Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (28 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Sharon for his part proclaimed that he would never return to the Likud “even if the election results are disappointing and Shlomzion emerges as a small party. I have never abandoned my comrades on the field of battle—and I’m not about to do so now.”
18
He was spending his mornings at the
Tel Aviv home of his new comrade Amos Keinan, a multitalented writer, playwright, sculptor, and prominent intellectual of the Left.
e
Keinan had lived for years in
Paris and had met there with Palestinian activists. Sharon wanted to meet with
Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the
Palestine Liberation Organization. Shlomzion, he proposed, should call for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. He himself had long believed that “Jordan is Palestine,” in other words, that King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy, a colonial creation of the British, ought eventually to disappear, leaving the Jewish republic of Israel and the Palestinian republic of Jordan to resolve their territorial differences over the
West Bank.
f
The dream of Shlomzion began to come unstuck, according to Keinan, when polling data showed a distinct disconnect between its bold thinking on the Palestinian issue and the much more hawkish inclinations of Sharon’s grassroots admirers. Sharon summarily dumped his leftist friends, Keinan recalled, “and swung 180 degrees rightward,” packing Shlomzion’s list of
Knesset candidates with his personal friends and old army buddies.
The Rabin government collapsed prematurely in December 1976 when the National Religious Party refused to support the prime minister in a vote of confidence. Election Day, originally scheduled for the fall of 1977, was brought forward to May 17. Then, out of the blue, Rabin himself was forced to resign in March 1977 when the attorney general,
Aharon Barak, decided to prosecute his wife, Leah, for a currency violation. Leah had been exposed by
Haaretz
as holding a (relatively small) account in a U.S. bank, which was forbidden under
Israel’s then-still-draconian currency restrictions. Everyone did it, but she was caught, and Barak threw the book at her—and vicariously at her husband. Shimon Peres took over as party leader and acting prime minister, and Labor slid steadily down in the polls.
On the Likud side, Menachem Begin was struck by a heart attack and spent much of the election campaign in the hospital.
Sharon realized that his own election battle had been reduced to getting past the threshold—1 percent of votes cast—and making it into parliament. The joke doing the political rounds was that his grand pretensions were all now condensed into the hope that the men of his Yom Kippur War division would come out and vote for him.
He telephoned Begin in the hospital and humbly pledged that Shlomzion would merge with the Likud after the election. Really, he would have preferred to join before and receive an assured if humiliating entry ticket to the new Knesset. Begin, who still bore warm affection for the all-sabra war hero, asked Ehrlich and
Yitzhak Shamir to arrange it—and the two old foxes managed to fudge and stall till the deadline passed and the lists were closed.
19
In the event, Sharon scraped in with two seats—his own and his No. 2, a little-known teacher from Tiberias named Yitzhak Yitzhaki. Some thirty-four thousand people voted for Shlomzion, 1.9 percent of the votes cast. The overall results were a political earthquake for Israel. Labor plunged from 51 seats to just 32, and the
Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), a new, centrist movement, won an astounding 15 seats. The Likud gained 4, up to 43. The arithmetic was compelling: Labor, for the first time ever, had effectively lost the capacity to lead a coalition. Menachem Begin would be prime minister. Moreover, together with the religious parties and Shlomzion, Begin could build a coalition of 62; he didn’t need the DMC to govern.
Sharon wasted no time. At 5:00 a.m. on May 18, as the new era dawned over the country, he telephoned to congratulate the jubilant Begin and was enormously relieved to hear the words “Your place is with us.” “How do I make that happen?” he asked ingratiatingly. “Write a conciliatory letter to Ehrlich.” Sharon immediately sat down at the kitchen table of an aide’s home in Tel Aviv and wrote, with all the pathos and contrition he could conjure up. Shlomzion’s two seats were the Likud’s to command, he assured the Liberal leader.
