Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (11 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
The British car was a right-hand drive, and there was speculation that perhaps that was a factor in the accident. But among Gali’s colleagues and friends there was an acrid undercurrent of suspicion that the cause of her death was to be sought in her growing anguish over
Arik’s relationship with her younger sister, Lily. There had been rumors of a romance between them.
Lily, four years younger than Gali, was strikingly good-looking with long black hair. When she enlisted, Arik pulled strings for her to serve in the paratroop brigade. She was around the Sharon home a good deal, often looking after Gur when Gali was out working. Now she moved in full-time to take care of the orphaned child, who was deeply attached to her. Arik, too, made a point of spending time with his son and came home from his base almost every night. A year after Gali’s death, Arik and Lily were married.
“I didn’t go to the wedding,” a close family friend recalled.
There was a sort of dark cloud hanging over it. I liked Margalit a lot. She was a very serious person. Very professional and accomplished in her work. An impressive young woman. But there was always something sad about her…[My husband] went. He said he didn’t want to judge anyone, especially not a good friend. Many in our group of friends stayed away. But as I came to know Lily better, I changed my attitude toward her, especially when I saw how she brought up Gur … Over the years we grew close. She never mentioned Margalit, though. Not to me at any rate. I never heard her talk about her.
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In a newspaper interview years later, Lily said she had married Arik “because it was good for Gur. Today, looking back, I can say that in fact I loved him very much then already. But it wasn’t love that decided it. The situation was that we were two people with a shared, sacred goal—to look after a little boy who had lost his mother.”
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The police examiners who investigated the accident, meanwhile, found significant contributory negligence in Margalit’s driving. A suit filed by Arik and Gur against the truck driver’s insurance company was settled out of court. The driver did not admit to any guilt on his part.
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n August 1964, Gur, now eight, welcomed a little brother into his life. Arik and Lily’s firstborn, Omri, joined the family, living now in a rented home in the northern village of Nahalal. Gur also got a pony of his own, a gift from his father to help him take to life in the country. They often rode out together through the flat expanses of the Valley of Jezreel and the hills of lower Galilee. It was a happy time all around. Arik was back on the fast track. He was deputy commanding officer at Northern Command, serving on the front line directly under a man he respected and liked, General
Avraham Yoffe.
Ben-Gurion handed over both the prime ministership and the Ministry of Defense to
Levi Eshkol, and with them a strong recommendation to name
Yitzhak Rabin chief of staff after Tzur. Eshkol seemed willing to comply, and Ben-Gurion called in Rabin to tell him. In that same conversation, Rabin wrote later, “he opened his heart to me and said, ‘You know I have a special regard for Arik Sharon. I see him as one of our best military men and one of the finest fighters the State of Israel has had. If he would only tell the truth, that would help him get ahead. I’m asking you, please don’t treat him the way he’s been treated until now.’ ”
Rabin writes of his “personal commitment to Ben-Gurion…[But] I decided to advance Arik not just to fulfill Ben-Gurion’s wish. In my
own previous position on the
General Staff, I had been extraordinarily impressed by Arik’s work as a reserves brigade commander: his organization of the brigade, his training schedule, his guidance and leadership of the officers. He created a formidable fighting force. This showed me what he was capable of.”
Rabin took over on January 1, 1964.
In my first week as chief of staff, I called him in and said, “Everyone knows you’re a superb military man. Your trouble is, though, that people tend to believe you’re not a decent human being. I don’t know you well enough to say. I want to promote you, but I’ve got to be sure that your accusers aren’t right. I am going to appoint you for one year as deputy commanding officer at Northern Command. If at the end of the year your direct superior, the CO of Northern Command, says that you behaved like a decent human being, then I’ll promote you to general.”
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Sharon’s seven lean years were over.
Yoffe was one general who didn’t want to oust Sharon or block his advancement. He accepted the new chief of staff’s challenge, welcoming Sharon to the north but cautioning him—and reassuring his apprehensive staff—that his advent must not entail a purge. He must prove himself by proving he could run Northern Command, and run it well, with the help of all the officers currently serving there.
