The Middle East: The Wages of No.(Ariel Sharon takes over as Israel's prime minister, with the Palestinian question the country's most pressing issue)(Brief Article)

Ariel Sharon has won personal election as Israeli prime minister, but in the snake pit of the country's politics he will have his work cut out to form a government. Like all his predecessors, he has to woo a whole range of small parties with which to build a governing coalition. A general election for the parliament seems probable. And yet this may be a moment for the reality enforcement that alone can break the Arab- Israeli deadlock.

To cut a deal means saying yes at a certain point. At Camp David and afterwards, down to the eve of the election, outgoing prime minister Ehud Barak offered concessions to the Palestinians so generous that Israelis were taken by surprise. Even so, they might well have said yes in the event of an equally generous response from the Palestinians. Instead, on behalf of his people, Yasser Arafat has said no. Evidently he believes that renewed violence will pay larger dividends. This exposed Barak as some sort of a sentimentalist, and Sharon enjoyed a historic electoral romp.

A famous legend comes from antiquity about the dangers of consistently saying no. A wise woman known as the Sibyl had nine invaluable books. The Roman Tarquinius refused the price she wanted for them, whereupon she began to destroy the books until he paid for three what had been asked originally for the nine. Moral: Miss your chance and you get less, at higher cost.

So it is with the Palestinians. For decades they have been saying no, all the time steadily diminishing their prospects. Although the majority hope for peace to the point of despairing of it, their leaders have let them down, invariably taking the Tarquinius position in bargaining. This has been a historic mistake. Each and every no, each war, each uprising, has shrunk what eventually remains for them. In this present round of violence, more than 400 Palestinians have died to no purpose at all, thousands more have been wounded, and many homes destroyed. This is already a society with flagrant corruption at the top and a general self-imposed poverty, no rule of law but judicial execution and random murder, with in addition an absolute divide between Islamists and secularists. One step more, and it will be anarchy.

Responsible for these conditions, Arafat either cannot or dare not say yes, and rescue his people from impending calamity. This is where Sharon comes in. Should he be able now or after parliamentary elections to establish a stable government, he may have the authority to draw a line between what is for Israel and what is for the Palestinians. It is far too late for the Palestinians to go back on their history and ask for repeated mistakes to be undone. But it is not too late for an Israeli prime minister to create conditions in which a Palestinian yes at last becomes a necessity. Tarquinius after all did see the wisdom of accepting one third of what he might have obtained at the beginning, when the final alternative was nothing at all.

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