Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (64 page)

The tangible expression of this new unilateralism was to be a security fence, a barrier of barbed wire and, in places, concrete wall, dotted with watchtowers and flanked by a patrol road. The IDF, no longer reliant on or desirous of cooperation with Palestinian security forces, would deploy this barrier as its bulwark against terrorist incursions from the
West Bank.
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The fence was to incorporate the settlement blocs along the pre-1967 border, which Israel intended to annex in an eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians. This would mean
enclosing some Palestinian areas that Israel would ultimately not wish to annex. They would be “returned” in negotiations that would one day resume. Similarly, Israel would unilaterally designate the whole of the
Jordan valley as a security zone for the foreseeable future, with the understanding that this arrangement, too, would end once a negotiated final agreement came into sight again.

With each new crisis in the post–Camp David negotiations, Barak would return to these still-inchoate ideas. As elections began to loom, he tried to project them to the public, to demonstrate that Arafat’s intransigence and the intifada violence would not leave Israel powerless. “Us here; them there” was his slogan. His campaign strategists’ difficult job was to inject this unilateralism into the national debate while at the same time leaving room for a dramatic return of “bilateralism,” should the final, frenetic negotiating efforts yield an agreement after all.

There was a logical flaw in this: In practice, there was no prospect of the fence being built and the new separation policy going into effect unless the miraculous happened and Barak won the election.
⁴⁴
But such a miracle was only conceivable if the negotiations produced a last-moment agreement—in which case the unilateral solution would no longer be necessary…

As leader of the opposition, Sharon opposed all the Barak government’s proffered concessions in the negotiations with the Palestinians. But he regarded the process as unstoppable. And in a vicarious but significant way, reminiscent of his complex relations with Rabin during the Oslo process, he underwent together with Barak the experience of having those concessions rebuffed by Arafat and the slide into violent confrontation. Together with Barak, despite the continuing differences between them, he drew dramatic conclusions from Arafat’s intransigence. Both men concluded that the collapse of bilateral negotiations in the Israel-Palestine conflict pointed to unilateralism as Israel’s sole way forward. Both saw the
demographic danger to the Jewishness of Israel inherent in indefinite occupation of the Palestinians. Both believed the United States and the international community would not countenance ongoing low-grade war and diplomatic stalemate. Thus, when Barak lectured Sharon in the Knesset, in his final act as prime minister, on Israel’s existential need to achieve unilateral “separation” between itself and the Palestinians, he was nurturing a seed that had already been planted and was growing.

Barak’s belated unilateralism as expressed in the planned fence—and its conceptual rationale, the demographic threat—were both still ideological anathemas to the Israeli Right. A fence meant partitioning
Eretz Yisrael. Even if it were purportedly erected as a temporary step for strictly security reasons, it would become a permanent political reality, the Right warned. Israel would be back on or near the 1967 line, and all the settlements beyond the fence would wither or be forcibly dismantled. As for the so-called demographic threat, with more than a million ex-Soviet immigrants having unexpectedly poured into the country over recent years, only Israelis of little Zionist faith could still brandish that cowardly old canard.

In the Likud, and even more so in the settler movement, there was a vague but uncomfortable sense that Sharon was wobbling. Why did he persist in proclaiming, even after Netanyahu had withdrawn from the race, that his goal after the election was a national unity government with Barak as his minister of defense? Granted, the Knesset arithmetic would make it hard for him to form a coalition. But why Barak? Likud loyalists demanded. Barak was the man who still, even at this eleventh hour, was trying to sell out on
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. And what was this vague but troubling talk by Sharon of “painful concessions,” a phrase Sharon began to use in late December? Apart from anything else, this was hardly the way to fire up party activists and get them out on the streets in the weeks before the election.
⁴⁵

Sharon for his part, and his campaign managers, assumed the settlers and their supporters, whatever their doubts about him, would come out and vote for him. On the “Russian front,” Sharon’s team felt confident of crushing victory. Both
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the mainly immigrant party Yisrael Beiteinu, and
Natan Sharansky, head of the older and now declining
Yisrael B’Aliya, urged their followers to vote for Sharon. His sloganeering in this sector was unsubtly different from the general line. In Russian, the candidate was “a strong Sharon for a strong Israel” rather than the only man who would bring peace.

