by David Landau
By mid-morning the fighting had died away. The whole complex was in Sharon’s hands. The price: 40 Israeli dead and 140 wounded. A high price, but the reward was high, too. “Our mission had been to open the main axis to our forces in Sinai, and we had now done that,” Sharon writes. He goes on to fault the High Command for procrastinating the whole day before deciding on his division’s next assignment.
On Wednesday morning, June 7, at any rate, the orders came through: Sharon was to head south for Nakhl, which he had taken in his charge across Sinai at the head of the paratroop brigade eleven years before. The assignment was to cut off an Egyptian division that had been deployed at Kuntilla on the Negev border and was now heading back west. “If the Egyptians succeeded in getting to the Mitle Pass before we hit them,” Sharon explains, “they could close off our advance to the canal.” Outside Nakhl, which was defended by a full brigade, the lead vehicles hit a minefield, and Sharon decided to defer the attack to Thursday morning.
They celebrated that night with the rest of the nation over the news that the Western Wall had been taken, along with the whole Old City of Jerusalem, held since 1948 by Jordan.d Mordechai Gur, Sharon’s subordinate who had turned against him after the Mitle in 1956, led the paratroopers who liberated this holiest site in Judaism after a bloody battle outside the city ramparts.
When the tanks surged into Nakhl at dawn, they found the fortified complex deserted. “Everything was in place,” Sharon writes. “Tents were up, self-propelled guns were ready to move, artillery and mortars dug in and ready to fire. Everything was there except the people. We called it the ‘ghost brigade.’ ”
The division from Kuntilla, however, was fast approaching, chased by an IDF armored brigade that had been deployed defensively in the Negev at the start of the war but now crossed into Sinai to join the battle. “With a brigade of tanks, a reinforced battalion of half-tracks, and the divisional reconnaissance unit, I set an ambush for the fleeing Egyptians,” Sharon recorded. “The Egyptian Sixth Division entered a terrible killing field … For miles the desert was covered by ruined tanks and burned-out armored personnel carriers. Bodies littered the ground, and here and there across the scene groups of Egyptians were standing with their hands behind their heads … By [evening] the Sixth Division had ceased to exist.”26 This time, the Centurions and Shermans were supported by frontline jets that swooped down, pouring napalm and cannon fire onto the Egyptian column.
The desert was teeming with Egyptian soldiers desperate to get back, many of them without water in the blazing summer heat. The orders were to enable—later it became actively to assist and facilitate—the return across the canal of enlisted men, while officers were to be taken prisoner. These—almost five thousand of them—were eventually exchanged for a handful of Israeli POWs and various spies and agents imprisoned in Egypt.
General Tal’s division had had similarly stunning success along the northern axis. Starting from south of Gaza City on the first day, it swept west along the coast to take el-Arish. On the second day, as its forward units raced ahead toward central Sinai and the canal, other units swung back to conquer Gaza City and the rest of the Gaza Strip. Some writers attribute Dayan’s turnabout on Gaza to pressure from kibbutzim along the Gaza border that came under fire from inside the Strip. It is hard, though, to see how Gaza could have remained an unoccupied enclave once Israel was in occupation of the whole of Sinai (and of the entire West Bank). On the third and fourth days, Tal, too, fought major tank battles, on the Bir Gafgafa–Ismailia road. His units finally reached the canal at Ismailia and points north—again, contrary to Dayan’s original wishes.
The last two days of the Six-Day War were fought mainly between Israel and Syria, on the Golan Heights. Here, yet again, Dayan found his original intentions overturned by the pressure of events. The breathtaking speed and relative ease with which the IDF had smashed through the Egyptian divisions gave added weight to the demands of the kibbutzim beneath the Syrian escarpment to put an end to their sporadic shelling from the Syrian positions above. During the first four days of war the bombardment was incessant. Eshkol wavered, but Dayan was set against extending the war to Syria for fear of direct Soviet intervention. On Thursday night, though, he changed his mind. He gave David Elazar, the CO of Northern Command, two days—Soviet pressure for a cease-fire was already mounting—to push the Syrian army back across the escarpment on the top of the Golan Heights. The air force was available now for devastating close support. Armored reinforcements from Central Command were rushed up north to help. The fighting up the steep slopes of the Golan was brutal. But by midday Saturday the IDF was swarming across the plateau and digging in on a line anchored at Kuneitra, the main town on the Golan.
On Saturday, June 10, Sharon was summoned to meet with Gavish, the CO of Southern Command, and a helicopter was sent to pick him up. It developed engine trouble. “As we began to lose altitude,” he recalled, “small groups of [wandering Egyptian soldiers] began shooting at us, and we traded fire with them. Landing on the road, I wondered briefly what was going to happen to us. It was too ironic for words.”
