Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (13 page)

Before his infantry and armor moved on their target with almost choreographed precision, Sharon unleashed a massive softening-up bombardment from the six artillery battalions attached to his division. “Let everything tremble,” Sharon ordered the chief artillery officer,
Yaacov Vaknin, just after 10:30 p.m. “Tremble it shall,” came the reply, shouted from the artillery command half-track standing alongside Sharon’s own half-track. For the next twenty minutes, shells and mortar bombs rained down on the Egyptian complex until
Kuti Adam called a halt to it and his men began to advance on the center trench.

The paratroopers reached their target close to midnight. “Three batteries of field-guns were silenced in a matter of minutes,”
Yael Dayan recorded. The paras next ambushed a convoy of reinforcement trucks and destroyed them. One, however, was loaded with artillery ammunition, and in the explosion three Israelis were killed and many more wounded.

The two tank brigades also surged forward, from their opposite vectors, at around midnight and began engaging the Egyptian armor in earnest. The whole night and into the morning, Sharon orchestrated the battle by radio.

While the battle still raged, he received an order from the CO of Southern Command,
Shaike Gavish, to enable a brigade of Yoffe’s armor to pass through the complex on their dash west. “There below us on the main road,” Yael Dayan wrote, “as far as I could see, were a thousand headlights advancing rapidly towards us. Arik was standing erect in his command half-track, raising his hand to the horizon as if blessing the sight.” Sharon ordered his own tanks to stop firing, “and we were treated,” he writes, “to the remarkable sight of a brigade of tanks moving unscathed right through the two forces locked in combat.”

By mid-morning the fighting had died away. The whole complex was in Sharon’s hands. The price: 40 Israeli dead and 140 wounded. A high price, but the reward was high, too. “Our mission had been to open the main axis to our forces in Sinai, and we had now done that,” Sharon writes. He goes on to fault the High Command for procrastinating the whole day before deciding on his division’s next assignment.

On Wednesday morning, June 7, at any rate, the orders came through: Sharon was to head south for
Nakhl, which he had taken in his charge across Sinai at the head of the paratroop brigade eleven years before. The assignment was to cut off an Egyptian division that had been deployed at
Kuntilla on the Negev border and was now heading back west. “If the Egyptians succeeded in getting to the Mitle Pass before we hit them,” Sharon explains, “they could close off our advance to the canal.” Outside Nakhl, which was defended by a full brigade, the lead vehicles hit a minefield, and Sharon decided to defer the attack to Thursday morning.

They celebrated that night with the rest of the nation over the news
that the Western Wall had been taken, along with the whole
Old City of Jerusalem, held since 1948 by Jordan.
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Mordechai Gur, Sharon’s subordinate who had turned against him after the Mitle in 1956, led the paratroopers who liberated this holiest site in Judaism after a bloody battle outside the city ramparts.

When the tanks surged into
Nakhl at dawn, they found the fortified complex deserted. “Everything was in place,” Sharon writes. “Tents were up, self-propelled guns were ready to move, artillery and mortars dug in and ready to fire. Everything was there except the people. We called it the ‘ghost brigade.’ ”

The division from
Kuntilla, however, was fast approaching, chased by an IDF armored brigade that had been deployed defensively in the Negev at the start of the war but now crossed into Sinai to join the battle. “With a brigade of tanks, a reinforced battalion of half-tracks, and the divisional reconnaissance unit, I set an ambush for the fleeing Egyptians,” Sharon recorded. “The Egyptian Sixth Division entered a terrible killing field … For miles the desert was covered by ruined tanks and burned-out armored personnel carriers. Bodies littered the ground, and here and there across the scene groups of Egyptians were standing with their hands behind their heads … By [evening] the Sixth Division had ceased to exist.”
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This time, the Centurions and Shermans were supported by frontline jets that swooped down, pouring napalm and cannon fire onto the Egyptian column.

The desert was teeming with Egyptian soldiers desperate to get back, many of them without water in the blazing summer heat. The orders were to enable—later it became actively to assist and facilitate—the return across the canal of enlisted men, while officers were to be taken prisoner. These—almost five thousand of them—were eventually exchanged for a handful of Israeli POWs and various spies and agents imprisoned in Egypt.

G
eneral Tal’s division had had similarly stunning success along the northern axis. Starting from south of
Gaza City on the first day, it swept west along the coast to take
el-Arish. On the second day, as its forward units raced ahead toward central Sinai and the canal, other units swung back to conquer Gaza City and the rest of the Gaza Strip. Some writers attribute Dayan’s turnabout on Gaza to pressure from kibbutzim along the Gaza border that came under fire from inside
the Strip. It is hard, though, to see how Gaza could have remained an unoccupied enclave once Israel was in occupation of the whole of Sinai (and of the entire West Bank). On the third and fourth days, Tal, too, fought major tank battles, on the
Bir Gafgafa–
Ismailia road. His units finally reached the canal at Ismailia and points north—again, contrary to Dayan’s original wishes.

The last two days of the Six-Day War were fought mainly between Israel and Syria, on the
Golan Heights. Here, yet again, Dayan found his original intentions overturned by the pressure of events. The breathtaking speed and relative ease with which the IDF had smashed through the Egyptian divisions gave added weight to the demands of the kibbutzim beneath the Syrian escarpment to put an end to their sporadic shelling from the Syrian positions above. During the first four days of war the bombardment was incessant. Eshkol wavered, but Dayan was set against extending the war to Syria for fear of direct Soviet intervention. On Thursday night, though, he changed his mind. He gave David Elazar, the CO of Northern Command, two days—Soviet pressure for a cease-fire was already mounting—to push the Syrian army back across the escarpment on the top of the Golan Heights. The air force was available now for devastating close support. Armored reinforcements from Central Command were rushed up north to help. The fighting up the steep slopes of the Golan was brutal. But by midday Saturday the IDF was swarming across the plateau and digging in on a line anchored at
Kuneitra, the main town on the Golan.

