Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (47 page)

He then read out the text of the resolution that he was submitting: “The central committee endorses the content of the prime minister’s policy statement. The central committee expresses its confidence in the prime minister and chairman of the party.” And he then did precisely what Sharon suspected he would do: he asked for a show of hands.
⁹

A sea of hands went up. But Sharon, his alacrity belying his girth, was on his feet and at
his
microphone at the other end of the platform, reading out
his
resolution and asking for the members’ support. “Who is in favor?” he demanded, in his high but booming voice. “Who is in favor of eliminating terror? Raise your hands. Who is opposed to letting deportees participate?
^d
Raise your hands. Who is in favor of eliminating terror? Who is in favor of eliminating terror?” Over and over.
Mi be’ad chissul haterror?
The question instantly entered Hebrew usage, and has firmly remained there ever since, as an expression of the quintessence of disingenuousness.

“I have won by massive majority. His statement has no significance,” Shamir shouted into his microphone, which by now had mysteriously lost its resonance. The thousands of hands were still up, but for what resolution? The serried ranks in the front kept up a chorus of “Arik, Arik.” Shamir delivered a final, hoarse shout into his microphone: “I thank the members of the central committee for the confidence that you have placed in me. In view of the disorder in the hall, I hereby close this session of the central committee. Any resolutions passed hereafter will have no validity.” Upon which he and his entourage swept out of the hall, followed by all the ministers loyal to him. Sharon, unperturbed, droned on, reading the “constraints” one by one
and asking for a show of endorsement for each of them. At the end he announced that all of them had duly been endorsed.

“So, Arik Sharon, an own goal?” asked the well-known television interviewer Dan Shilon, kicking off a conversation with the ex-minister for the weekend issue of
Yedioth Ahronoth
. As though to rub it in, he added: “Since your resignation I haven’t met a single person who believes in the sincerity of your professed motives.” Sharon’s reply was classic: “That is one of the sad things that has happened in our public life. People find it difficult to believe that someone can get up and leave his cabinet seat over a matter of principle.” As for “the night of the microphones,” Shamir had tried “to steal the vote,” Sharon said, leaving him no alternative but to intervene. Shamir was “a dangerous man.” Shamir’s concessions were feeding terrorism and increasing the danger of war. “I am not prepared to return to a government headed by Yitzhak Shamir.”

F
our months later, he returned, as minister of housing in a new government headed by Yitzhak Shamir. The new government was the narrow-based, rightist-religious coalition that Sharon had long demanded. Baker had decided to force the issue—and was delivered a resounding rebuff. The secretary tried to fuse Shamir’s original proposal together with a proposal from Egypt’s president, Mubarak, and with American ideas into one simple and direct question: “As regards the participation in the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, would the government of Israel be ready to consider on a name-by-name basis any Palestinian who was a resident of the territories?” To say yes would implicitly admit deportees and dual addressees. Shamir said no.
Shimon Peres, believing he could form a Labor-led narrow government with the help of the
ultra-Orthodox parties, engineered the collapse of the unity government in a
Knesset vote on March 15, 1990.

“I felt battered, beaten, and betrayed,” Baker writes. “From the outset, I’d tried to give Shamir the benefit of the doubt … In the end, Shamir wasn’t even willing to embrace his own plan.”

But if Baker felt battered, Sharon felt buoyed, and justly so. He did not claim to have foreseen, when he resigned his cabinet seat, for just how short a time he’d be enjoying the bucolic life again. The government, after all, had two and a half years still to run. But he did now claim retrospective victory for the “constraints”: Shamir had defied the Americans over precisely the terms that Sharon and his allies had demanded that Israel reject. Shamir had “stopped at the edge of the precipice,” Sharon asserted triumphantly. “The drama surrounding
my resignation perhaps catalyzed that welcome development.”
¹⁰
More likely it did not, and Shamir would have refused Baker without any histrionics from Sharon. His and Arens’s endless foot-dragging was only good so long as they had room to maneuver. Once Baker decided to corner them, they reverted to the rigid rejectionism that was the true underpinning of their policy.