The Sharon camp remained anxious, though, over the danger that another large and important constituency, the
haredim,
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might not
turn out to vote at all. No one could confidently dismiss that prospect. There had never been an election solely for prime minister in Israel. The
haredim
had never before been required to go to the polling stations solely in order to vote for a Sabbath-desecrating, unkosher-eating candidate to lead the Zionist state. Granted, they had voted once before (in 1996) under the new electoral system for a secular prime minister (an overwhelming majority of them voted for Netanyahu in that impressive show of
haredi
political clout). But then, elections for the Knesset and for the prime minister were held simultaneously. The justification for voting in both was obvious to any Talmud student: We
went
to vote for our
haredi
party, which is our religious duty. Once
in
the polling station and handed two ballot slips, we voted for the (unfortunately secular) prime minister, too.

The key, as always, was in the hands of the rabbis. They had sanctioned—indeed, they had ordered—the vote for Bibi in 1996. Sharon needed them now to extend that Talmudic logic just a little bit further. For many years, he had been well enough liked in their councils. Barak, moreover, was positively disliked, having proclaimed in the fall of 2000 that he was planning a “secular revolution” that would dismantle many of the hallowed status quo arrangements between synagogue and state. But Sharon, too, had queered his pitch by voting and speaking in the Knesset, in July 2000, against the Tal Law, a controversial bill that sought to enshrine in statute the ad hoc exemption from army service granted by the state to yeshiva students. Sharon ensured that the rest of the Likud faction voted against the bill, too, despite mutterings in the ranks.

The original exemption had grown out of an agreement between David Ben-Gurion and the ultra-Orthodox parties in 1948. Back then, it affected a couple hundred yeshiva students. Each year it was extended by the minister of defense for another year. Now their number had risen to tens of thousands, to the seething resentment of those who did serve three years in the regular army and decades more in the reserves.

Sharon would have to eat his words if he wanted the votes of the
haredi
rabbis. He proceeded to do so with the best grace possible.

It worked. On January 27,
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the
Shas sage, gave orders to his followers to take to the streets and campaign for Sharon. It would be a sin, he ruled, for anyone not to vote for him. The aged Ashkenazi rabbis who ruled the United Torah Judaism party required more wooing, but eventually they, too, came around. On Election Day, February 6, the
Council of Torah Sages published a formal letter in the
haredi
press instructing their flock to vote for “the candidate who, it is
to be hoped, will not lend his hand to destroy the status of religion.” It was a grudging, unenthusiastic endorsement. It pettily avoided mentioning Sharon’s name. But it was good enough.
Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the senior non-Hasidic rabbi, let it be known that he himself intended to go and vote. The rebbe of Vishnitz, doyen of the Hasidic sages, said he would, too, if his health permitted. Sharon breathed easy.

While Sharon’s strategy with the
haredim
was to persuade them to come out and vote, his purpose with another large and potentially crucial constituency, Israel’s Arabs,
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was to encourage them to stay at home. Their various political leaders were urging them to do so as a deliberate act of retribution against Barak in the wake of the October
police shootings. Barak hoped that his appointment of a commission of inquiry into the shootings would mollify Arab opinion and lead to a rescission or at least partial relaxation of the boycott. But that had not happened. Now the Barak camp pinned its hopes on Sharon’s long-established image, from
Kibbiya through Sabra and Shatila, as a cruel and indiscriminate killer of Arabs. Surely that would persuade Arab voters to swallow their anger and come out to vote?

The Sharon campaign could only soft-pedal the candidate’s military past in its television broadcasts and hope not to arouse painful memories among the Arabs. Happily, this tactic perfectly dovetailed into the campaign’s broad election strategy. This was essentially two-pronged: to say as little as possible, and to project a reassuring aura of empathy and sagacity. Saying little was simple enough: the campaign
media chief,
Eyal Arad, simply declined almost all requests for interviews, on air or in print. On the rare occasions when he did speak, the candidate visibly strained to confine himself to unprovocative platitudes. The message was peace, security, and unity, and he kept on message.

