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Settlers are reluctant warriors for Sharon
By FLORE DE PRENEUF © St. Petersburg Times, published February 2, 2001 EFRAT, West Bank -- The bumper stickers that cover the back of Nadia Matar's minivan are a testament to her right-wing convictions. But oddly enough, among the dozens of slogans that spell out Matar's opposition to the Oslo negotiation process based on trading land for peace with the Palestinians, not a single sticker promotes the candidacy of Ariel Sharon, the right-wing front-runner in Israel's upcoming election. Pollsters predict Sharon will beat incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday by as many as 20 percentage points. Matar, a resident of Efrat, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and co-chair of Women for Israel's Tomorrow, a grass-roots, hard-line organization, will certainly do her part to elect Sharon. But not with enthusiasm. Above all, she explained, "It's an anti-Barak campaign." One of her neighbors in Efrat, Ilana Cohen, predicted "a reluctant landslide" in which people will be "voting for Sharon despite themselves, just to get Barak out of office." The lukewarm attitude toward next week's probable victor among settlers comes as somewhat of a surprise. After all, Sharon earned his nickname "the Bulldozer" in part because of the tremendous energy he devoted to settling the land Israel conquered in the 1967 Middle East War. Unlike Barak, who recently discussed with Palestinian negotiators peace plans under which 40,000 settlers would have to abandon their homes, Sharon has promised repeatedly during the campaign that he would not evacuate a single settlement once elected. But, in a sign that there may be more to Sharon than meets the eye, settlers have remained cautiously noncommittal. Settlers are "much less involved" than during the first campaign of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, said Matar. "There is more cynicism and more worry." Many have taken note of the fact that Sharon, while speaking out for the rights of settlers to live on occupied territory, has refrained from making a single campaign visit to settlements, whether in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or Golan Heights. Others point to the broken promises made by Netanyahu, who did visit settlements during the election campaign but handed over to the Palestinians parts of Hebron, a West Bank city religious Jews claim is theirs since biblical times. More damning still, to many settlers, Sharon was foreign minister in Netanyahu's Cabinet when the government signed a U.S.-brokered agreement at the Wye Plantation in 1998 that allowed Palestinians to control an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. Like many other right-wingers, Matar then worked to bring down Netanyahu -- with the result that Barak was elected the next spring. And she pledges she will do the same if Sharon dares to give back an inch more of land. "We'll make sure that any wrong move toward the left will bring down the government," said Matar, 35, whose association has organized vigils and protest marches since its founding in 1993. "I'm not loyal to a person," she said. "I'm loyal to ideas." Showing a similar reserve, the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria -- the biblical name for the West Bank -- endorsed Sharon's candidacy Sunday but announced in the same breath that it would act against any prime minister who gives away territory. Right now, Sharon represents the hard-line, nationalist camp, a gladiator for the "Greater Israel" that settlers embody. But in his long career at the center of Israeli politics, Sharon, 72, has also shown instances of pragmatism and ideological flexibility. "The problem with Sharon is that he has two faces," Matar said. "The one that I admire is the strong Sharon who eradicated terror as head of the 101 commando unit in the 1950s, the incredible builder of Jewish towns all over the country. But there is also the Sharon who uprooted Yamit and pushed Bibi (Netanyahu) to go ahead with the Wye agreement." Sharon sent in the army to evacuate Yamit, a Jewish settlement in the Sinai, after Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. While Matar choses to overlook Sharon's record in Yamit in the hope that he will preserve Jewish settlements, Cohen, her neighbor, is trying to forget Sharon's brutal past -- manifested in the killing of dozens of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank village of Kibya in 1953, for example -- in the hope that he can restore her sense of security. "He can act tough, he can play tough -- he can be anything. That's the main point about Sharon," said Avishai Margalit, a political philosopher at Hebrew University. "He destroyed Yamit and he destroyed Kibya. He can move in all directions." This mixed record is part of Sharon's appeal at a time when the Israeli public is looking for a way out of the deadlock created by four months of violent hostilities with the Palestinians. Since the new intifada started in September, residents of Efrat, a settlement of about 1,400 families that acts as a southern suburb of Jerusalem, have felt threatened daily. The 10-mile road between Efrat and Jerusalem has repeatedly come under showers of stones and occasionally gunfire from Palestinians. "Barak hasn't taken care of the physical security of the people," said Cohen, 31, who moved to Efrat with her children to enjoy a suburban lifestyle. "I believe in a Palestinian state and human rights, but for there to be security there have to be red lines and Barak has no red lines." More than anything, Sharon's expected victory Tuesday is being seen as an indictment of the Oslo land-for-peace formula that Barak pursued even as Palestinians continued to riot. An editorial in Ma'ariv, one of Israel's leading newspapers, suggested recently that "the size and durability of the gap (between Sharon and Barak in the polls) attests that something very fundamental is taking place in Israeli society: It is the shattering of the Oslo dream. The size of the illusion matches the size of the disappointment." Indeed, more than a race between two candidates, settlers see the elections as a referendum on Oslo. They are hoping for a resounding "no" to the diplomatic steps Barak was about to take last summer toward a final peace deal when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected them as insufficient.
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