Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (2 page)

What he began, during the dramatic years of his prime ministership (2001–2006), contradicting a lifetime of military extremism and political
obduracy, entitles him, like his grandfather, to a place of honor in Israel’s annals.

What might have been—what could still be, despite the intervening years of setbacks and disappointment—makes him the worthy subject of this effort to understand his life and times. When he was elected prime minister, many proud and patriotic Israelis talked seriously of leaving the country. His accession to power was the stuff of nightmares. The future seemed to hold only war and bloodshed. When he collapsed, less than five years later, we wept. Not just for him; for ourselves.

I
n the Knesset that January, he read on monotonously, now deploring the pervasive infiltration of foreign words and phrases into Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s pristine Hebrew. “I don’t understand, for instance, how that anomalous alloy ‘
Yallah,
bye’ has supplanted our own beautiful ‘
Shalom
’ for saying farewell.”

His secretary, Marit Danon, who served five previous prime ministers, recalled years later her double surprise when, days after he took over in 2001, he sent out for a falafel for his lunch from a popular Jerusalem street stand. She duly served up the plebeian fare and was leaving the room when Sharon invited her to share the meal. “Marit,” he asked, “does not your soul yearn for the falafel?” On another occasion, hungry as always but never willing to admit it, he lifted the phone to tell her, “Uri [his aide] is assailed by famine.”
¹

For “famine,” Sharon used the word
kafan,
a rare term unknown to many Hebrew speakers. Danon would have a two-volume Hebrew dictionary always at hand on her trolley when she took dictation from the prime minister.
²
“Almost daily I was on the phone to the Hebrew Language Academy,” she recalled, “asking for the correct pointing of a particular word in a speech, because of his obsession to get every word perfectly right.”
^d
The language, like the land, was his responsibility.

A
riel Sharon probably had a much nicer childhood than he admitted to. In family photographs from the 1930s he looks happy enough. A plump, clear-eyed little boy, neatly, almost fussily turned out, staring boldly at the camera, comfortable with his parents, his sister, his various uncles and aunts.

The backdrop is usually poor looking. The walls of the family homestead, both inside and out, expose bare boards and rough-hewn doors. The farmyard is unkempt, but it is clearly a busy and active place.

In later years, as a politician and eventually as leader of the rightist Likud Party, Sharon often spoke of the tensions between his parents and the other farming families in their moshav, or cooperative village, of
Kfar Malal, nine miles northeast of Tel Aviv. He never tired of telling how he, at age five, fell off a donkey and cut his chin and how his mother carried him bleeding through the fields to a private doctor in the township of
Kfar Saba, nearly two miles away, rather than have him treated at the clinic in Kfar Malal. The clinic was run by Kupat Holim, part of the Histadrut trade union organization. Samuil and
Vera Scheinerman, Sharon’s parents, refused to belong to Kupat Holim.

Some of the village old-timers, though, pooh-poohed his account. It was hyped, they hinted: the auto-hagiography of a rightist arriviste who grew up, in fact, a Labor boy in a thoroughly Labor village. Vera, too, the lonely heroine of her son’s reminiscences, failed to confirm the ideological motives to which Arik ascribed her and Samuil’s running feuds with the village committee. “Revisionists?
^a
We weren’t Revisionists,”
she told an interviewer at the age of eighty-five, still running the farm at Kfar Malal. “Who even knew what that meant around here? It was simply that anyone who tried to demand a bit of order was immediately dubbed a Revisionist.”
¹

But Arik’s depiction of his parents as loners, tough and obstinate individualists in a society that preferred conformism, was basically right. Samuil and Vera were among the earliest settlers at Kfar Malal. New immigrants from Russia, they joined in 1922. First they lived in a tent. Then Samuil built the rickety cabin that, with additions, was to house the family till the mid-1940s, when they could finally afford a house of bricks and mortar. Yehudit, always called Dita, was born in 1926, and Ariel, called Arik, arrived two years later. There were quarrels over land. Kfar Malal was required to donate some of its fields to nearby settlements founded later. On one occasion—this, too, made famous by Arik’s incessant, proud narration of it—Vera resolved on the unilateral disengagement of the Scheinermans’ little vineyard from the annexationist designs of neighboring
Ramot Hashavim. Husband away, children asleep, she crept out at midnight with rifle in one hand and wire cutters in the other and dismantled the new demarcation. The village suspected
Bedouin marauders, but she put them right—and threatened to do it again unless the fence was restored to the far side of her vineyard.

As an individualist and as a trained agronomist with novel ideas, Samuil Scheinerman tried to introduce crops new to Palestine on his little farm. He planted peanuts and sweet potatoes. They were family staples for years. “So what? Arik doesn’t look small or stunted on them,” Vera observed years later.
²
But neither of these niche foods swept the market, and making a living remained a problem. Vera swallowed her pride and wrote to her brother, Joseph, who had settled in Istanbul, asking if he could find work for Samuil.

For two years Samuil worked in
Turkey. He came back full of plans for growing cotton, but no one in the Jewish Agency Settlement Department wanted to listen. In time, he planted avocados, another exotic novelty in those days, mangoes, and clementine oranges. Slowly his finances improved, but Dita and Arik’s high-school fees were still a heavy drag on the family budget.

High school for village kids was by no means the norm, and Vera and Samuil’s insistence on it exacerbated the charges of snobbishness and hauteur constantly muttered by their neighbors. Most of the other Kfar Malal children made do with eight years at the local elementary school, graduating at fourteen to become full-time farmhands. Arik did his share of farmwork before dawn. Then, in a blue shirt with red
lacing and khaki shorts,
³
the de rigueur dress code for kibbutz and moshav youngsters, he bused in to Tel Aviv.

The Geula High School, a private institution catering mainly to the sons and daughters of the
Yishuv’s
^b
bourgeois gentlefolk, stood by the seashore. Arik strode the half hour from the bus terminal, saving his fare money for a falafel and soda after classes. By late afternoon he was back home again, working in the fields until nightfall. Then—homework.

In later life, Sharon praised his parents for inculcating in him both the stomach and the stamina for sustained, hard work. “As a child,” he wrote in
Warrior,
the autobiography he published, in English, in the 1980s, “I listened to my father talk about the nobility of physical labor. By the time I was old enough to have my own thoughts on the subject, the work itself was in my bones … By the age of eight or nine I was doing the heavier work on my own. In the spring I would take the horse and wagon out to the vineyard and hitch up the plow.”

In Tel Aviv, after school, Sharon would sometimes spend his afternoons with his paternal grandmother, Miriam, Mordechai’s widow. She regaled him in
Russian with “stories of her life in Petrograd, where she had studied to be a midwife; in Brest Litovsk, where she had practiced her profession; and in Baku, where the family had fled during the war.” Russian forebears and a good smattering of the language were to stand the politician Sharon in good stead decades later, when more than a million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union poured into Israel. So was the snippet of Scheinerman family lore, of uncertain provenance, that the midwife Miriam had actually brought the Likud leader and prime minister Menachem Begin into the world. Begin was certainly born in Brest Litovsk, and his father and Mordechai were certainly friends and fellow activists in the local Zionist cell.

The adult Sharon always praised his parents, too, for dinning into him a love of culture. “Be a
ben kfar,
a man of the soil,” the agronomist Samuil urged his son. “But be a
ben tarbut,
a man of culture, too.”
⁴
Samuil was an enthusiastic amateur
musician, and despite his prickly personality he found a few like-minded souls to make music with. He painted too. Vera read constantly. She made sure her children imbibed the Russian classics. From the tight domestic budget they bought little Arik a quarter-size violin and the lessons to go with it. They took him to musical soirees in neighboring
Ramot Hashavim, at the home of Dr. Steinitz, an accomplished pianist and lecturer on music.
^c

While his young farmer’s fingers showed little aptitude for the fiddle, Arik took away with him a lifelong devotion to classical music from his incongruous childhood conservatory at Kfar Malal and Ramat Hashavim. Political rivals who suffered the sharp side of his tongue during the day knew they would find him all smiles and good cheer at night, in his regular seat at the
Tel Aviv concert hall, for a performance of the Israel Philharmonic.
^d

At school, a classmate recalled, Arik was a good student and generally liked by the teachers. But where he really shone was in the martial arts class. Here he served as the instructor’s aide, helping to teach the boys and girls how to wield a cudgel to maximal effect. His budding military prowess was in evidence, too, on a class outing in tenth grade when the teacher lost his way and Arik led the hot and worried city kids back to safety.

Samuil kept quarreling and bickering with other families till the end. He died young, in 1956. At the burial in the village cemetery Arik himself eulogized his father. Standing at attention in his red paratrooper boots and red paratrooper beret, Colonel Ariel Sharon, a national hero by then, though already a controversial one, pulled out a folded paper from his tunic pocket and read appropriately uncontroversial words of love and longing for the dogged, hard-bitten idealist.

There was one item on Kfar Malal’s agenda that provoked no discord at all between the regimented village families and the cantankerous Scheinermans: defense against the
Palestinian Arabs who lived all around. Vera never forgot the sense of near terror one night during the
countrywide violent riots of 1929, when rumors reached the village that thousands of Arabs were massing in
Kalkilya, a nearby town, to overrun Kfar Malal. With the other mothers she cowered with Dita and baby Arik in a concrete cowshed while the men made ready to fight for their lives. The attack never came. For his bar mitzvah, Samuil gave Arik a richly decorated Caucasian dagger he had brought with him from Baku. It was a symbolic gift but one whose import both giver and receiver recognized.

Guarding and patrolling the village at night was always part of the farmers’ lives. After his bar mitzvah, Arik was on the roster. At fourteen, like other likely lads, he took his oath of allegiance to the
Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish state in the making. The rite duly took place at dead of night, replete with Bible and revolver and flickering candle. The Haganah was supposedly secret, but everyone knew it existed, and most people encouraged the boys and young men to volunteer. Training at Kfar Malal took place on Saturdays and one weekday evening.

No sooner had Arik taken up arms as an eager young teenager than he found himself involved in the first of the historical disputes that were to dog his military career and later darken his political life. For Arik, they were historical in two senses: they became key episodes in the history of Zionism; and his own specific role in them was debated, often bitterly, for long years and even decades after the episodes themselves had become history.

The
saison,
or hunting season, was the cynical sobriquet attached to the period from December 1944 to April 1945 during which the Haganah actively pursued members of the Etzel,
^e
the rival underground army of the Revisionists, and the Lehi,
^f
an even more radical underground group. Some of these “dissidents” apprehended by the Haganah were handed over to the British, who deported them to detention camps in
East Africa. Others were held in secret kibbutz lockups or merely roughed up and released.

Most of the serious pursuing, apprehending, and roughing up was done by the
Palmach, the Haganah’s two-thousand-strong full-time guerrilla force. But the part-time soldiers sometimes played a role, too. Did young Arik Scheinerman, a dab hand with a cudgel, swing his
stick and his fists in the
saison
of 1945? That was hardly something the future leader of the Likud would want to be remembered for. The evidence is sketchy. Sharon himself denied any such thing. “I hated [the
saison
],” he wrote in
Warrior
. “Even arresting and punishing the militants seemed reasonable enough. But turning them over to the British? How could Jews turn over other Jews? It seemed criminal, a shameful thing to be associated with.”