Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  High school for village kids was by no means the norm, and Vera and Samuil’s insistence on it exacerbated the charges of snobbishness and hauteur constantly muttered by their neighbors. Most of the other Kfar Malal children made do with eight years at the local elementary school, graduating at fourteen to become full-time farmhands. Arik did his share of farmwork before dawn. Then, in a blue shirt with red lacing and khaki shorts,3 the de rigueur dress code for kibbutz and moshav youngsters, he bused in to Tel Aviv.

  The Geula High School, a private institution catering mainly to the sons and daughters of the Yishuv’sb bourgeois gentlefolk, stood by the seashore. Arik strode the half hour from the bus terminal, saving his fare money for a falafel and soda after classes. By late afternoon he was back home again, working in the fields until nightfall. Then—homework.

  In later life, Sharon praised his parents for inculcating in him both the stomach and the stamina for sustained, hard work. “As a child,” he wrote in Warrior, the autobiography he published, in English, in the 1980s, “I listened to my father talk about the nobility of physical labor. By the time I was old enough to have my own thoughts on the subject, the work itself was in my bones … By the age of eight or nine I was doing the heavier work on my own. In the spring I would take the horse and wagon out to the vineyard and hitch up the plow.”

  In Tel Aviv, after school, Sharon would sometimes spend his afternoons with his paternal grandmother, Miriam, Mordechai’s widow. She regaled him in Russian with “stories of her life in Petrograd, where she had studied to be a midwife; in Brest Litovsk, where she had practiced her profession; and in Baku, where the family had fled during the war.” Russian forebears and a good smattering of the language were to stand the politician Sharon in good stead decades later, when more than a million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union poured into Israel. So was the snippet of Scheinerman family lore, of uncertain provenance, that the midwife Miriam had actually brought the Likud leader and prime minister Menachem Begin into the world. Begin was certainly born in Brest Litovsk, and his father and Mordechai were certainly friends and fellow activists in the local Zionist cell.

  The adult Sharon always praised his parents, too, for dinning into him a love of culture. “Be a ben kfar, a man of the soil,” the agronomist Samuil urged his son. “But be a ben tarbut, a man of culture, too.”4 Samuil was an enthusiastic amateur musician, and despite his prickly personality he found a few like-minded souls to make music with. He painted too. Vera read constantly. She made sure her children imbibed the Russian classics. From the tight domestic budget they bought little Arik a quarter-size violin and the lessons to go with it. They took him to musical soirees in neighboring Ramot Hashavim, at the home of Dr. Steinitz, an accomplished pianist and lecturer on music.c

  While his young farmer’s fingers showed little aptitude for the fiddle, Arik took away with him a lifelong devotion to classical music from his incongruous childhood conservatory at Kfar Malal and Ramat Hashavim. Political rivals who suffered the sharp side of his tongue during the day knew they would find him all smiles and good cheer at night, in his regular seat at the Tel Aviv concert hall, for a performance of the Israel Philharmonic.d

  At school, a classmate recalled, Arik was a good student and generally liked by the teachers. But where he really shone was in the martial arts class. Here he served as the instructor’s aide, helping to teach the boys and girls how to wield a cudgel to maximal effect. His budding military prowess was in evidence, too, on a class outing in tenth grade when the teacher lost his way and Arik led the hot and worried city kids back to safety.

  Samuil kept quarreling and bickering with other families till the end. He died young, in 1956. At the burial in the village cemetery Arik himself eulogized his father. Standing at attention in his red paratrooper boots and red paratrooper beret, Colonel Ariel Sharon, a national hero by then, though already a controversial one, pulled out a folded paper from his tunic pocket and read appropriately uncontroversial words of love and longing for the dogged, hard-bitten idealist.

