Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (91 page)

It was going to be a long debate. All 120 Knesset members had registered to speak, plus two ministers, Shaul Mofaz and
Natan Sharansky, who were not MKs. Rivlin gave them each five minutes. Like a soccer referee, he stopped the clock whenever the heckling drowned out the speaker. But he warned that any speaker answering a heckler did so on his own time. “I haven’t got to the point yet,” a Shas minister
complained when the five-minute guillotine descended on him. “Sorry,” Rivlin replied, “you shouldn’t have argued with them.” He allocated two whole days for the debate, with the vote set for the night of October 26.

“We do not want to rule forever over millions of Palestinians, whose number doubles every generation,” Sharon declared. A new chorus of outrage erupted from his own party rebels and the parties to the right. “Israel aspires to be a model of
democracy. It cannot live with this reality indefinitely. The disengagement plan opens the gate to a different reality.”

That was the crux of it: bringing an end to the occupation. That was how the disengagement was seen on both sides, by supporters and opponents alike. Sharon’s stress on demography was echoed by the two other grand old men of the house, Shimon Peres of Labor and Shinui’s
Tommy Lapid. “In western Palestine today there are 5.2 million Jews and 4.8 million non-Jews,” Peres said.

Lapid said the withdrawal from Gaza was unavoidable. “Nor will it be the last withdrawal. It is unavoidable because none of the self-professed Eretz Yisrael lovers among us has an answer to the unanswerable question: In order to rule over 3.5 million Palestinians we need to forgo the democratic character of the state, or else give them the vote and forgo the Jewish and Zionist character of the state. I myself want a Jewish and Zionist state, and I do not want a state that rules over another nation against its will. What the prime minister is initiating today is the first step in the right direction.”

This coalescence of statesmanlike logic at the start of the debate augured well for its outcome. Peres was nominally still leader of the opposition, while Lapid was a key partner in the dwindling coalition. Both were clearly determined not to let Sharon fall. Would their support be enough in the face of a fragmenting Likud?

A fortnight before, things had looked far less sanguine for the prime
minister. At the opening of the Knesset’s winter term, on October 11, he suffered a stinging defeat in the house. Fifty-three members declined to endorse his statement setting out the government’s legislative program for the months ahead. Only 44 voted in favor. Most of the Likud rebels left before the vote because of the reference in his speech to the disengagement plan. Labor, which had promised him a “safety net” for the disengagement, voted solidly against him because of his—that is Netanyahu’s and his—economic policy. “Swinish capitalism,” Peres called the regime of drastic cuts and savings. “Six thousand millionaires and six million beggars,” he said, summing up the results of Netanyahu’s exertions.

Sharon seemed caught in a cleft stick. His coalition supported his economic policies but did not support his disengagement plan in sufficient numbers. The opposition enthusiastically supported the disengagement but decried his economic policy. Worse yet, the new national budget was due up before the Knesset soon.

Netanyahu, silver-tongued as ever, suggested to Sharon that they keep the disengagement funding out of the budget bill. That way, he argued, the existing coalition could vote for the budget, while an ad hoc coalition of Labor, Shinui, and half of the Likud, with sundry small parties, would pass the disengagement legislation. Sharon demurred. It would mean, in effect, he said, enshrining the split in the Likud.
¹¹
How did Netanyahu himself propose to act in the upcoming Knesset vote on the disengagement? The finance minister was noncommittal.

Making matters even worse for the prime minister was an idiotic interview given by his chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, to
Haaretz
. The top aide, at his flip and garrulous worst, told the reporter that the disengagement “is really formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde required so that there should not be a negotiating process with the Palestinians.”
¹²
Looking back years later, and attempting to sound sheepish and remorseful, Weissglas disparaged his own ignorance of chemistry. “
Elliott Abrams told me I should have said deep freeze,” he recalled. He had meant, he said, preserving the U.S. commitment to the
road map as a living organism, not as a dead specimen.
¹³

The formaldehyde line, which resonated around the world and brought ridicule and obloquy on Sharon, does read more like a trying-to-be-cute misstatement rather than an indiscreet betrayal of his boss’s secret determination never to cede another inch of land. Weissglas never believed that was Sharon’s intention.

“I’ve got things to say today to our
Arab neighbors,” Sharon continued in his Knesset speech. He spoke of

Sharon ended the speech, perhaps the most significant of his life, with a pointed quotation from Menachem Begin about the settler leaders:

This was the ultimate insult. Sharon had adopted not only the policy of the Left but also its ideology, built on a deep aversion to the religious-nationalist ethos. Citing Begin, but really taking him out of the context of his lifelong policy and beliefs, Sharon rounded on the religious nationalists who furnished the flesh and the spirit of the settlement movement that he himself had championed for so many years. It was a poignant moment, and also a deeply significant one. It exposed the brutal rupture with Gush Emunim that lay beneath the decision to disengage unilaterally from Gaza and northern Samaria.

That rupture is key to understanding the full import and lasting promise of the disengagement. Unilateralism was not merely a default option, dictated by the lack—or, more accurately, Sharon’s firm perception of the lack—of a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. Unilateralism was first and foremost an internal political act, within Israeli society. It was a momentous step to free Israeli policy
making from the stranglehold of the settlers, with their religious and nationalist agenda that Sharon now forthrightly condemned as a “messiah complex.”
Yuri Shtern, the gifted young immigrant MK,
¹⁴
understood the enormity of Sharon’s betrayal. “
You
are the false messiah,” he shouted out. But Sharon, having delivered his bludgeon blow, read on, unmoved. “I call on the whole nation of Israel to unite at this decisive moment and to build a great dam against the internecine hatred that is driving many to a madly irrational stance.”

