Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (94 page)

But the more striking phenomenon, in the wake of the disengagement, was how manifestly the trauma did
not
permeate the wider Israeli public, outside the national-religious camp. The tears of sympathy quickly dried. The national mood was not of sadness but of relief over how well it had all gone, tinged perhaps with embarrassment over having been rattled by the settlers’ threats of civil strife. Those who hadn’t been rattled now went around saying, “We told you so”—which added to the general sense of anticlimax. Within days, the story was off the front pages. Israelis who had delayed their vacations now embarked on them with gusto, making the most of the last days of school holidays.

For Sharon, the following weeks were an untrammeled splurge of
gloria mundi
. At the UN General Assembly in
New York in September statesmen from dozens of countries literally vied for face time and a photo op with the Israeli leader, who, by universal consensus, had taken the Middle East a giant step forward. Bringing peace to the region would be “my calling and my primary goal for the coming years,” Sharon vowed in his speech to the General Assembly. “The successful implementation of the Disengagement Plan opens up a window of opportunity for advancing toward peace, in accordance with the sequence of the Roadmap. The State of Israel is committed to the Roadmap.”

The general assessment, at home and abroad, given the success of the disengagement, was that more withdrawal and dismantlement of settlements on the West Bank would follow, whether through negotiation with the Palestinians or in further unilateral steps. The original import of the Herzliya speech would be revived. Sharon himself insisted the disengagement was a one-off event, never to be repeated.
But this unequivocal assertion itself was then subjected to equivocal parsing by his aides and close advisers. They created a deliberate cloud of obfuscation around his intentions, pumping out contradictory statements on the record and off. Sharon’s wink-and-nod policy, which for so long had characterized the expansion of Israel’s settlement map, was now, it seemed, to be applied to its contraction.

The obfuscation was designed, at first, to preserve the option of running for prime minister again at the head of the Likud. Sharon’s coterie was divided over this. Sharon himself had signaled repeatedly over the summer months that the time and effort he was spending pandering to his half-disaffected party were increasingly weighing him down. The disparity between his standing in the public and his standing in his own party grew wider and more incongruous in the wake of the successful disengagement. He was determined that things would be different in the next Knesset. Either the party would change, or else he would change parties. Speculation over a new, centrist “Sharon party” mounted from day to day.

Matters came to a head at a rowdy Likud central committee meeting on September 25–26. The issue on the agenda, ostensibly formal, was whether to bring forward the party’s leadership primaries. In practice, as Sharon declared, the move was an attempt by the rebels to unseat him and restore Netanyahu to the party leadership. The Likud primaries would inevitably trigger early general elections. The present Knesset still had more than a year to run. But so determined were Sharon’s party rivals to dislodge him that they were prepared to forgo that year in power. They did not feel, at the end of the day, that their party was in power. The party leader had effectively crossed the lines.

On the evening of the twenty-fifth, with Sharon on the rostrum and about to speak, the sound system mysteriously failed. Three times the prime minister climbed up, in the hope that the electricity would come on, and three times he returned to his seat amid mounting pandemonium. Eventually, he got up and, with his phalanx of security men and aides, exited the hall. The smirks on some of the faces around him fed
media speculation—encouraged by the Netanyahu camp—that the electricity cut was a deliberate provocation by Sharon’s side, designed to portray him as victim and his rivals as thugs.

Provocation or not, that was indeed the prevalent reaction in the public. Feeding the conspiracy theory was the fact that Sharon’s aides distributed the text of his speech to journalists before he failed to deliver it. So he had the best of both worlds: the speech was published, and he did not have to read it out over the cacophony of pro-Bibi hecklers.

This unspoken speech was more a parting speech than a staying-and-fighting speech. He took his time writing it, up in his tower above his fields. As things turned out, it was his parting message not just to the Likud but to the nation.

This was something of an ellipsis of the Likud’s and his own past history, not to say a tendentious, indeed mendacious, rewrite. But its point was not to re-chronicle the past but to chart the future.

There was still obfuscation here. “The Jordan valley” and “security areas” were deliberately vague designations, open to Sharon’s old, expansive designs on the Palestinian territory. But no one was minded to read such machinations into his text. Friend and foe alike assumed he intended a further substantial contraction of the settlement deployment during his next term. No one doubted that he would have a next term, whether at the head of the Likud or, as seemed increasingly likely, at the head of a new, centrist party whose platform, essentially,
would have one plank: unilateralism. The word coming into vogue to express this future political thinking was
hitkansut,
perhaps best translated as “ingathering.” The word conveys a sense of strength, of cohesion, rather than of withdrawal and shrinkage.

The committee of top civil servants set up discreetly by Weissglas after the Gaza disengagement
^h
was instructed explicitly to study options and scenarios for a unilateral withdrawal or series of withdrawals from the West Bank.
²⁴
“Where will Sharon go from here?” Aluf Benn asked in
Haaretz
on November 21, the day Sharon finally announced his decision to leave the Likud and found his own party. “He’s sticking to the
road map—that’s the plan for a Palestinian state, for anyone who’s forgotten. He denies there’ll be another disengagement. Despite that, though, it’s clear that the withdrawal from Gaza will not be the last. Instead of disengagement, Israel will evolve a program of
hitkansut,
rolling up the far-flung settlements on the West Bank and shoring up the big settlement blocs.”
²⁵

That same day, November 21, Sharon made his move, announcing on prime-time television that he was leaving the Likud and founding a new party. An early general election had become inevitable. Labor had elected a new leader, Amir Peretz, and was preparing to secede from the government. “The Likud in its present form cannot lead the country to its national goals,” Sharon explained. The new party didn’t have a name yet. Sharon called it the Party of National Responsibility. Later it became Kadima, which means in Hebrew “forward.”