At any event, Sharon now urged all his party colleagues to set aside the frictions of the past, however raw and recent, and unite to defeat Peres’s attempt to form a government that would throw any constraints to the wind and rush headlong into a chimerical peace with the PLO. A Peres government would be dependent, worse yet, on the votes of the
Arab parties, which, Sharon insisted, were simply PLO surrogates in the Israeli parliament. Shamir was their leader, Sharon assured his colleagues. No one was challenging that. They must all work to ensure that he had “a decisive, national government” to lead.

Shamir was of the same mollifying mind. He pointedly invited Sharon to attend the Likud ministerial caucuses and encouraged him to pick up his contacts with the
haredi
rabbis and their political lieutenants. Sharon needed no encouragement. “We must restore the rightist-religious alliance between us and the Orthodox,” he said.

Shimon Peres pinned his hopes for forming a Labor-led government on the three ultra-Orthodox, or
haredi,
parties,
Agudat Israel (five seats), Degel Hatorah (two), and
Shas (six). Doctrinally cool to the whole concept of secular
Zionism, most
haredi
rabbis preferred the relative moderation of Labor to the more assertive nationalism of Likud. This was particularly true of the “Lithuanian,” or anti-Hasidic, rabbis who ran Degel Hatorah and also held considerable sway over Shas. It was an unexpected and devastating blow to Peres, therefore, when, on the night of March 26, Rabbi Eleazar Schach, the ninety-two-year-old doyen of the anti-Hasidic rabbis, told a
Tel Aviv sports stadium packed with his supporters that Labor were “rabbit-eaters who have severed themselves from the Jewish people … There are
kibbutzim that don’t know what Yom Kippur is. And they raise rabbits and pigs there,” he added, referring to animals whose consumption is forbidden under Jewish dietary laws. “And this is called the Jewish people?”
¹¹

Peres refused to be deterred. He believed he had the five men of Agudat Israel firmly in his camp. He was confident that once he had a government up and running, Rabbi Schach would see the upside, and Degel Hatorah and Shas would join, too. He informed the Knesset that he would present his government for swearing in on April 15.

But only after Peres and his ministers arrived at the Knesset, all decked out in their Saturday best and with their families in tow, did
they discover that two of the Agudat men, vital for their majority, would not be attending. Sharon had gotten to them. One of the two, Eliezer Mizrachi, was in hiding, protected by bodyguards hired by Sharon. The other, Avraham Werdiger, phoned Peres ahead of time to say he could not vote for a dovish government.

The crestfallen Peres could only apply sheepishly to the president for an extension of his coalition-making mandate. But that, too, proved fruitless, and in the end it was Shamir who presented a new government to the Knesset, on June 11, 1990. It was the farthest right, most religious coalition Israel had ever had, an amalgam of the Likud, the National Religious Party, the three
haredi
parties, and three ultranationalist parties. None was omitted. Even Moledet, which advocated the “transfer” of the
Palestinians out of Palestine, was in; its leader, Rehavam Ze’evi, became a minister.

Peres’s effort went down in Israeli history as “the stinking ploy,” a phrase coined by his inveterate rival, Yitzhak Rabin, who soon displaced him at the head of Labor. It involved not only wooing the
haredim
but also trying to winkle away individual Likud members with promises of perks and preferment for them and their supporters. The Likud fought back, Sharon in the forefront, with blandishments of its own to the same for-sale backbenchers.

“The telephone number is 1–202–456–1414. When you’re serious about peace, call us.” James Baker, testifying in Congress two days after the new Israeli government won Knesset approval, minced no words. Bush backed his secretary of state with a polite but firm letter to the new-old prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. “What I need to know from you,” he wrote, “is whether you are prepared to go forward without new preconditions on the basis of acknowledging—privately at first, if need be—that you will meet with a delegation of Palestinians from the territories that include a few individuals who fit the deportee and dual-addressee categories.” Shamir, through diplomatic channels, replied that he wasn’t. American peacemaking efforts seemed effectively over, pending, as Baker writes in his memoirs, “a new Israeli Prime Minister and another Secretary of State.”
¹²

