Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (59 page)

Despite Sharon’s repeated protestations that his grandmothers lived deep into old age and that the genes therefore were on his side, age became a key theme in the race. To parry the crass ageism emanating from his two younger rivals,
Ehud Olmert (fifty-three) and
Meir Sheetrit (fifty), Sharon proposed, and managed to push through the central committee, a resolution that the Likud would hold another leadership primary before the next general election. The main task of the leader elected now, therefore, would be to rebuild the party after its defeat. Rebuilding needed internal peace and harmony. Sharon, solid and experienced, was the man best capable of providing them.

Sharon had another advantage: his warm personal relationship with Barak. Granted, Olmert was on good terms, too, with the Labor prime minister. But the Sharon-Barak nexus was different. Sharon, it was felt within the still shell-shocked party, might well lead the Likud into four years of partnership in a unity government under the seemingly unassailable Barak. Sharon, it was said, might be minister of finance in this scenario. What remains incontrovertible, at any rate—and needs to be stressed over and over in view of what unfolded less than two years later—is that, whatever Sharon’s own inner aspirations, no one else in the party, or indeed in politics in general, seriously contemplated the possibility that Sharon might become prime minister.

Sharon spent most of the primaries campaign on the road. In his large, worn-out Cadillac, the candidate and his aides, sometimes with a journalist in tow, would be out early. “On Monday, he began his day at 5:00 a.m.,” wrote
Danny Ben-Simon
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in
Haaretz
.

Everything was going well, until Omri and
Uri Shani, the campaign manager, let their hair down—of all places in an interview with a leading
Yedioth Ahronoth
journalist—and said that the armored Cadillac “makes a huge impression on the Indians.” There were other pearls in the same genre: “All the Likud activists really care about is jobs and money,” and so forth.
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Senior figures in the party demanded that Shani be sacked. They could hardly demand the same for Omri, but clearly he had fouled the nest. Touring the
Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, a famous stronghold of Likud support, later that week, Sharon and his entourage were greeted by large signs: “Indians and Proud of It.” The visit was not a success, the renditions of “Arik, king of Israel,” less than lusty. Sharon published a statement saying he had “sternly upbraided” the two offenders. “They claim to have said what they said in jest. That, too, is serious. Such sentiments are alien to the Likud, even in jest.”

The crisis passed, and Sharon won comfortably, on the first round, with 53 percent of the vote, against 24 percent for Olmert and 22 percent for Sheetrit. “His victory was almost entirely grounded on the support of the Bibi camp,”
Ofir Akunis recalled. He described a sweaty celebration in the Independence Hall, on the ground floor of the Likud’s rather down-at-heel headquarters building in Tel Aviv, Metzudat Ze’ev.
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Smiling and relaxed, Sharon reveled in the congratulations of supporters and opponents alike. Lily was there with him, and she, too, was warm and gracious, but she kept fending off well-wishers who tried to kiss or embrace her. She was under treatment for her cancer and had to beware of infection.

It is hard, in light of how fast he fell, to recall how high Barak seemed to be riding when he came into office in 1999, directly elected with a solid popular majority and seemingly myriad possibilities of putting together a stable and cohesive coalition. He was Israel’s golden boy. Kibbutz-born, a dashing military career, with brain as well as brawn, just four years in politics and already at the summit, committed
to making peace, he seemed unstoppable. On election night, a huge crowd gathered at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where the man Barak regarded as his mentor had been murdered. Now Barak proposed to take up his bloodstained mantle. People wept openly as he declared, in sonorous tones, with his familiar, not unattractive lisp, “This is the dawn of a new day.”

Many in the crowd chorused back at him, “Just not
Shas.” Shas had become a byword for sleaze. Its leader, Arye Deri, had been convicted of bribery and fraud a month before and sentenced to four years in prison. The trial and conviction, far from deterring voters, had become Shas’s election platform. The slogan was “He’s innocent!” The result was seventeen seats, by far the highest tally Shas had ever attained.

