Sharon's way now riding high

At the height of a long and controversial career as a soldier and statesman, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is enjoying his finest hour.

His longtime nemesis, Yasser Arafat, is scrambling to meet Israeli demands that he suppress Palestinian militants. Violence against Israelis has dropped dramatically this week.

While there is deep skepticism about Mr. Sharon's capacity to convert his current successes into the crystalizing achievement of peace with the Palestinians, as he says he wants to do, there is no doubt that he has a moment or two to savor.

The last time he wedged Mr. Arafat into such narrow straits - during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which Sharon orchestrated as defense minister - tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose him. The noted Israeli writer Abba Eban called the invasion "a dark age in the moral history of the Jewish people."

Now, Sharon heads a broad-based coalition government. There are no mass demonstrations to protest his hard-edged handling of the Palestinian uprising. His main political competitor, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, can do little more than heckle from Op-Ed pages.

"Sharon is winning," says Palestinian political scientist Manuel Hassassian. Arafat's speech on Sunday - in which he demanded his people cease "armed activities" against Israelis - is a sign of "Sharon's victory over the Palestinians," adds Palestinian legislator Abdul Jawad Saleh.

Since assuming power in March, Sharon has insisted that Israel would not negotiate with the Palestinians under fire, demanding absolute quiet as a precondition for implementing a cease-fire or resuming discussions about a peace deal.

In the meantime, he has fought the Palestinians by assassinating suspected militants, using fighter jets and attack helicopters to destroy sites associated with Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and maintaining a policy of "closure" on the Palestinian territories that UN officials say has created the worst socio-economic crisis for the Palestinians since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

Once criticized - at home and abroad - as an invitation to anyone with a gun to delay peacemaking, Sharon's demand for quiet is now broadly endorsed by the US and the Europeans. Palestinian arguments that a cease-fire is untenable without tangible political gains have been dismissed.

Although Sharon has long styled himself as an enemy of terrorists, in some ways he has them to thank for his ascendancy.

A year ago, as he campaigned for the premiership, Sharon sought to portray himself as a grandfatherly warrior who could do what was necessary to protect Israelis from the Palestinians. No one doubted his resolve.

In the early days of his military career, he headed a unit formed to carry out reprisal raids following Arab attacks on Israelis. In August 1953, Unit 101 killed 20 Palestinians in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. In October of that year, Unit 101 killed 69 people in the Palestinian village of Kibya. In both cases, the majority of the dead were women and children.

Following the invasion of Lebanon, a government panel determined that Sharon bore "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel.

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