The Sharon conception

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With 862 Israelis dead and 6,785 wounded during
the three years of the intifada, most of
them during Sharon's term; with the
socio-economic situation deteriorating by the
minute; with the sharp decline in Sharon's
trustworthiness in the eyes of the public in
nearly every sphere, the prime minister had no
tidings and no plan that aroused any
desire in him to chat for any length of time
with the people.

Sharon's holiday interviews, although they were
obviously drafted ahead of time by his
advisers, revealed a tired man to whom
unpleasant things are happening. His sons'
silence at police headquarters. The police
investigation of suspected bribe-taking. A
catastrophic situation in which small businesses
are collapsing by the hundreds and
thousands, so that the only thing flourishing
around here is unemployment and poverty.

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In practice, the pre-Rosh Hashanah Sharon
repeated Yitzhak Shamir's favorite motto: The
sea is the same sea, and the Arabs are the same
Arabs. Thirty years after Israel fell
victim to a faulty conception, Sharon has a
fatalistic conception of his own, and it
boils down to this: Until the shooting stops and
the terror infrastructure is
dismantled, we're not giving anything. There is
nothing we can do and no contribution we
can make apart from battering the Palestinians
until they are defeated on the battlefield.

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Sharon's conception is that we don't move and we
don't initiate. We don't establish a
final goal, draw up a list of objectives or mark
the finish line. From the Oslo Accords
in 1993 until today, the number of settlers in
the territories has doubled, and the
sky's the limit. In this way, we are moving in
giant steps toward 2010, when there will
no longer be a Jewish majority between Jordan
and the sea. We may reach the point where
the two-state solution is not implementable
anymore, and find ourselves done in by the
second faulty conception in Israeli history.
First the Golda Meir conception, and now
the Sharon conception.

Haaretz

With so many Israelis dead and wounded, the deteriorating economy, and 'the sharp decline of his trustworthiness in the eyes of the public' it's no wonder Sharon doesn't like talking very much.

I think his policy of 'not giving anything,' 'we don't move and we don't initiate,' and only trusting the military solution is so wrong.

According to the article "We may reach the point where...we find ourselves done in by the second faulty conception in Israeli history" (the first being that of Golda Meir).

"Time is not on his side, considering the preparations being made by the Likud in case he doesn't make it through the year."

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Like Bush, he has the best WMD but has difficulty solving his problems. Who knows, he might be out before Arafat. Wouldn't that be something.