"Back in November, so many plans were around," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told me last week, "from the Saudis, from Geneva, from the Arab League, and I saw we could not resist those pressures without a plan of our own."
"What could I do -- destroy the Palestinian Authority? No -- Israel cannot take on its shoulders the lives of three and a half million Palestinians. Sign a peace agreement? No -- terror would only begin again. Leave as is? No -- I've seen everything in Israel since the War of Independence, and it's my responsibility to deal with it now.
"I discussed this between me and myself and came up with a new initiative," he said. He calls it the Disengagement Plan; it will be hailed and denounced as the Sharon Plan.
Because Palestinian leaders have allowed terrorists to wage war against Israel, turning the "road map" into a dead letter, Sharon proposed to establish security without them. This involved not just a security fence, but for Sharon to say "yes" to calls to withdraw from Gaza and other exposed Israeli villages in the disputed West Bank.
"I had to take this dangerous step of relocating some of our people," Sharon said. "In Israel, the right does not like me to do it, and the left cannot do it. But you don't wait forever."
This week, US President George Bush stunned Arab dictators and their acolytes in the UN and EU by taking the Sharon "yes" for an answer. The US government labeled as "unrealistic" the notion that Israel would be forced to "a full and complete return to the armistice lines" (rejecting the loaded word "borders") of 1949. That realism covers "existing major Israeli population centers," which Arabs call "settlements."
The Bush document also applied realism to the device that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat used to break up the deal that former president Bill Clinton thought he had brokered: A "right to return" that would swamp Israel with Palestinians. Bush made clear that refugees would return to a Palestinian state, not to take over the Jewish state. Sharon added: "Don't create false expectations. Our answer will be no."
America's unequivocal support of what the world knows must be part of a two-state solution puts pressure for peaceful negotiation on Palestinians, who must take control of their destiny from fanatics. As Iraqis are learning, free nationhood comes to those with the courage to control extremists.
Bush prevailed on Sharon to ease the disruption of Palestinian lives along the security fence, which I think will encompass the Ariel salient, and to delay a Jordan Valley barrier. Sharon will take all 7,500 Israelis out of Gaza by 2006, and the settlers' movement is infuriated.
But having promised "painful compromises" before recent elections, Arik expects to remain in office through a Likud Party vote and possible defection.
"I'm not boasting" (he used the Russian word for boasting), "but I am not suspected of compromising our security," he said.
If the far right parties desert him, he'll bring in Labor, headed by his old rival Shimon Peres. A threatened indictment? "A terrible libel," he said. He speaks highly of US Secretary of State Colin Powell and almost reverently about Bush: "Something in his soul committed him to act with great courage against world terror. Though under constant pressure, the man has not changed his mind."
What does he think Senator John Kerry's reaction will be to the Sharon Plan?
"I hope to meet with him when I come back next month," Sharon said.
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS