Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (43 page)

On Saturday night, June 5, at the fateful cabinet meeting, Begin had said:

This statement by Begin, at this crucial moment, was powerful corroboration of Sharon’s contention—the leitmotif of his lecture—that Peace for Galilee, with its forty-kilometer limit, was understood by all concerned, and certainly by Begin, to be a first stage in what might develop into a wider war, “Rolling Pines,” as he now termed it.

Sharon highlighted other key interventions by Begin in the running of the war. On June 10, Begin had complained at cabinet about “people hostile to us” who were accusing the government of cheating over the forty-kilometer line. “It is so typical,” Begin said. “We’re Jews—so we cheated. Whom did we cheat?! What is this nonsense? What do they want? Can you measure a battlefield with a ruler?” Much later, on August 1, after long weeks of siege, Sharon quoted Begin telling the cabinet, “If there’s no choice, we will enter Beirut. It is absolutely wrong for us to say that we will not [enter Beirut].”

Sharon’s lecture triggered an outpouring of predictable reactions. It was criticized for tendentiousness and selectivity. All the old arguments resurfaced, but this time on the back of a version that Sharon himself had carefully crafted. This was pretty much as he had planned and hoped. A resurgence of the debate would help his long-term rehabilitation: it would remind people that he had a case, that it wasn’t all black-and-white. The whole burden of a war that went terribly wrong could not be dumped exclusively on him. There was a powerful prime minister above him. There was a cabinet. And there was the army, too, which had unfortunately not succeeded in carrying out all its operational
plans, certainly not in the time originally allotted by the prewar planning.

What Sharon neither planned nor hoped for was the duel that developed, in the wake of the lecture, between him and one of his most implacable foes, Menachem Begin’s son, Benny. This was particularly galling for Sharon, because the former prime minister himself, pressed on the phone by reporters the day after Sharon’s lecture, had declined to comment on it. “The time has not yet come for me to say my piece about the war. I am not yet ready for that. When I’m ready, I’ll respond.”
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No denial, no rebuttal. No criticism.

Benny Begin built his attack solely on the cabinet communiqué of June 5 and on his father’s statements to the leaders of Labor and to the Knesset the next day, all of which referred to the forty-kilometer line. He failed to take up any of Sharon’s references in his lecture to Menachem Begin’s detailed discussion, before, on, and after June 5, of the broader war aims. He did not grapple with the prima facie impression that these references to Begin provided—of an active, informed, and aggressive war leader. In Benny Begin’s version of the war, there was no war leader, no prime minister, just Sharon, duping “the government,” misleading the nation and the world.

Although Menachem Begin himself said nothing,
Ze’ev Schiff, the preeminent military analyst, observed in
Haaretz
that it was unlikely “that Benny Begin said what he said … without his father’s agreement and consent.”
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But if Sharon read that at the time, four years later he apparently forgot it. On July 11, 1991, out of a clear blue sky, Sharon filed suit for libel against
Uzi Benziman, a journalist, for writing in
Haaretz
that he had duped
Begin in the
Lebanon War and that Begin knew it.
Haaretz
was sued as co-defendant. The lawyer, once again, was Sharon’s now-longtime confidant
Dov Weissglas.

There had been over the years—as the defendants pointed out during the trial—846 instances in which journalists and authors had made the same or similar allegations in print. Why Benziman?
Mibi Mozer, a leading libel lawyer who acted for both
Haaretz
and Benziman in this case, had no doubt there was personal animosity involved. Benziman had published a hostile biography of Sharon in 1985, titled (in Hebrew)
Does Not Stop on Red,
and innumerable articles critical of him. “Our sense was that Sharon had an agenda: to catch Benziman out.”

Sharon filed suit in the Jerusalem District Court, claiming half a million shekels ($208,000) in damages. The two sides sparred over whether Begin should be called to give evidence early, before the case was ready to go to trial, because of his advanced age and ill health. Before that was resolved, Begin died, on March 9, 1992.

In his book on the trial,
Nothing but the Truth,
published in 2002, Benziman describes how his disappointment gradually turned to despair as source after source declined to provide him and Mozer with signed affidavits and begged, citing all manner of reasons, not to be called to give evidence in court. “Public figures, politicians past and present, and senior officers in the reserves all banded together in a conspiracy of silence over the Lebanon War. They did not want to get involved in giving evidence. They would rather that the deception that had taken place in the war, and that they knew about from up close (some of them had even discussed it in the media), remain unchallenged. Israel’s political and military elites are full of cowards who are afraid to tell the truth about the Lebanon War so as not to come into conflict with Ariel Sharon.”
Dan Meridor, the cabinet secretary and close Begin confidant, said he didn’t want to testify and that anyway his testimony wouldn’t help the defendants. “On the face of it, I had good reason to be angry with Meridor,” writes Benziman. “He knew that what I had written was true.”

Benny Begin came to Benziman’s rescue. He was reluctant at first but eventually supplied an affidavit that, in Benziman’s own words, “was everything I could have dreamed of. It was a complete confirmation of what I had written and a dramatic description of how, for the first time, he had heard his father speak in a way that made it clear that Sharon had indeed deceived him.”

“I showed my father the relevant passages in Sharon’s [1987] lecture. He responded with shocked disbelief … He recalled forcefully that he had informed the opposition, the
Knesset, and the president of the United States of the limited aims of the operation. ‘Did I then deceive them with my statements?’ he asked. He was greatly agitated and kept repeating, ‘These things are completely untrue.’ ”

But was it not possible, Mozer asked Benny Begin, that Sharon and his father had been in cahoots? Together they had planned the expanded war, and together they had concealed it from the cabinet? No way, he replied, describing again his father’s reaction to Sharon’s lecture and to his own articles published in response: “It’s just not possible that Arik planned from the outset to reach Beirut,” the elder Begin had remonstrated.

The judge in the Tel Aviv District Court,
Moshe Telgam, declared himself impressed by the “sincere and knowledgeable tenor of Dr. Benny Begin’s evidence.” He held against Sharon both on grounds of fair comment and on grounds of truth.

The Supreme Court swept this away on appeal. It took another five years, but eventually Sharon achieved, if not victory, then at least a
backhanded affirmation from the highest court in the land that the historical facts of the Lebanon War were not quite as straightforward as Benziman and
Benny Begin made out. Sharon lost the case in the Supreme Court, too—but solely on grounds of fair comment. All three justices held that Judge Telgam should have confined himself to this defense of fair comment, which was adequate to decide the case. The presiding justice in the Supreme Court,
Eliahu Matza, was elaborately careful not to take sides on the historical issue. “It must not be deduced that I accept, or do not accept, in whole, or in part, the lower court’s findings. For my part, I prefer to ignore them, not only because of my usual desire to avoid unnecessary obiter dicta, but also, and mainly, because of the nature of the historical argument. As far as I am concerned, determining historical truth is best left to historians.”

The second justice,
Eliezer Rivlin, joined with Justice Matza in ticking off Judge Telgam. “The means at the judge’s disposal could not enable him to find his way through the thickets of the factual questions that he chose to grapple with.” The third justice, Ya’acov Turkel, was the most censorious. “A judge should curb his desires and confine himself—in his judgments and not only in his judgments—exclusively to the issues that he is duty-bound to rule on in order to reach a decision in the case before him.”

Turkel concluded with a one-sentence “final comment” that gave Sharon’s side cause for gratification. “To remove any doubt, the dismissal of this appeal does not imply endorsement of the district court’s conclusion that the defendants are protected by the defense of truth—about which we have said what we have said.”

Benziman, in his book, reacted with bad grace, suggesting that the Supreme Court took account of the fact that Sharon was now prime minister. Ironically, though, his own honest reporting in the book provided abundant reason why the justices would have been uncomfortable to rule for either side on the historical issue. Benziman even confided to his readers that Mozer, his lawyer, tended to believe at one stage that Sharon and Begin conspired together, behind the cabinet’s back. Benziman reported, too, that several leading journalists held that view and tried, therefore, to persuade him to drop his suit. And he reported at length the categorical testimony of Begin’s longtime close aide and friend, Yechiel Kadishai, that Begin did take into account the possibility that the war would extend beyond the original forty kilometers and that he said so explicitly to a number of people. Kadishai testified that he himself had told Begin, early in the war, of the rumors already then circulating that Sharon was deceiving him—and Begin brushed them aside.

After five years, “stab in the back” was wearing thin as the platform from which Sharon proposed to storm his way back to national leadership. However cogent his arguments seemed to be, in his own mind at any rate, they suffered from the inherent political weakness of casting other people’s minds back to the Lebanon War. While Sharon felt he had convinced at least some of the public that the war was not his responsibility alone, he could hardly claim to have persuaded many Israelis that it was a success, as he continued doggedly to assert. It was fortunate for him, therefore, if to be cynical, that the
first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out when it did, at the end of 1987. The intifada breathed new life into the frustrated general, who seemed to be fading away as a frustrated politician. It was, after all, a new war, and he was an acknowledged master of the art of war. Better yet, it was nothing like the Lebanon War.

Granted, his contention that driving Arafat from Lebanon would render the Palestinians of Palestine placid and compliant had been debunked long ago. The incidence of violence in the occupied territories had not fallen off, even at the height of the war, and it had remained fairly stable in the subsequent years. Stones were frequently thrown at army and civilian cars; more rarely, Molotov cocktails.

But that was small beer compared with the mayhem that erupted throughout the territories after an Israeli truck plowed into a group of Palestinian workers in the northern Gaza Strip on December 8, 1987,
killing four and injuring ten. By all accounts, then and later, it was an accident. But the fifty thousand Gazans who marched from the funeral that evening to the gates of a nearby army camp, hurling rocks and abuse, were not prepared to believe that. The next day, rioting spread like a brush fire up and down the Strip; days later it had broken out all over the West Bank and
East Jerusalem. In the twenty years of Israeli occupation there had never been anything even remotely comparable in scope to this spontaneous, countrywide rebellion, led by youths with stones and slingshots. Quickly, the movement grew a grassroots political leadership. Local committees formed in the Palestinian towns. When members were arrested, others took their places. On the Israeli left, some could say they had warned that a Palestinian uprising was ultimately inevitable, that there was no such thing as “enlightened occupation.”

By February 1988, after just two months of intifada, there were 48 Palestinian dead. By late 1991, the figure was 787. Some 750 of them had been killed by the army, among them 159 minors, and another 37 were thought to have been shot by settlers. Israel lost 13 dead soldiers and another 13 civilians during this period. By July 1993, the Palestinian death toll topped 1,000. Another 503 Palestinians had been killed by their own people as collaborators. The Israeli death toll, from attacks in the territories and inside Israel proper, stood at 165.
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The intifada caught the Israeli government and army wrong-footed. They had not seen it coming, despite the extensive intelligence network that the
Shin Bet security service maintained throughout the territories. Yitzhak Rabin took his time to speak out—and, when he finally did, provoked a worldwide wave of revulsion. He ordered the army to “break their bones,” which some of the troops proceeded to do with gusto. Rabin and his aides tried repeatedly to explain that what he had said, and the wooden nightsticks that had been issued to the troops in the territories, were not intended as a license to maim. He had meant club rather than shoot, and then only to put down violent rioting, not to punish. He had been misquoted. Officers or soldiers found abusing their powers would be tried and punished. There would be no sadism in the Jewish army.