Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (48 page)

In all, thirty-nine Scuds hit Tel Aviv,
Haifa, and other Israeli cities during
Desert Storm. They wrought considerable damage to property but directly caused only one death (several deaths during this period were attributed to missile-induced heart attacks and to asphyxiation from wrong use of gas masks) and left some three hundred injured (from assorted causes, some related only indirectly to the rockets),
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also a relatively low figure. This was, however, the first time in Israel’s history that the Jewish state was attacked and failed to respond. As
such, it produced a major national trauma, over and above the huge dislocation of civilian life as large numbers of Tel Avivans and Haifaites sought refuge each night in less targeted areas of the country.

Arens kept up a solid front of loyalty with the prime minister throughout the nearly two months of conflict. The Americans knew that Arens’s incessant pressure for an air corridor to western Iraq, and for the allied air forces to “deconflict” while the IDF engaged, could always be deflected by a direct appeal to Shamir for yet more forbearance and gritting of teeth. Arens let none of his reservations leak out to the depressed Israeli public, many of whom never stopped worrying till the very end that
Saddam Hussein might tip a Scud with a chemical warhead.

Sharon had no such inhibitions. Within days of the outbreak of the war, the whole country knew that Sharon was urging IDF action to silence the Scud launchers and to punish Iraq and that the elderly, overcautious Shamir didn’t have the stomach for it. Sharon had no compunction over disloyally tongue-lashing the government’s passivity as he posed for the cameras clambering around the ruins of homes hit by the Scuds.

At cabinet, Sharon advised that the air force be instructed to send aircraft over western Iraq on photography missions without obtaining prior American consent. “Notify them and fly!” was Sharon’s prescription. Five days later, he broadened it: Israel should land commando units in western Iraq to search and destroy the Scud launchers, simply informing the Americans “that we are carrying out an operation there, and that for the following three days the area is under Israeli responsibility.” But Shamir did not waver, and the majority of the ministers sided with him. That remained the policy—despite Arens’s persistent efforts to change it—until the end of the war.
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King Hussein of Jordan seriously damaged his relations with Washington by publicly sympathizing with the Iraqi dictator before and during the war. For Sharon, contemplating the Middle East peace conference that Secretary Baker quickly began organizing on the back of America’s victory, Hussein’s bad bet was added reason why Israel should use the occasion to explain to the world that Jordan is Palestine.

During a six-week period of intensive shuttle diplomacy in the region in April and May 1991, laying the groundwork for the conference, it seemed to Baker that Sharon announced a new settlement in the territories every time his plane touched down in Tel Aviv. “I am not happy with these statements [of Sharon’s],” Baker recalls Shamir assuring him. “ ‘I’m not asking you to adopt our position,’ I countered.
‘But I
am
asking you to keep this man from throwing land mines in the way of peace.’ ‘I don’t want to involve you in our internal politics,’ Shamir demurred…‘I will deal with it.’ By now, of course, I felt that he wouldn’t—and he never did.”

That testimony is important because, as with the Likud government’s original settlement drive after 1977 and as with the
Lebanon War in 1982, it sets in proper perspective the relative roles of the prime ministers of the day—then Begin, now Shamir—and the minister charged with executing their policy: Sharon. There was no question in Baker’s mind that Shamir was Israel’s ultimate policy maker, on settlements as on everything else, regardless of his mealymouthed excuses, which the secretary had long stopped buying. Shamir was very different from Sharon. He was amicable, conciliatory, and soft-spoken.
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But at the end of the day Shamir chose to acquiesce in Sharon’s settlement provocations because the two of them were of one mind in regard to the settlement issue and in their determined resistance to Bush and Baker’s efforts to impose a settlement freeze using the
loan guarantees as both the stick and the carrot.