20
g
He sent off his missive by messenger to Ehrlich’s home and sat back to contemplate life in a Begin cabinet.
a
In a final act of pettiness, General Avraham “Bren” Adan, now CO of Southern Command, declined to provide a
helicopter to take Sharon back up north. “Frankly, I was shocked,” Sharon’s deputy,
Jackie Even, recalled. “In the end we smuggled him up on a plane.” A generation later, with David Elazar (1976), Shmuel Gonen (1991), and Haim Bar-Lev (1994) all dead, the “war of the generals” still raged between Adan and Sharon unabated.
“At the end of the war,” Bren told
Yedioth Ahronoth
in 1999, “I was sure Arik felt like shit. He hadn’t succeeded in
anything
. He hadn’t crossed the canal properly; he hadn’t gotten to Ismailia; he had been embroiled in arguments all the time. I felt that our division, on the other hand, had had enormous achievements. After some time I began to realize that people believed the opposite … During the war, I thought it was immoral to spend time briefing journalists, holding press conferences. Big mistake! The journalists went to Arik.”
INTERVIEWER:
But wasn’t it important in terms of morale that Sharon drove forward and reached the other side of the canal?
BREN:
That was a contribution in terms of morale, no doubt about it. But he only appeared to be driving forward. In fact, he crossed the canal on three light motorized barges that could hardly transport two whole divisions. In other words, there was a bridgehead on both sides of the canal—but no bridge! When Sharon’s division tried to move large forces forward, it was unable to do so. The troops were taking hits. A crisis developed. Then my division went into action. First thing, I sent a battalion to defend Sharon from the north, and this battalion knocked out sixty Egyptian tanks. My deputy, Dovik [Tamari], handled the retrieval and concentration of all the rafts, and by Sisyphean effort he brought them to the canal. Meanwhile, our brigades under Natke Nir and Arieh Keren smashed an Egyptian brigade moving up from the south in an ambush that I planned and laid.
On the seventeenth we started bridging the canal together with an engineering battalion from Arik’s division. We crossed the canal; we took Egyptian positions on the other side, and we destroyed Egyptian missile bases one after another.
b
See pp. 131–33.
c
The report was classified for thirty years, but in 1995 the
High Court of Justice lifted the restrictions on all but forty-eight pages of the findings, which remain under wraps. In 2008, the
military censorship waived restrictions on many of the testimonies, but not those of Prime Minister Golda Meir and the head of Military Intelligence,
Eli Zeira.
d
The United States also increased civilian economic assistance and guaranteed Israel’s oil supplies to compensate for the loss of Abu Rodeis.
e
Shlomzion was the name of Keinan’s elder daughter, after a Second Temple–era queen of Judea, Salome Alexandra.
f
Keinan was less focused on the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan across the river than on the need, as he saw it, for Israel to come to terms with the Palestinian people in Palestine. He wanted Shlomzion to call for a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank. Sharon, he recalled in later years, was broadly if vaguely agreeable.
g
Ehrlich blocked Sharon’s way back to the
Liberal Party, but he could do nothing to prevent the two Shlomzion men’s merger into Begin’s Herut.
T
he political earthquake of the election was quickly eclipsed by its dramatic and unpredicted aftershock. No sooner had he been sworn in than Menachem Begin, the inveterate extremist and warmonger in the eyes of his rivals, authorized secret peace talks with Egypt. These were conducted by the new foreign minister, whose accession to the Likud government itself triggered sharp political reverberations—the lifelong Laborite Moshe Dayan.
In November, the secret burst upon a bemused world and an incredulous Israel. President Sadat announced that he would fly to Jerusalem and address the Knesset; Begin immediately responded with a formal and courteous invitation. On Saturday night, November 19, the enemy leader was received with flags and fanfare at Ben-Gurion International Airport. “Aha, it’s you,” Sadat said, smiling, when he saw Sharon alongside the red carpet. “I hoped to capture you on Egyptian soil in October ’73.” “I’m glad I managed to avoid you,” Sharon replied.
