Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (27 page)

Washington sweetened the pill for Rabin by significantly upgrading the quality and quantity of weaponry it undertook to supply to Israel, including F-15 and F-16 warplanes, M60 tanks, hydrofoil naval boats, and intelligence-gathering equipment.
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Rabin, having balked at a similar proposal earlier in the year—and having incurred an ominous public “reassessment” of Washington’s policy toward Israel—now recommended the Interim Agreement package to the
Knesset as a step toward peace with the largest and most powerful Arab state and a major enhancement of the relationship with Israel’s superpower patron.

For the Likud and its allies, progress to peace meant progress to withdrawal from the remainder of Sinai, and perhaps from the other
occupied territories too. Meanwhile, they argued in the Knesset, Israel was trading tangibles for paper promises. As a Knesset member, Sharon, too, had spoken of the critical danger, as he insisted, of withdrawing from the Mitle and Gidi passes. Now, as Rabin’s adviser, his chief concern was to keep a low profile in the hope that people would not dig up his previous pronouncements.

Privately, though, as the Interim Agreement evolved, Sharon kept up a barrage of detailed and specific criticism that Rabin found both constructive and honorable. “It was my adviser, Arik Sharon, who recommended, contrary to other views, that the Egyptian early warning station be inside the passes, as close as possible to our forces,” Rabin recalled later in his memoirs. “In general, I drew encouragement from Arik’s approach. He said, ‘I disagree with your position and strongly oppose the Interim Agreement. But as long as I’m your adviser, I’ll give you the best advice possible in the context of your policy.’ In this way, Sharon demonstrated both loyalty and decency.”
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Rabin went on to contrast Sharon’s “loyalty and decency” with the behavior of one of Peres’s advisers, Professor Yuval Ne’eman, “who, while serving in his official position, turned his house into a meeting place for key people from Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement, who sat there and planned harsh attacks on the prime minister … The comparison between Sharon and Ne’eman exposes the difference between decency and hypocrisy. It was no coincidence that Ne’eman worked for Shimon Peres and Arik Sharon worked for me.”
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This passage is evidence of the depth of Rabin’s antipathy toward Peres. But it also reflects Rabin’s naïveté—or was it willful blindness, or indeed hypocrisy?—toward Sharon’s own vigorous dalliance with Gush Emunim during his period of service as the prime minister’s adviser.
Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), then in its infancy, rose to prominence after the
Yom Kippur War and spearheaded Jewish settlement campaigns in the biblical heartlands of “
Judea and
Samaria,” as the Right pointedly termed the West Bank. Emunim balked at the policy of the Labor-led governments since 1967 limiting Jewish settlement to the
Jerusalem area and the Jordan River valley.

Naïveté, blindness, and hypocrisy have characterized the attitudes and actions of a long series of Israeli leaders toward
Gush Emunim and its relentless drive to build Jewish settlements throughout the Palestinian territories. Labor “hawks” clandestinely encouraged still-small and inchoate groups of religious-nationalist would-be settlers immediately after the
Six-Day War. Men like
Yisrael Galili,
Golda Meir’s close confidant, and
Yigal Allon, her deputy prime minister, hankered
for “the integrity of Eretz Yisrael.” Moshe Dayan and his followers in the Labor Party also opposed relinquishing the West Bank.

Under Rabin, the contradiction deepened: on the one hand, the government fought Gush Emunim’s settlement efforts; on the other, collusion increased between Labor ministers and the young religious activists. Each group thought it was using the other. The ministers thought they could harness the religious zeal and nationalist fervor of these youngsters to create new Jewish settlements in places they considered strategically necessary. The religious youngsters believed they could harness the ministers’ support in order to create settlements everywhere. Their purpose was twofold: to do God’s will by settling the entire land, and to preclude the return of the territories to
Arab rule (which, too, they believed was doing God’s will).

As an opposition backbencher protected by parliamentary immunity, Sharon had joined Gush Emunim’s first foray to an intended settlement site in the heart of Samaria, near Nablus, just days after the Rabin government took power. As soldiers moved in to dismantle the encampment and forcibly removed the would-be settlers, Sharon physically shielded the elderly spiritual leader of the movement,
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. “Don’t touch him,” he shouted, shoving the soldiers away. “And don’t touch me.” He urged the young men and women settlers to hug the rocks and refuse to budge.

Rabin was tough with the would-be settlers on this occasion, but in fact he had already signaled significant weakness on the crucial question of the
West Bank and its future. Presenting his new government for the Knesset’s endorsement on June 3, he gave a solemn undertaking to call new elections before concluding any agreement with Jordan that involved territorial concessions. He noted, rightly, that
Golda Meir had given the same commitment when she set up her last, short-lived government three months earlier. It had been squeezed out of her by her coalition partner, the
National Religious Party (NRP), and now it was being squeezed out of Rabin in the same way. The NRP, Labor’s longtime political ally and traditionally a dovish party, was steadily being dragged to the right by its young generation of activists who were closely affiliated to Gush Emunim.

Sharon, while still in the Knesset, zeroed in on this political weak point at the heart of government policy. “What is this talk of ‘priorities’?” he challenged Rabin in a debate in July 1974. “The government purports to uphold the right of Jews to settle everywhere in the homeland, but in accordance with ‘political and security priorities.’ What are these priorities? These priorities are designed to pave the
way for restoring Samaria to Jordan. Let’s talk straightforwardly. Tell the truth, why don’t you. The truth is that you want to hand this territory back to Jordan. Say so openly! Say: ‘We have decided to hand this territory to Jordan.’ Don’t talk to us about the right to settle in all parts of the homeland, but the need to do so according to priorities.”
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As adviser to the prime minister, Sharon could hardly maintain that level of strident political polemic against his boss. But he did keep up his intimate contacts with Gush Emunim.