No sooner had Rabin (and Sharon) assumed their new roles than a sharp downturn occurred in relations between Israel and the Arab world, and most especially between Israel and Syria. An
Arab League summit convened in Cairo in January 1964 and resolved to thwart Israel’s National Water Carrier, a major new project that had been under construction for several years and was now nearing completion. The carrier was designed to siphon off
Jordan River waters entering the Sea of Galilee from the north and transport them, by canal and by underground pipe, to the center and arid south of the country, where annual rainfall was much sparser.
The Zionist dream of “making the desert bloom”—meaning particularly the parched
Negev desert, which constituted the bulk of Israel’s territory—depended in large part on the success of this enterprise. The Arab states adopted a “headwater diversion plan” designed to divert much of the Jordan waters before they reached the Sea of Galilee. For Israel this was unacceptable. Eshkol, the new prime minister and minister of defense, made it clear that Israel would act to thwart the Arab plan.
The same Arab summit of 1964 also saluted the
birth of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), injecting new vigor into the Palestinian cause. The summit created the PLA, or Palestine Liberation Army, and resolved that all the armies of all the frontline states would operate under a single unified command. Palestinian guerrilla groups, among them
Fatah, led by
Yasser Arafat, began mounting attacks on civilian targets inside Israel. Syria gave active encouragement to such attacks. Jordan and Lebanon provided passive support.
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In November, Syrian tractors and bulldozers went to work on their planned canal. The IDF responded with artillery fire directed at the earthworks. Syrian artillery, high on the Golan escarpment, retaliated by firing down onto the Israeli settlements below. The escalation continued with Syrian attacks on Israeli fishermen out in the Sea of Galilee and Israeli reprisals along the border. Israeli
tanks were frequently in action, too, and on several occasions the air force took part, providing firepower that countered Syria’s topographical advantage.
Compounding the overall tension was incessant skirmishing over three “demilitarized zones” along the Israel-Syria border. Israel insisted on its right under the 1949 Armistice Agreement to cultivate these areas and retaliated forcefully against Syrian firing on the Israeli farmers.
Rabin writes that many, including Dayan, believed there was no way to stop the Syrian diversion work short of all-out war. He himself, however, believed with Eshkol that a firm but restrained strategy could be effective, both in stopping the Syrian project and in containing the Palestinian incursions. In the event, the Syrians halted their project in the summer of 1965. The sporadic clashes continued, however. They climaxed in April 1967 when Israeli pilots shot down six Syrian
MiGs in a dogfight over the
Golan Heights.
Sharon reveled in being back in the thick of things. He seemed to be present at every border skirmish and often took part in the shooting himself. When there was no skirmishing, he would tour the front incessantly and kept the units busy with training and snap inspections.
Ehud Barak, a future prime minister and political rival, at the time an officer in the supersecret
Sayeret Matkal commando unit, remembered years later “what a pleasure it was to be debriefed by Sharon after a mission across the border, or to be inspected by him before a mission. It was all at his fingertips: how to learn a route, how to prepare weapons and equipment, what would really be needed over there. He knew it all.”
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Once again, as with the reprisal operations in the 1950s, Sharon was an instrument of the policy, which was determined not by him but by others much his senior in rank and authority. Once again, he
was a convenient, prominent, self-aggrandizing target for critics who opposed the policy as excessively aggressive.
Sharon completed his year’s probation and received a favorable report from Yoffe. “He passed the test without a shadow of a doubt,” Rabin wrote in his memoirs.
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But Yoffe retired at the end of 1964, and when David Elazar took over at Northern Command, Sharon found himself embroiled again in internal rivalries and backstabbing. He asked for time off and flew to
East Africa with Yoffe for a long trekking and safari holiday. When he returned, another deputy had been appointed alongside him. “From then until the fall of 1965 I stepped as lightly as I could through a minefield of bickering and intrigue.”
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Not lightly enough, though. When he finally left Northern Command in October, he was kept cooling his heels at home for three months between jobs.