  ARMS AND THE MAN

  There was one item on Kfar Malal’s agenda that provoked no discord at all between the regimented village families and the cantankerous Scheinermans: defense against the Palestinian Arabs who lived all around. Vera never forgot the sense of near terror one night during the countrywide violent riots of 1929, when rumors reached the village that thousands of Arabs were massing in Kalkilya, a nearby town, to overrun Kfar Malal. With the other mothers she cowered with Dita and baby Arik in a concrete cowshed while the men made ready to fight for their lives. The attack never came. For his bar mitzvah, Samuil gave Arik a richly decorated Caucasian dagger he had brought with him from Baku. It was a symbolic gift but one whose import both giver and receiver recognized.

  Guarding and patrolling the village at night was always part of the farmers’ lives. After his bar mitzvah, Arik was on the roster. At fourteen, like other likely lads, he took his oath of allegiance to the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish state in the making. The rite duly took place at dead of night, replete with Bible and revolver and flickering candle. The Haganah was supposedly secret, but everyone knew it existed, and most people encouraged the boys and young men to volunteer. Training at Kfar Malal took place on Saturdays and one weekday evening.

  No sooner had Arik taken up arms as an eager young teenager than he found himself involved in the first of the historical disputes that were to dog his military career and later darken his political life. For Arik, they were historical in two senses: they became key episodes in the history of Zionism; and his own specific role in them was debated, often bitterly, for long years and even decades after the episodes themselves had become history.

  The saison, or hunting season, was the cynical sobriquet attached to the period from December 1944 to April 1945 during which the Haganah actively pursued members of the Etzel,e the rival underground army of the Revisionists, and the Lehi,f an even more radical underground group. Some of these “dissidents” apprehended by the Haganah were handed over to the British, who deported them to detention camps in East Africa. Others were held in secret kibbutz lockups or merely roughed up and released.

  Most of the serious pursuing, apprehending, and roughing up was done by the Palmach, the Haganah’s two-thousand-strong full-time guerrilla force. But the part-time soldiers sometimes played a role, too. Did young Arik Scheinerman, a dab hand with a cudgel, swing his stick and his fists in the saison of 1945? That was hardly something the future leader of the Likud would want to be remembered for. The evidence is sketchy. Sharon himself denied any such thing. “I hated [the saison],” he wrote in Warrior. “Even arresting and punishing the militants seemed reasonable enough. But turning them over to the British? How could Jews turn over other Jews? It seemed criminal, a shameful thing to be associated with.”

  Two years later, with the Palestine issue before the newly formed United Nations, the Zionist leadership again clamped down on the Revisionist underground. This time, Arik Scheinerman seems to have joined in with gusto. By now he was an unofficial NCO in the unofficial army of the state-to-be. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1945, he had been picked to take part in a Haganah platoon commander’s course in the remote southern kibbutz of Ruhama. Here again he distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat training and field craft, though he graduated, to his chagrin, only a probationary corporal, not a full corporal.

  He wanted to enlist in the Palmach. His parents wanted him to register for studies in agricultural science. Instead, he did neither but enrolled in the Jewish Settlement Police. This was a legitimate branch of the Mandatory security forces, designated to protect the Jewish settlements and patrol the roads between them. But it was also a convenient cover under which military-minded youngsters like Arik could continue their own weapons training, and train other Jewish youth, without harassment from the authorities.

  It also allowed him plenty of spare time to work on the family farm. “One d
ay,” he writes, “as we were working together in the orange groves…[Samuil] said, ‘Arik, I want to tell you, anything you decide to do with your life is all right with me. But you have to promise me one thing. Never, never take part in turning Jews over to non-Jews. You must promise me that you will never do that.’ ”5

  In fact, though, the second saison, in 1947, did not entail collaboration with the British forces. These, still vigorously enforcing their blockade of Palestine’s shores against Jewish refugee-immigrants from post-Holocaust Europe, were by this time seen as outright enemies by David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, and the mainstream Zionist leadership. The Haganah made do with beatings and incarceration of Etzel activists. In the area around Kfar Malal, known Etzel recruiters were warned away, and when the warnings went unheeded, one of them had his arms thrust in an irrigation pipe and deliberately broken. Another was locked in a refrigeration plant for twenty-four hours. Arik, attached now to the Haganah’s fledgling intelligence branch, is said to have gathered the information that led to these brutal assaults. In another incident, Arik tracked five Etzel men carrying tommy guns and engineered their ambush by a Haganah unit. But they opened fire and escaped, leaving a Haganah man shot through the buttocks.

