Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (68 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
For Ariel Sharon to preach, and even more so to practice, “restraint is strength” was every bit as dramatic a reversal of his lifelong policies and lifelong image as the disengagement from Gaza four years later. The drama was less apparent at the time, and is perhaps less easy to pinpoint in retrospect, because, unlike the disengagement, it consisted of omission rather than action. Even when he did finally unleash the army, in
Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, he did so with restraint—relative to the IDF’s real strength and relative, too, to the initial fears and dire prognostications about what he would do. This reversal of the whole flow of his public life until then led to a surge in his popularity. It would contribute significantly to the support he enjoyed in the broad center and even on the left of the Israeli spectrum when he eventually embarked on the disengagement from Gaza three years later. “Restraint is strength” paved the way for the disengagement.
From Shani’s perspective, “restraint is strength” was also the culmination
of his own makeover of Sharon during the previous two years, working closely with Sharon’s son Omri. Though a true expression of the prime minister’s policy, it was also a slogan, an extension, in a way, of the sophisticated sloganeering of the election campaign.
Marketing or reality? Image or substance? For Shani, the etymology seems inextricably blurred.
I’m not talking about marketing. When a man says, I want to be prime minister, and I’m prepared to change my behavior in order to achieve that goal … I won’t be the same man. I’ll behave differently. I’ll consult with people and listen to what they have to say—that’s not just marketing.
Right at the outset I said to him, if you want to be prime minister, you need to have 60 or 70 percent of the people supporting you. If you’re seen as extreme right-wing, you don’t have a chance. If you plonk down settlements all over the place … Omri kept saying: There is a chance. I wasn’t sure. I was sure, though, that he was prime ministerial timber. That he was a man who could take decisions. I said, every time he talks extreme, or thinks extreme, we’ve got to pour a bucket of cold water over him. Like if you have a child who’s hyperactive, you’ve got to give him Ritalin, and give him a balanced diet, and give him a calming environment, because at the end of the day he’s a brilliant child. But if you allow noise and hullabaloo around him, then he’ll be crazy. I’m trying to construct a colorful metaphor. This is Arik Sharon. When he was surrounded by people who worshipped him, who told him all day long, You’re the greatest; you’re a howitzer, you’re the leader of Israel, which he wasn’t, and they boosted the extremist side of his character, of his behavior, of his policy thinking … Look at his relations with the U.S. when he was defense minister—he didn’t give a damn for them—compared with when he worked with us, before he became prime minister and as prime minister.
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What Shani depicts as his and Omri’s successful effort “to bring out the inner Arik” was seen by some of Sharon’s old retainers as a veritable kidnap. “After Lily got ill, Arik started to change,” a former aide recalled sadly. “She was his compass; that’s how he regarded her. Without her, Omri started to run riot. He took control of his father. He took his father to bad places. He sent himself as emissary to Arafat. He said to his father, ‘Let me handle it’…The most painful moment was after the Dolphinarium. We’d got carte blanche from the
U.S. to act. Here in Israel there was total consensus that we’ve got to act. And … nothing!”
In this aide’s pained, nostalgia-filled reading, the radical change that took place in Sharon’s policy thinking was brought about by the overwhelming influence of Omri. “ ‘Restraint is strength’? I’m trying to explain to you this joke … The closeness of that family is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate. ‘All for one and one for all’ is a gross, gross understatement of their sense of solidarity. They trusted no one but each other, relied only on themselves.”
Omri, the ousted aide conceded, may genuinely have changed his own views on the conflict with the Palestinians. But Arik—never.
When Arik was minister of infrastructures, I once said to him, “Why don’t you say you’ve got no problem with the Palestinians having a state? What do you care if they call themselves a state, as long as they don’t have an army and an air force and we control their borders?” He nearly threw me out of the window! As prime minister, I once said to him on the phone, “Why don’t you dismantle Netzarim [an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip]? We need two battalions to defend it. Soldiers are getting killed there. Civilians are getting killed. Take it down …” I nearly dropped the phone from the decibel level of his shouts! And then he went and dismantled all the settlements in Gaza.
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Omri listened impassively to an account of this bitter indictment and said only, “I was an easy target. Whoever wanted to attack him attacked me.” He phoned later to say, “You’re overdoing my role, my influence, my views … I wasn’t him.”
