Is this a balanced article? I'm interested in people's thoughts.

January 16, 2006

The Things That Have Not Changed
By Fareed Zakaria

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10756413/site/newsweek/

The graveyards are filled with indispensable men, Charles de Gaulle once remarked. Ariel Sharon would seem to be the exception, one who truly became irreplaceable in his final years. Everyone seems to agree that his passing from the political scene would change everything, opening up a political void and jeopardizing the prospects for progress between the Palestinians and Israelis. But perhaps de Gaulle was right, even in the Middle East.

Sharon came to hold the view that he is now firmly associated with-unilateral disengagement with the Palestinians-extremely reluctantly. Withdrawal from Gaza was always a left-wing idea. In fact, the Labor Party leader, Amram Mitzna, campaigned on it in the 2002 election. Sharon rejected any such thinking, believing firmly in a "Greater Israel," one that he had risked his life conquering and building.

What changed his mind were demographic realities-namely the prospect that as the Palestinians multiplied, Jews would become a minority in their own country. Add to this a political reality: Israelis had soured on the dream of a Greater Israel-because they saw that it came with Palestinians in it. The Israelis wanted out. Sharon, a shrewd politician, recognized these trends and followed them.

These realities persist with or without Sharon. That is surely why his new party, Kadima, continues to poll as well as it did weeks ago, even though Israelis know now that Sharon may not lead it. Kadima fills a political vacuum. The Likud position remains a flat refusal to give up land, which the Israeli public thinks is implausible. The Labor Party, on the other hand, opposes unilateralism, arguing for a negotiated comprehensive settlement with the Palestinians. Israelis think this is naive. "The Palestinians cannot deliver, but we cannot stay," says Israeli politician Alon Pinkus. "These are the two pressures that will shape any Israeli government's approach." That means some kind of unilateral disengagement.

To be sure, Sharon's role was vital. He was the one leader who could break the taboo on returning land and evacuating settlers. Israelis trusted him to implement a difficult policy. He had credibility on the right, with the security forces and with key segments of the electorate. His probable successor, Ehud Olmert, actually advocated withdrawal from Gaza well before Sharon did, but would still face a huge challenge in executing any new moves. The West Bank is far more important to the Israeli right than Gaza was, and perhaps most important, Olmert is not Sharon.

Even with this large caveat, I do not believe that Sharon's absence would prove to be the crucial stumbling block. That's because the great obstacle to progress in the Middle East is no longer Israeli intentions but rather Palestinian capabilities. The big story that no one wants to admit yet is that the Palestinian Authority has collapsed, Gaza has turned into a failed state and there is no single Palestinian political organization that could create order in the territories and negotiate with Israel. Palestinian dysfunction is now the main limiting factor on any progress in the peace process.

There were many hopes that Gaza could become a model of what the Palestinians would do once liberated from occupation. Last week The Christian Science Monitor reported on the new scene: "As the first year devoid of an Israeli presence since 1967 dawns," it wrote, "armed militias roam the streets freely, foreigners are kidnapped with regularity, and the measure of a man in this coastal territory is not his political title, or even the size of his house, but the number of AK-47-wielding bodyguards he employs."

Some of these problems are not all of the Palestinians' making. Israel has ruled them harshly and disrupted their political and economic life, and some of these disruptions continue even in Gaza. Goods have to be loaded and unloaded at checkpoints, people checked and rechecked, all of which imposes huge costs on normal activities. But whatever the past and whatever the constraints, the fact remains that Gaza lacks a single authority, a functioning government, and as a result is in a "state of anarchy," in the words of The Christian Science Monitor. This is not the model that people had hoped for.

If the United States and the international community are looking to push along the peace process, the urgent need is to build Palestinian governing capability. Without that, Israeli intentions do not matter. If the Palestinians can get their act together, the spotlight will inevitably shift to the Israelis. And then the United States should urge Israel to continue in the direction that Ariel Sharon has pointed toward, separating itself from the Palestinian population in a process that inevitably will result in a Palestinian state on more than 90 percent of the territories captured in the 1967 war. A sense that this is what Sharon would have done eventually will be essential in moving to that settlement. In that sense, he might still prove to be utterly indispensable.