Yisrael Tal took up the story in an interview years later:
I received an order to present myself immediately at Jebel Libni for a meeting of divisional commanders with the CO. A helicopter was sent to pick me up from Bir Gafgafa. During the flight I was glued to the window, staring out at the expanses of Sinai beneath us. I saw hundreds of Egyptian soldiers with their personal weapons fleeing west toward the canal. Among them, I saw a conspicuous figure, moving heavily along the dunes. I saw at once that it was Arik Sharon. I was rather concerned for his well-being. I told the pilot to land at once. I jumped out. Arik saw me and came running to the helicopter. He embraced me heartily and shouted above the din of the rotor, “Talik, we destroyed them.” I shouted back, “Get into the helicopter right now, before these Egyptians kill you.”27
Click here to see a larger image.
At Jebel Libni there were more embraces with Gavish and Yoffe and posing for photographs. Then on to Tel Aviv to meet with Rabin. “Somehow Lily had learned that I was coming in and was waiting for me at the airport with Gur,” Sharon writes. “It was a wonderful surprise despite the fact that we would not have any time together. She drove me to General Headquarters … Our meeting with Rabin was full of congratulations and warmth.”
A week later, as the demobilization of the reserves wound down, Sharon flew home for his first real leave since the waiting period began a month before. It was, despite the mourning in some families and the suffering of the wounded, a triumphal return—for the army in general and for Sharon in particular. As he toured the Old City of Jerusalem with Lily and Gur, he was mobbed by well-wishers shouting his name, jostling to touch him and thank him. All the generals were instant heroes in those heady days, their photographs smiling out from magazine covers and victory albums. But he, somehow, seemed to attract special attention, to the chagrin of some of his colleagues. There was whispering that he and his friends had encouraged journalists, local and foreign, to cover his division to the exclusion of others. His trailer was depicted as something of a running buffet cum press conference. His name and voice seemed to appear all over, in print and on television, at home and abroad.
In the Diaspora, too, Jews basked in the glow of Israel’s victory, which many saw as a salvation from the threat of another Holocaust. The Six-Day War marks the beginning of the renaissance, muted and hesitant at first, of Jewish identity among the three-million-odd Jews of the Soviet Union, where both Zionism and Judaism had been suppressed for decades. In the United States, home to more than six million Jews, the war—both the fear before and the relief and pride after—finally put to rest a certain ambivalence that many Jews there felt toward the Jewish state, as though its existence somehow threatened their Americanism.
Before the war, Sharon would later recall, he sometimes took young Gur to Mount Zion, on the borderline between the Israeli and the Jordanian sections of Jerusal
em. From the buildings on the mount they could peer over into the Old City. “ ‘Over there,’ I would say, ‘those places are not in our hands, but they are ours. They belong to us.’ ” Now he set out to show his oldest son the newly won territories. Many other Israeli families were doing the same that summer. “When they saw me, they would invariably gather around with congratulation, talk, and laughter. At these times I would look into Gur’s eyes. Although he never said anything, a proud happiness lit his face … Watching him, I too felt an immense pride.”
Sharon poured his love into the child, more especially since Gali’s death. “He really was the most enchanting child,” says Dalia Rabin, Yitzhak’s daughter. She was Gur’s group leader in the local scouts troop in Zahala. “He was the most beautiful boy in the group, and the most intelligent. I was at his funeral. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
Gur died in his father’s arms, shot through the head by an antique gun he had taken down from the wall to play with together with a friend in the yard. “ ‘I’ll be out in the front,’ he told me, then turned around to leave. Just before he did, he gave me a playful salute, the gesture of a boy who had grown up around the army and who liked military things.”
For the stricken, anguished father, the point was critical. Gur had been around guns all his life and knew how to handle them. Sharon never accepted the version of the other, older boy that Gur had shot himself by accident. Omri, then three and a half, and baby Gilad witnessed the accident. “He told the boy not to point,” Sharon, in his account of the tragedy, recalls Omri saying. “Gur told the boy not to point it.”28
It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Lily had taken the car to go shopping. Sharon lifted the boy and ran out, screaming for help. A car stopped and sped with them to the local clinic and from there to the hospital. “I had seen so many wounds in my life; no one had to tell me that this one was hopeless … I sat in the back seat with Gur on my lap, my shirt soaked with his blood. Ages seemed to pass as we raced to the hospital. And as we did, he died in my arms.
“In keeping with Jewish law, the funeral would have to be held before sundown … They put him in a simple pine coffin, and I asked them to open it for a minute. I looked at him again, then watched as they closed the lid … Standing in front of the grave [alongside Gali’s], I remembered five and a half years ago … that I had said, ‘The only thing that I can promise you is that I will take care of Gur.’ Now I could not shake the thought that I had not kept my promise … I didn’t take care of him. I just didn’t take care of him.
