Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Ze’evi remembered things rather differently. “I told [Sharon] that a reconnaissance patrol was approved but nothing more than that,” Ze’evi testified to Laskov. “We’re sitting and talking, and I see that a whole column of vehicles is lining up, half-tracks, jeeps, AMX tanks. I say to Arik, ‘What’s all this?’ He says, ‘Those sons of bitches, when I tell them to prepare a reconnaissance patrol, everyone starts pumping it up out of all proportion. But don’t worry, it’s just a patrol.’ I said to Arik, ‘I’m warning you, this patrol is to bring back nothing but information.’ ”63

  Sharon put one of his battalion commanders, Mordechai Gur, in command of this ill-defined force with its ill-defined mission. He gave him, he writes, “strict orders not to get involved in any fights … But within a mile of the entrance the first half-track was slammed by a volley of fire from hidden positions high on the defile walls. The driver was killed instantly and the half-track swerved sideways and stopped. The second half-track moved up and was also hit and stopped.”64

  Gur’s force had driven into a well-laid trap. Egyptian troops, holed up in caves and dugouts high above the pass, virtually invisible from the air, rained down mortar and machine-gun cross fire on the Israeli vehicles. The paratroopers, those who were not hit in the first fusillade, tried to clamber out, to find what cover they could, and to return largely ineffective fire at their tormentors. Gur resolved to stand and fight rather than try to back away. He managed to send a runner back to Sharon to describe the inferno in which he found himself. He begged urgently for help.

  Sharon sent in two units of reinforcements, under Eitan and Davidi, to join the battle. “It was a precarious situation. We were exposed on the flatland at the end of the pass. Many wounded were already being brought out of the battle. I felt I had to take immediate steps to create a defensive perimeter facing the approaching Egyptian armor and to have the wounded evacuated.” He began redeploying the rest of the brigade on the slopes at the entrance to the pass and at the same time arguing with the air force, who were reluctant to land their DC-3s in the soft desert sand. In the end, they took the chance and began ferrying the casualties out of the battle zone.

  Gur and his dwindling force were pinned down and fought desperately until sunset, when Yitzhak Hofi, the deputy brigade commander who had joined the original patrol and made it westward with two tanks and several half-tracks, charged back through the pass and provided fire cover, under which, with the help of the reinforcements, the paratroopers finally withdrew. After nightfall, Sharon sent two small units to creep along the sides of the pass and ferret out the Egyptian positions. “They attacked one Egyptian cave and firing hole after another in hand-to-hand fighting. For two hours the sounds of battle reverberated through the pass before finally giving way around eight o’clock to an ominous silence.”65

  The next morning, Sharon recalls, his troops were poised to give battle to the column of Egyptian tanks. But the only sound from the desert was the drone of two Israeli Piper Cubs, searching in vain for the Egyptian armor. With the Anglo-French intervention now (belatedly) imminent, the Egyptians had preferred to turn northwest and withdraw across the canal.

  More than 250 Egyptians died in the caves overlooking the Mitle. But the paratroopers’ losses—38 killedk and 120 wounded—were a grievous blow to the brigade. They would represent some 20 percent of all the IDF’s losses in the hundred-hour Sinai War, which ended, for Israel at any rate, as a huge and resounding success. Three IDF columns, mainly comprising reservists, struck into Sinai in the wake of the paratroopers’ jump. One headed south from Eilat, took Sharm el-Sheikh at the southern tip of Sinai, and spiked the guns that had blockaded the Straits of Tiran. The paratroopers had been designated to attack Sharm el-Sheikh, too. But by the time they regrouped after the battle of the Mitle and dashed down the western Sinai coast, it was too late. Another armored column attacked the heavily fortified Egyptian complex at Abu Agheila in northeastern Sinai. This was the heaviest fighting of the campaign, but eventually the Israeli force overran the defenders and pushed on toward Ismailia on the Suez Canal. The third, northernmost column skirted the Gaza Strip, taking Rafah at its southern end and then splitting. Half the force doubled back through the Strip, attacking the Egyptian units stationed there. The other half raced on along the Mediterranean coast, taking el-Arish and surging on toward Kantara, on the canal.