It was a historic moment, but it is not well remembered, because it was eclipsed by the drama that was enacted in the Knesset chamber the following night, live before the eyes of the entire nation watching transfixed on prime-time television. This was a drama without words, almost like a silent film. Words were being spoken from the podium, by the final speakers in the marathon, two-day debate. But they served merely as background sound. All cameras, and all eyes, were on Sharon’s face as he sat impassive, no muscle moving, in his seat at the head of the government table, in the center of the Knesset chamber. For more than an hour he sat there, listening to the debate, waiting for the vote, fobbing off various emissaries and go-betweens with messages from Netanyahu and his friends, who were threatening to vote against the disengagement. “Meet? With them? No way,” he was heard to whisper loudly. “If they want to see me, they can come here.”

The putsch, as Sharon’s aides called it, had been brewing behind the scenes throughout the debate. “The only way to carry out this disengagement,” Netanyahu warned the Likud caucus during the first day of the debate, “is to have it endorsed first in a national referendum. Let the people decide. I don’t doubt the result will be favorable. But holding the referendum will defuse the land mine; even the people of
Gush Katif will accept the verdict of the nation. The alternative,” he asserted, “is no government and no coalition.”

Later that night, in a
Jerusalem hotel, Netanyahu and his ministerial co-conspirators issued an ultimatum for publication in the morning newspapers: either Sharon agreed to hold a referendum, or they would vote in the Knesset against the disengagement plan. In the morning, the National Religious Party published a similar threat: Sharon must pledge to hold a referendum, or their four MKs would secede from the coalition.
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To strengthen their own and Netanyahu’s hand, the NRP produced a document signed by prominent rabbis of the national-religious camp undertaking to accept the verdict of a referendum, whichever way it went.

At four in the afternoon, as the debate droned on in the plenary, Sharon did one of his theatrical performances in the members’ dining room. Veritably encased by an extra-thick phalanx of bodyguards, he took just two questions from the throng of reporters. The NRP? He wasn’t handcuffing anyone to the cabinet table, he replied. A referendum? “What
are
you talking about?” he replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

From the streets and parks around the Knesset precinct, the sound of mournful singing wafted in. Thousands of children from the settlements of the West Bank and Gaza had been bused in, their schools shut for the day, to hold a prayer vigil in the open air as the legislators prepared to vote. “Mercy,” they sang plaintively, “have mercy, O Lord our God, on thy people Israel.” Dressed in T-shirts bearing the legend “We have love in our hearts, and it will triumph,” the children recited Psalms, led by the two retired chief rabbis of the state Mordechai Eliahu and Avraham Shapira. “The holy Torah says, ‘To your seed I have given this land,’ ” Rabbi Eliahu intoned. “Not to Esau and not to Ishmael. We will not disengage from the Land of Israel. God will confound the plan, and it will not happen.”

Knesset Speaker Rivlin, tears in his eyes, told the children, “We hope the decision will not be taken forcing you to leave your homes and your schools. There, in the Knesset building, fateful decisions are taken. But if, God forbid, the decree is issued against all of us, then, though wearing sackcloth and ashes, we must acquiesce, we must accept it. We will make every effort to prevent decisions that break our hearts. But if they are taken nevertheless, you children must understand that what the government and the Knesset decide is binding on all of us. On you, too, and on your parents.”
¹⁵

Contrary to parliamentary practice, the Likud rebels and the parties of the Right had refused to pair any of their members with a Shinui member sick with cancer and a pro-disengagement Likud man who had recently undergone brain surgery. At seven forty, ratcheting up the tension, the surgery patient, Eli Aflalo, was wheeled into the chamber, wearing a large wool cap on his head. Led by Sharon, members flocked around him to shake his hand and wish him well. Sharon himself now took his place and began his steely-nerved vigil.

Downstairs, Netanyahu and his friends were still fluttering about, counting and recounting the likely vote, desperately trying to cut a deal with the members of the three small Arab opposition parties. Two Arab MKs, members of Ra’am, were determined to vote in favor. The other six, representing Hadash and Balad, had all made speeches against it. But which way would they vote?
Ahmad Tibi of Hadash
calmly ate his hummus in the members’ dining room as Labor and Meretz members clustered around him, warning that he and his colleagues, perhaps unwittingly, were about to become co-conspirators in a rightist parliamentary coup.

In the chamber, Rivlin announced the roll-call vote. “But, Mr. Speaker,” a Labor member called out, “you promised you wouldn’t start till all members were here. Where’s Bibi?!” Rivlin replied that all 119 members were present in the building; only Yehudit Naot, the member ill with cancer, was absent. As the names were called, it became clear that two groups of members were not in the chamber: Netanyahu and his followers, still lingering in the corridor outside, and the six Arab MKs from Hadash and Balad, who sidled in as the vote ended.

The Knesset clerk, following protocol, repeated the names of the absentees. “Mohammad Barakeh.”

“Later,” the Arab MK replied.

Speaker Rivlin: “There is no ‘later.’ This is the second round. I’ll register you as absent.”