“For the first time in my life,” Sharon wrote, “I felt I was facing something that I could not overcome, that I could not live through.” His friend Uri Dan remembers him saying at this time that life would have no meaning anymore. He hired the attorney Shmuel Tamir to demand that the police conduct a full inquiry. “I’m sure Gur didn’t shoot himself,” he told the lawyer. “I don’t want to sue anyone. I just want all the facts to be investigated and the police to be convinced that Gur didn’t pull the trigger.” The other boy’s family claimed he had held the gun first but that Gur had taken it and looked down the barrel, and then it fired. Tamir studied all the ballistic and other evidence, “and in light of the facts I presented, the police investigators accepted Arik’s version.”29 Nevertheless, Sharon would sometimes hurl accusations at the other boy on the street. The boy was the son of an air force pilot. His mother wrote to the chief of staff, Haim Bar-Lev, to complain about this harassment, and Bar-Lev called in Sharon to try to talk to him. Eventually, the boy and his family moved out of the district.30
Sharon pulled through emotionally, thanks in large part to Lily. “The hardest times were at night,” he writes, “when sleep was impossible and the scene played and replayed itself in my head. Awake during the nights, Lily and I cried together. During the day there was work, then at home if we did not talk about it we could hold the pain inside. But once we would start to talk, it was impossible to put a barrier to the tears. Neither of us could find any comfort or relief from the terrible grief.”
Lily nevertheless often complained over the years to their friend—who had been Gali’s friend and now, with the two tragic deaths in the family, grew ever closer to Lily—that Arik refused to talk about Gur, that he kept his bereavement bottled up. In the trunk of his car he carried a rake, a hoe, and a watering can. When he passed the graveyard, he would take them out, tend the double grave site, and shed a silent tear.31 He organized an annual horse race in memory of his boy, who loved to ride; but he never spoke, even there, about Gur.32
Once, many years later, he let a rare shaft of light into this dark place in his soul. It was during an interview as prime minister on Israel TV Channel 2 in 2003. Looking at family snapshots, the interviewer, Rafi Reshef, gingerly referred to Gur. “He looks like a lovely boy,” he ventured.
“Yes, he really was a lovely boy,” the prime minister replied.
A boy with special leadership qualities. Very able. An excellent horseman. He took part in riding competitions. He was eleven years old when he was killed. At first, the blow hits you a thousand times a second. Later, it still keeps on hitting you all the time. If you ask me—there isn’t a day that I don’t think about it. But if you’re doing things—believe me, I don’t know how a blow like this affects people who aren’t busy doing things, and just live with their bereavement all the time—if you’re doing things all the time, it helps you to cope … It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. You can see it hurts. But I have inside me an ability to overcome very, very difficult things.
WEST BANK, EAST BANK
Arik Sharon’s efforts to colonize the captured territories, which were to preoccupy him for much of the remainder of his public life, began before the Six-Day War had even ended. “As soon as I heard that Samaria and Judea were liberated,” he wrote in Warrior, “I had cabled instructions to the commander of the infantry school to move from the base in Netanya to a captured Jordanian army camp near Shechem. That was the first one I moved.”
“Shechem,” which Sharon deliberately used in his English text, is the biblical Hebrew name for the large West Bank town known in Arabic and English as Nablus. The religious and nationalistic yearnings to annex the West Bank were reinforced from the outset of this decades-long and still unresolved political struggle by the less biblical, more rational contention that the territories were crucial for Israel’s defense. Given the enmity of the surrounding Arab states, it was argued, Israel was indefensible in its pre–Six-Day War borders. At one point, opposite Netanya on the Mediterranean coast, the country was less than ten miles wide.
Settlements, usually kibbutzim and moshavim, had been Zionism’s way of staking out its claim to the land from its earliest days. After independence in 1948, the leadership continued to see settlements along the borders—inhabited first by soldier-farmers, then by immigrant-farmers—as the surest way to secure and solidify the 1948 armistice lines.
This settlement tradition, espoused mainly by the Labor Zionists who had dominated Jewish life and politics in Palestine both before and after independence, was now almost naturally espoused by all those who sought, for religious, nationalist, or security reasons—for many of them, it was an amalgam of all three—to perpetuate Israel’s control over the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and strategic parts of Sinai).
Right from the start, though, such settlement ran into Arab and international opposition. The Arabs saw it, correctly, as a strategy ultimately designed to expand the borders of Israel at their expense. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 requiring Israel’s “withdrawal … from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and at the same time acknowledging “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Israel argued that the resolution did not specify withdrawal from “all the territories” or even from “the territories”—just f
rom “territories,” meaning there was scope for adjustments. These needed to be negotiated between the parties, Israel maintained; that was the meaning of “secure and recognized boundaries.”
Much of Israeli policy in the years and decades that followed the Six-Day War has been focused—though this was not often articulated—on how to avoid, allay, or weather international disapproval of Israeli settlement in the post-1967 territories while at the same time allowing the settlements to multiply and grow. “Allowing” covers a multitude of nuanced attitudes adopted over the years by various Israeli governments, of various ideological persuasions, to the diplomatic and legal problems posed by settlements and, in more recent years, to the domestic political power wielded by the growing settler constituency.
Sharon was brilliantly quick in grasping the dilemmas inherent in the Israeli yearning to settle the newly acquired territories—and in devising the first solution to get around them: army training camps. As the head of training, he was perfectly placed to implement his solution, which turned out to be no less than historic in affecting the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict for decades ahead. “Within a few months I was able to transfer quite a few [of the military training schools]: the infantry school, the engineering school, the military police school, part of the artillery school, the main basic training school for new recruits, the paratrooper recruit school, and others.”