  The final cost to Israel was 172 dead, 700 wounded, and 4 prisoners of war. Egypt suffered thousands of dead, great numbers of wounded, and 5,581 prisoners of war.

  The British and French experience was far less favorable than Israel’s: their combined land, sea, and air forces, operating—albeit not without copious snafus and delays—out of Cyprus and Malta and from half a dozen aircraft carriers, crushed Egyptian resistance. But Nasser had ordered all the cargo ships in the canal to be sunk, and so, while British troops were back in control of the waterway, Britain and France could not reopen it for maritime traffic. And Nasser, though his army was trounced, claimed a great victory. Far from being overthrown, he seemed more popular than ever.

  The reaction from the two superpowers, the United States and the U.S.S.R., was wholly and vociferously negative. President Eisenhower, who had been reelected on November 6, threatened to induce a run on sterling unless Britain withdrew forthwith. Israel for its part was the target of some ominous nuclear saber rattling from the Soviet leader, Marshal Bulganin, and more civilized but no less stern admonishments from Eisenhower. Ben-Gurion, who had waxed lyrical over his expansive “Third Kingdom of Israel” with its biblically named outposts in the far south, quickly folded and agreed to pull out. The UN Security Council set up a peacekeeping force that it deployed along the Israel-Sinai border and at Sharm el-Sheikh. In March 1957, the blue berets moved into the Gaza Strip, too, and the last IDF units pulled back across the armistice lines.

  The war left Sharon’s standing and prestige in the army seriously weakened and his military career compromised. “Why are we, the best fighters, not in the fighting?” he had remonstrated with Southern Command by radio on October 31, in the course of his pleading to be allowed to move into the Mitle Pass. “When are we going to stop this guarding and start some fighting?” To the historian Motti Golani, this radio message shows that Sharon did not understand “the bigger picture” even when he was right in the thick of it.66 There was no need to advance into the Mitle and risk a bloody battle now that the intended effect of the parachute drop was in train. The Anglo-French ultimatum had been delivered on the morning of the thirtieth, twelve hours after the Israeli parachute drop, as planned. It had been duly rejected by Egypt, and the two European powers launched their military operations that morning, the thirty-first, with bombing runs over the Canal Zone. There was no purpose, therefore, in Sharon’s troops advancing west.

  Mordechai Gur, who led the “patrol” into the pass, was scathing in his criticism of Sharon:

  He didn’t direct the battle. No one directed it … Sharon was physically exhausted on the way down to the Mitle, after all the planning and conferring that preceded it. When Arik’s there—he’s there. Now he simply wasn’t there. He slept the whole time or dealt with other things. When we saw he wasn’t functioning, Davidi took the decisions instead of him. That’s how we overran Kuntilla, Themed, and Nakhl. [At the Mitle] he wasn’t functioning for hours on end. He was panicked, presumably because he’d acted against orders and because the casualty figures scared him. He collapsed under the stress … The brigade commander was totally out of it.67

  That public indictment came thirty years after the Sinai War, when Sharon and Gur were rival politicians. But Gur leveled the same accusations against Sharon inside the army as soon as the fighting was over. And there was worse. “I never saw his back when we were charging the enemy,” Gur said at a tense and bitter meeting of the paratroop officers that Sharon himself convened in March 1957. “Not at Gaza. Not at Khan Yunis. Nor at Hussan. Nor Kinneret. Nor Kalkilya. And most of all, not at the Mitle. Where was h
e from 1:30 in the afternoon till 8:30 at night? He wasn’t there. He didn’t take part in the fighting. He wasn’t even on the radio.”

  By then, many of the officers were in open revolt against their commander. They wanted him out. He had urged them to speak freely; they accused him, in effect, of cowardice. He tried to defend his behavior at the Mitle. He needed to organize the rest of the brigade, he said, for the armored Egyptian assault that he expected imminently. He needed to organize a makeshift landing strip in the desert for urgent medevac flights. He had directed the battle from the entrance to the pass, feeding in reinforcements, planning how to outflank the Egyptians dug into the hillsides.

