Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (3 page)

Two years later, with the Palestine issue before the newly formed United Nations, the Zionist leadership again clamped down on the Revisionist underground. This time, Arik Scheinerman seems to have joined in with gusto. By now he was an unofficial NCO in the unofficial army of the state-to-be. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1945, he had been picked to take part in a Haganah platoon commander’s course in the remote southern kibbutz of Ruhama. Here again he distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat training and field craft, though he graduated, to his chagrin, only a probationary corporal, not a full corporal.

He wanted to enlist in the Palmach. His parents wanted him to register for studies in agricultural science. Instead, he did neither but enrolled in the Jewish Settlement Police. This was a legitimate branch of the Mandatory security forces, designated to protect the Jewish settlements and patrol the roads between them. But it was also a convenient cover under which military-minded youngsters like Arik could continue their own weapons training, and train other Jewish youth, without harassment from the authorities.

It also allowed him plenty of spare time to work on the family farm. “One day,” he writes, “as we were working together in the orange groves…[Samuil] said, ‘Arik, I want to tell you, anything you decide to do with your life is all right with me. But you have to promise me one thing. Never, never take part in turning Jews over to non-Jews. You must promise me that you will never do that.’ ”
⁵

In fact, though, the second
saison,
in 1947, did not entail collaboration with the British forces. These, still vigorously enforcing their blockade of Palestine’s shores against Jewish refugee-immigrants from post-Holocaust Europe, were by this time seen as outright enemies by David Ben-Gurion, leader of the
Yishuv, and the mainstream Zionist leadership. The Haganah made do with beatings and incarceration of Etzel activists. In the area around Kfar Malal, known Etzel recruiters were warned away, and when the warnings went unheeded, one of them had his arms thrust in an irrigation pipe and deliberately broken. Another was locked in a refrigeration plant for twenty-four hours. Arik, attached now to the Haganah’s fledgling intelligence branch, is
said to have gathered the information that led to these brutal assaults. In another incident, Arik tracked five Etzel men carrying tommy guns and engineered their ambush by a Haganah unit. But they opened fire and escaped, leaving a Haganah man shot through the buttocks.

Periodically over the years, people would come forward with vivid recollections of these activities that the adult Arik would have preferred to forget. “He was very, very active in everything we did against the Etzel,” said Dedi Zalmanson, one of Arik’s Haganah comrades, in 1983.
⁶
“He chased after me with a pickax handle,” said Yosef Menkes, an old-time Etzelnik, in 1990.
⁷
“He smashed up my coffee shop,” said Ben-Ami Zamir, another ex-Etzel man, in 1995.
⁸
Arik, he recalled, arrived by truck at the head of a Haganah posse. “He asked me for a soda, pointing to a crate on the floor. As I bent over to fetch it, he whacked me over the head with the wooden club he was carrying. I was covered in blood. Unluckily for him, my brother, who was in the Palmach, happened to be around, and he fought back. My sister, who’d been boiling up water for coffee, poured it all over them.” Arik, prime minister by this time, issued a categorical denial. “I never took part in the first
saison
nor in the second
saison,
and I never hit a Jew with a pickax handle.”
⁹

In
Warrior,
Sharon wrote that he was attracted to the militants, jealous of “their actions and their heroism. But I was also in the Haganah, and I believe that people did not have the right to go off and do whatever they wanted, no matter how courageous they might be.”
¹⁰
It was a delicate balancing act by a general whose own subsequent military career was stained by acts of excessive and wanton retribution and who now, as a politician, aspired to lead the party that still adulated the Etzel. Sharon often claimed that his military career was in fact stymied—he was held back for years and was never appointed chief of staff—because he wasn’t “one of us,” in other words, a reliably anti-Revisionist Laborite. “What do you mean ‘not one of them’?” one lifelong Revisionist,
Mordechai Zippori, snorted contemptuously. “ ‘Not one of them’?! He took part in the
saison
and beat up Etzel men.”
¹¹

L
ife was not all cudgels and plowshares. Arik was in love. “She was not exactly my first love,” he wrote years later. “But what I felt now seemed completely different from anything I had felt before.” Margalit Zimmerman, whom everyone called Gali, was just sixteen, a student at the boarding school for immigrant children next door to his parents’ farm. He had furtively watched her weeding and was
smitten. Happily, his Haganah duties required him to impart military rudiments to the boys in Gali’s class, and through them he communicated his first request for a date. “I cut a hole in the wire fence that surrounded the yard so she could sneak through … In the evenings we would go out and sit next to the old village well in the middle of the groves, holding hands and talking in the dark.”
¹²

On November 29, 1947, endorsing the recommendations of a special commission of inquiry, the
United Nations General Assembly voted by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem was to remain under international control. Throughout the country, Jews took to the streets dancing, singing, and weeping with joy. Ben-Gurion watched the celebrations with a heavy heart. “I knew that we faced war,” he wrote in his diary, “and that in it we would lose the finest of our youth.”