1
It is hard now to re-evoke the feelings that swept the country then; so much has soured since. But for the crowds that poured onto the streets of Jerusalem to wave their welcome to Sadat, for the millions who watched and listened spellbound as he spoke in the Knesset, for the whole euphoric nation, it was a dreamlike moment that seemed to hold out new worlds of hope. After thirty years of hermetic regional isolation and implacable
Arab enmity, and only four years after the trauma of Yom Kippur, the president of the strongest Arab state had come to make peace. “No more war” was the pledge on both Sadat’s and Begin’s lips. If that were enshrined in a treaty, with solid security safeguards, the existential threat that Israel had always lived with would hugely diminish.
The euphoria of the visit was followed by more humdrum diplomacy. Quickly, though, this ran aground. A second Begin-Sadat summit at Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, on Christmas Day 1977, ended in
deadlock. Begin signaled that he was ready for far-reaching concessions in Sinai but not in Judea and Samaria.
a
Sadat, already accused of betraying the Arab cause by seeking a “separate peace,” demanded a meaningful Israeli commitment regarding the Palestinians’ future. The United States stepped up its involvement, to keep the process from stalling. More fitful negotiating followed, but the radiant optimism of the original breakthrough seemed in danger of fading amid a welter of disputes, recriminations, and misunderstandings.
For Israel under Begin, the historic breakthrough with Egypt bared a deep contradiction at the core of its policy making. Begin was genuinely committed to peace with the states of the Arab world but not with the Palestinians. Of course he wanted Israel to live at peace with the Palestinian people, too; but not as equals, not as two nations living side by side in a Palestine partitioned into two states. For him, Palestine belonged to the Jews alone. The Palestinians, or the “Arabs of Eretz Yisrael,” as he insisted on calling them, could have autonomy, but not sovereign independence. By the same token, he would not hand back the Palestinian territory to Jordanian sovereignty.
Begin was not the first Zionist leader conflicted between the desire for peace and the burning belief that Israel must govern all of Palestine. Parts of the Zionist Left, too, especially in the immediate pre-state period, were loath to accept the compromise of partition proposed by the international community and accepted, reluctantly, by Ben-Gurion.
After 1967, that ambivalence resurfaced, prompting key Labor ministers like Moshe Dayan and
Yigal Allon to advocate and support Jewish settlement in parts of the West Bank while at the same time professing to seek peace and a re
partition of the land. They, at least, contended that their limited settlement plans would not prevent repartition.
Begin and Sharon, when they came to power, proclaimed unequivocally that
their
settlement plans were intended precisely to achieve that end: preventing the repartition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan or the rise of an independent
Palestinian state on the West Bank.
But Begin, complicating the contradiction, did not annex the West Bank. This would have been the natural and logical consequence of his lifelong ideology. He solemnly renounced annexation when Dayan made that his condition for becoming foreign minister.
2
Begin most
likely would have forgone annexation anyway, with or without Dayan. To annex the occupied territories would have confirmed all the world’s worst fears of this onetime terrorist leader. It would have forfeited American support and turned Israel into a pariah. Begin’s decision not to annex was a clear signal that he sought legitimacy and acceptance in the international community.
But of course—another facet of the same contradiction—occupation and settlement precluded legitimacy and acceptance. This was doubly the case now that the prospect had opened of real peace with the Arab world. For Begin and Sharon, perversely, the opening to peace made it all the more urgent to sprinkle settlements all over the Palestinian territories. Sadat’s visit, Sharon blithely explained as though this were the obvious logic, “added immensely to the pressure to get the Samarian and Judean settlements established quickly.”
Compounding that perversity, President
Jimmy Carter, who regarded the settlements as both illegal and an obstacle to peace, soft-pedaled his objections to them during this key period for fear of provoking Israel to backtrack on the peace with Egypt. The years between Camp David in 1978 and the final
Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982 were the period of the most relentless and determined settlement building by Begin and Sharon.
Thus encouraged, Begin believed he could have it all: peace (with Egypt), peace and occupation (with the Palestinians), occupation and legitimacy (with the rest of the world).
To sustain these contradictions, Israel under Begin followed a policy of prevarication. Begin nurtured the quintessential inconsistency that informed his government’s words and deeds. All the ministers were complicit, but none more so than Sharon. Begin was the architect; Sharon was the master builder.