  Was Sharon, Ben-Gurion’s paragon of the courageous new Jew, in fact a coward? Some of his critics inside the paratroop brigade cast this ultimate aspersion openly. “He was not a brave man,” said Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, then a platoon commander who was wounded at the Mitle. “He was fearful for his own personal safety.”68

  Others confirmed that he did not often lead his men into battle but acknowledged that, at his rank, this was not necessarily the criterion by which to judge his bravery. Yitzhak Hofi, his deputy at the Mitle, said Sharon’s behavior was entirely acceptable by the yardstick of any other fighting unit, where senior officers controlled the battle from behind the front line. “But by the standards of the paratroopers, which he himself had inculcated, there was something strange in his conduct.”69 Even Gur, his most stringent critic, conceded in a 1986 interview that Sharon did lead in several of the reprisal operations. “But at a certain point he began to think that he was too important [to lead from the front]. In the Gaza operation, for instance, he went along with us and then, suddenly, he moved aside.” Gur praised Sharon’s unequaled ability to “read the battlefield.” “That’s why I was so furious with him at the Mitle, for simply not being there. If he’d have been in contact with us, everything would have ended differently.”70

  In the welter of recriminations after the Mitle, another charge surfaced. This one stuck to Sharon for the rest of his life: he was an inveterate liar. This, too, wasn’t new. Ben-Gurion himself had gently suggested to his young hero a number of times that he needed to rein in his penchant for not quite telling the truth. “He never called him outright a liar,” said Yitzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s longtime bureau chief and most discreet and intimate aide who was later to become president of the state (1978–1983). “On one occasion when I was present, he spoke to him almost in a fatherly way. ‘Arik, you know people say about you that you aren’t always accurate …’ He was being euphemistic. He knew from his military aide, Nehemia Argov, that that was the word inside the army. Arik: ‘No, no. I do try to be accurate.’ BG: ‘Well, it’s not good not to be accurate. One must be accurate.’ Arik: ‘Okay, okay.’ ”71

  Dayan’s criticism of Sharon’s mendacity was withering. “[M]y complaint against the paratroop command was not so much over the battle itself as over their subterfuge in terming the operation a ‘patrol’ in order to satisfy the General Staff. This made me sad, and I regretted that I had not succeeded in molding such relations of mutual trust that if they had wished to defy my orders, they would have done so directly and openly.”72

  Shimon Peres watched these swirling emotions from his own position of close proximity to the prime minister and to the military leadership, and with an abiding affection for Sharon. Half a century later, he looked back on those events and on Sharon’s subsequent, turbulent career and offered a trenchant observation of his own. “For Arik, the report on the battle was part of the battle. You’ve got to fight not just the enemy; you’ve got to fight your superiors, too. They’re men of little faith.”73

  Shmuel Scheinerman’s death from cancer on December 31, 1956, added to the gloom that seemed to envelop Sharon at this time. “I felt I had not known him. In my childhood everyone had been too busy. Then came the War of Independence, then Unit 101 and the paratroopers. Since the age of seventeen I had hardly been at home. Perhaps it is normal for children not to fully appreciate their parents until later in life. For me, unfortunately, the first intimations of that truth came with the blow of my father’s passing.” Just recently, moreover, he and Gali had bought a home—from General Laskov, as it happened—in the Tel Aviv suburb of Zahala, brushing aside the sick Shmuel’s imprecations that they build a house and settle on his land at Kfar Malal. In the hospital, close to the end, Sharon recalled, “[Shmuel] said softly, ‘It’s a pity I’m going to die. You still need my help in so many ways.’ ”

  Arik had been able, at least, to gladden the dying man’s heart with the news that he had a grandson. On December 27, Gali gave birth. The couple was overwhelmed with joy: “Both of us had wanted many children. But two years earlier we had been told we would be unable to conceive. The news had put a cloud over our lives.”74 The circumcision ceremony, on the eighth day in Jewish law, was bittersweet. Shmuel was dead; the newborn was named after him: Gur Shmuel.

