The world's sudden, uncustomary silence over Israeli military policies could give Ariel Sharon unprecedented latitude - license to take far-reaching military actions, or to refrain from acting diplomatically - in what could mean license to kill the peace process.
A number of factors - some as curious and fleeting as the month-long World Cup soccer championships - have acted in concert to effectively free Ariel Sharon from the glare of international scrutiny.
Foremost among the driving factors was George W. Bush's recent address, in which the American president enunciated what was seen by Sharon staffers as a ringing endorsement of the prime minister's efforts to quarantine Yasser Arafat in the context of a war on terrorism.
Other elements mitigating criticism of Israel include the evacuation Sunday of illegal outpost settlements in the West Bank; foreign media trepidation after a red-faced CNN publicly prostrated itself for devoting more airtime to a suicide bomber's adoring family than to the anguish of the relatives of a toddler and a grandmother that he killed; boycotts of The New York Times and other major news outlets over alleged anti-Israel bias and a subsequent shift in media focus, centering on the suffering of Israeli victims of terror.
Underlying all is the reluctace of European powers and State Department officials to go to the mat with an unusually determined George Bush.
In one example, IDF troops besieged, bulldozed, stormed and demolished parts of the Palestinian Authority administrative headquarters in the West Bank town of Hebron with nary a whimper from the international community. Similar Israeli actions during Operation Defensive Shield, launched in response to a tsunami of suicide bombings in late March, elicited fierce condemnation, headed by uncompromising United Nations censure.
Clearly buoyed by the winds from Washington, Sharon raised eyebrows Monday by declaring that following the Bush speech, "We certainly see an opportunity of the first order to further the diplomatic process."
But Sharon's defense minister was quick to caution that the prime minister would be making a grave error if he mistook international equanimity as license to abandon peace efforts and step up warfare in the context of Israel's current re-occupation of nearly every major Palestinian population center in the West Bank.
"The sense is that we can now go and let loose everything we've got in order to exercise our right to defend ourselves," Ben-Eliezer said in a broadcast interview Monday. However, added Ben-Eliezer, the chairman of the centrist Labor Party and a likely Sharon opponent in prime ministerial elections slated for no later than next year: "This can happen only at a time when every minute of the day, Israel continues to seek and move toward any possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough."
Ben-Eliezer took Sharon to task for turning down a request by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to hold diplomatic contacts with senior Palestinian officials, a bid that aides to the prime minister ruled out as conferring unwarranted legitimacy to Arafat's continued rule.
"Not only is Sharon wrong, Sharon is making a very large mistake. If Sharon doesn't allow this, it is simply a very big pity. You cannot carry out anything, no war on terror, no [projected West Bank-border] security fence, if you have no diplomatic horizon," Ben-Eliezer said, going on to imply that Sharon was not about to put forward a peace program of his own:
"The diplomatic horizon need not necessarily be dictated by others. It must be a goal of ours, and we must move toward it night and day."
Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Samet argues that Sharon carefully sidesteps any commitment in his statements on diplomacy. In voicing the opaque phrase "We are in the midst of the beginning of the midst of the peace process," Sharon may actually be referring to the beginning of the end of the peace process, Samet says.
"For Israel, American license is often something very tricky," he continues. During then-defense minister Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Reagan administration gave Israel a "blinking green light" license, which later turned red. "We don't know what kind of a 'blink' Sharon got during his recent U.S. visit, but we know Sharon, and we know him as a man of brinkmanship. He carries to the utmost what he sees as license."
Some would say that Sharon carries license to the brink of the abyss, Samet continues, while others would say that he indeed carries it to the brink of the abyss, but then takes one more step. "Observers who are more objective and more to the point, would say that Sharon will go as far as he can, gauging the climate, the atmosphere, the reactions at the time, and then will either take another step, if he sees it as feasible, or takes one step back - after having taken 10 steps forward."
Samet believes that Sharon is now poised at that position. "If you compare what Israel is doing now in the territories with what did very hesitantly a few months ago, you will see that there is much more self-assurance on the part of the government, the military, and Sharon himself. Secondly, there seems to be more license - you can go in and out and in again, blowing things up with complete impunity as far as the international community."
The process is dangerously incremental, Samet maintains. "Both world powers and Israeli public opinion are accepting as continuing 'facts on the ground' measures that had been tentative and experimental a few months ago, during Defensive Shield." At the same time, Arab powers have toned down to a whisper their condemnation of Israeli assassinations of lower-level PA officials suspected of links to terror.
"This might have been viewed as acceptable, had the government been conducting a two-tiered policy, acting softly diplomatically while carrying a big stick. But there is no diplomatic tier," Samet concludes.
Not only does this policy make clear that there is no Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic horizon as far as Sahron is concerned, he says, "as military actions continue, accompanied by the 'cushioning' of American support, you see the crux of Sharon's policy, which is what one sees in nature - the closer you get to the horizon, the farther away it gets."