Sharon's way now riding high

Many Israelis wondered whether Sharon - as prime minister - would employ these sorts of tactics in dealing with the Palestinians. He has not.

"He's much more moderate than in the past," says Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Age did something good to him."

To be sure, the Israeli military has been more aggressive under Sharon than under his predecessor, Ehud Barak. Palestinians killed in the conflict outnumber Israelis by more than 3 to 1, and many Palestinian civilians have died during Israeli attacks.

But Palestinian terrorist acts - such as suicide-bomb attacks in a crowded pizzeria and on a pedestrian mall - have always made the Israelis seem relatively less barbaric. In the high-tension aftermath of one such attack, Sharon held fire. In other cases, most of the Israeli retaliation was directed against buildings and institutions and not against people.

Events in the US have also benefited the Israeli leader. President Bush has yet to meet Arafat and has seemed much less inclined than some of his predecessors to engage in even the pretense of even-handedness in dealing with the two parties.

Ever since Sept. 11, Sharon has sought to style the Israeli struggle against Arafat as a smaller version of the American battle against Osama bin Laden. While this approach took a few months to take hold, it now seems that the US officials view Palestinian attacks against Israel as harshly as they do the violence perpetrated against the US.

Sharon "seems to have got the [US] administration to come around to the approach he wanted to take from the beginning," says Mark Heller, a strategic analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

US support has been crucial in forcing Arafat to crack down, as he is now doing in earnest. Yesterday, Palestinian police under Arafat's authority exchanged gunfire with supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement as the police sought to arrest one of the group's leaders. Better known as Hamas, the organization has been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks on Israelis.

The clash is an indication that Arafat is willing to risk wrecking Palestinian unity in order to meet US and European demands that he stifle Palestinian militancy.

At home, Sharon has capitalized on the national letdown that followed the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the renewal of open conflict. "The pessimistic right-wing view that some people had in the past is now perceived by most people as a very realistic view," says Professor Diskin. In opinion polls, roughly three-quarters of Israelis says they approve of the job the prime minister is doing.

The only problem is answering skeptics who say that Sharon has no strategy beyond beating down the Palestinians.

"Israel still must provide some answer and outlet for the nationalist aspiration of the Palestinian people," wrote columnist Uzi Benziman in the Israeli daily Haaretz this week. "Sharon has not come across as a leader who has devised a plan that is sufficiently dynamic to alter the destructive character of Israeli-Palestinian relations."

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