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Sharon's savvy strategy

Victor Davis Hanson:

"Brilliant tactician, lousy strategist." So goes the conventional wisdom about the old bulldozer, Ariel Sharon. But that assessment is exactly backward.
Mr. Sharon's strategic insight has always proved more impressive than his messy tactical operations. Keep that in mind, even as divided Israelis seem to be yelling at each other while united Palestinians gloat about expelling the Zionists.
Mr. Sharon's counterattack across the Suez Canal in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur war was also seen as reckless in its disregard for logistics and lines of communication. His 1982 army that invaded Lebanon proved tactically lax in allowing allied Christian militias to commit atrocities.
But Mr. Sharon's long-term thinking? That's another story. Trapping the Egyptian 3rd Army in the Sinai, and then showing the world Cairo was defenseless in the path of an Israeli armored division, was a strategic masterpiece aimed at ending the 1973 war outright to Israel's advantage.
The march into Lebanon forced Yasser Arafat out of the Middle East for a decade -- and he might have been discredited for good as a defeated terrorist had third parties not escorted him to Tunis or brought him back under the Oslo accords.
So Mr. Sharon was always a strategic thinker, and we are seeing his accustomed foresight in the controversial Gaza exodus.

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But Gaza itself is only a tessera in a far larger strategic mosaic. The Israelis also press on with the border fence that will in large measure end suicide bombings. The barrier will grant the Palestinians what they clamor for, but perhaps also fear -- their own isolated state that they must govern or let the world watch devolve into something like the Taliban's Afghanistan.
Once Israel is out of Gaza and has fenced off slivers of the West Bank near Jerusalem deemed vital for its security, Mr. Sharon can bide his time until a responsible Palestinian government emerges as a serious interlocutor.
Then any lingering disagreements over disputed land can be relegated to the status of a Tibet, northern Cyprus, Kashmir or the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands -- all postbellum "contested" territories that do not prompt commensurate attention from the Muslim world, Europe or the United Nations.
Palestine as a sovereign state rather than a perpetually "occupied" territory also inherits the responsibility of all mature nations to police its own. So when Hamas and Co. press on with their killing -- most likely through rocket attacks over the fence -- they do so as representatives of a new Palestinian nation.
In response, Israel can strike back without worrying about blowback on isolated vulnerable Israeli settlements.

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While there probably won't be a single Jew in the new Palestinian nation, there are more than 1 million Arabs inside Israel. Even more bizarrely, more than 100,000 illegal aliens have left Arab lands to reside in the "Zionist entity." Politically correct Arabs will not even use the word "Israel," but tens of thousands of Arabs seem to want into it nonetheless.

So who has the apartheid state?