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Omri’s diffidence is closer to the truth than Shani’s arrogance or than the spurned aide’s bitter refusal to stomach his adulated leader’s change of heart. “To say that Sharon was an instrument in the hands of Uri and Omri and
Reuven Adler is an exaggeration,”
Avi Gil, a close aide to Shimon Peres, confirmed. “He was very dominant, very opinionated. Politicians aren’t puppets.” Gil was both an insider and an outsider during the formative period of Sharon’s prime ministership. As Peres’s man, he was not a member of Sharon’s close coterie. And yet the coterie embraced him almost as one of their own, using his professionalism in their diplomatic activities and his interpersonal savvy in helping to keep the Sharon-Peres relationship running smoothly.
There was an informal atmosphere around the prime minister, Gil said, and people were encouraged to bat ideas around. Sharon felt
enormously grateful to the people who helped him present an image of himself to the public that made him prime minister. “And they continued to be around him—Uri and Omri and Adler and others. But I do not believe that Sharon was dramatically influenced, in cardinal issues, against his will. He was clever and cunning and endowed with a healthy sense of humor so that he didn’t really care if someone claimed to have influenced him. He could live with it.”
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Another astute insider-outsider perspective came from Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister during this first phase of Sharon’s rule:
Sharon was still totally preoccupied with defense, as he had been his whole life. But as prime minister he saw things differently. If anything, I was the one who wanted to hit out harder, particularly against the suicide bombers and the people behind them. He was for more careful, gradual, and considered actions. Yes, he went into a storming rage after terror attacks. But he knowingly let himself be restrained. He shouted and screamed, “Kill them,” “Assassinations,” “Bomb Arafat.” But then he calmed down, and things were decided differently.
As time went on, he continued to change. I’d known him for many years, in the army and in politics, and I felt it clearly. It was the effect of how he was impacting on the outside world and how the world impacted on him. From a persona non grata he became a legitimate leader and eventually an admired leader. Arik had been through a lot in his life. I’d almost go as far as to call this a brainwash. By Western leaders. By Bush, mainly. By Blair; he liked Blair. By others. They learned his weak points. They saw the gulf between his image and his sensitivities. He was a tough guy—the world likes tough guys—but he was talkable to. By his second year he felt he was being made welcome. This had a fantastic effect. You saw his eyes light up when he talked about Bush or even Mubarak.
It was the effect of his experience as a player on the world stage, Ben-Eliezer believes, that principally accounted for Sharon’s subsequent further transformation, from settlement builder to settlement remover. “I knew he was totally determined to carry through this move. It began long before, with the security fence. Once he’d internalized the need for something, he would go for it, to the end. He was always like that. He had the feeling that the world expected something from him, and from him alone. To make the breakthrough.”
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• • •
W
hile Uri Shani’s boasts—and the old loyalist’s accusation—about Shani’s influence on Sharon’s mind need to be substantially discounted, Shani can justly take credit for running a tight ship at the
Prime Minister’s Bureau, imposing iron discipline on everyone, including his boss. The prime minister’s other aides all attribute Sharon’s eventual success and popularity, in no small degree, to the smooth functioning of the bureau, in terms both of its quiet efficiency and of the remarkable—indeed unique in Israeli prime ministerial annals—absence of interpersonal quarrels and rivalries among the close advisers. Years later, still all singing from the same hymnbook, they say of themselves and of each other: We all had big egos; we all left them at the door when we came to work for Sharon; Uri Shani was our model and mentor in this respect.
Even
Marit Danon, who faults Shani for overstating his influence on Sharon, praises him as “a very, very good manager. Everything worked. There were no snafus. How does that come about? First, everyone is punctual. Things happen precisely when they’re scheduled. Then there’s the personality of the leader and his relationship to his staff. And finally, the team spirit. This was a very cohesive bureau. None of Sharon’s close aides was sitting there with one eye on his future
Knesset career (apart from
Gideon Sa’ar, the cabinet secretary). To the present day, we’re almost like one family.”
