No time for fear Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister of Israel has considerable political ramifications and must be approached with the seriousness it merits. Still, we must not exaggerate the gravity of the situation and give in to fear.
Fear leads to recklessness, which can provoke a predator and give it an excuse to pounce.
It can also cause the potential prey to panic and run. In short, fear, whether it takes the form of impetuousness or cowardice, ineyitably yields disaster. Sharon is a raging bull, and we must neither provoke nor flee him. The butcher of Sabra and Shatila imagines that a blitzkrieg offensive will give him the ideal opportunity to reshuffle the negotiating deck in favour of the priorities of the Israeli right and, perhaps, to place Israeli society as a whole in a more advantageous position from which to deal with the demands of the post-settlement phase. To recoil in fear, conversely, will fuel the fanatical and arrogant Israeli general's conviction that the Arabs are vermin to be crushed, encourage him to take yet more intransigent positions and feed his hopes of imposing his final conditions by force of arms.