At last Rabin invited me in for a talk—a very blunt talk, as it turned out, with no pulled punches. He let me know precisely how he felt about my performance—the things I had done wrong, my relationship with … Elazar, everything…
So it was something of a surprise to hear him finish up the litany of my failings by saying that despite the criticisms I was now promoted to major general
b
and appointed as director of military training [and] commander of a reserve division.
I was as happy as I was surprised. Lily prepared a small party … Not too long afterward we moved back to the house in
Zahala so that I could be closer to my new headquarters. There, six months later, our third son, Gilad Yehuda, was born. Our dream of having a large family seemed on its way to being fulfilled.
“N
ever, in all its wars,” writes Yitzhak Rabin, asking his readers’ indulgence for this rare immodesty, “was the IDF readied for war more perfectly than it was before the
Six-Day War.” As head of training from early 1966, Sharon was certainly entitled to take a share in the credit for that amazing military victory, over and above his direct role in it as the commander of an armored division in Sinai. His basic training manual was the “spirit of the paratroopers.” He
instituted a commando course for all officers in field units as a way of inculcating the paratroop techniques and traditions throughout the fighting army.
He also worked diligently to keep abreast of everything that was known in Western armies of Russian weaponry and battlefield tactics. The Russians were steadily deepening their involvement in the equipping and training of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. Israel for its part was beginning to see some initial, limited success from its own persistent efforts to break down the arms embargo that America had imposed on the Jewish state since its inception. The first U.S.
tanks—not, yet, the latest models—began to arrive, bolstering the IDF’s British (also not the top of the line) and French armory.
Sharon’s ability as a military commander and a leader of men came into its own during the critical period from the middle of May until June 5, 1967, when the army found itself suddenly plunged into an eve-of-war deployment, as the politicians scrambled desperately to avoid war. “Arik issued new instructions,” a military correspondent wrote, describing life in Sharon’s division, dug in on the
Negev-Sinai border. “The spontaneous, rather casual appearance of the troops was to disappear, to be replaced by established military routine…[S]mall tents were erected in which barbers cut soldiers’ hair. Shaving was compulsory and walking around without weapon or helmet resulted in punishment. Prisons were built and MP platoons arrived from
Beersheba. Training was to resume in all units … An army of reservists was to be transformed into a body of regulars, united, trained, patient.”
The correspondent was Lieutenant (res.)
Yael Dayan, daughter of the former chief of staff. Moshe was now, since Ben-Gurion’s break with his own
Mapai Party, an opposition backbench member of the
Knesset in the Old Man’s new, disappointingly small
Rafi Party. Yael, a successful author, was mobilized as one of the army spokesman’s pool of correspondents whose dispatches were distributed to local and foreign media. “I had suggested I join Arik’s headquarters … I am suspicious of all men who have become legends in their own lives, including my father. I [wanted] to verify or disprove the qualities attributed to him.”
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Those qualities were all on show in abundance—both the legendary ones and Sharon’s subversive proclivity for running down his superiors, military and civilian, in the hearing of his subordinates. This incessant, deliberate display of behind-the-back insubordination, a carryover from the wild days of
Unit 101, was intended apparently to bond his officers together and to enhance his prestige in their eyes.
Now, however, Sharon’s raucous whining was in tune with the general mood, both in the army and in the eerily quiet city streets. There was a mounting impatience, and beneath it a serious ebbing of confidence that threatened to weaken the nation under arms. “Guys, there’s just no one up there to rely on,” Sharon harangued his staff officers each time he returned from meetings in
Tel Aviv. “This government is just no government at all.”
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The crisis with Egypt was instigated by the Kremlin. On May 13, the Speaker of the Egyptian parliament,
Anwar Sadat, visiting Moscow, was informed by his Soviet hosts—falsely—that Israel was massing troops in the north for an attack on Syria. The same message was delivered to President Nasser by the Soviet ambassador in
Cairo. Nasser ordered two divisions into Sinai. The troops marched through Cairo shouting, “We’re off to Tel-Aviv.”
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