by David Landau
Ben-Gurion, in his diary, faulted Sharett for publishing the names of Har-Zion’s three accomplices and justified Har-Zion’s refusal to cooperate with the police investigators. The upshot was an internal IDF investigation. There was no trial and no punishment. Har-Zion was back in uniform within months. “The final outcome of the affair,” writes the historian Benny Morris, “reflected Ben-Gurion’s position in general. He never really wanted to prosecute four of his most favorite soldiers, especially since a trial might have thrown light on other ethically dubious actions of Unit 101 and the paratroopers.”53
A much more ominous drama was meanwhile building up between Israel and Egypt. On February 17, 1955, an Israeli farmer was murdered near Rehovot. Clearly the killers had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip. Sharon submitted a plan to attack in reprisal a small Egyptian army unit encamped south of Gaza City. Ben-Gurion and Dayan together persuaded Sharett to agree. The order to the paratroopers, they explained, would strictly forbid them to kill enemy soldiers “except if that proves vital for the fulfillment of the mission,” which was defined as blowing up buildings in the camp and in the nearby railway station.
To ward off suspicious snooping by UN observers, the paratroopers left their forward camp at the kibbutz of Kfar Azza together with girl soldiers, all singing and laughing as if they were off on a hike. As they approached the border, they split off into separate attacking forces. One headed for the Egyptian army camp, another for the station; a third set up an ambush on the main road from the south, to intercept reinforcements.
Bad navigating led to mistakes, and the first and second forces found themselves in a vicious firefight with Egyptian soldiers. Eight paratroopers died, and a dozen more were injured. The Egyptians lost fourteen men. A number of buildings were destroyed, and the attacking units withdrew under fire, carrying their dead and wounded with them. The third force, meanwhile, wiped out a column of Egyptian reinforcements, killing twenty-two men without loss. Waiting on the border, Dayan listened to Sharon’s grim report impassively. “The living are alive and the dead are dead,” he said, wheeled around, and left the scene.
Ben-Gurion published a paean of praise for the paratroopers. “The cabinet has unanimously asked me to convey to the paratroop battalion our feelings of appreciation and admiration for the spirit of Jewish heroism demonstrated in this battle … I am sure that these feelings are shared by the entire country. The paratroop battalion, which enjoys the love of the whole nation, has proven once again for all the world to see the triumph of Jewish heroism and has added a glowing page to the annals of the Israel Defense Forces.
“We do not lust for battle,” the defense minister continued, “and we regret all loss of life, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. But it is as well that all should know that we are strong and that our blood is not to be spilled with impunity … Your glorious, all-volunteer battalion, comprising native-born Israelis and immigrants, members of oriental communities and of western communities, young men from all the lands of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America—your battalion is the living embodiment of the unity of the Jewish people.” Ben-Gurion signed, “With love and admiration.”
A PASS TOO FAR
From the immediate political perspective the Gaza operation was profitless: Israel was condemned by the UN Security Council. From a historical perspective, the operation stands out as a catalyst of escalation in the tension between the two armies, in the arms race between the two governments, and, ultimately, in the process by which the Arab-Israeli conflict grew into a vicarious battle between the superpowers.54
Egypt fueled the tension by ratcheting up its support for the Palestinian infiltrators. The fedayun groups operating out of the Gaza Strip became effectively an agency of the Egyptian military, armed and paid by army intelligence. They raided deep into Israel, occasioning ever larger reprisal attacks, usually by the paratroopers, against Egyptian military units. In one four-day period in August 1955, fedayun units ranged through southern and central Israel killing 11 civilians, injuring 9, and causing extensive damage to property. The paratroopers, in their first mechanized attack, captured and destroyed an Egyptian police station at Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, killing 72 Egyptians and wounding 58 for the loss of 1 dead and 11 wounded on their own side.55
A month later, after repeated Syrian shelling of Israeli fishermen, the paratroopers swept up the northeastern (Syrian) shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), overrunning Syrian gun posts and killing more than 50 Syrian soldiers, wounding at least that number, and taking dozens more prisoner. Sharon’s men suffered 6 dead and 10 wounded. The operation was “too successful,” Ben-Gurion (now back in the dual role of prime minister and defense minister) complained when Dayan, with Sharon in tow, came to Tel Aviv to explain what had happened.
