Bank. Passing through the barbed wired no-man's-land into the Palestinian-controlled sector, I reflected on Ariel Sharon's historic sacrifice of Greater Israel to ensure that Israel remains great. \nThe stroke Sharon suffered last week brought this memory flooding back to me. Israeli politics had traditionally been split -- to oversimplify slightly -- about the matter of settlements. The left believed any permanent peace with the Palestinians had to be based upon a negotiated settlement. The right, meanwhile, believed Israel could lay the seeds of peace only by occupying more settlements.\nThe left was given its window of opportunity with the Oslo Accords in 1993. The Palestine Liberation \nOrganization used Israeli concessions to prop up the Palestinian terror network in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel's generous offer in 2000 at Camp David was answered by enhanced terror, the second intifada.\nWith the left's window thus closed, Israelis turned to Likud. But the right's idea of laying the seeds of peace in the rocky turf of Gaza would not come to fruition. The few Jews foolish enough to penetrate a young and fiery Arab population soon found themselves sorely outnumbered. Enter the ever strategic-minded Sharon. With a negotiated peace elusive and any Greater Israel bound to be on shaky ground, he argued for a third way -- to unilaterally withdraw Israeli soldiers and settlers from occupied areas, and redraw more defensible boundaries of a new Israel. (This coincided with the umpteenth "road map" the White House sponsored, which distinguished itself from the rest by explicitly calling for the creation of a free and democratic Palestine.) \nAlong these lines, Sharon removed Israel from Gaza. As for the West Bank, the much-loathed security fence ("the wall") near completion will give Palestine more than 90 percent of the West Bank. The security fence, as any Israeli will tell you, has brought down the intifada. Many critics deride Sharon and the strategy he devised. They are wrong to do so. Under a centrist political banner, this old warrior sought to press his design of a smaller but more secure Israel to a just conclusion. \nAll of which begs the question: Will Sharon's idea die or depart with its architect? Not necessarily, for two reasons. First, the strategy has already hollowed the old parties of the left and the right, leaving extremists on both sides hopelessly marginalized. Second, and perhaps more important, the vision has won widespread public support.\nThe memory of crossing from the Israeli to the Palestinian sector in eastern Jerusalem is a reminder to me of how Sharon learned, not a moment too soon, that securing Israel ultimately meant securing a free Palestine. That philosophy is a hazardous one, to put it mildly, but in the Promised Land, there are no other kinds. With luck, it will continue to be the philosophy of the broad Israeli mainstream, and thus provide a fitting tribute to Sharon's tenure as prime minister.