The sheer obscenity of this statement, made at the same time that the people he is set to expel from their homes were being attacked by Palestinian mortars that Sharon ordered the IDF to do nothing about, is made all the more clear when one looks at a statement he himself made 10 years ago. Speaking to Kfar Chabad’s local newspaper in 1995 of the press accusations at the time that opponents of the so-called peace process were inciting civil war, Sharon said, “Look what happened in Stalinist Russia, for example. In the mid-1930’s, the Soviet authorities disseminated stories that there was a plan to assassinate Stalin. They were used as a justification for destroying the high command of the Red Army as well as the Jewish writers and the Jewish doctors. This is exactly what the Rabin government is doing now in Israel Have we gotten to such Stalinist Bolshevism? Where are they leading with the blood libels they are putting out? To the abandonment of the settlers in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and maybe to a civil war. We have to shout out the warning: Tyrants at the gate.”
So there we have it: Not only has U.S. policy of safeguarding the PA while insisting on further Israeli land concessions to the PA made terrorism the choice of the Palestinian electorate, but Ariel Sharon’s decision to go along with the U.S. has made him chart a policy course that leads, as he stated so well a decade ago, to grave dangers to Israeli democracy.
Minister Natan Sharansky has explained that the true test of democracy is not the test of elections, but the “town square test” – whether an individual can stand in the middle of the town square and freely express his unpopular political opinion without fear of punishment. By this measure, the PA is not now and has never been a democracy. And the only change in democracy witnessed by Holy Land residents in the last year has been the increased danger to Israelis who have taken to the town squares to voice their opposition to Sharon’s alarming new policies.
Is the Middle East democratizing? Certainly not in our neck of the woods.