  Periodically over the years, people would come forward with vivid recollections of these activities that the adult Arik would have preferred to forget. “He was very, very active in everything we did against the Etzel,” said Dedi Zalmanson, one of Arik’s Haganah comrades, in 1983.6 “He chased after me with a pickax handle,” said Yosef Menkes, an old-time Etzelnik, in 1990.7 “He smashed up my coffee shop,” said Ben-Ami Zamir, another ex-Etzel man, in 1995.8 Arik, he recalled, arrived by truck at the head of a Haganah posse. “He asked me for a soda, pointing to a crate on the floor. As I bent over to fetch it, he whacked me over the head with the wooden club he was carrying. I was covered in blood. Unluckily for him, my brother, who was in the Palmach, happened to be around, and he fought back. My sister, who’d been boiling up water for coffee, poured it all over them.” Arik, prime minister by this time, issued a categorical denial. “I never took part in the first saison nor in the second saison, and I never hit a Jew with a pickax handle.”9

  In Warrior, Sharon wrote that he was attracted to the militants, jealous of “their actions and their heroism. But I was also in the Haganah, and I believe that people did not have the right to go off and do whatever they wanted, no matter how courageous they might be.”10 It was a delicate balancing act by a general whose own subsequent military career was stained by acts of excessive and wanton retribution and who now, as a politician, aspired to lead the party that still adulated the Etzel. Sharon often claimed that his military career was in fact stymied—he was held back for years and was never appointed chief of staff—because he wasn’t “one of us,” in other words, a reliably anti-Revisionist Laborite. “What do you mean ‘not one of them’?” one lifelong Revisionist, Mordechai Zippori, snorted contemptuously. “ ‘Not one of them’?! He took part in the saison and beat up Etzel men.”11

  Life was not all cudgels and plowshares. Arik was in love. “She was not exactly my first love,” he wrote years later. “But what I felt now seemed completely different from anything I had felt before.” Margalit Zimmerman, whom everyone called Gali, was just sixteen, a student at the boarding school for immigrant children next door to his parents’ farm. He had furtively watched her weeding and was smitten. Happily, his Haganah duties required him to impart military rudiments to the boys in Gali’s class, and through them he communicated his first request for a date. “I cut a hole in the wire fence that surrounded the yard so she could sneak through … In the evenings we would go out and sit next to the old village well in the middle of the groves, holding hands and talking in the dark.”12

  On November 29, 1947, endorsing the recommendations of a special commission of inquiry, the United Nations General Assembly voted by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem was to remain under international control. Throughout the country, Jews took to the streets dancing, singing, and weeping with joy. Ben-Gurion watched the celebrations with a heavy heart. “I knew that we faced war,” he wrote in his diary, “and that in it we would lose the finest of our youth.”

  The youth were now called up in their thousands for full-time service as the Haganah steadily morphed into a regular army, ready to be proclaimed as such as soon as the British flag was hauled down and the Jewish state declared, the following May. The intervening months quickly deteriorated into countrywide civil war. The Palestinian political leadership flatly rejected partition. Palestinian fighters, backed by Arab volunteers from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, attacked Jewish settlements and transportation. The Haganah, spread too thin to defend the entire Yishuv, attacked city suburbs and villages seen as strongholds of the Palestinian forces. The British for their part, having announced their departure date, effectively washed their hands of their security responsibilities. Their troops protected only their own evacuation routes. Ben-Gurion sent emissaries abroad on a desperate quest for arms; he anticipated with dire certainty that the Arab states would pitch their regular armies into the battle once the Jewish state came into being.