The border escalation was doubly disturbing because by this time Israel was facing the threat of a hugely more powerful Egypt, backed by the Soviets’ military arsenal. The stunning shock was delivered by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic new leader of the country, in a speech in September 1955. Egypt, he announced, had signed a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia and would soon be receiving the first deliveries of state-of-the-art Soviet weaponry. The Americans knew something of this imminent Egyptian turnabout. Through intelligence contacts they tried to head off Cairo’s shift into the Soviet sphere, but without success. For Israel, it was a bolt from the blue. The three Western powers, the United States, Britain, and France, had agreed in a 1950 concordat to severely restrict their arms sales to all Middle Eastern countries. Would they now ease those restrictions in the face of the challenge from Moscow?
In August 1956, an ambush laid by the paratroopers on the Gaza border against infiltrators again developed into a full-pitched battle with Egyptian forces. A dozen Egyptians were killed, among them a medical team. Israel’s consternation was all the greater because by this time secret negotiations were under way with France on possible military collusion against Egypt. The last thing Ben-Gurion and Dayan needed at that point was a border skirmish triggering an unplanned and premature conflagration. “Dayan’s anger at the paratroop commander became more open and more pronounced,” wrote an Israeli military historian. “[Sharon] was conducting ‘his own independent policy,’ in Dayan’s words.”56
The tension between Dayan and Sharon flared again in October, around a reprisal action against a Jordanian police station at Kalkilya, on the West Bank, which turned into a battle between the two armies and left 18 Israeli dead and 68 injured. These were far higher casualty figures than the public and the prime minister were prepared to stomach for any reprisal operation that was less than all-out war. The fact that almost a hundred Jordanian soldiers, militiamen, and police were killed in the Kalkilya raid did not mitigate the losses. The fact that it came just a fortnight after another costly reprisal action, at Hussan, near Bethlehem, where ten paratroopers died, made it even harder to take.
A week later, on October 17, Dayan called in the officers who took part in the Kalkilya operation for a debriefing. He explained the constraints under which the government operated: the need to avoid civilian casualties and to avoid triggering intervention by British air force units stationed in Cyprus. He urged the officers to speak out freely, but when Sharon and others criticized his policy and his behavior, he lashed back. He accused Sharon of indifference to Israeli casualties. Sharon needlessly risked soldiers’ lives, he charged, in order to kill greater numbers of Arab soldiers and score “fuller” victories. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the battlefield tactics at Kalkilya, everyone realized that the reprisals strategy had become counterproductive, escalating the tit-for-tat violence to unacceptable levels. “I think,” Dayan confided, “that there will be a pause in operations while we carefully reconsider our policy.”57
Alone in that room, Dayan knew that a large-scale war between Israel and Egypt, and also between France and Egypt, was likely to break out within weeks. He knew that Britain, too, might take part alongside France. Together with Shimon
Peres, the director general of the Defense Ministry, and a handful of aides, Dayan was deeply involved in secret negotiations with the French over this fateful scenario. In five days, with dark glasses shielding his telltale eye patch, he would accompany Ben-Gurion—the Old Man’s disguise was a trilby hat pulled down over his famous, flowing demi-tonsure—and Peres on a French air force plane via North Africa to a top-level summit conference at Sèvres, near Paris, where the details of this military collusion finally would be worked out. Guy Mollet, France’s Socialist prime minister, Christian Pineau, the foreign minister, and Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, the minister of defense, promised Ben-Gurion to protect Israel’s skies from Egyptian bombers while the IDF struck at Egyptian forces in Sinai. In a separate understanding negotiated by Peres, the French leaders agreed to provide Israel with the technical assistance and the uranium required to create its own nuclear weapons program.58
For France and Britain, the Sèvres Protocol was a last-ditch attempt to dislodge Nasser and prevent a total Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal. Britain had reluctantly agreed in 1954 to withdraw its forces from the Canal Zone over a two-year period, thereby ending the seventy-seven-year British military presence protecting the waterway.j The agreement provided that Britain could keep up some of its bases in the Canal Zone, under civilian maintenance, for use by its troops in wartime. In July 1956, a month after the last British military units left, Nasser announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, largely owned by the British government and French shareholders. He said the company’s future revenues would go toward the cost of the Aswan High Dam project in Upper Egypt, which the United States and Britain had recently pulled out of. (The dam was subsequently built with Soviet aid.) While the canal no longer served as an imperial lifeline from the mother country to British India, it was still a vital and lucrative route for international trade and especially for the constantly expanding traffic in oil tankers. Britain was both damaged and humiliated by Nasser’s action. France, in addition, bitterly resented Egypt’s support for the FLN rebels in Algeria.
