Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (18 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
“But how to buy it? I had received from my parents the greatest spiritual wealth a child could want, but not a penny of money—they had never had a penny free. My whole adult life I had spent in the army living on the subsistence salary of a career officer. So there were no savings to draw on. And now as I made the round of Israeli banks I found that a private person simply could not get a farm loan.”
51
He needed $600,000. He got it with the help of Avraham Krinitzi, the mayor of Ramat Gan, the town neighboring Tel Aviv that had “adopted” the paratroop brigade. Krinitzi had often heard his friend Meshulam Riklis, an ex-Israeli now living and flourishing in America, complaining that the IDF was forgoing bold, rightist generals like
Ezer Weizman
q
and Arik Sharon. Now, Krinitzi suggested, Riklis could pitch in to help Sharon. Riklis agreed without hesitation. People like Sharon, he replied to Krinitzi, should not have to worry about money. They should worry about one thing: defending Israel.
Riklis met with Sharon, who was still in uniform, and offered him a standing loan of $200,000, interest-free, to help buy the ranch—but on one condition: that he did not make do with being a rancher but stayed involved in matters of defense and foreign policy. Riklis’s views were of the Right, and he believed Sharon would champion them.
With the first $200,000 thus generously covered, Sharon was able to raise the rest of the money in the form of a loan from the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, which had recently opened a branch in Israel. Here, too, personal and political sympathies seem to have been interwoven with the lender’s financial considerations: Samuel Sax, Exchange National’s chairman, was a former U.S. Navy Reserve officer who knew Sharon and presumably supported his political ambitions. But his loan, linked to the dollar, was to be paid back at the rate of $50,000 a year, starting immediately.
a
He received his law degree in 1966.
b
“Dear and Exalted Arik,” Ben-Gurion wrote to him, “I was glad to hear that you’ve become a general. To me, you were a general years ago. But what has changed is that certain failings which you had then, I believe, you don’t have anymore … My trust has not been disappointed” (IDF Archives).
c
Twelve planes were left behind, Rabin writes. Their job was to defend the whole country for the first few hours of the war.
d
The Wall was to have been accessible to Israelis under a provision of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, but Jordan refused to honor it.
e
See below p. 73.
f
“Specifically, I proposed that we should base our defense on the natural line of hills and dunes that runs parallel to the Canal five to eight miles to the east … A second line with our mobile reserves should be established fifteen to twenty miles from the Canal, where the mountains begin and the Mitla and
Gidi passes cut toward the interior …” (
Warrior,
220).
g
Acronym for the Hebrew: Bloc (of) Herut, Liberals.
h
A nasty sideswipe but not inaccurate: within ten weeks of his retirement as chief of staff in January 1972, Bar-Lev was in the Labor government as minister of trade and industry.
i
After the War of Attrition ended, Tal pointed out that a very high proportion of Israel’s casualties had been sustained inside the strongpoints or in the course of supplying them. The other school countered, reasonably enough, that without the strongpoints the casualty figures might have been higher.
j
As prime minister, Sharon appointed Dagan, by then a reserves general, head of the
Mossad. He held the post for eight years.
k
In the Rafah Salient, too, as in the adjacent Gaza Strip, a couple of isolated settlements had come into being by this time. The Bedouin landholders were quietly compensated.
l
The High Court of Justice in the Israeli system is the Supreme Court in its role as the court (of first instance) that hears petitions against the executive branch.
m
Sharon and his staff officers in the
Yom Kippur War, who grappled with the rolling bridge and eventually laid it across the canal, claimed it weighed six hundred tons.
n
With Bar-Lev, on the other hand, Sharon’s relations had markedly improved. “You are an outstanding commander,” the outgoing chief of staff told Sharon in their parting interview.
You have strategic understanding and operational ability and the capacity to push things forward. As you know, I criticized aspects of your behavior in the past that were detrimental to the army’s interests and detrimental to you, too. I am glad that in this latter period, as CO of Southern Command, these things have receded and over the past two years you have discharged your duties in a very professional way. I hope that as CO of Southern Command you have come to recognize the wisdom of the concept of holding strongpoints on the shore of the canal and that in the future, too, you will continue to deny the Egyptians any territorial gain. (Gai,
Bar-Lev,
212)
o
The Free Center, with four members of the
Knesset, was a breakaway from Herut, led by the lawyer
Shmuel Tamir. Tamir had bridled at Menachem Begin’s autocratic rule over his party and had been forced to secede. By listing the Free Center, Sharon was signaling that he, too, would not be cowed by Begin’s authoritarian ways, which deterred middle-of-the-road voters. The State List, also with four members in the present Knesset, was the rump of Ben-Gurion’s
Rafi Party. Its hard core were salt-of-the-earth moshavniks. The Independent Liberals, also a Knesset faction of four, were out-and-out doves, a far cry from the old Irgun “fighting family” who were still the backbone of Begin’s Herut. There was little chance they would join, and when it came to it, they didn’t, but Sharon lost nothing by listing them. Another component of the new Likud was the Movement for Greater Israel, a group mainly of ex-Laborites headed by Sharon’s old friend and commander,
Avraham Yoffe.
p
A dunam is one thousand square meters.
q
Weizman, another avowed and outspoken right-winger, had left the army in 1969 and joined Herut, serving as a minister in the government of national unity.
S
haron arrived at the 143rd Division’s forward base at
Tasa, in western Sinai, in mid-afternoon on Sunday, October 7, 1973, to take command of the central sector. Avraham “Bren” Adan was deploying to his north with the 162nd Division, another reserve formation, while the peacetime commander of Sinai, Avraham “Albert” Mandler, took over the southern sector. Shmuel Gonen (still widely known by his original family name, Gorodish), Sharon’s successor as CO of Southern Command, moved with his staff from
Beersheba to the forward headquarters at
Um Hashiba near the
Gidi Pass, which was code-named Dvela.
a
The
Yom Kippur War was twenty-six hours old. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were dead on the two fronts, the Egyptian and the Syrian. Hundreds of tanks had been destroyed or crippled. Five Egyptian infantry divisions had crossed the Suez Canal. The first waves of attackers had swarmed across in shoals of small boats. They then set about erecting ten
bridges, swiftly and efficiently, down the entire length of the canal. Thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were relentlessly streaming across. The Egyptian units were digging in on the eastern bank, fortifying bridgeheads two miles deep. Israeli warplanes sent to bomb the bridges and strafe the advancing columns were being picked off with alarming ease by the ground-to-air missile batteries on the western bank. Many of the Israeli canal-side strongpoints were surrounded and under attack. Others had simply been bypassed: they were six to seven miles apart, and the Egyptians poured through the gaps. The beleaguered men were begging for relief. But efforts to reach them had resulted only in more burned-out tanks and more dead crewmen.
“No, Arik didn’t ask me why my tanks had not deployed according
to ‘Dovecote.’ ” Colonel Amnon Reshef, whose Fourteenth Armored Brigade bore the brunt of the fighting in Sinai that first night and day of the war, was at
Tasa to welcome Sharon. “Dovecote” was the defense plan centered on the
Bar-Lev Line. At times of tension, regular army infantrymen were to man the strongpoints, and regular army tank units were to take up positions on ramps and high ground between them, ready to hold off an Egyptian attack until the reserve divisions arrived. On Yom Kippur, the strongpoints were manned by a battalion of 436 reservists from the
Jerusalem Brigade, many of them noncombat soldiers. Reshef’s tanks were assembled in the
ta’ozim,
the fortified rear staging areas miles back from the canal. The other two armored brigades in Sinai were camped even farther back.
“I was summoned to a briefing with Mandler on Saturday morning,” Reshef recalled. “He was called to the phone. ‘H hour is this evening at six,’ he came back and told us. ‘For what—they still don’t know. It may be the end of the Egyptians’ war games; it may be war.’ We suggested moving the tanks forward to their firing positions, but Southern Command forbade it for fear of exacerbating the tension on the front line.”