On Saturday, June 10, Sharon was summoned to meet with Gavish, the CO of Southern Command, and a helicopter was sent to pick him up. It developed engine trouble. “As we began to lose altitude,” he recalled, “small groups of [wandering Egyptian soldiers] began shooting at us, and we traded fire with them. Landing on the road, I wondered briefly what was going to happen to us. It was too ironic for words.”

Yisrael Tal took up the story in an interview years later:

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to see a larger image.

At Jebel Libni there were more embraces with Gavish and Yoffe and posing for photographs. Then on to
Tel Aviv to meet with Rabin. “Somehow Lily had learned that I was coming in and was waiting for me at the airport with Gur,” Sharon writes. “It was a wonderful surprise despite the fact that we would not have any time together. She drove me to General Headquarters … Our meeting with Rabin was full of congratulations and warmth.”

A week later, as the demobilization of the reserves wound down, Sharon flew home for his first real leave since the waiting period began a month before. It was, despite the mourning in some families and the suffering of the wounded, a triumphal return—for the army in general and for Sharon in particular. As he toured the
Old City of Jerusalem with Lily and Gur, he was mobbed by well-wishers shouting his name, jostling to touch him and thank him. All the generals were instant heroes in those heady days, their photographs smiling out from magazine covers and victory albums. But he, somehow, seemed to attract special attention, to the chagrin of some of his colleagues. There was whispering that he and his friends had encouraged journalists, local and foreign, to cover his division to the exclusion of others. His trailer was depicted as something of a running buffet cum press conference. His name and voice seemed to appear all over, in print and on television, at home and abroad.

In the Diaspora, too, Jews basked in the glow of Israel’s victory, which many saw as a salvation from the threat of another Holocaust. The Six-Day War marks the beginning of the renaissance, muted and hesitant at first, of Jewish identity among the three-million-odd Jews of the Soviet Union, where both Zionism and Judaism had been suppressed for decades. In the United States, home to more than six million Jews, the war—both the fear before and the relief and pride after—finally put to rest a certain ambivalence that many Jews there felt toward the Jewish state, as though its existence somehow threatened their Americanism.

Before the war, Sharon would later recall, he sometimes took young Gur to
Mount Zion, on the borderline between the Israeli and the Jordanian sections of Jerusalem. From the buildings on the mount they could peer over into the Old City. “ ‘Over there,’ I would say, ‘those places are not in our hands, but they are ours. They belong
to us.’ ” Now he set out to show his oldest son the newly won territories. Many other Israeli families were doing the same that summer. “When they saw me, they would invariably gather around with congratulation, talk, and laughter. At these times I would look into Gur’s eyes. Although he never said anything, a proud happiness lit his face … Watching him, I too felt an immense pride.”

Sharon poured his love into the child, more especially since Gali’s death. “He really was the most enchanting child,” says
Dalia Rabin, Yitzhak’s daughter. She was Gur’s group leader in the local scouts troop in Zahala. “He was the most beautiful boy in the group, and the most intelligent. I was at his funeral. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

Gur died in his father’s arms, shot through the head by an antique gun he had taken down from the wall to play with together with a friend in the yard. “ ‘I’ll be out in the front,’ he told me, then turned around to leave. Just before he did, he gave me a playful salute, the gesture of a boy who had grown up around the army and who liked military things.”

For the stricken, anguished father, the point was critical. Gur had been around guns all his life and knew how to handle them. Sharon never accepted the version of the other, older boy that Gur had shot himself by accident. Omri, then three and a half, and baby Gilad witnessed the accident. “He told the boy not to point,” Sharon, in his account of the tragedy, recalls Omri saying. “Gur told the boy not to point it.”
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It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Lily had taken the
car to go shopping. Sharon lifted the boy and ran out, screaming for help. A car stopped and sped with them to the local clinic and from there to the hospital. “I had seen so many wounds in my life; no one had to tell me that this one was hopeless … I sat in the back seat with Gur on my lap, my shirt soaked with his blood. Ages seemed to pass as we raced to the hospital. And as we did, he died in my arms.

“In keeping with Jewish law, the funeral would have to be held before sundown … They put him in a simple pine coffin, and I asked them to open it for a minute. I looked at him again, then watched as they closed the lid … Standing in front of the grave [alongside Gali’s], I remembered five and a half years ago … that I had said, ‘The only thing that I can promise you is that I will take care of Gur.’ Now I could not shake the thought that I had not kept my promise … I didn’t take care of him. I just didn’t take care of him.

“For the first time in my life,” Sharon wrote, “I felt I was facing something that I could not overcome, that I could not live through.”
His friend
Uri Dan remembers him saying at this time that life would have no meaning anymore. He hired the attorney
Shmuel Tamir to demand that the police conduct a full inquiry. “I’m sure Gur didn’t shoot himself,” he told the lawyer. “I don’t want to sue anyone. I just want all the facts to be investigated and the police to be convinced that Gur didn’t pull the trigger.” The other boy’s family claimed he had held the gun first but that Gur had taken it and looked down the barrel, and then it fired. Tamir studied all the ballistic and other evidence, “and in light of the facts I presented, the police investigators accepted Arik’s version.”
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Nevertheless, Sharon would sometimes hurl accusations at the other boy on the street. The boy was the son of an air force pilot. His mother wrote to the chief of staff,
Haim Bar-Lev, to complain about this harassment, and Bar-Lev called in Sharon to try to talk to him. Eventually, the boy and his family moved out of the district.
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