Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (36 page)

Reagan called Begin and spoke, deliberately, of a “holocaust.” Begin instinctively bridled. Reagan did not back off and gave Begin an “ultimatum” to stop the bombardment forthwith. Begin reported back to the president that the bombing had stopped at 5:00 p.m. The cabinet had also decided, he said, that any further use of the air force would require the prime minister’s personal approval. Sharon was no longer empowered to bomb Beirut.

Begin’s public clipping of Sharon’s wings reflected a bitter debate inside the cabinet room, the angriest and bitterest since the war began. Minister after minister accused Sharon of deliberately seeking to upend the American-mediated package deal.

There had been earlier signs of a weakening in Sharon’s all-powerful position. On July 30, the housing minister,
David Levy, pointedly asked Begin at cabinet if he knew about certain troop movements around the Beirut airport, and Begin replied: “David, I always know about everything. Some things I know about before, and some things after.” Sharp-eared ministers discerned a note of exasperation in his voice.
²⁴

A week later, Minister of the Interior Burg asked Begin about the call-up of a reserves
paratroop brigade (his son’s) at short notice. He feared it meant the army was preparing to storm West Beirut, with the inevitably high loss of life that that would entail. He warned the prime minister that his party, the National Religious Party, would leave the coalition if that happened. Begin said he knew nothing about the call-up and hadn’t approved it. He called Sharon, who readily confirmed that he had approved it. After all, he explained, the two of them had discussed the prospect of storming the city, albeit as a last resort if the diplomacy failed, and calling up reserves for this eventuality was “obvious.” “Obvious? What do you mean obvious? How can you do that without [my] approval? So many people know and the prime minister doesn’t know!” Sharon apologized profusely.
²⁵

Outrage over the bombings put paid to any lingering solidarity in the Labor opposition with the government at war. Yitzhak Rabin, Labor’s premier defense spokesman, had supported the siege of Beirut, including the cutoff of water, much to the chagrin of his own party doves. Now the doves called for Sharon’s dismissal and for a commission of inquiry to be set up to investigate the war.
²⁶
Sharon for his part began accusing the opposition of cynically exploiting the war for political ends. Labor was “marshaling all its great media strength and international resources … to unseat the government—and all this while
Israeli forces were in the field in mid-battle. It was unprecedented and, to anyone with a sense of Israeli political history, unbelievable.”
²⁷

O
n August 21, the
evacuation of Beirut began. It lasted for twelve days, and by the end 14,298 armed men had been ferried out of the city. More than 8,000 of them were PLO men and the remainder Syrian soldiers. Another 664 women and children were evacuated with them. Some 8,150 of the evacuees were taken out by sea, to
Tunisia and seven other Arab countries (Syria, North Yemen, South Yemen,
Algeria,
Sudan, Iraq, and Jordan). The rest went overland, along the Beirut–Damascus road, with Israeli soldiers shouting obscenities at them from the hillsides.

Whether the Israeli military pressure or the dogged American diplomacy was the primary reason for Arafat’s agreement to go, Sharon felt vindicated. “This mass expulsion was an event whose importance could hardly be exaggerated. Here was the first step in what I saw as a process that would lead to a peace treaty between ourselves and the new Lebanese government. Hardly less significant, the PLO’s defeat [opened] the possibility of a rational dialogue between ourselves and Palestinians not dedicated to our destruction.”
²⁸

Even the evacuation occasioned a furious altercation between Israel and America, an altercation that, incredibly, almost turned violent. The casus belli was a number of jeeps that the departing Palestinians had loaded onto a ferry that was part of the evacuation fleet. Sharon ordered the evacuation stopped until the jeeps were off-loaded: the agreement permitted personal weapons, not jeeps.

“Sam Lewis approached Begin about it,” Shultz writes, “and the prime minister exploded: ‘They are not an army! They are rabble! Let Bourguiba [the president of Tunisia] take them in and buy them Cadillacs.’ We told the Israelis that the ship was going to leave … The Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed our naval assets in the area to prepare to defend the car ferry, and themselves, against Israeli attack … Lewis told Begin we would give the order to sail, and we hoped that Israel would not try to block the ship’s departure … The ship sailed.”
^g

On Monday, August 30, Arafat embarked on a Greek freighter, escorted by the Greek warship
Croesus
. The Sixth Fleet provided air cover. Israeli marksmen stationed on nearby rooftops had the PLO chairman in the sights. But Begin was personally committed to Reagan to let him sail unharmed.

