by David Landau
Arik was there on the canal bank with the Gilowas [on the morning of the sixteenth]. They should have tasked Bren’s division with clearing the area of the approach roads. And let Arik cross.
They stopped Haim Erez and turned him around. And soon enough, of course, the Egyptians recovered and built a new defensive line with vast minefields and reinforcements. Instead, we should have continued advancing westward toward Cairo with two divisions. I’m not saying we should have entered Cairo. I’m not saying the Great Powers would have allowed us to approach Cairo. But that would have meant decisive victory. If the powers had intervened to stop us, that means we have achieved a decision in this war. As it was, the war ended indecisively.
The contrary viewpoint is perhaps best expressed by Asher Levy, the brigadier-general who fought the war first in Bren’s division and then in Southern Command headquarters. Best expressed—because Levy, at the end of the day, is among those who believes passionately that without Sharon there would have been no crossing of the canal. But as regards what came later, he says,
It was because of his character, the bad traits in Arik’s character. He saw that he was left behind while Bren began to sweep ahead, down the coast of the lake toward Suez. Not because [Bren] was such a great general, but because things went well for him. The IDF was back to its old self. The plans for racing down southward were good, and all went fantastically—until Suez. All the glory was over there. And Arik’s sitting over here…
He was wrong about Missouri. It was vital to ensure at all costs that the eastern bridgehead stay open. That was Southern Command’s most crucial task, and they assigned it to Arik. But he didn’t like it, because the glory wasn’t there. The plan was that he takes care of the bridgehead and Bren crosses. But he wanted to cross. And Haim Bar-Lev wouldn’t let him. He said, Bren crosses and you broaden the bridgehead. And Bar-Lev was 100 percent right.
And so he decided that we’ve got to conquer Ismailia. The Command were against it. They said it would be too great an effort, and they were opposed to making another such effort at that stage of the war. But Arik dragged them into it, and many men were killed there.
It is that sort of scathing and forthright criticism of Sharon—Levy, it will be recalled, is similarly unbiased about the events of October 8—that gives cogency and conviction to Levy’s ultimate verdict on Sharon’s war record. “The fact that Arik Sharon was there meant that despite all the setbacks and difficulties and despite the fact that the bridge hadn’t arrived, Arik Sharon with his tenacity and perseverance determined that Israel crossed the canal. No one can take that away from him, ever. Whoever denies it is simply not telling the truth.”51
Levy’s appraisal, shared by every last soldier in the 143rd Division, has long become a part of the national ethos. It is not assailable in the collective public mind. Sharon, whatever the subsequent—and previous—controversies surrounding him, has his place assured in the Israeli pantheon on the basis of that one night’s battle.
In a way, that makes the “war of the generals” that followed all the more pointless and perverse. If, as Sharon and his friends say, Bar-Lev was trying to rob him of the glory, he failed. If, as Sharon’s many enemies say, Sharon was obsessively and selfishly pursuing the glory on the west side of the canal, he didn’t need to. He’d got it already. As far as Israeli history is concerned, Arik Sharon crossed the canal. As soon as the first paratrooper on the first rubber dinghy touched down on the west bank at 1:32 a.m. on October 16, that was the story: Sharon had crossed. When Haim Erez’s tanks were trundled over five hours later, it was sealed in the nation’s annals.
* * *
a Dvela means “dried fig” in Hebrew. IDF code names are eclectic and arbitrary; they have no intrinsic significance.
b Eight years later, with Reshef now a full general and Sharon the minister of defense, Reshef resigned from the army rather than fight, he says, in Sharon’s looming war in Lebanon. In civilian life, he became a prominent dove. But his assessment of Sharon the battlefield commander never changed. “He radiated presence, charisma, leadership. Men followed him willingly. They heard his voice on the radio, his assurance, his encouragement, his motivation. They saw him; he was with us. He was always there.” Reshef shared his memories and assessments in a series of interviews in his home in Tel Aviv in 2006–2007.
c The large IDF base in central Sinai.
d Lakekan, on the shore of the Great Bitter Lake to the south of Matzmed, had been successfully evacuated by order of Reshef the previous afternoon (http://www.hativa14.org.il/).
e This is another of Sharon’s tall war stories. “It was I who disobeyed orders,” said his deputy divisional commander, General Jackie Even, “his orders. And after the war he thanked me for it.” In fact, it was two of Sharon’s most senior subordinates, Jackie Even and Colonel Gideon Altschuler, who together ensured that a sufficient force remained on the key strategic hill of Hamadia to stave off the Egyptian assaults.
f Sharon, in Warrior, delivers a trenchant critique of the day’s disaster, setting it in the wider context of the cursed conceptziya that blighted the post-1967 IDF. He does not expressly include himself among the targets of his grim retrospective. But nor does he entirely exculpate himself. He scarcely could, given the central role he had played in the army over those past six years.
