Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (76 page)

No time, either, for Netanyahu to change his condition. “Since the prime minister has done the right thing,” he announced, “and since we are facing weighty challenges, I have informed the prime minister that I am prepared to accept the post of foreign minister.”
³
The very next day he was sworn in.

By the end of that week Sharon’s sanguine assessment of his prospects was being backed by newspaper polls.
Yedioth Ahronoth
had him defeating Labor in the general election by a larger margin than Netanyahu, though both would win comfortably, regardless of who ran at the head of Labor.
Maariv
showed him opening a significant gap against Netanyahu in the Likud primary: 48 percent to 38. The
Yedioth
poll, moreover, gave Sharon a 67 percent approval rating as prime minister (“good” or “very good”) and 65 percent on credibility—more than double Netanyahu’s score.

Netanyahu, a veteran and obsessive poll reader, trimmed his rhetoric accordingly. In a speech to the Likud conference on November 12, he predicted a great victory for the party in two and a half months, “and I can promise you now: Arik and I will march together to bring that historic victory for the Likud. We’ll march together, Arik and I, I and Arik.” In other words, whoever won in the primary, the other would serve under him in the new government.
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The party, on course to victory, would preserve its unity. And the subtext: Netanyahu was resigned to losing. Barring bad mistakes, then, or really bad luck, Sharon seemed home and dry.

A
ll the voters understood the extent to which war, peace, and prosperity hinged for Israel on the strength of its alliance with America. “Six times I’ve made my way from Jerusalem to Washington to meet with the president,” Sharon recalled proudly in a speech in July. (By the election, it was seven: he was in the Oval Office again in October.) “Our discussions have stayed secret. These efforts have recently brought about a breakthrough which gives grounds for hope that we
can move forward toward a solution … George Bush has confronted the Palestinians with a simple choice: terror or peace.”
⁴

This was a flagrantly upbeat description of a much less simple situation. While the president’s June 24 speech, effectively repudiating Arafat, had been enthusiastically welcomed in Jerusalem, the subsequent diplomacy had not produced “agreement … over the plan,” as Sharon expansively asserted. Rather, the road-map initiative was evolving in Washington, and Sharon was bobbing and weaving to avoid agreeing to it and to avoid being seen as rejecting it.

He was urging his public, though, to look beneath the minutiae of diplomacy to the bedrock of unconcealed sympathy in the Bush White House for Israel, and specifically for Sharon himself. Nowhere was that support more salient than in Washington’s responses to the IDF’s “
targeted assassinations.” Time and again, when outrage swept the
Muslim world and much of the West, too, over these extrajudicial killings and over the “collateral” deaths and injuries often sustained by innocent bystanders, U.S. spokesmen insisted on Israel’s right to act in self-defense against terror. Sometimes, they would add a mild word of advice about the need to think ahead, to a future of peaceful negotiations with the people now suffering the brunt of Israel’s fury.

Even when Israel itself was riven by controversy over the justification or the wisdom of such an assassination, the government could count on Washington for support. On the night of July 22, 2002, Israeli jets dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in Gaza where the Hamas military commander,
Salah Shehadeh, was known to be staying. Sharon and Ben-Eliezer were assured that only his wife and two aides were with him. They decided that given the significance of Shehadeh in Hamas’s military chain of command and the heinousness of the terror attacks that he had personally directed, this extent of “collateral damage” was justifiable.
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Seventeen people were killed in the blast: Shehadeh, his wife and daughter, and an aide, and thirteen innocent civilians, ten of them children, all sleeping in an apartment block next door. The youngest victim was a two-month-old baby. Many Israelis recoiled at these numbers. Condemnations resounded around the world. But in Washington, the furthest the White House would go was to characterize the
bombing as “heavy-handed.”

Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Israel’s targeted
assassinations had sometimes occasioned sharp rebukes from the administration. But after 9/11, U.S. officers were sent to spend time with IDF field units in order to study Israeli techniques and experience in carrying out targeted assassinations.
⁶

Sharon himself was an eager advocate of these operations. “I hear the noise of
helicopters over the ranch,” he would sometimes shout into the phone to a sleepy aide. “Does that mean we can expect good news from Gaza?”
⁷
Over the first thousand days of the intifada, according to an IDF document, Israel carried out ninety-five targeted assassination operations, more than half of them against Hamas men. In a very high percentage of the attacks the target was killed. In some half a dozen cases he was injured; in another six he escaped unscathed. In one-third of the attacks innocent people were killed.
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Over time, and in the face of repeated applications by human rights groups to the
High Court of Justice, a rough code of legal and moral conduct evolved to govern the decision making: the targeted assassination must be preventive, not punitive; the target must be “a ticking bomb,” poised to commit an imminent terrorist attack; the method chosen must be “proportional” and designed to minimize collateral casualties; and other methods of neutralizing the target, such as arrest, must be either unavailable or too dangerous to the lives of IDF troops. Army lawyers were often involved in the planning. Plainly, though, the term “ticking bomb” was open to interpretation, and there was constant pressure to extend it beyond the man who actually strapped the bomb belt to his body to those who sent him out to kill and die.

Meanwhile, the White House was increasingly committed to making war on Saddam’s Iraq,
⁹
and the road map was seen as a means of enlisting support, both in the
Arab world and in the West. Britain’s
Tony Blair, at the head of a Labour government distinctly less warlike than its leader, was particularly insistent in his pressure on President Bush to demonstrate determination in the Israel-Palestine diplomacy. Bush “hastily blessed the … Road Map,” writes
Martin Indyk, “only as a sop to … Tony Blair, who needed the president’s endorsement of an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative to bolster support within his Labor Party for the
Iraq War effort.”

A less sour interpretation of the diplomacy during the latter half of 2002 gives at least some of the credit to King Abdullah of Jordan and to his prime minister, Marwan Muasher, for nudging President Bush to translate his two-state “vision” into a practical and detailed blueprint for progress. “We assume you’re going to take military action [against Saddam]…We will do everything we can to support you,” the king told the president in the Oval Office on August 1. “But we need more
cover on the Palestinian issue. We need a roadmap on how we’re going to get from where we are now to realizing the vision that you have laid out.” Muasher added bluntly: “Frankly, Mr. President, most Palestinians are skeptical that this vision will be realized … We need to define a roadmap. That starts with security, institutions, the humanitarian situation, but also outlines the remaining steps till mid-2005, so that people can know exactly what they are getting.”
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The various drafts of the road map that now began to circulate differed from the Mitchell plan and the Tenet plan in their explicit insistence that the parties perform their various requirements in each phase in the road map
simultaneously
instead of sequentially. There could be no more demands by Israel for seven terror-free days on the Palestinian side before it began to rein in its own forces. “The parties are expected to perform their obligations in parallel.”
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Thus, in the first phase, the two sides were to end violence and resume security cooperation; the Palestinians were to “undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood … including free, fair and open elections”; Israel was to withdraw to the pre-intifada lines and freeze settlement building. The international community, which stood behind the road map, would expect Israel to get on with its withdrawal and freeze (including the immediate dismantling of the outposts built since Sharon came to power), while the Palestinians got on with their program. There was to be no conditionality between the two sides’ performances.

But such conditionality had been the linchpin of Sharon’s policy hitherto. He had accepted the Mitchell plan, which required a settlement freeze, on condition that the Palestinians moved first on security. He doubted that they would in fact move, and hence never expected to actually have to implement the freeze. This time, if he accepted the road map, there would be no such comfortable cushioning. He sent Weissglas to Washington time and again to try to soften the text and above all blur this key question of simultaneity versus sequence.