The Sharon-Emunim nexus, interacting with the Sharon-Rabin bond, was to stamp an indelible imprint on Israel’s history, as well as on the personal futures of the prime minister and his adviser cum critic. In December 1975, during the festival of Hanukkah, Gush Emunim mounted its eighth attempt—the army had dispersed the previous seven—to found a Jewish settlement in the heart of Samaria. The site chosen was
Sebastia, an abandoned Turkish railway station. The timing of this eighth effort was especially propitious: the UN General Assembly had recently passed a resolution defining Zionism as a form of racism. The Israeli ambassador,
Chaim Herzog, famously tore up the resolution at the podium. The government convened a gathering of world Jewish leaders in Jerusalem to demonstrate solidarity with Israel. Rabin was loath to give the order for yet another forcible eviction while this conference took place in Jerusalem. He postponed the showdown—a tactical mistake that encouraged more and more sympathizers to stream to Sebastia and bolster the settlement attempt.

The result, eventually, was a compromise, and Ariel Sharon, the prime minister’s adviser and the settlers’ champion, was instrumental in securing it, shuttling busily between Sebastia and Jerusalem. Thirty settler families were to move in to the nearby IDF artillery training base, Camp Kadum, “pending a cabinet decision” in their case. This ostensibly provisional solution was in fact a huge victory for Gush Emunim and an ignominious defeat for the government. The temporary lodgings at the army base steadily grew into a sizable civilian settlement, which eventually dwarfed the base. It was subsequently named Kedumim. It was the forerunner of many other settlements throughout the populated Palestinian heartlands of Samaria and
Judea.

When the deal was concluded, at Minister of Defense Peres’s office in Tel Aviv on December 8, the settler leaders pulled out a bottle of brandy and drank toasts. Rightly, they saw this outcome as a watershed: the Labor government’s policy restricting Jewish settlement had been breached. Back in Sebastia, a thousand young men danced and sang in fervent rejoicing.

By the same token, Sebastia represented a fateful moment of irresolution
by Yitzhak Rabin. Recriminations flew between the Prime Minister’s Bureau and that of the minister of defense over who had been weak and offered concessions. It seems clear that the original idea of moving a group of the settlers to an army base was Sharon’s.
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He, after all, had been the driving force in situating these army bases in the West Bank in the first place. “For this alone,” Sharon reportedly said at Sebastia after the deal was done, “my service in the Prime Minister’s Office has been worthwhile.”
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Sharon nurtured the hope that his time with Rabin had somehow rekindled his candidacy for army chief of staff but found himself rebuffed yet again. It was always a vain hope, certainly as far as Rabin was concerned. “As long as I’ve got a say, Arik won’t be chief of staff,” the prime minister was quoted as saying in the left-wing paper
Al Hamishmar
. He explained that Sharon’s previous high-profile political activity made him ineligible.

Sharon accordingly turned back to politics. A bizarre interlude ensued during which he haggled with the Likud leaders and at the same time engaged in vigorous flirtations with well-known figures on the dovish left with a view to creating a new party under his leadership. He was to have a hard time living down this not-so-brief spell of political promiscuity once he finally gave it up and reverted to the nationalist fold. His subsequent years are peppered with lame denials and mealymouthed prevarications, but they never quite allayed the suspicions that this dalliance aroused among the religious settlers and the hard-core ideological Right. When he eventually did change his political outlook, as prime minister, his detractors pointed to this inconstancy long ago as the first telltale sign of ideological deviance.

And indeed, Sharon at this time was less concerned with ideology than with the unsettling thought that he might find himself left out of government again after the next election. He saw that Labor under Rabin was losing popularity: the government was beset by a series of economic scandals involving prominent Labor Party figures. There was also a pervasive feeling that Labor had not been sufficiently punished for the Yom Kippur catastrophe. Nevertheless, Sharon did not believe that the Likud could successfully capitalize on the ruling party’s growing weakness as long as Menachem Begin stood at its head. He frankly doubted that Begin, whom he saw as remote and detached from the public despite his rousing oratory, could win an election after seven consecutive defeats over twenty-nine years.

Since unseating Begin as the Likud leader was not really a practical proposition, the alternative, he thought, might be to create a third party, between Likud and Labor, to siphon off disaffected Labor voters.
But first he went through the motions inside the Likud, baldly proposing that the party hold a primary to choose its candidate for prime minister and hinting that he would run against Begin.

Sharon continued desultory negotiations over his future in the Likud through the summer of 1976. Matters came to a head in September at a tête-à-tête with
Simcha Ehrlich, the Liberal Party leader and thus Begin’s partner at the helm of the Likud. The two met in the coffee shop of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in
New York, where both were attending a Zionist conference. “Simcha,” Sharon began bluffly, “let’s forget the past.” “As far as I’m concerned,” the mild but canny Ehrlich replied, peering out through horn-rimmed glasses, “the past begins this morning.”

By November, there was nothing more to talk about. Sharon announced the creation of his new party, to be called
Shlomzion, and Ehrlich provided the above embarrassing account of their conversation to
Haaretz
.
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As good as his word, Ehrlich attacked him mercilessly. “Arik can’t work in a team. His personal ambition is what drove him to leave the Likud. That, and his political volatility. He is not a man of principle. For him, tactics take priority over principles.”

In a letter written the following April and published only after his death in 1983, Ehrlich was even more damning. “In 1973, I said that
I admired those who prevented Arik from becoming chief of staff, because he would have been a disaster. I see him as a danger to
democracy and free society. If he were in power, he would be capable of setting up camps for political prisoners. He is a man without principles, without human feelings, and without any moral norms whatsoever.”
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