October 8 was the black day of the Israeli Defense Forces, a day that traumatized the army. On the first two days of the war in Sinai, we had suffered defeats. But for those defeats it was easy enough to find scapegoats; poor intelligence, Defense Minister Dayan’s miscalculations, the government’s errors. October 8, however, belonged to the IDF alone.
The failure stemmed from a combination of major tactical errors and also from an attitude of overconfidence that since the Six Day War had hardened into arrogance. After the victories then, the idea had taken hold that the tank was the ultimate weapon … The IDF was overcome by a kind of tank mania. Other combat arms—infantry, armored infantry, and artillery—were neglected. Standard battle doctrines such as ratios of force and concentration of effort were taken less seriously. The commanding idea seemed to be that the business of the Israeli tanks was to charge and the business of the Arab infantry was to run away … But this psychological flaw was not Gonen’s alone. Adan’s Centurion and Patton tanks were hit at long distances by a hail of Sagger missiles and other anti-tank fire. Those that managed to close with the enemy found themselves surrounded by swarms of Egyptians firing Sagger and RPG bazookas. Natke Nir, who led the attack, left eighteen of his twenty-two tanks burning on the field. It was only by incredible courage that he managed to penetrate to within eight hundred yards of the canal before ordering his few survivors to withdraw in reverse gear, firing as they retreated.
g Saguy himself later entered the Knesset as a Likud member. He served as mayor of Bat Yam, a town bordering Tel Aviv, from 1993 to 2003.
h Unbeknownst to Sharon and his brigade commanders, Matzmed had in fact fallen earlier that morning.
i Among the fatalities during this waiting period was General Mandler, killed by artillery fire on his command vehicle on October 13. Kalman Magen was immediately appointed in his place to command the southern division.
j See above, p. 88.
k He rose to become a general and, later, minister of defense (1996–1999).
l See p. 87.
m The original slogan, millennia old, applied to the biblical king David.
n According to Elazar’s biographer, it was Elazar who in fact rescinded the order to attack. Tal awoke Elazar before dawn, Bartov writes, and briefed him on the crisis. Elazar sided with Sharon. “There’s a limit to how often you can tell a senior commander who’s in the field and thinks he can’t do it and thinks he’ll have casualties,” Elazar explained later. “That morning—I thought, enough is enough!! And so Tal called Gonen and told him to call off the attack” (Bartov, Dado, 313).
CHAPTER 4 · ADVISE AND DISSENT
Even if nothing more had
happened in his life after the Yom Kippur War, that war alone would have imprinted Ariel Sharon’s name indelibly into Israel’s history. The surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on October 6, 1973, sent a jolt of existential terror through the nation. Suddenly the survival of the Jewish state seemed to hang in the balance again. People feared for their lives as the front lines gave way and enemy armies poured across the 1967 borders. In days and nights of desperate fighting, the Syrians were stopped and then pushed back across the Golan Heights. Ten days into the war, a wave of relief swept through the country with the news that Israeli troops had crossed the Suez Canal and were counterattacking on the Egyptian mainland. “Arik” was on everyone’s lips. “Arik, king of Israel,” the general who had led the crossing and turned defeat into victory of sorts, however costly and incomplete.
If Yom Kippur was Israel’s Pearl Harbor—though even more traumatic because so much closer to the heartland—Sharon was its MacArthur: arrogant, swashbuckling, manipulative, loved or hated, always controversial, master of self-promotion, contemptuous of his superiors. It was his image that everyone associated with the national deliverance.
Events veritably conspired to produce his moment of triumph. Sharon had only recently doffed his uniform—but not so recently as to be held responsible for the debacle on the Suez front. He had been forced out of the army, as he claimed, by the very men who were now held responsible for the disastrous war and were forced by a commission of inquiry and a public outcry into ignominious retirement. Though forced out of the regular army, moreover, he had been left with a reserve command that placed him at the very heart of the maelstrom and allowed his great gifts as a general to shine through.
He was a general again, for the duration, but he was already a frontline politician—running an election campaign against the government, which, as it now suddenly turned out, had led the country into catastrophe. Party loyalties and military tactics blurred and clashed in the heat of battle as Sharon vied for the glory that was rightfully his and his rivals, as he saw it, conspired to rob him of it. He was supported and protected, as so often in his stormy military career, by Moshe Dayan. The minister of defense was himself mortally weakened by the war. But he was still strong enough to prevent Sharon’s adversaries from removing him, as they sought repeatedly to do.
