Sharon’s play on words is interesting, and just might mark a significant shift in Israeli tactics. It is deeply unlikely, however, to mean a decisive change in strategy.

The Israeli prime minister, perhaps more than any other leader of our times, believes passionately that the West Bank should stay under Israeli control. That belief is founded not on religious fervor, on the endlessly repeated mantra that this is part of the land that God gave to Israel, but rather on military analysis.

Like most soldiers who reach general rank, Sharon has long been convinced of his own mastery of strategic theory and practice. After he retired from military life and entered the rumbustious world of Israeli politics, he made it clear from the outset that his main mission was the notion of “forward defense”. When he was appointed minister of agriculture, by Menachim Begin in the late 1970s, Sharon wasted little time over food production. Instead, he hurled himself into the main issue, as he saw it, of securing the territories known to the Israeli right as Judea and Samaria. His fervent belief was — and no doubt remains — that Israel within its pre-1967 borders is almost impossible to defend. In particular, the narrow coastal plain between the West Bank and the Mediterranean was vulnerable to sudden attack, and the hills of the West Bank posed a constant tactical threat to that densely populated strip of Israel.

Secondly, Sharon explained, Israel vitally needed a defense line along the Jordan Valley, on the eastern border of the West Bank, to contain any future attack from Jordan or Syria or both. Thirdly, as he saw it, Israel had to make Jerusalem its capital for all time. These three, highly simplified, goals became known as the Sharon Plan. It was based on the crudest of tactics: Colonizing the West Bank with as many Jewish settlers as were prepared to live in that harsh landscape.

Not that it was a particularly hard life: From the start the state lavished on the settlers vast subsidies and intricate security arrangements. What they did not get — in the first phase at any rate — was the more productive agricultural lands.

This is how Sharon spelled it out in his autobiography, Warrior (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1989): “While I described to the Cabinet committee the absolute need to retain strategic land, I also stressed that we were not talking about Arab agricultural land.

“I made it clear that I was not in any way suggesting that we should expropriate productive Arab-owned land. On the contrary, the controlling terrain I was referring to consisted almost wholly of rocky ridges and mountains that were unfit for agricultural use and consequently were unpopulated. Our concern was to make this region defensible, not to dispossess its people.”

Indeed, the people were not dispossessed. They were allowed to live, mostly in deplorable conditions in tightly ring-fenced towns and villages without essential services, under the gaze of ever-increasing numbers of Israeli colonists in their garish red-roofed, air-conditioned and fortified settlements. Their water was expropriated, their land confiscated for new settlements and roads, and their olive groves grubbed up as collective punishments for acts of resistance.

Today, there are some 200,000 settlers on the West Bank, and some 6,000 in the Gaza Strip (where they nevertheless control 30 percent of the land). There are 3.5 million Palestinians in the territories, and more than a million more within Israel proper. In the whole area, there are around 5.5 million Jews. In other words, the Jewish majority in the area controlled by Israel is less than a million, and the gap is closing fast.

That is a crude, but centrally important, aspect of the conflict. Sharon, no stranger to crude analysis, is as aware of it as anyone. That is one possible explanation of his latest play on words. “To keep 3.5 million people under occupation is bad for us and them,” he told Israel Radio.

This heresy — as many on the Israeli right see it — may not be quite so radical as it sounds. If the O-word is accepted, so what? Does it mean that Sharon and his ilk are prepared to dismantle the settlements? Hardly. Will they order their army out of the Jordan Valley? Never. Are they prepared to have a full-fledged Palestinian state on their doorstep? When hell or the Negev freezes over, whichever is the sooner.

Words are infinitely flexible in the Holy Land. You can deny the occupation, by talking of Samaria and Judea. You can accept the occupation, by giving it another name. But when Sharon says the occupation is a bad thing, you can be sure that he is not thinking of ending it.

(According to the Washington Post of May 28, “A day after he stunned Israelis and Palestinians alike by describing his nation’s long hold on the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “occupation,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon backtracked on Tuesday, saying he should have termed Israel’s presence in the areas “control over disputed lands.” — Editor)