Baker flew indefatigably from capital to capital wooing regional leaders to attend a peace conference (both the word “peace” and the word “conference” were the subjects of prolonged and bitter argument among the invitees) that would launch two tiers of negotiation: bilateral talks between Israel and each of its neighbors, and multilateral talks on key issues affecting the entire region. Baker termed his exhaustingly long sessions with President
Hafez Assad in Damascus “bladder diplomacy.” Shamir was hardly less obstreperous, but in the end even he realized that he could drag his feet no longer without jeopardizing the foundations of American support for Israel. He carried his decision by a comfortable vote of 16 to 3 in the cabinet. Sharon was the only Likud minister to oppose it.

The conference took place at the end of October 1991 in Madrid. It was a triumph for American diplomacy and a moment of new hope for the Middle East. After all the delays and nitpicking—the protagonists were wrangling over the shape of the table till the morning the conference opened—the bald and remarkable fact was that Israelis and Arabs sat together, in front of the whole world, and pledged to embark on peace talks. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev opened the
proceedings with appropriately momentous speeches, and even though the spell was broken by some crude rhetoric from the Syrian foreign minister, everyone present felt that a window of promise had opened up. Shamir, wary of too exuberant momentum, resorted to Menachem Begin’s tactics after Camp David: to slow things down, he put trusted hard-line aides at the head of Israel’s negotiating teams in the talks with the Syrians and with the Jordanian-Palestinians that now began. Suffice it to say that ten weeks later, the Jordanian/Palestinian-Israeli negotiators were still sitting in the corridor
outside
the negotiating room in Washington, arguing about whether the Jordanians and the Palestinians were one delegation or two.

I
n Israel, Baker’s pre-conference shuttles had been darkened by the resurgent dispute over the loan guarantees. In April, coinciding with a Baker visit, a new settlement, Revava, was founded on the West Bank, and Sharon’s Housing Ministry announced plans to build twenty-four thousand homes for settlers in the territories over the next four years. In May, Sharon visited Washington. Baker refused to see him. “I intervened with the President to block a meeting between Sharon and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Jack Kemp at Kemp’s office. The meeting … was held at the Israeli embassy … Like his settlements policy, Ariel Sharon was an obstacle to peace.”

The dispute grew more personal with the passing months. Bush was increasingly portrayed on the Israeli right as unsympathetic and his secretary of state as downright hostile. Shamir was seen by Bush as devious and by Baker as straight and honorable but implacably extreme. Sharon was the chief focus of the Americans’ ire. Bush was said to be distressed at the thought that if the United States withheld the loan guarantees and Shamir was damaged politically, Sharon would benefit, whereas if the United States relented on the loans and the settlement building still continued, Sharon would benefit from that, too.

The antipathy that Sharon had generated in U.S. government circles during the Lebanon War, and his infamy in the American media, had been marginally mitigated by the verdict in the
Time
trial. But he had kept up his transatlantic sniping throughout the decade, bolstering his chosen political image at home as an unbending nationalist who would not countenance seeing Israel be pushed around by its superpower patron. Thus, for instance, in the highly embarrassing and potentially disastrous “Pollard affair” involving an Israeli spy in the heart of U.S. intelligence, Sharon lashed out at Peres, Shamir,
and Rabin for cooperating too readily with Washington—and made sure his strictures became public knowledge. Sharon made much play of having been kept out of the loop while
Jonathan Jay Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the
U.S. Navy, was transmitting reams of raw intelligence to Tel Aviv. He was similarly kept in the dark while Israel scrambled to contain the damage after Pollard’s arrest, in November 1985, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Sharon was not in fact completely in the clear, because Pollard was recruited by the Bureau for Scientific Liaison (“Lekem” by its Hebrew acronym), a shadowy organization over which Sharon,
as defense minister, had installed an old friend and sleuth, Rafi Eitan, as director. But he berated the top troika with gusto and vilified the United States for its vindictiveness toward an ally. He warned at cabinet that Israel’s decision to send back the voluminous product of Pollard’s espionage was tantamount to ensuring a life sentence for the young Jewish spy. In the event, that is what Pollard received.
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Inevitably, the U.S.-Israel spat over the loan guarantees became entangled in Washington’s pre–Madrid conference discussions with Arabs, too. The Americans feared that to award the guarantees might deter Arab states from attending, while to refuse them might deter Israel. The administration asked Israel to defer its request until after the conference. This triggered a huge confrontation with Israel’s supporters in Washington, marshaled by the lobbying organization AIPAC. Memorably, at the height of the battle, Bush referred to himself as “one lonely guy” fighting “powerful political forces.”