  * * *

  a The Revisionist Zionist movement, founded in 1925 by Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, became the main opposition to the Labor-led World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Jewish state in the making. The Revisionists evolved over the years into the Likud.

  b Yishuv: the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.

  c Like many of the people in Ramot Hashavim, the Steinitzes—both he and she were medical doctors—had fled Hitler’s Germany and were now reinventing themselves as farmers in the Jewish homeland. Their Bechstein grand made the bucolic life a little more palatable for them. “Now your grandfather,” Prime Minister Sharon used to needle the young Likud hard-liner Yuval Steinitz nearly seventy years later, “there was a sensible man.” Yuval, a left-wing professor of philosophy turned right-wing politician, was chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Sharon alternated irony and charm in an unremitting effort to winkle him away from the camp of his archenemy, Benjamin Netanyahu, into the dovish camp that supported his disengagement from Gaza. In charming mode, he would recall at Steinitz’s committee how, as a youngster driving his oxen into the fields, he would stop and listen to the music wafting from the open windows of Grandfather Steinitz’s house.

  d This stopped, for security reasons, when he became prime minister.

  e An acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization, commanded by Menachem Begin.

  f Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for Israel’s Freedom, known by the British as the Stern Gang. One of its leaders was another future prime minister—Yitzhak Shamir.

  g Shimon Peres, then a junior aide to Ben-Gurion, makes the point in Ben-Gurion: “[Priority] Number one for Ben-Gurion was Jerusalem. That was his argument with Yigael Yadin [the deputy chief of staff], who wanted to fight in Ashkelon because the Egyptians had reached Ashkelon. And Ben-Gurion said no; Jerusalem first. It was the same on the Jordanian front: John Glubb [the Transjordanian commander] said we’ll cross from Beisan to Haifa and bisect the Jewish state, and Emir Abdullah said no; first Jerusalem. Interesting, that parallel.”

  h Lahat went on to become a major general in the army and, later, mayor of Tel Aviv.

  i Chief of staff from 1958 to 1961.

  j Israel tried to head off this Anglo-Egyptian agreement by ordering a network of Egyptian-Jewish agents to carry out provocative attacks against American cultural centers and other institutions in Egypt. The idea, breathtaking in its naïveté and irresponsibility, was that such attacks would poison Egypt’s relations with the West and prompt Britain to keep its troops on the canal. The amateurish attacks all failed hopelessly; two of the Jews were executed; an Israeli agent committed suicide in prison; six other Egyptian-Jewish members of the group received long prison terms. What was poisoned as a result, terminally in the view of many historians, was the cohesive solidarity within the ruling Mapai Party. Ben-Gurion, who was on his Negev kibbutz and out of power during “the unfortunate mishap,” as it was called for years in the censored Israeli p
ress, insisted on a judicial process to determine if his stand-in as defense minister, Pinhas Lavon, had ordered the operation. Lavon put the blame on the head of Military Intelligence, Binyamin Gibli (no relation to Yitzhak). Luckily for Chief of Staff Dayan, he was out of the country when the order was given. Ben-Gurion’s veteran Mapai colleagues, led by his close lieutenant and eventual successor, Levi Eshkol, wanted to make do with a ministerial committee that had delivered an inconclusive verdict on who gave the order. After years of simmering conflict, Ben-Gurion eventually resigned from office and seceded from Mapai in 1963, taking Dayan and Peres with him. The labor movement as a whole was seriously weakened by this infighting. In time, this decline helped pave the way for the Likud’s accession to power in 1977, after three decades of Labor rule.

  k Two more died in separate incidents.

  CHAPTER 2 · PROBATIONER

  Please give our very best wishes and greetings to the Old Man. I hope that in case of need you won’t forget me here. I’m particularly asking you this because, regretfully, the relations that have developed between the new ‘court’ and myself might cause some people over there to forget me.” Sharon’s letter from London, dated July 28, 1958, was addressed to “Dear Yitzhak”—Ben-Gurion’s secretary, Yitzhak Navon. “Of course you’re too busy with much bigger and more important matters,” the plaintive cri de coeur continued, “for me to trouble you with these little things … But please—don’t forget I’m here, waiting for a summons in case of need. Warm wishes from Margalit, Arik.”1

  He was at the Royal Military Academy in Camberley, Surrey, for a yearlong course for middle-ranking officers from Britain itself and from around the world. Gali lived in a rented flat in London with their newborn son, Gur, and Arik would come home for “weekends of music and theater in London … On the whole, I was happy about it, but I was concerned too. I had left my command, the source of my strength.”2