But Barak, like Rabin before him, recognized the crucial need to include at least one religious party in his peacemaking coalition. The national-religious community had become almost homogeneously hard-line, intimately tied to the settlers. The National Religious Party joined the government at first but was certain to secede as soon as serious peace negotiations began. But the ultra-Orthodox, growing rapidly because of their young marriages and large families, were conflicted between their xenophobic anti-Arabism and the instinctive political moderation of their rabbis.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, had ruled back in the 1970s that withdrawal from the biblical territories was permissible if it saved lives. Barak was determined to have him at his side as he set out to make peace, as Rabin had when he embarked on Oslo.

Like Rabin, too, Barak proposed to seat Shas ministers at his cabinet table alongside their most strident foes: Meretz. Rabin, hardly a political charmer, had worked overtime to keep that strange couple together. He managed to do so until after Oslo. Barak, socially gauche and an unconcealed misanthrope toward politicians of every stripe, managed to put both parties’ backs up almost from the start and eventually lost them both. He started, in fact, with the two
ultra-Orthodox parties in his mammoth seventy-five-seat coalition,
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but lost the five members of United Torah Judaism that first summer in a gratuitous fight over transporting a large electricity turbine to a power station on the Sabbath.

Barak’s political maladroitness might have been mitigated had
the new prime minister surrounded himself with politically savvy, smooth-talking aides and used them effectively. He had these in abundance, gifted young people devoted to him, but he managed to set them, too, at each other’s throats. The blood on his office carpet never seemed to dry, and he seemed to take peculiar pleasure in shedding more and more of it. The rumor mills began feeding the political gossip columns, and eventually even the languid torpor and sense of resignation enveloping the Likud and its leader began to give way to a vague consciousness that all was far from well on the other side of the aisle.

All the gossip, of course, and all the seepage of political strength would have been stanched had Barak’s main order of business—making peace—proceeded satisfactorily. Tragically, though, despite his frenetic activity from the get-go, his grand ambitions on the peace front crashed, too. Ariel Sharon, as his luck would have it, was on hand to pick up the pieces.

“B
arak’s peace strategy was simple, at least on paper,” writes the historian
Ahron Bregman. “He would first strike a deal with Syria, then get Israeli troops out of [south] Lebanon … then—and only then—turn seriously to the conflict with the Palestinians.”
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Regarding the Palestinians, moreover, Barak proposed a radical change from the incremental strategy of peacemaking prescribed by the
Oslo Accords, in which the hardest problems were left till last. Instead, he wanted to achieve a final, comprehensive peace agreement in one fell swoop. “We don’t need to waste our time on little issues,” Barak told Yasser Arafat when the two leaders met at the Erez checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, just days after the new Israeli government was sworn in. The “little issues” were Israel’s fulfillment of the Wye agreement.

Such out-of-the-box thinking, although refreshing after three years of Israeli foot-dragging under Netanyahu, set warning bells tinkling among the disappointment-hardened Washington professionals. But Bill Clinton bubbled with enthusiasm. “I’m eager as a kid with a new toy for the meeting I’m going to have with the new Israeli prime minister,” he told a Democratic fund-raiser in Florida on July 13.

They met alone in the Oval Office for two and a half hours, without even note takers present. Clinton unhelpfully swelled Barak’s ego by telling him, “There are only two people in the world who I know are capable of thinking of the third, fourth and fifth steps, it’s you, Ehud, and myself. But you do it better than I do.”
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Later, they flew with their wives to Camp David and stayed up there talking till nearly 3:00 a.m. “It was a night full of hope,” Clinton recalled.

An intensive spate of diplomacy unfolded between the frenetic new Israeli premier and the ponderous Syrian president, who had held power in
Damascus for more than three decades and whose health was now visibly failing. The difficulty was apparent right from the start: Barak told Clinton he was not prepared to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, line, as Syria demanded, if Syria insisted that that line ran right along the shore of Lake Kinneret.