But Sharon and his smooth-talking emissary were given a stern reminder at this time that even with their sympathizers in the highest places in Washington they could not have things all their own way. After a
suicide bombing on a bus killed six and injured seventy at an intersection in the heart of Tel Aviv, Sharon ordered the siege of Arafat
reimposed, tighter than ever this time. IDF
tanks and APCs charged back into Ramallah, spraying machine-gun fire. They surrounded the
muqata
again and began demolishing PA administrative buildings with bulldozers and explosives. Arafat’s own suite of rooms and offices filled with dust and debris. His aides called the White House on their cell phones, seriously scared this time that Sharon meant to take out the
rais
.
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The renewed siege was an exercise in brinkmanship. The Americans, involved in their pre–
Iraq War diplomacy at the UN and in the region, were not taking chances. On September 20,
Condoleezza Rice called Weissglas to remonstrate. The next day, Ambassador Kurtzer helicoptered to Sharon’s ranch to deliver the hands-off-Arafat message. Secretary Powell followed up with a phone call to Sharon. And, with Bush’s approval, he instructed the U.S. delegation not to veto a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning the renewed siege.

In Washington, Rice lectured the for-once-silent Weissglas: “Israel has had no better friend than this administration, and you’ve had no better friend in this administration than me. But I’m telling you, if you do not end this siege in Ramallah, if you don’t withdraw your forces from the compound, you are going to have a public rift with the President. This needs to end
now
. If you and I are having this same conversation a week from now, you are going to have a serious problem.” Their aides started working on a withdrawal schedule. On September 29 the IDF armor and earthmovers revved up and drove away.

The wrangling over the road map proceeded desultorily until, almost as a relief, the government in Israel imploded and elections loomed. Sharon asked for a time-out: hold off publishing the road map until after the election, scheduled for January 28, 2003. This time, Weissglas was successful, and the administration, despite Blair’s chafing and the Jordanians’ increasing skepticism, put publication plans in abeyance. And Sharon could justly bask in the comfortable assurances he had received from Bush during his visit to Washington in October that U.S. and allied forces would make every effort to smash Iraqi Scud missile launchers at the outset of the looming war. They would bomb airfields in western Iraq, and they would beef up Israel’s ground defenses with more batteries of Patriot missiles. Sharon, who tongue-lashed Shamir during the last Gulf War for his U.S.-dictated passivity, undertook now himself to do nothing to surprise the United States. If Israel were attacked and decided to retaliate, it would inform America first.
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That was not the only historical irony of that October visit. President Bush could hardly have been more outspoken in support of the
still dangerously teetering
Israeli economy. “I understand what terror has done to economy,” he told reporters. “Terror has affected our economy; terror has affected the Israeli economy. But we’ve got great confidence in the Israeli economy. We’ve got great confidence in the Israeli people. The greatest asset Israel has is the brainpower and ingenuity of her people. And I’m convinced that the economy will be strong.”
¹³

Bush 41 had denied Likud-led Israel
loan guarantees, largely because of Ariel Sharon’s provocations, and thereby helped Likud lose an election. Now his son was holding out the promise of such guarantees to the same Sharon, knowing that it would help the Likud under him to win another term in power. Bush and his advisers knew, too, that the president’s public backing and the prospect of the guarantees were powerful ammunition for Sharon in his upcoming battle with Netanyahu, who would surely attack him on economic policy.
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Pollsters and pundits all agreed that the interesting fight was the one inside the Likud. Whoever won in there would almost certainly defeat whoever won in Labor. In the countrywide vote by Likud Party members, Sharon romped home by a margin of more than 16 percent. Still, Netanyahu’s 40 percent entitled him to the No. 2 spot on the Likud Knesset list, as agreed. The two camps now made ready to fight over the rest of the list. This contest was decided by the three-thousand-odd members of the central committee, gathered in Tel Aviv. The result was a stinging blow to the prime minister. His key lieutenants were all punished by the central committee members, while Netanyahu’s top loyalists took the prime spots on the list, followed by an eclectic assortment of newcomers, few of whom owed the prime minister any particular fealty. Omri squeezed in, just. But his vaunted sway over the party activists proved a hollow myth: candidates whom he had sponsored did almost uniformly badly.