For Israel, the war with Egypt was designed to achieve three goals:
• to maul the Egyptian army and smash as much of its newly supplied Soviet weaponry as possible;
• to break the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, at the tip of the Red Sea, and open up the southern port of Eilat to commercial shipping; and
• to end the Egyptian-run fedayun infiltration from the Gaza Strip. If that were stopped, it was held, Jordan would rein in its own fedayun, too.59
Sharon’s paratroopers were to play a key role in the opening phase of the clandestinely coordinated hostilities. The Sèvres Protocol provided that Israeli forces were to launch “a large-scale attack on the Egyptian forces on the evening of October 29, with the aim of reaching the Canal Zone the following day.” The only way that could realistically happen was by a parachute drop. “On being apprised of these events,” the protocol continued, “the British and French Governments during the day of 30 October 1956 [will] respectively and simultaneously make two appeals to the Egyptian Government and the Israeli Government” to withdraw their forces ten miles from the canal. Egypt, in addition, would be required to “accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by the Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement.”
Egypt, of course, was not expected to agree to any of this, in which case “the Anglo-French forces will launch military operations against the Egyptian forces in the early hours of the morning of 31 October.” Israel, meanwhile, released from its own requirement to heed to Anglo-French demands, would “send forces to occupy the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba and the group of islands Tirane and Sanafir to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba.” Another paragraph provided that “the arrangements of the present protocol must remain strictly secret.”
How secret did Ben-Gurion keep it, and for how long? Specifically, how much did Sharon know and understand of the larger picture before and during the fighting? The question is important in understanding Sharon’s conduct, which resulted, according to his critics, in the needless deaths of nearly forty paratroopers and the injury of more than a hundred.
Sharon himself claimed he knew everything before everyone. “As we licked our wounds after Kalkilya,” he wrote, “Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres left for Paris to try to conclude negotiations with the French and British that would bring all three countries into a concerted action against Egypt. When they returned on October 25, I went to see Ben-Gurion. He told me briefly that a deal had been struck by which Israel, France, and Great Britain would each gain their objectives … Events that would shake our world were now only days away. As I stood there absorbing it, I could almost feel the wings of history brushing the air.”
This is not quite as bizarre as it sounds: a young lieutenant colonel dropping in on the prime minister and defense minister to hear secret plans to which senior generals were not yet privy.60 Sharon did frequently call on the Old Man. Indeed, on November 4, as the Sinai War was winding down, Sharon was at Ben-Gurion’s home reporting in person on the operation he had led, and his wife, Margalit, also came in and was greeted warmly by the prime minister.61
On the afternoon of October 29, Sharon’s lead battalion under Rafael Eitan, 395 men in all, took off as planned in a fleet of DC-3s and flew toward the Mitle Pass, 150 miles from the Israel-Sinai border. The original intention had been to drop on the western end of the pass, a bare dozen miles from the canal. But intelligence reports pointed to an Egyptian deployment in that area, and so the drop was moved to the eastern end of the pass. The change of plan proved fateful.