Clinton tried to narrow the gaps both on the line and on security arrangements. In October, at Barak’s urging, Clinton wrote to Assad saying he believed the gaps were bridgeable and stressing that an Israel-Syria agreement would mean a new era in America’s relations with Syria. In December, Assad told Secretary Albright in Damascus that he was ready for immediate, high-level talks with Israel without preconditions and was delegating Minister of Foreign Affairs Farouk Shara as his representative. Barak decided that he himself would represent Israel. The talks were set for December 15 at Blair House, the official guest residence opposite the White House.

On December 13, in a hushed and expectant Knesset, Ehud Barak declared with appropriate pathos that peace with Syria and with the Palestinians would be “the apex of the realization of the Zionist vision.” He spoke empathetically of the eighteen thousand Israelis living on the Golan. They would face uncertainty as the negotiations went ahead and the pain of sacrifice if the two countries reached agreement. He promised to submit the agreement to a plebiscite. He was confident it would be approved.

T
he opposition, led by Ariel Sharon, duly performed its constitutional role. But it was a perfunctory performance. “The Golan is not lost,” Sharon said, winding up his speech. “Our fight for it is just, and therefore we will prevail. I call from here to all the citizens of Israel who fear for the future: Join our struggle. Together with you we will triumph. Thank you.”

Party members knew of Lily’s illness and Sharon’s long and difficult hours at her side through trips to
New York and treatments. “He gave her a lot of time,” Akunis recalled. “He was very preoccupied. But beyond that, I had the feeling he was sluggish. The truth is the whole Likud was pretty soporific as an opposition at that time. Sort of groggy, on the ropes.”
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Another Likud source who sat in on the faction meetings during this period remembers the MKs delicately ignoring Sharon’s frequent
snoozing. “They weren’t troubled,” he says, “because they were all basically waiting for Bibi to come back. They didn’t really regard Arik as their leader.”
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As if to dramatize this low, sad period in his life, on December 19 his beloved Sycamore Ranch burned half down to the ground. There was no question of terror or arson; a bird’s nest near the chimney top caught fire from sparks flying upward. The roof and upper floor were gutted. A lot of the couple’s belongings were lost. They moved into the adjacent home of their son Omri while the long job of rebuilding began.

D
espite Barak’s still-undented aura of supreme confidence and the sense of resignation that seemed to hang over the Likud, Sharon’s expressions of tenacious opposition to withdrawal from the Golan seemed to capture a shift of popular sentiment. Public opinion polls, both those published in the media and those commissioned privately by Barak’s bureau, showed that a referendum was by no means a foregone conclusion, after all.

The polls apparently accounted for Barak’s exasperating assertion to the Americans, on the eve of the Washington meetings of December 15–17, 1999, that he could focus only on “procedural issues” at this stage and would not agree to meet alone with Shara. “I cannot afford to discuss substance,” he explained lamely to
Dennis Ross. “The risk of leaks is too great … I may be undercut politically and rendered incapable of making the decisions necessary for agreement.”
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“Barak now had a really serious attack of cold feet,” Bregman records. The two delegations reconvened after the Christmas–New Year break at a secluded conference center belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service outside Shepherdstown, a small town in West Virginia.

Three days after the conference Akiva Eldar published in
Haaretz,
word for word, an American draft peace treaty submitted to the two sides at Shepherdstown in the strictest secrecy. The document referred in detail to provisions for normalization and security between the countries—the two areas in which Israel had pushed for Syrian concessions—but it fudged the critical borderline question, the key question for Assad that Barak was not prepared to answer. A number of other issues still in dispute were rendered in alternative bracketed texts, one reflecting the Israeli position (I), the other the Syrian (S). The leak of Syria’s concessions to Israel without concomitant Israeli concessions,
in an Israeli newspaper to boot, confirmed all Assad’s suspicions that somehow the Americans and the Israelis were in cahoots. He told Clinton he would not send representatives to another round of talks.