In television campaign broadcasts, the image of the grizzled old warrior was not completely airbrushed out; there were still the heroic scenes from the
Yom Kippur War, with Sharon in his bloodstained head bandage. But that was no longer the predominant impression. Rather, viewers took away with them an oft-repeated scene of the white-haired, portly, but spry grandfather-farmer striding through his fields in gum boots, two young children running toward him. He stoops and, strong but gentle, hoists his beloved grandson into the air. He hugs him to his breast. The cows look on, in sympathetic bovine
placidity. String instruments play subtly patriotic music in the background. “Ariel Sharon—leader to peace” is the slogan sung softly but with conviction by a choir of girls.

In unused footage, some of the farm animals are seen turning and trotting away as he approaches. “If they’re going to run off, people will say I frighten even the cows,” Sharon jokes into the camera. The chief goal was to portray him as strong but not frightening. Middle-of-the-road voters were to be subtly weaned of their long-ingrained fear of him.

It was probably one of the more brilliant makeovers in advertising history. It succeeded, in part at least, because the scene of rural domesticity was not false. Sharon’s home and family had always been integral parts of his life. Especially after the
death of Lily, he sought out the company of his grandchildren and loved to live alongside them on the ranch. The task of
Reuven Adler, his adman friend and now his campaign manager, was to project that aspect of the candidate’s persona, less familiar to the general public, and eclipse, though not entirely erase, the image of the tough old general. Old generals never die, and this one, the TV clips beamed, was still fighting fit and would know how to handle the terror and violence of the intifada. “I will bring peace that will protect us,” a sober-looking Sharon declares to the camera, now in a solid blue suit and conservative tie. The unseen girls’ choir chants that line, too, in a sentimental jingle. The mature and loving Sharon offered much more to the voter than military know-how. He offered experience, moderation, reliability, statesmanship.

In a deeper sense, beneath the saccharine texts and slick camera work, the makeover was the climax of two decades of dogged, infinitely patient work—by the admen and other advisers, but above all by the candidate himself. Sharon’s comeback began the day after he was ousted from the Defense Ministry by the Kahan Commission in 1983. Circumstance and fortune helped him to stay on the slippery pole and keep clambering relentlessly up it. But his chief mainstay was his own iron determination to recast his appeal to the broad swath of the Israeli mainstream, no longer as a swashbuckling extremist with a vicious streak and a big chip on his shoulder, but as a seasoned yet mellowed leader whom the country could rely on.

Sharon, then, was no mere actor reading his lines. He was part of the plot. Indeed, his new image
was
the plot. But was it all political strategy, or was it substance, too? And where is the line between them? Plainly, this windfall election was a defining moment for Sharon. Was the change in his image all slick campaigning, or did it reflect changes
taking place “inside him,” in his understanding of what was required of Israel’s leader? Was his sole concern achieving popularity—first in the election, then in the job of prime minister, and finally in the history books? Or did his newfound moderation express a genuine embrace of pragmatic positions not only because they were popular but also because he was coming to believe in them?

The two advisers closest to him, who effectively ran his campaign, are divided over how to read this defining moment. For
Uri Shani, the veteran aide whom Sharon had brought in to revitalize the half-moribund Likud when he took over as chairman, the election campaign was just that: a campaign. Scripted and directed by cynical professionals, it sought solely to harmonize the candidate, to the greatest extent possible, with the needs and desires of the voters. The candidate, in Shani’s narrative, was as cynical and professional as the rest of the team—at that point. Sharon did definitely undergo a dramatic and genuine change of perspective, says Shani. But it came later, when he w
as prime minister. Sharon’s oft-repeated line as prime minister, “What you see from here, you don’t see from there,” was literally true. Once ensconced in the
Prime Minister’s Office, he began seeing things differently.