  Arik was mobilized on December 12. He did his initial fighting in the general area of Kfar Malal, in the center of the country. “Operating around the old coastal highway, we raided Arab bases and set ambushes … Typically we would leave our camp in the middle of the night, picking our way through the orchards…[W]e would be at our ambush site before first light, waiting for the early-morning traffic between the Arab villages and bases … As one action followed the next, I became aware that the others in our platoon had developed confidence in my ability to lead them into these actions.”

  The guerrilla war was “vicious, cruel and littered with atrocities.”13 On the last day of 1947, armed Arabs killed 39 Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refineries. The Haganah hit back, killing 60 Arabs in the village of Balad el-Sheikh. In February, two terrorist bombs in Jerusalem killed a dozen Arabs and 60 Jews. In March another 17 Jews died and many more were injured in a truck bombing at the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem. On April 9, 110 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Etzel in an attack on the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem. Four days later, in a revenge attack, 77 Jewish medical staff died in an ambush on a convoy traveling to a beleaguered Jewish hospital on Mount Scopus, in east Jerusalem.

  Arik was part of the Alexandroni Brigade, a loose collection of local Haganah units gradually taking shape into a regular military formation. After a large-scale night attack on Iraqi irregulars in the village of Bir Addas, he was formally appointed a platoon commander. “A good many of the soldiers I was now leading were from Kfar Malal, boys I had studied with and played with, but whose families had been at odds with mine for ages. But now our relationships had become something else entirely.”14

  Some of these boyhood friends were lost during the months of guerrilla warfare that preceded the “real” war against the invading Arab armies after the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. At the time, there seemed little difference between before and after.

  What set that day [May 14] apart was the short pass I had. I would be seeing Gali for the first time in almost two months. That night I was scheduled to lead a raid on the bridge to Kalkilya…[T]here was just enough time to get home, give Gali a kiss, and say goodbye. As I walked toward the children’s school where she still lived, I heard a radio … Ben-Gurion’s voice … announcing the establishment of the State of Israel. “In the Land of Israel the Jewish People came into being. In this land their character was shaped.” These were beautiful words, sonorous words. But they did not excite me … It seemed to me that we already had our independence for the past six months. We had been neck-deep in it and fighting for it since November. The coming night at the bridge to Kalkilya would be no different from all the other nights.

  The Haganah, hard-pressed in the early mo
nths after the Partition Resolution, scored some successes in the weeks before independence. In April, Haganah forces broke the Arab blockade on the road up through the hills from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Convoys of supply trucks brought food, fuel, and ammunition to the city. Mixed cities designated part of the proposed Jewish state were overrun: Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 22–23, Safed on May 13–14. Many of their Arab inhabitants fled. Jaffa and Acre, which were both to have been within the proposed Arab state, were also taken. So was much of the western Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, fell to the Arab Legion and local Palestinian fighters. Hundreds of settlers and soldiers were killed or taken into captivity in Jordan.

  The fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance. The city had been designated a corpus separatum in the UN resolution, but once it became clear that the fate of Palestine would be decided by war and not diplomacy, Jerusalem became the most sought-after prize—both for Ben-Gurion and for the Transjordanian leader, the emir Abdullah.g The two wily neighbors had hoped not to fight. Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir to negotiate with the emir, with a view to Transjordan peaceably annexing part of Palestine to his kingdom. But the talks failed. Jordan’s small but well-trained Arab Legion acquitted itself by far the best of all the invading Arab armies.

  It was against units of the Legion, well dug in around a British-built fortress at Latrun, commanding the road to Jerusalem, that young Arik Scheinerman now found himself deployed. This was to be not another derring-do night raid against ill-trained irregulars but a pitched battle against disciplined soldiers, equipped with artillery and heavy machine guns. The Israeli side, moreover, was dishearteningly ill-prepared.