Ehud Olmert,
Tzipi Livni,
Meir Sheetrit, Roni Bar-On, and other Likud moderates hailed the move and joined up enthusiastically. So did Shimon Peres, recently ousted from the Labor leadership, and other prominent Labor figures like Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik. Mayors and other elected officials waited hopefully for a call from Sharon or Omri inviting them to join. The Sharons reached out, too, to prominent nonpoliticians in academe and the arts, seeking to broaden the new party’s evolving list of Knesset candidates. Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz hesitated. At first he announced that he was staying in the Likud and would fight Netanyahu for the leadership. But the polls eventually persuaded him to jump aboard the Kadima bandwagon.

The polls were showing the new party at around forty seats. Sharon’s advisers predicted an even better result. Labor looked like winning twenty-odd. The prospect, therefore, was of a large, homogeneous, and compliant governing party with a sizable, like-minded coalition
partner at its side and scant need for additional, smaller allies with their exhausting quibbles and demands. It must have seemed a luxurious vista to Sharon.

He hardly had time to contemplate it. On January 4, 2006, he was felled by a massive stroke. Olmert took over automatically as acting prime minister. Later in the month, Olmert was elected unopposed as leader of Kadima, the new party. He led it to victory in the general election, which took place on March 28, and was sworn in as prime minister on May 4.

Olmert’s embrace of
hitkansut
was unequivocal, both in the election campaign and in his early policy statements as prime minister. He would try to negotiate with the Palestinians under the
road map, he declared, but if there was no progress, he would embark on further unilateral withdrawals on the West Bank with a view to establishing an interim borderline pending eventual peace negotiations.

The civil servants committee submitted its preliminary report in May. The committee pointed out numerous difficulties—diplomatic, military, political, economic, and legal—that the government would inevitably encounter, whichever unilateral option it chose. The committee was not tasked with recommending a particular option. But it emphasized the possibility of dismantling
settlements in the outlying areas of the West Bank while leaving the army deployed in those areas, or some of them, for an interim period.

Olmert adopted none of the options. In February 2006, while still the acting prime minister, he sent ten thousand troops and police to dismantle the West Bank “illegal outpost” of Amona, near the large settlement of Ofra. A violent melee ensued in which dozens of policemen and some three hundred protesters were injured, among them three rightist Knesset members. Nine buildings that had been ordered demolished by the high court were duly flattened. But
Gush Emunim and its supporters touted the battle of Amona as a victory. They had demonstrated that their spirit, thought broken by the Gaza disengagement, was not broken after all. It was being steadily restored, especially among their cadres of young people.

But no further major confrontations between government forces and settlers took place during the Olmert years (2006–2009). Nor were there any further unilateral withdrawals by Israel. In November 2007, the Bush administration launched a new peace initiative at an international conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The
phases of the road map were effectively to be telescoped into a comprehensive negotiation. All the core issues were to be on the table. The declared goal was the two-state solution—a Palestinian state in the West Bank
and Gaza living alongside the State of Israel. Sustained, discreet talks between Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, during the following year came close to reaching a comprehensive agreement.
²⁶
The talks petered out, though, after Olmert’s forced resignation announcement in September 2008, under a welter of financial allegations. Kadima, now led by
Tzipi Livni, again emerged the largest party from elections in February 2009. But she failed to form a government. The new rightist-religious government led by the Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, refused to pick up the Olmert-Abbas negotiations from where they had left off. Sporadic diplomacy by the United States over the next four years produced no progress.

W
ould Sharon have done better? Would he have done what he (and Olmert) intended to do, leading Israel out of (most of) the occupied West Bank, by agreement or—more likely—unilaterally? The disappointing election result in 2006 is the first piece in this intriguing, hypothetical puzzle. Kadima under Olmert managed only twenty-nine seats in the election in March.
ⁱ
Two months into the new government, moreover, Israel was at war. In July 2006, Olmert unleashed the air force, and then the army, to attack deep into southern Lebanon in reprisal for the ambush by Hezbollah of a military patrol along the Lebanon border fence. The north of Israel was virtually paralyzed as, day after day, Hezbollah
rockets rained down from across the border.

A UN-brokered cease-fire ended this four-week
Second Lebanon War without a clear-cut victory for Israel. Sharon loyalists muttered that he would never have ordered war so peremptorily, but once it had been launched, he would never have fought it so hesitantly. Olmert for his part implied privately that Sharon’s reluctance to confront Hezbollah had enabled the
Shiite movement’s massive stockpiling of rockets and other hardware over years. There were unflattering off-the-record references within the new government to Sharon’s supposed “Lebanon trauma.”

Whether because of the war and its aftermath—Olmert was censured by a commission of inquiry for the way he ran it—or because he lacked the political strength and courage, Olmert failed to implement anything of his vaunted
hitkansut
policy. Amona was effectively the last word between him and the settlers. He allowed the game-changing potential of Sharon’s Gaza disengagement to wither. He allowed himself and his government to be cowed by the settlers and their political
supporters. He enabled the settlers to recover their confidence and their political clout. The huge domestic victory of the disengagement was frittered away. Three years later, the settlers and their cohorts were effectively back in power, an integral part of Netanyahu’s new, rightist-religious government.