Only a new leader can save Israel now

Ariel Sharon's government in Israel is on its last legs. After a year in power, Sharon is generally reckoned to have been a disastrous failure. His promise of peace with security has been exposed as hollow. He offers no strategic guidance save endless struggle, no diplomatic vision beyond constant naysaying. His only programme, according to the wags, is the evening news on television.

As the conflict with the Palestinians rises to a paroxysm of mutual bloodletting, the internal contradictions within Israel's governing coalition are pulling it asunder. The public response to the staccato of suicide bomb attacks is one of baffled outrage. Extreme-right ministers, such as Avigdor Lieberman and Benny Elon, are stoking up feeling with their calls for ever more extreme measures against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza. The Labour Party, Sharon's reluctant coalition ally, is looking for an opportunity to jump ship. It lacks a leader and any alternative policy but internal unease is growing.

Labour ministers know that if the party is to survive at all as a force in Israeli politics, it will soon have to take the plunge.

Sharon's most likely successor is a member of his own Likud Party, Binyamin Netanyahu, 20 years younger, much fitter, and more in tune with the mood of the Israeli right. His re-emergence is the most remarkable return from the political grave since Richard Nixon's bounce back from defeat in the 1960s. Just three years ago, Netanyahu was ousted from power in such total disgrace that he contemplated leaving politics altogether. Today he is poised to recoup the leadership of the Likud and perhaps of Israel.

Netanyahu is winning support by posing as a more energetic and decisive leader than Sharon. By comparison with Sharon's painful mental incoherence and visible exhaustion, Netanyahu projects an aura of confidence and vigour. Yet Netanyahu's policy prescriptions are essentially the same as Sharon's. Both men fundamentally mistrust the good faith of the Palestinian leadership; both disbelieve in the possibility of peace; both think that Israel's only recourse now is to beat the Palestinians remorselessly into the dust.

Israel's politics today resemble those of France in early 1958 as the Algerian war approached its climax and brought about the collapse of the Fourth Republic. Then as now, an increasingly demoralised army confronted an elusive enemy that would stop at nothing. Then as now, terrorism provoked counter-terror, torture-and attacks on civilians that merely cemented the bond between the rebels and the occupied Arab population.

This is not a war in which Israel can be beaten militarily . But Israel has suffered serious military reverses in the past few days. The impunity with which Palestinian fighters destroyed an Israeli tank and shot up a line of Israeli soldiers like skittles at a checkpoint indicates a new vulnerability that Israel's conscript army can ill afford.

In the end France tired of fighting a squalid war on behalf of a million French colonists in Algeria. Today Israelis are despairing of a conflict that the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, Yossi Sarid, calls, with some justification, a "war for the settlements".

On the face of things, there is no prospect of an end to the bloodshed. The spiral of violence has grown steadily worse over the past 17 months. Yet the Arab-Israeli conflict has its characteristic internal rhythm that may yet produce a pause, even if not a halt to the carnage.

In the past certain psychological moments have provided the opportunity for bold diplomatic initiatives. In 1973, at the height of the October War, when Israel and Egypt were at each other's throats, Henry Kissinger managed to pluck from the flames a disengagement agreement that began the process of Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement. In 1977, only a few months after the election as Israeli Prime Minister of Menahem Begin, excoriated as a nationalist rightwinger who would never make peace, President Anwar Sadat surprised the Egyptian people and the Israelis by visiting Israel. His initiative culminated in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979 - a pact that, under immense strain, has survived intact to this day.

Have we reached another such turning-point now? Briefly last week it seemed as if Saudi Arabia's shift of position might open a window of opportunity. The Saudis appear at last to have internalised some of the lessons of 11 September. They may no longer be willing to pay protection money to terrorist groups or to bankroll Hamas and other violent Palestinian Islamic movements. Instead they now talk of a 'two-state solution' in terms not very different from those of the Israeli centre-left. They even seem ready to approve agreed border adjustments and some arrangement for Jerusalem that would accommodate Jewish religious and other interests.

Some of the ferocity of the latest violence may be interpreted as a last-ditch effort by extremists on both sides to block such a compromise - akin to the "politique de pire" of the French OAS terrorists who tried to prevent decolonisation in Algeria. It was precisely the threat to democracy posed by such terror tactics that led the broad mainstream of French opinion to conclude that, if only for her own political health, France must disengage from Algeria.

Israel today stands at a similar crossroads. She faces a choice between retrenchment behind the 1967 borders or descent into Lebanese-style civil chaos. Twelve hundred people have been killed since the outbreak of the last disturbances in September 2000. But an estimated 100,000 died in the course of the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990. In the course of that struggle, Lebanon lost her independence and suffered a social and economic cataclysm from which she has still not recovered. Israel is in danger of careering down a similar road.

Like France in 1958, Israel needs a leader who can take the bold, unpalatable, urgently necessary decision to pull back an army of occupation and bring the settlers home. But where is that leader?

Bernard Wasserstein is Professor Of Modern History At The University Of Glasgow and the author of Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (Profile Books).