In the event, the administration won a 120-day postponement, until after the Madrid conference. When it ended, Baker suggested a compromise, originally proposed by Senator
Patrick Leahy of Vermont, whereby the guarantees would be conditioned on a ban on any new
settlement
construction and reduced by the amount spent by Israel to finish construction of settlement homes already begun. This immediately ran up against the problem of an Israeli smoke screen. How many homes were under construction in the settlements? Baker maintained that according to his information there were 6,000. Some Israeli officials said 13,000. Sharon claimed there were 22,000. But it made no difference, because Shamir rejected the proposed settlement freeze out of hand. No compromise was possible, and Israelis went to the polls on June 23, 1992, in the knowledge that their Likud-led government had been denied the vitally needed loan guarantees because of its settlement policy.

They responded by kicking the Likud and its allies out of office, after fifteen years in power. Shamir miscalculated the Russian immigrants’ reaction to his steadfastness, and that was part of his undoing. The newcomers pouring into the country from the disintegrating U.S.S.R. were indeed hard-line on the whole: they wanted Israel big and strong and had little sympathy for the
Palestinians, long backed by the Soviet regime. But essentially they were pragmatists. The messianic sentiments of the Emunim settlers were alien to them. They looked askance at the worsening relationship with the United States, especially as it threatened the funding for
their
housing and absorption. In significant numbers, they voted for
Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor. Bush and Baker finally recommended to Congress to award Israel, under Labor rule, the $10 billion in loan guarantees.

For Sharon, the vicarious battle against Bush and Baker was just one bruising fight among the many that filled his two frenetic years as housing minister. Challenged with a sudden, hugely welcome, but also hugely daunting influx of Soviet immigrants, Sharon fought against building regulations, he fought against planning laws and zoning commissions, he fought accusations of cronyism and political preferment, he rode roughshod over budgetary restraints and fought the minister of finance and his mandarins who held the purse strings—and in the end he fought a bitter, ugly brawl with the state comptroller,
Miriam Ben-Porat, a stern ex-judge charged with supervising proper governance and administration.

By now Sharon had become something of a fixture in the annual state comptroller’s reports, just as he was a regular target of newspaper
investigations, of parliamentary questions, and of criminal complaints to the attorney general and to the police. Stories of pork-barrel politics blurred and fused with allegations of personal malfeasance.
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In countless allegations against him over the years, his line of defense was that contrary to the suspicions about him he had acted solely in the public or the national interest. He or his aides would usually bolster this defense by asserting that those impugning his motives or besmirching his actions were themselves politically motivated.

Time after time, Sharon emerged from his legal scrapes unscathed, having been granted the benefit of the doubt. Public reaction ranged from admiration to disgust. Many Israelis came to associate Sharon with
corruption. A leading academic jurist, looking back, said he loathed Sharon for single-handedly undermining the ethics of Israel’s public life. In his youth, this professor admitted, Sharon was his idol. Others, perhaps less starry-eyed about Sharon earlier, and certainly less starry-eyed about Israeli public life, tended to conclude that Sharon did what other politicians did—only more so.

Sharon evoked this full range of reactions in his constant tussles over political appointments as minister of industry and trade. With his disarming forthrightness, he said it was in the public interest to see Herut people appointed to top jobs in government companies, because they had been discriminated against in the past. Apart from directorships and top jobs, a solicitous political patron like Sharon, installed in a powerful ministry, could also help clients, supporters, and other favorites with more oblique forms of preferment. Thus, for instance, in late 1985 two newcomers suddenly surfaced among the select coterie
of iron importers, and both, according to newspaper reports, were devoted Herut Party activists. “These particular licensees don’t seem to have any knowledge of the iron business at all,” an opposition Knesset member observed. “The only thing they know how to do is to sell their iron licenses to someone else. The licenses are worth $150,000.”