Meanwhile, on August 23,
Bashir Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon by the parliament. He made a point of declaring, both before and after his election, that he had not colluded with the Israeli invaders and that he did not propose to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
²⁹
This left the Israelis still divided along the lines that had evolved over the previous two years. Many of the army commanders had little faith in Gemayel and his
Phalange. They felt their view was amply borne out by the Christians’ stolid reluctance to take any serious role in the fighting over the past three months or even to say anything publicly that would sound like support for the Israeli goals (which were, after all, their own goals, too). Key members of the Mossad, however, as well as Begin and Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan, continued to believe that once Gemayel was firmly installed, he would conclude a formal peace accord with Israel that would have important political and economic repercussions throughout the
Arab world. They suspected that the Americans, and specifically Habib and his deputy,
Morris Draper, were advising Gemayel to avoid openly friendly relations with Israel.
³⁰

Begin’s—and Gemayel’s—painful awakening came on the night of August 31, in the northern border town of
Nahariya, where Begin and his wife were briefly vacationing in a pointed demonstration of how quiet and peaceful the border area was now. Gemayel arrived for a meeting with the prime minister at a nearby military base. It ought to have been an occasion for mutual congratulation and heartfelt, if discreet, celebration. Instead, the president-elect encountered a cold and sullen Begin, who barely returned his embrace and immediately launched into a grudging congratulatory speech replete with heavy hints about the need now to pay outstanding bills.

They then retired to a separate room, with only a handful of advisers on each side. But Begin’s tone and tenor did not change. “Where do we stand regarding the peace treaty?” he began truculently. Gemayel tried to answer discursively, explaining that he absolutely did want
“real peace, in the long term” but that he wasn’t the sole decision maker. There was a government and a parliament. It would not do to rush things, either politically or militarily.

Gemayel spoke about an “order of priorities” that he had discussed with the Americans. The main thing now was to get the Syrians and the
Palestinians out of the Beqáa and out of the north of the country. Begin interrupted. He wanted a firm deadline for signing a peace treaty. He suggested December 31. Gemayel balked. He would need at least a year, he said.

“From the moment Gemayel was elected,” Yitzhak Shamir recalled years later, “he no longer wanted to be an ally. He evaded and equivocated, and ever since then Begin was not the same man. It was a grievous blow for him to see that after all our help, the man was disloyal.”
³¹

Both Sharon and Eitan (separately) visited Gemayel during the following fortnight in an effort to patch things up. Sharon dined at the Gemayel family estate at
Bikfaya on the evening of August 12. “The atmosphere was especially warm,” he wrote. “I knew the first item of business was to allay the hard feelings that had developed between Bashir and Begin at … Nahariya. The chemistry that night had not been good.” It was different now. “Bashir and his wife, Solange, were happy and obviously excited about the inauguration, and a feeling of intimacy pervaded the room as Bashir and I sat down to talk over the steps he planned to take as president.”

The ironic truth is that it wasn’t Gemayel’s extreme caution—not to say his pusillanimity, or even infidelity—that blackened Begin’s mood on that fateful night in Nahariya. That had occurred earlier in the day, in a terse meeting with Ambassador Lewis, who arrived in Nahariya to deliver in letter form and verbally an entirely unexpected American plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The bottom line was that Israel must eventually cede much of the West Bank and Gaza and in the meantime must stop its settlement building. “It was as if he had been hit in the solar plexus with a sledge hammer,” the Foreign Ministry director,
David Kimche, recalled, describing Begin’s reaction.
³²
Begin himself muttered through clenched teeth, “The battle for Eretz Yisrael has begun.”

Almost as if to mock Begin, or to take revenge on him, the American plan stressed repeatedly that it sought to build on “the opportunity” offered by the Lebanon War. The war had demonstrated two key things, Reagan wrote:

This, ironic perhaps in terms of American politics, signaled Reagan’s endorsement of the plain, straightforward reading of the language of Camp David, the reading of his unloved predecessor,
Jimmy Carter. And now—most ironic of all in hindsight—Reagan offered his solution: no
Palestinian state; no Israeli annexation; but Palestinian self-rule under Jordan. The irony lies in the sad fact that a Likud-led government in Israel today, let alone a more dovish government, would grab at these terms with both hands—if only they were still available.

Begin rejected them with both hands. He cut short his holiday and convened the cabinet for a somber session ending with a bitterly truculent communiqué. “The positions conveyed to the Prime Minister of Israel on behalf of the President of the United States consist of partial quotations from the Camp David agreements, or are nowhere mentioned in that agreement or contradict it entirely … Were the American plan to be implemented, there would be nothing to prevent King Hussein from inviting his new-found friend, Yasser Arafat, to come to Nablus and hand the rule over to him.”

I
nstead of concocting this casuistry, designed to perpetuate the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a more farsighted leader would have been devising urgent plans to end the IDF’s occupation of Lebanon, and most especially of
Beirut. As
Chaim Herzog writes, the terrible and tragic events that were now to take place in Beirut

A wholly different view of the war thus far, predominant by now in opposition circles but also troubling some of the ministers, was that the drawn-out hostilities had been, on balance, a disaster for Israel—in terms both of casualties and of the international (including American) opprobrium. Ousting the PLO in no way counterbalanced those setbacks. As for the Syrians, while they had been forced out of the Lebanese capital, they were still firmly entrenched in the northern Beqáa. The hope, moreover, of a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon had been roughly crushed at the Begin-Gemayel meeting in
Nahariya.

From that—negative—assessment of the war, too, the sensible thing for Begin and Sharon to do once the PLO had left was to cut Israel’s losses and get the IDF out, too. But Begin and Sharon were not ready to leave. “Even after the [Begin] meeting with Gemayel,” writes Begin’s biographer,