Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (15 page)

A
few days after the door-slamming episode, an officer from the adjutant general’s office phoned to ask how Sharon wanted to receive his accumulated leave—as vacation or in cash. Bar-Lev, he learned, would not approve a further extension of his contract. He appealed to Dayan, only to be told, “Bar-Lev doesn’t want you; I don’t see how I can interfere.” Golda Meir, the new prime minister (Eshkol had died suddenly in February 1969), also declined to step in on his behalf.

Sharon now conducted a brief but very public flirt with leaders of the parliamentary opposition. Was he just posturing in order to put pressure on Golda and the government to overrule Bar-Lev? Or was he seriously preparing to embark on a political career? Unsurprisingly, Sharon himself endorses the latter version. But even if he was being disingenuous, his account is entertaining:

Since 1965, Sapir’s Liberals had been in alliance with Menachem Begin’s
Herut Party in an electoral bloc called
Gahal,
^g
a first attempt at creating a credible alternative to Labor. Sapir took Sharon to see Begin.

The date was July 3, 1969. Election Day was October 28, and by law the parties’ lists of candidates had to be submitted a hundred days ahead, by mid-July. As Sharon tells it, the understanding with Begin did not survive his drive back to Tel Aviv. He picked up a soldier-hitchhiker, who, “without paying the slightest deference to my rank or reputation … began telling me that I was making a terrible mistake, that I shouldn’t do it, that I had to stay in the army … Lily was waiting for me, in bed already. I got in and covered myself up with the blanket. ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘I feel as if I need to be protected.’ I had already decided that I was not going to go through with it.”

The next morning’s headlines trumpeted the Begin-Sharon understanding. Sharon writes that he was in the act of composing embarrassing letters of withdrawal to Sapir and Begin when “fate intervened in my personal affairs…
Pinchas Sapir was visiting the
United States. When he heard about the newspaper headlines, he was livid. Calling Bar-Lev, Sapir asked the military’s most prominent
Laborite
^h
what he thought he was doing (as Sapir himself told me later)…Sapir told Bar-Lev to get busy and find some way of keeping me in the army and out of the hands of the ‘enemy.’ ”

A way was duly, and quickly, found. He would be appointed to the hitherto nonexistent post of “lecturer for the IDF” and sent on an extended speaking tour to the United States, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. He would meet, too, with military and diplomatic officials in the various capitals. This eight-week foreign odyssey would end, by happy coincidence, the day before the election. He would thus be conveniently out of the country during the campaign, and everyone could forget his high-profile but now felicitously truncated tryst with the opposition.

He wrote a formal, pompous letter to Begin and Sapir explaining that after long and hard consideration he had decided that “in these difficult days, when the IDF is at war along the borders and its soldiers are shedding their blood in defense of Israel’s freedom and independence,” his place was “alongside them, and in the front line.” To Josef Sapir he wrote a separate note, apologizing for the embarrassment and hinting at the unfavorable impact Begin had made on him. He was determined, he confided, not to enter political life “in a state of dependence on [Begin].”
³⁶

After the election, with Golda and Dayan and Sapir all safely back in their jobs, Bar-Lev obediently deposited the country’s most fateful front, Southern Command, in the hands of the man he had wanted to fire. “In December,” Sharon writes, “I received orders to take over Gavish’s command.”

Sharon seems to have persuaded Bar-Lev that whatever his past objections he would abide by the strategy that the High Command had decided upon, and to a large extent had already implemented, with the rapid fortification of the forward positions along the canal. Most of the fortification work had been finished before the
War of Attrition began in earnest, in March 1969. Sharon did not abandon the fortress system and based the defense of Sinai on mobile forces, as Tal and he had advocated.
ⁱ
As CO of Southern Command, he tinkered
with the
Bar-Lev Line and ended up, in the words of
Chaim Herzog, with “a form of compromise … which no military concept could accept.” Far from abandoning the line of strongpoints, Sharon ordered many of them rebuilt and reinforced after the battering they took in the War of Attrition. In time, though, he persuaded Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as IDF chief of staff on January 1, 1972, to let him “thin out” the line by closing some—by the end it was fourteen—of the thirty-two strongpoints.

In addition, he embarked on a massive building program of eleven underground fortifications in the hills some miles to the rear, where the massed armor and artillery were to be deployed that would ultimately defend Sinai in the face of an Egyptian crossing. He called these fortresses “
ta’ozim,
strongholds, to distinguish them from the
ma’ozim,
strongpoints,” on the canal bank. “Here I put command and long-range surveillance posts, underground bunkers, firing positions, bases for forward reserve units, and emplacements for artillery.”
³⁷

By mid-April 1970, the Israeli positions were being subjected not only to artillery barrages but also to attacks by Egyptian commando units crossing the canal in fast boats under cover of darkness. Israel responded with commando raids of its own, some deep inside Egypt. In one such raid, on July 28, paratroopers and naval commandos set down on the tiny, heavily defended Green Island, near the southern end of the canal in the
Gulf of Suez, and destroyed key Egyptian radar and anti-aircraft installations housed there. This gave the air force freer rein to deploy above the
Canal Zone as a sort of flying artillery, targeting Egyptian emplacements and armor.

In September, a force of Israeli infantry and armor was ferried across the Gulf of Suez to the port of Zafarana, from where it attacked and overran Egyptian positions along twenty miles of coastline in eight hours of sustained fighting before re-embarking. In December, just before Sharon took over, heli-borne commandos dismantled and transported back to the Israeli side a state-of-the-art Soviet radar system deployed at Ras Arab, also on the west bank of the gulf. And in January 1970, under the new CO a commando force overran Shadwan Island, 155 miles down the Gulf of Suez, killed or captured all of the hundred-man Egyptian garrison, and again made off with radar units and other military hardware.

Both sides now made moves that dangerously escalated the War of Attrition. Israel, worn down by the incessant toll of casualties on the canal, embarked on a policy of deep-penetration bombing raids against strategic targets throughout Egypt. President Nasser, acutely conscious of his vulnerability to Israeli airpower, demanded from his
Soviet patrons a drastic upgrading of Egypt’s own air force and its anti-aircraft defenses, along with Soviet pilots and experts to help man the sophisticated new systems he wanted. In the first months of 1970, the Soviet presence in Egypt doubled and tripled, reaching more than twelve thousand men. Israeli pilots, some of them now flying American-supplied Skyhawk and Phantom warplanes, were ordered to back off from dogfights rather than risk downing Soviet airmen.

Israel’s deep bombing campaign came to a peremptory end in April, when Phantom jets mistakenly bombed an elementary school, killing forty-seven children and injuring another fifty. The focus of the fighting returned to the
Canal Zone, where the Egyptians, with Soviet help, were trying under the cover of almost constant artillery exchanges to deploy their Soviet
SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries right up to the water’s edge. On July 30, the undesired but inevitable dogfight took place and resulted in the downing of four Soviet-piloted
MiGs and the deaths of the four pilots.

The escalation added urgency to U.S. diplomatic efforts to reach a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, or, failing that, at least an end of the present round of fighting. The Nixon administration had been actively trying to broker a peace deal through Four Power (United States, U.S.S.R., Britain, and
France) and Two Power (United States and U.S.S.R.) talks. These had failed to cut through Cold War rivalry, but in December 1969 Secretary of State
William Rogers had announced a comprehensive American peace plan based on Israeli withdrawal from all Egyptian and Jordanian territory barring “minor adjustments” in the framework of a peace settlement.
Golda Meir’s government, still a unity coalition with Begin’s
Gahal in it, had rejected the proposal. Now, with the war at a global danger point, Rogers came back with a more modest plan, designed to achieve an immediate cease-fire in Sinai.

The American proposal had three parts: a ninety-day cease-fire and “standstill” in place for thirty miles on either side of the canal; a statement by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan that they accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and specifically its call for withdrawal from occupied territories; and an undertaking to resume peace talks through the UN peace envoy, Sweden’s
Gunnar Jarring, which had been conducted on and off since 1967 without registering any progress.

Golda Meir was under heavy international and domestic pressure to accept. Casualty figures mounted relentlessly. Since the end of the
Six-Day War, 367 IDF soldiers had been killed on the canal front and 1,366 injured.
³⁸
Almost daily, the black-bordered death notices appeared in the newspapers. The fact that Egyptian casualties were
much higher was of no comfort and little strategic significance. As Nasser and his generals had rightly discerned at the outset, a war of attrition for a small, tightly knit society was much more damaging than for a country of tens of millions.

For the first time since the waiting period before the 1967 war, searching questions began to be aired not just on the leftist margin but in the political mainstream. In late July–early August, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all announced their acceptance of the U.S. proposal. The cease-fire on the canal went into effect on August 7, 1970. Begin pulled his
Gahal bloc out of the government, ending three years of unity rule.

Egypt, with Soviet connivance, immediately began advancing its SAM anti-aircraft batteries toward the canal bank, in brazen violation of the “standstill.” The Egyptian push began on the very night of the cease-fire and continued in the days and weeks ahead. Israel strenuously protested to Washington, but the administration was reluctant to upend the cease-fire. Nixon preferred to step up the supply of advanced warplanes to Israel as a means of mollifying the anger and anxiety in Jerusalem.

E
gypt’s War of Attrition was supported by its Six-Day War allies, Syria and Jordan, through the activities from their soil of Palestinian guerrilla groups. Immediately after the war, the Palestinian nationalist group
Fatah, under
Yasser Arafat, tried to establish itself inside the occupied West Bank and lead resistance there. But it was eventually pushed out and forced to conduct its operations against Israel on a hit-and-run basis from over the border. Soon, Arafat was acting in defiance of Jordanian constraints. Increasingly, the armed Palestinian presence on the East Bank began to pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.

In September 1970, after two attempts on his life, King Hussein of Jordan lashed out at the armed PLO units that were running the border areas and the Palestinian
refugee camps inside the kingdom as a veritable state within a state. The
Arab Legion, comprising
Bedouin tribesmen loyal to the royal house, crushed the PLO men and took a bloody toll of civilian camp dwellers, too. Hundreds of the armed Palestinians fled across the river, where IDF troops were ordered not to shoot them or send them back but to disarm and arrest them, “although,” Sharon writes with evident disapproval, “these were the very terrorists who had carried out who knew how many murderous raids into Israel.”