Sharon himself led the rest of the paratroop brigade, reinforced by an armored company of thirteen French AMX light tanks, on a dash across the desert to link up with Eitan’s force. Three Egyptian fortified positions stood in their way. On the evening of the twenty-ninth they took Kuntilla, some twelve miles inside Egyptian territory, “moving the attacking units around to the rear,” Sharon writes, “so they could come in out of the setting sun.”
At dawn on the thirtieth, “we were in position in front of Themed, a Bedouin oasis that had been heavily fortified with minefields and perimeter fences and was held by two companies of Egyptian infantry.” This time he attacked head-on, with the sun behind him. Tanks, half-tracks, and jeeps all surged forward. “Huge whirls of dust clouded the desert from the charging vehicles, illuminated from behind by the bright morning glare. Emerging from the cloud, at the last moment, we formed a single line and smashed into the middle of the Egyptian defenses. Themed, too, fell quickly.”
The last obstacle was the little township of Nakhl, with an adjoining military camp, forty miles farther west. Sharon’s forces took them by late afternoon in another swift frontal assault. “I had left a company behind to secure Themed, and now I left a battalion at Nakhl … In the back of my mind was the thought that the British and French might not act, and if they didn’t I would have to have a protected line of withdrawal out of the desert.” The rest of the brigade swept across the remaining seventy miles without opposition, and by ten that evening the first units entered Eitan’s encampment.
Eitan, Sharon writes, had been strafed during the day by Egyptian warplanes and shelled by a motorized infantry unit advancing through the Mitle from the west. But Israeli planes had bombed and destroyed this force, and the pilots had reported “that the pass was now free of any discernible Egyptian presence.” Sharon determined to press on through the pass to the western end. In his testimony after the war to General Haim Laskov, who was appointed by Dayan to investigate the fighting at the Mitle, Sharon said he had met with the CO of Southern Command, General Assaf Simchoni, at 3:00 a.m. on October 29, and the two of them had agreed that the paratroopers, once they had linked up, would push on through the Mitle Pass to the original drop site at the western end. They would then station one battalion at each end of the pass.62
At dawn on the thirty-first, however, an order came through from the High Command in Tel Aviv forbidding further movement westward. Egyptian jets swooped down to strafe the paratroopers, vulnerable targets in their shallow foxholes. The Egyptian planes were chased off by a squadron of Israeli fighters, and three of them were downed. But the Israeli pilots radioed to the paratroopers, Sharon writes, “that an Egyptian armored brigade was moving toward us” from the direction of Bir Gafgafa, a large military base to the northeast. Again Sharon proposed moving his force into the Mitle. His reasoning this time was that his twelve hundred lightly armed men—only three of the brand-new AMXs had made the journey to the end; the others had broken down, and there were no spare parts to fix them—would be sitting ducks for the oncoming Egyptian armor, spread-eagled as they were on the flat ground east of the pass. They needed to take up defensive positions on the slopes of the Mitle from where they could pick off the Egyptian tanks with bazookas and recoilless rifles as they made their way through the narrow defile. Again, though, the order came back from Tel Aviv: stay put. Southern Command sent its chief of operations, Rehavam Ze’evi, by Piper plane to survey the scene and to make sure the order was obeyed.
Sharon persuaded Ze’evi to approve sending a reconnaissance patrol into the pass, to confirm that it was free from Egyptian forces. “ ‘You can go as deep as possible,’ ” Sharon recalled Ze’evi saying, “ ‘just don’t get involved in a battle …’ Immediately I put together a unit to go into the pass. My idea was that this unit would move the twenty miles to the western end and hold the position there, preventing Egyptian forces from attacking from that direction. Then the rest of the brigade could move inside, deploying to defend themselves against the armored forces … For this job I put the three tanks together with two companies of infantry in half-tracks.”