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Danon’s own presence on the team was due to Shani’s diktat, as he tells it:
When Sharon first came into the bureau, we had a quarrel over the secretary. I’d been there for two weeks ahead of time, organizing things. I decided we want Marit and not Arik’s longtime secretary, Sara Shema. He approved of my other arrangements but balked at that. “What,” he said, “I can’t even have my own secretary?” I said simply, “No, you can’t. You’re the prime minister. You’re not the manager. You’re here to take the political decisions, the military decisions. You don’t run the office.” He agreed. I believed, and still believe, that prime ministers rise or fall on the way their bureaus operate. Of course that’s not 100 percent of the story; but it’s 60 percent at least!
Shani’s despotism extended to the highest officials in the land.
I resolved from the outset that this prime minister would not meet alone, “four eyes only,” with anyone. Not the head of Mossad; not the head of Shin Bet; not the IDF chief of staff—no one. I and the military
secretary, or I and the policy adviser, or one of them alone, plus a tape recorder, would be present at every meeting.
Once, after “Gandhi’s”
i
murder in October 2001, he was sitting with the head of
Shin Bet, [Avi] Dichter, together with me and the military secretary and the tape recorder, and the head of Shin Bet says to him, “I’d like to talk to you four eyes only.” The military secretary jumps up and leaves the room. After all, this is the prime minister and the head of Shin Bet. I said, “Sorry, there’s no four eyes.” Arik says to me, “Excuse me, yes?” I say, “
You
excuse
me
. There’s no four eyes, Arik. I know what he wants from you in four eyes, and it’s not going to happen.” He went ballistic. He banged on the desk. “I demand to sit with Dichter!” I said, “Look, I’m sorry to have to remind you, but remember Sabra and Shatila? Remember the commission of inquiry? If I leave the room, that’ll be precisely the point on which you won’t be covered at a commission of inquiry. I’m not leaving. Think carefully. If you want me to leave—order me out of the room.” All this in front of Dichter. Arik subsided, and they continued the meeting as though nothing had happened. Arik was crafty; he understood, despite his rage, that I knew something he didn’t know, and wanted only to protect him.
Dichter, in the “six eyes conversation,” asked Sharon to issue a statement explaining that he, as prime minister, had approved the Shin Bet’s not having guarded Ze’evi. Ze’evi had refused to have a close Shin Bet escort, 24/7.
In other words, Dichter was saying, “Give me a rope and I’ll hang you!” I didn’t wait for Arik to answer. I said, “The prime minister will not do that. But I will help you, because you are an excellent head of Shin Bet and we’re in wartime. If we were at peace, Dichter, I’m looking you in the eyes and saying quite frankly, you’d have to go, because the Shin Bet screwed up and a minister was murdered. What do you mean, ‘He didn’t want to be guarded’?! You screwed up. But we’re at war. So you and I together will deal with this thing and fix it. But it won’t touch the prime minister.” Arik just listened. We got up and left the room. I issued a statement in my own name. It was the first I’d ever issued. And there was no commission of inquiry into how and why Gandhi was murdered, which is remarkable when you come to think of it.
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j
• • •
A
fter the Dolphinarium, Sharon’s efforts and his time were devoted almost entirely to fighting “the war” and conducting the diplomacy surrounding it. The U.S. administration sent the head of the
CIA, George Tenet, to negotiate an immediate cease-fire and implement the Mitchell proposals. After hours of argument, he handed out a “working paper” and demanded a yes-or-no answer.
Sharon said yes. Tenet spent hours with Arafat in
Ramallah, lying on the floor of the
rais
’s office with crippling back pains and haggling with him from this supine position. In the end, Arafat said yes, too, though he wrote Tenet a letter emphasizing the linkage between the
Tenet Paper and the
Mitchell Report, particularly the section of the report that required an Israeli settlement freeze.
On June 13, the two leaders each announced to his own people a new cease-fire and his acceptance of the Tenet Paper. Arafat’s staff contacted a few of the key
Fatah-linked activists and instructed them to hold their fire. Orders were transmitted to the
Tanzim youth movement and the
al-Aqsa Brigade cells across the
Palestinian territories. But the PA did nothing to impose the cease-fire on Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, the Islamist
militias. In the ten days following the joint announcement, six Israelis were killed in shootings and bombings in
the territories. Within weeks, Tenet’s effort had sunk into oblivion, and the country was in the throes of a new wave of escalation.
