Doron Rosenblum

"Two states for two peoples"? That vision has been replaced today by a reality of two peoples in two worlds: one is not yet ripe for a state; the other has grown weary of it prematurely.

This strange universe does not sit only on the shoulders of Ariel (aka Atlas) Sharon. It is being held up by four giant turtles - Sharon, Peres, Yosef Lapid and Arafat. Four restless ancients, greedy for power, devoted to the pursuit of their own good. Our universe rests on the back of their self-interest - heavy, solid and going nowhere.

Since times are never "normal" in Israel, and most fateful decisions are patched together with haste and distress, no wonder those called "assessment and intelligence officials" are taking up every central position in the discourse.

Only a fool will therefore be impressed by the heroic battle of Benny Elon and his ilk to preserve democracy; the fact is that "democracy" (like "statesmanship," like "settlement," like "the security reasons") interests them as much as the wall interests the lizard. For them it is just a temporary stepping stone, a backdrop on which they can camouflage themselves, on the way to "the profound, hidden goal."

Never have we had a leader who has missed, year after year, every opportunity that has come our way for change, for dialogue to put an end to terror, for political initiative, for some way out of the cycle of bloodshed.

True, we don't necessarily expect brilliant rhetoric from national leaders; but listening to the holiday interviews given by the prime minister on Independence Day made one wonder: How obtuse, evasive and vague can a prime minister be, especially when he is supposedly carving out a new direction at a fateful juncture?

Whereas both the United States and Britain are now undergoing a painful process of sobering up and are reexamining their policy since September 11, 2001, in these parts we are seeing the continued obtuse acceptance of the policy pursued by the Sharon government since the start of the intifada, as though there were no other policy available.

The success of Sharon's tactics is evident from a certain ambivalence, even among his rivals, concerning the possibility that his term of office will be snapped, despite the considerable likelihood that this will happen.

A year after the start of the Iraq war, the Americans, too, have entered into this demonic logical loop, with which we are so familiar, in which the "reaction" not only doesn't punish but retroactively justifies the terrorist act that generated it, and constitutes the pretext for a new wave of even more terrible terrorism.

What was the secret of the spell that Tennenbaum, of all people, cast over Sharon? Is it the fact that he was a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces? Would Sharon have shown similar empathy for an ordinary honest citizen who was innocent of any wrongdoing?

Having never stopped making political statements, as chief of staff, in the guise of "professional opinions" ("expel Arafat," the Clinton blueprint "is a danger to Israel"), Mofaz became, as defense minister, a type of minimalist of the sounds of silence, a furtive individual who would not be out of place in a Trappist monastery.

Before becoming prime minister, Ariel Sharon acted like the shepherd boy who cried "Wolf!" so often that everyone finally stopped taking him seriously. Since becoming prime minister, Sharon has replaced his cry of "Wolf, wolf!" with the false promise of "Lamb, lamb!" - which is greeted with the same rising mistrust.

The blow to Prime Minister Sharon's prestige this week, with the indictment of contractor David Appel, puts him in a much more questionable position from the standpoint of history. What has he achieved? He doesn't even have the excuses and escape nets that Nixon did.

Israel has had PMs who were narrow-minded, evasive, procrastinators, lacking political vision; but they all maintained at least the appearance of striving for peace with our neighbors - as a Jewish moral imperative, as a condition for the normalization of our existence, as part of our emergence from the existential ghetto and as part of our self-determination.

Say what one will about Sharon's intentions and motives - it cannot be denied that the man is going through certain processes, albeit under constraint and with a thousand modes of evasion.

A Canadian humorist proposed a shortcut to the happy life: Wake up late, don't go to work, throw the eggs out the window because they aren't fried right and adopt polite and courtly manners - ignoring one minor detail: You haven't got a cent in your pocket. This is more or less what is happening these days with the right and the left's 'diplomatic plans': a peace-free post-diplomatic process.

When "senior members of the General Staff" suddenly lashed out at the government's policy in the territories this week, it reminded me of the little boy who didn't talk for years until one day he opened his mouth and complained that the soup needed salt. Before that, he simply had nothing to complain about.

How long did Sharon think the public would be able to grit its teeth in a never-ending war of terrorism and escalation? Five years? Ten years? How many terrorism casualties can we tolerate? Two thousand? Ten thousand?

While the cheapness of life in Israel has reached insufferable proportions there is something astonishing in the obsessive preoccupation with the fate of specific individuals, live or even dead, who were abducted and imprisoned "by animals," as Prime Minister Sharon calls them.

After three years of total, monopolistic domination, something is starting to crack in the exclusivity of the political-military worldview that has seized control of our lives.

Indeed, the myth of Unit 101 was in part created by the discipline shedding moral ambivalence and the wily games of deceiving the legitimate state authority. Here, too, a strange resemblance exists between the minuet that Sharon, as commander of Unit 101, performed around David Ben Gurion and his ministers, and his twisting dance today.

True, opinion surveys still show that the public continues to support every new force-driven option that is supplied by the army and Ariel Sharon. However, with every new round of the escalation spiral - the terrorist attack, the retaliation, the "targeted preemption" and the bloodbaths that follow - an abiding sense of the bitter failure is beginning to slowly trickle in.

It is enough to look at how we are wasting this current "cease-fire," with passivity, without an ounce of compassion or political vision, with that ever-present sly wink in America's direction, with an almost passionate re-embrace of brute force, to understand that we have become more like our enemies than we would like to think.