The youth were now called up in their thousands for full-time service as the Haganah steadily morphed into a regular army, ready to be proclaimed as such as soon as the British flag was hauled down and the Jewish state declared, the following May. The intervening months quickly deteriorated into countrywide civil war. The Palestinian political leadership flatly rejected partition. Palestinian fighters, backed by Arab volunteers from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, attacked Jewish settlements and transportation. The Haganah, spread too thin to defend the entire
Yishuv, attacked city suburbs and villages seen as strongholds of the Palestinian forces. The British for their part, having announced their departure date, effectively washed their hands of their security responsibilities. Their troops protected only their own evacuation routes. Ben-Gurion sent emissaries abroad on a desperate quest for arms; he anticipated with dire certainty that the Arab states would pitch their regular armies into the battle once the Jewish state came into being.

Arik was mobilized on December 12. He did his initial fighting in the general area of Kfar Malal, in the center of the country. “Operating around the old coastal highway, we raided Arab bases and set ambushes … Typically we would leave our camp in the middle of the night, picking our way through the orchards…[W]e would be at our ambush site before first light, waiting for the early-morning traffic between the Arab villages and bases … As one action followed the next, I became aware that the others in our platoon had developed confidence in my ability to lead them into these actions.”

The guerrilla war was “vicious, cruel and littered with atrocities.”
¹³
On the last day of 1947, armed Arabs killed 39 Jewish workers at the
Haifa oil refineries. The Haganah hit back, killing 60 Arabs in the village
of Balad el-Sheikh. In February, two terrorist bombs
in Jerusalem killed a dozen Arabs and 60 Jews. In March another 17 Jews died and many more were injured in a truck bombing at the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem. On April 9, 110 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Etzel in an attack on the village of
Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem. Four days later, in a revenge attack, 77 Jewish medical staff died in an ambush on a convoy traveling to a beleaguered Jewish hospital on Mount Scopus, in
east Jerusalem.

Arik was part of the
Alexandroni Brigade, a loose collection of local Haganah units gradually taking shape into a regular military formation. After a large-scale night attack on Iraqi irregulars in the village of Bir Addas, he was formally appointed a platoon commander. “A good many of the soldiers I was now leading were from Kfar Malal, boys I had studied with and played with, but whose families had been at odds with mine for ages. But now our relationships had become something else entirely.”
¹⁴

Some of these boyhood friends were lost during the months of guerrilla warfare that preceded the “real” war against the invading Arab armies after the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. At the time, there seemed little difference between before and after.

The Haganah, hard-pressed in the early months after the
Partition Resolution, scored some successes in the weeks before independence. In April, Haganah forces broke the Arab blockade on the road up through the hills from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Convoys of supply trucks brought food, fuel, and ammunition to the city. Mixed cities designated part of the proposed Jewish state were overrun:
Tiberias on April 18,
Haifa on April 22–23,
Safed on May 13–14. Many of their
Arab inhabitants fled.
Jaffa and Acre, which were both to have been within the proposed Arab state, were also taken. So was much of the western Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem,
Gush Etzion, fell to the
Arab Legion and local Palestinian fighters. Hundreds of settlers and soldiers were killed or taken into captivity in Jordan.

The fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance. The city had been designated a
corpus separatum
in the UN resolution, but once it became clear that the fate of Palestine would be decided by war and not diplomacy, Jerusalem became the most sought-after prize—both for Ben-Gurion and for the
Transjordanian leader, the emir Abdullah.
^g
The two wily neighbors had hoped not to fight. Ben-Gurion sent
Golda Meir to negotiate with the emir, with a view to Transjordan peaceably annexing part of Palestine to his kingdom. But the talks failed. Jordan’s small but well-trained Arab Legion acquitted itself by far the best of all the invading Arab armies.

It was against units of the Legion, well dug in around a British-built fortress at
Latrun, commanding the road to Jerusalem, that young Arik Scheinerman now found himself deployed. This was to be not another derring-do night raid against ill-trained irregulars but a pitched battle against disciplined soldiers, equipped with artillery and heavy machine guns. The Israeli side, moreover, was dishearteningly ill-prepared.

On May 26, 2005, at a memorial event for the dead of his regiment, the Thirty-Second Regiment of the Alexandroni Brigade, Prime Minister Sharon reflected on that fateful night, fifty-seven years before:

The new recruits didn’t yet know, Sharon continued, of the draft dodgers in the
Yishuv who failed to enlist or of “moneyed aristocracy who sent their sons abroad lest they be harmed in the war. No one sang of these new recruits, the ‘overseas draftees,’ as they were called … Numbers on their arms. The lone remnants of their families, of their entire communities, cinders salvaged from the flames … No one told stories around the bonfire about their exploits. They had no one waiting for them at home, with whom to share their experiences. They had no homes. Men from another world, young like us but a thousand years older.”

It was a subtly political speech, but for his peroration Sharon cast aside subtlety: