By Rudolf Augstein

Ariel Sharon wants to wage war; he has no longer left any doubt about it. He wiped out two decades of endeavors for peace. In his eyes, Yasser Arafat is the person mainly to blame for his having to withdraw from Lebanon in 1982. Sharon wanted to make Lebanon an Israeli protectorate. He would still fix a protectorate over Palestine today if he were only allowed to do so.

While this can be said [openly] in France, in Germany it obviously cannot. The French daily "Le Monde" said last Friday: "Sharon wants to leave Arafat no other choice but to acknowledge an actual protectorate in which the Palestinian security forces would be transformed into assistants of the Israeli army and police."

Prime Minister Sharon makes Yasser Arafat personally responsible for the terror. Now he keeps him a prisoner and waits for his political end.

Similar things happened in history, under different conditions. After Hitler had made his devil's pact with Stalin, he waited with extreme patience the fall of the Chamberlain government. The Foreign Office took great pains to explain to him that Chamberlain's place would only be taken by a worse enemy, Winston Churchill.

Similarly, if Arafat fell, his followers at the top of the Palestinian Authority would certainly be more radical.

Before the Six-Day War in 1967, the whole Western world was decidedly friendly to Israel. At that time, a Der Spiegel reporter was a guest of the Israeli General Staff under General Yitzhak Rabin.

He reported a war was expected which would not be too long, but short, so that the great powers no longer attack like in 1956 during the Suez adventure. What it came down to from today's perspective was a war – short enough – waged in order to negotiate the only real chance for peace.

Ever since, the Palestinians have been constantly humiliated, until today's hopeless situation: Arafat has been locked in Ramallah and deprived of the right of decision through the deployment of tanks. The majority of the Israelis seem to stand on Prime Minister Sharon's side on that score.

Now it looks as if Israel wanted to force the Palestinian President Arafat to go to a different country. Tunis he knows already.

Arafat was constantly under duress and hardly had the opportunity to make serious mistakes, but in this respect most German newspapers beg to differ.

The French "Liberation" writes that Sharon does an extremely bad service to his country when he tries to convince the Palestinians by force of arms that they could also feel fine in a protectorate under Israel's leadership.

This wipes out all the unconventional procedures attempted so far. Negotiations are no longer possible under Sharon. The Americans are still paying lip service to the Palestinian President, but for internal reasons they are incapable of confronting Sharon.

According to Foreign Minister Balfour's Declaration from 1917, which wasn't an unselfish act either, a homeland for the Jews was supposed to be arranged in Palestine. Now the attempt is made to arrange a secure homeland state for the Palestinians who have been partly expelled from it.

But take it easy: According to "Die Welt" [one of the most important German daily newspapers, known for its pro-Israeli bent], the bridges between Israel and the Palestinians are not completely broken yet, as long as Israel delivers electricity and water to the Palestinians. Exhilarating prospects.

In 1917 Jerusalem had a population of 20,000. The Turks wanted to expel them out of the city according to the model of the Armenians they had "transferred." The German general Erich von Falkenhayn, who was the commander of the area at that time, prevented this, not necessarily out of philo-Semitism. He just hated any kind of disorder in his area of command.

That is how the victorious General Rabin, later murdered by a Jewish terrorist as the first leading Israeli, could say the simple truth 30 days before his death: "We did not come into an empty country."