Will President Bush Have the Courage to Stand Up to Ariel Sharon?

By Paul N. McCloskey Jr.

The other day, I heard my friend, Chris Matthews, refer to our President George Bush as a “a gutsy guy.”

Certainly the president has the guts to take on Saddam Hussain and Osama bin Laden.

Hopefully he will soon, as his father did, have the guts to take on Ariel Sharon. Should he do so, it could be an effective blow against terrorists who throughout much of the world see us as the chief support for Prime Minister Sharon’s long-standing determination that the Palestinians shall never have the separate state guaranteed by U.N. Resolution 242.

Perhaps the greatest motivation for suicide bombers today is what is widely perceived in the Muslim world as Israeli-U.S. terrorism against Palestinians. Every time an 8-year-old Palestinian child is killed, with weapons furnished to Israel by the United States, the seeds of future vengeance by terrorism are planted in someone’s mind. The battle against future terror is less related to weapons of mass destruction than it is to the world’s perception that the U.S. supports continuing Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory in violation of U.N. resolutions and international law.

It was not always so. Until the presidency of George Bush the younger, every American president since 1967—and George Bush the elder in particular—had strongly opposed expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war. Until the election of George W. Bush, every president had had the guts to say that the settlements and their expansion violated international law.

If our president has the courage to fight terrorism in all its ugly aspects, why not take on the terrorism of Ariel Sharon?

It is over 20 years ago that one of our greatest diplomats, Philip Habib, took on Sharon, then Israel’s defense minister.

Sharon had invaded southern Lebanon, ostensibly to protect Israel’s border from Hizbollah rockets. Once started, however, he went far beyond rocket range and drove all the way into Beirut, where PLO forces were penned in the Muslim portion of the city. Much of the Muslim sector of the city was destroyed by Israeli air, artillery and tank bombardments using U.S.-supplied armament. Yasser Arafat stayed alive only by nightly movements from one underground bunker to another.

Habib’s job was to negotiate removal of the Palestinian forces, restoration if possible of a Lebanese government free of the presence and control of Syrian forces, and, finally, the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

If we are to win the long war against terror, the president must stand up to Sharon on the settlements issue.

For several months, Habib shuttled between the various participants in the Lebanese government, the PLO and the Israelis. Foreign military units from France and the United States were invited in, and it was finally agreed that the PLO fighting men would be escorted out of the country. A key point in the negotiations was that the Palestinian dependents who were left behind—several thousand old men, women and children, situated in two refugee camps in the Israeli-occupied section of Beirut, Sabra and Shatila—would be protected from retribution by the Israelis or the Lebanese Phalange.

That Habib could negotiate this agreement was deemed almost a miracle by Secretary of State George Schultz and President Ronald Reagan. It earned Habib the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award. His victory turned to ashes, however, when, once the PLO armed fighters had departed, in September 1982, Sharon ordered Israeli troops to stand aside and allow Lebanese Phalange forces to enter into the refugee camps and, in an orgy of killing, slaughter over two thousand unarmed men, women and children.

Habib’s later words about Sharon were succinct:

“Sharon was a killer, obsessed by hatred of the Palestinians. I had given Arafat assurance that his people would not be harmed, but this was totally disregarded by Sharon, whose word was worth nothing.”

An Israeli investigating commission found the mass murders directly attributable to Sharon’s conduct.

To have Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, believed by many Israelis to be a war criminal, be named a “man of peace” by President Bush may be one of the worst misstatements any president has ever made. Those words could only infuriate the very people who were most likely to volunteer as suicide bombers against us. Worse, they cause the entire Muslim world to view the United States as the willing abettor of Sharon’s more recent acts of brutality in the occupied territories, which Bush has properly identified as the future Palestinian state.

The fact that President Bush has personally conferred with Sharon in recent months more often than any other foreign leader, including Britain’s Tony Blair, is not lost upon people in the Arab and Muslim worlds. We simply cannot deny that they have every reason to blame the United States for our repeated refusal to require Israel to abide by U.N. resolutions and international law.

Protecting Israel is one thing—approving illegal conduct by Ariel Sharon is quite another.

Israel’s security should not require the United States to accept brutalities that even many young Israeli soldiers won’t accept…the humiliation, oppression and expulsion of the Palestinian people.

Nuclear Hypocrisy

It is sheer hypocrisy to make war against Saddam Hussain because of his potential creation of nuclear weapons, yet tacitly approve Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons.

In remaining silent on these issues, we can no longer claim the moral high ground we did when we sponsored formation of the United Nations in 1945.

This could all change if our president would show the same courage with Ariel Sharon that he has demonstrated against Hussain and Bin Laden. He need only state, as his father did, that Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine violate international law and transgress the policy of every U.S. president from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton. George W. Bush is the only president to remain silent on this issue.

His father had the courage to take on Israel in 1991 and that courage may very well have cost him reelection in 1992. If we are to win the long war against terror, his son owes him and the country the obligation to stand up to Sharon on the settlements issue.

Such courage could save more lives than may be saved by the use of our unparalleled military power in Iraq, North Korea or elsewhere in the world.

Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey Jr. is a former U.S. congressman from California. He currently practices law in the San Francisco Bay area. This article first appeared in the March 2, 2003 issue of the Woodland (CA) Daily Democrat. Reprinted with permission.