The war, confidently undetected by Israeli intelligence until almost too late, was now confidently predicted to begin at 6:00 p.m. precisely. The tanks were to take up their positions at 5:00, and in any event not before 4:00. But the Egyptian bombardment, and the Syrian assault in the north, started at 2:00. Some two thousand artillery pieces rained shells on the Israeli positions across the canal. At the same moment, 240 Egyptian warplanes roared overhead, en route to attack Israeli airfields, radar installations, anti-aircraft batteries, artillery emplacements, and rear bases throughout Sinai. “Over 3,000 tons of concentrated destruction were launched against a handful of Israeli fortifications in a barrage that turned the entire east bank of the Suez Canal into an inferno for fifty-three minutes.”
1
Before the smoke cleared, the first Egyptian boats were in the water.
“The next afternoon, I reported to Arik what was happening,” Reshef said drily. “I explained that opposite each company of mine an entire Egyptian division had crossed. By the time my tanks had reached their firing positions, Egyptian commandos were waiting for them with antitank weapons. Arik didn’t cast blame, and he didn’t complain. There wasn’t time for that. The situation was catastrophic. He was focused, businesslike, constructive.”
Reshef was businesslike, too, despite his night and day of relentless fighting. A soldier’s soldier, six feet tall, ramrod straight with a handlebar mustache, he cut a very different figure from the bulky,
silver-haired Sharon. His mauled and shrunken brigade was now ordered integrated into Sharon’s division. “I didn’t know Sharon at all. I’d met him briefly just once, years before.”
b
I
n April, the IDF had gone on alert in response to intelligence reports that Egypt and Syria might be planning an attack in May. For several weeks, units in Sinai and on the Golan were beefed up with reserves, trained, and held in a high state of readiness. Sharon, still the CO of Southern Command, made plans for a possible crossing at
Kantara and farther south at
Deversoir, at the top of the
Great Bitter Lake. The huge Israeli-built ramparts were a problem there, but he solved it by hollowing out a section from the inside “so that its outward appearance would remain the same, though in actuality it would be thinner and less dense.” He marked out the section with a line of red bricks. “We also built a large enclosed yard with a hardened floor almost a thousand yards in length and several hundred in breadth with roads going in one side and out the other to facilitate traffic.”
2
Dayan urged the
General Staff to be prepared for war from the end of June. But nothing happened, and by August the state of alert had been reduced, and the languid, torpid sense of false security had crept over the canal front again. On September 13, a dogfight developed over southern Syria in which the IAF brought down thirteen Syrian
MiGs for the loss of one of its own planes. This naturally raised tensions again, and on September 24, at the request of the CO of Northern Command,
Yitzhak Hofi, a decision was made to reinforce the front line on the Golan with extra tanks. This was done, in part, by bringing up an armored brigade from Sinai.
The next day, Prime Minister Meir met secretly with King Hussein of Jordan and heard from him an explicit warning that war was imminent. But, reassured by
Military Intelligence that the likelihood of war was low, she paid little heed to this neighborly tip-off. The Egyptians had been observed working feverishly behind their canal embankment,
moving heavy equipment and drilling troops. But this was confidently explained by
Military Intelligence as a large-scale training exercise.
Only near noon on Friday, October 5, as the country prepared to close down for the fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year, did Military Intelligence’s stolid “low probability of war” assessment finally begin to crack. Reports had come in overnight of urgent instructions from Moscow to the families of Soviet personnel in Syria and Egypt to leave at once, and planes were being sent in to collect them. The standing army went on high alert. Mobilization orders were issued to some air force reserve crews. But it was still a far cry from full war footing. The head of Military Intelligence,
Eli Zeira, told cabinet ministers called to a hasty meeting in
Tel Aviv that he still believed war was unlikely. Chief of Staff Elazar agreed. The
conceptziya,
even now, continued to hold sway.
It gave way only during the night, when the director of the Mossad,
Zvi Zamir, telephoned from London to say war would break out the following day at sunset. His source was Ashraf Marwan,
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law and a close aide to his successor as president of Egypt,
Anwar Sadat. The Mossad had been running him since 1969. At a dawn consultation in Tel Aviv, Elazar demanded a preemptive strike by the air force. But Dayan balked, and Golda backed him, arguing that the critical factor now was U.S. support. In order to retain it, Israel must be seen not to have started the war. Elazar then demanded total, immediate mobilization of the reserves. But again Dayan opposed him. He suggested two divisions were enough for the moment. At 9:00 a.m., Golda approved the two divisions. Twenty minutes later she approved two more.