But the real trouble between the two governments was only just beginning. There had been a hint of it earlier in the year when Shamir told the Knesset that the anticipated immigration of hundreds of
thousands of Jews from the imploding Soviet Union would require “a big Israel.” The Soviet mass aliya, plus the new Israeli government’s no-holds-barred settlement policy in the Palestinian territories, plus its request from the United States for guarantees for the huge loans it needed to absorb the new immigrants—all these together made for a combustible mix. The invasion of an
Arab state by half a million American soldiers and assorted European and Arab armies, plus Israel getting rocketed by Iraq but still staying out of the war at Bush’s insistent request, plus a truculent Ariel Sharon building those settlements as fast as he could, thumping on the drums of war, provoking and insulting all and sundry—all these dramatically enhanced the volatility. It is a tribute to Bush and Baker that out of this dangerous brew they nevertheless did eventually orchestrate a lurch forward toward peace at the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference in October 1991.

With Labor now out of the government, the Americans feared a splurge of land confiscation and settlement building. Worse yet, in terms of Arab world sensibilities, they feared Israel would channel its abundant new infusion of Jewish immigrants into the Palestinian territories. But they had—or they hoped they had—a means of leverage: Israel had asked for $400 million in
loan guarantees. The request would subsequently grow to $10 billion. Bush and Baker took the position that they would not fund, even obliquely, the expansion of Jewish settlement on Palestinian land. Shamir and his government, girding themselves with righteous outrage, insisted that the “humanitarian” issue of immigrant absorption never be linked to—much less conditioned on—the “political” question of the territories.

Sensing the strength of feeling on the American side, and aware of the serious financial need on their own side, the Israelis tried at first to fog and fudge. Minister of Housing Sharon declared in June 1990 that there would be no deliberate encouragement of the immigrants to make their homes in the settlements. The State Department said this statement was encouraging and “a step in the right direction.” But the spokesperson
Margaret Tutwiler noted that Sharon’s statement had been reported in several different versions, and Washington awaited clarity.

But clarity was one commodity that would be hard to come by in everything to do with settlement building and settlement policy during the next two years. In July 1991, the newspaper
Davar
disclosed that would-be settlers could obtain parcels of land free from the government to build their homes on. In addition, easy mortgages were made available in the settlements, and infrastructure—water, sewerage, and electricity—was laid for free.

There was a pall of unclarity, moreover, surrounding the number of homes that were being built in the settlements. They were, after all, a small part of a vast, countrywide building program presided over by Sharon and designed to provide every newcomer from the former Soviet Union with a roof over his head. American diplomats on the ground, and, Israel assumed, satellites in the sky, kept trying to tally the houses and trailers in the settlements as they went up. Leftist Knesset members, aided by
Peace Now, published their own count—for which they were excoriated by Sharon as snitches and traitors. In fact, construction in the settlements quadrupled during 1991. In the first nine months of that year, according to official Israeli figures collated much later, 6,435 new houses (most single-family, some multiple-family) were begun in the settlements, compared with 1,820 during all of 1990 and 1,410 in 1989. In October 1990, Baker announced that he was postponing a visit to Israel by U.S. officials tasked with wrapping up details of the loan guarantee.

D
esert Storm provided something of a hiatus in the gathering tempest with Israel over the settlements and the
loan guarantees. The war against Iraq generated tensions of its own in the U.S.-Israel relationship, but the sides were aligned differently. The president and the secretary of state persuaded Shamir that his country’s deepest interest lay in staying out of the conflict and not responding militarily to the Scud missiles that began falling on Tel Aviv once the American attack on Iraq began. The Americans feared that any Israeli involvement would disrupt their coalition of Western and
Arab armies. “There is nothing your air force can do that we are not doing,” Baker assured Shamir. “If there is, tell us and we’ll do it.”
¹³

Arrayed against Shamir’s policy of restraint were Sharon, Modai, and other hard-line ministers who demanded that the IDF act, and also Minister of Defense Arens, who was eager to order Israeli air and ground attacks, but only in coordination with the U.S.-led allied forces.