In the final analysis, it was Sharon’s generalship that won the day, won Dayan’s backing, and won him the nation’s adulation. No amount of manipulative self-promotion could manufacture that battlefield reality—just as no amount of bad-mouthing by his many detractors could ultimately obscure it. A good general needs luck, Napoleon famously observed. But he also needs to be a good general. Sharon was a superb general in 1973, not only in the eyes of his own men in the 143rd Division, but also in the view of more dispassionate observers. “He was our outstanding field commander,” says Ehud Barak, subsequently chief of staff, prime minister, and minister of defense, whose tank battalion was attached to Sharon’s division. “I saw it at the time, and I saw it again later when I studied all the battle logs and debriefings of that terrible war.”1
After the war, despite the battlefield successes, the nation sank into the blackest despondency. It was not just the endless military funerals and the hospital wards teeming with wounded soldiers and besieged by anxious families. It was the nagging, relentless sense that all this need not have happened, that the tragedy could have been avoided or at least greatly diminished. In 1948 there were more dead and wounded and fewer families who emerged from the war unscathed. But people shared in the joy of victory. The overwhelming mood was of optimism and confident determination. The dead, it was felt then, had not died in vain.
From the moment the guns fell silent now, the war became the stick with which the Likud opposition beat the government. Menachem Begin’s sonorous, theatrical voice filled the Knesset chamber: “Why did you not deploy the tanks? Why did you not mobilize the reserves?” For months, he never changed the script and never relented, until there was barely a child in Israel who could not intone those searching accusations.
Sharon, poised to resume his war-delayed entry into political life, saw his role as twisting the knife into the bowels of the Labor establishment. The black mood that gripped the nation would be the catalyst, he believed, for achieving his vaunted purpose in political life: bringing about a change of government for the first time in Israel’s history.
The election, originally scheduled for October 21, had been postponed with the outbreak of the war. It was now to take place on December 31. Sharon would no longer be the Likud campaign manager; he declined to leave his division and doff his uniform until the last possible moment. But he led the electoral charge no less effectively from the west bank of the canal. “Israeli General Assails Superiors,” The New York Times blared forth on November 9. “The general who led Israeli forces across the Suez Canal,” correspondent Charles Mohr began his first report, “says he believes that his superiors were too slow to reinforce and exploit his breakthrough, losing the chance to achieve a decisive victory over Egypt.”
In minute detail, in two long articles illustrated with maps and photographs, Mohr laid out Sharon’s version of the war in the south, replete with all of his complaints about how it had been run and how he had been stymied and constrained at every turn. “The most arresting assertion,” Mohr wrote, “was that higher Israeli headquarters delayed for 36 to 48 hours in pushing reinforcements across the canal bridgehead that General Sharon’s troops had seized.” An even more arresting assertion, for Bar-Lev and Elazar and their political bosses, was the broad and brazen spin that permeated Mohr’s entire text: the canal crossing was Sharon’s own exclusive stroke of strategic genius.
“To comprehend the debate that General Sharon’s remarks will surely provoke,” Mohr wrote, “it is necessary to understand something of the canal-crossing he planned and evolved. The plan was complex … General Sharon said that during his four years as southern area commander he had realized that it might be necessary someday to make a canal crossing and had made preparations for one … Of his plan General Sharon said: ‘The main problem was how to reach the water and establish the bridgehead in the same night … It worked,’ General Sharon said in his faint, husky voice, ‘but it was complicated.’ ”
The “war of the generals” now merged into the election campaign, and The New York Times account became, in effect, a part of the Likud platform. The other side had tried to stop it. “Officials in Tel Aviv had apparently attempted to prevent General Sharon from telling his story and voicing criticisms,” Mohr wrote at the end of his second piece. “On the day on which the general was finally reached, an order had been given in Tel Aviv that a journalist who knew the general from the 1967 war was ‘not to be allowed to go to Arik.’ But this obstacle was overcome. As General Sharon poured cognac in his trailer that night he began to order arrangements made so that two guests could stay overnight. A press liaison officer protested that this was not possible because it was against orders. With a smile General Sharon said, ‘You are a major. I am a major general. They stay.’ ”
The other side hit back as best it could. The plan to cross the canal “did not belong to any individual,” Haim Bar-Lev retorted in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, also prominently carried in The New York Times. “It was IDF doctrine since the Six Day War … The Command decided on the time and the place.”2 Chief of Staff Elazar issued an official castigation of “biased and one-sided descriptions and interviews … which serve no constructive purpose but only personal enhancement.” Sharon’s reserves command was revoked; this time Dayan made no effort to block the decision.
The election results were a disappointment for Sharon. The Likud did fairly well, increasing its representation from 32 seats to 39 in the 120-seat Knesset. But the Labor Alignment still held firmly to the reins of powers with an invincible plurality of 51 seats—a drop of only 5 from the previous Knesset. Labor’s allies—the National Religious Party (10 seats, down from 12) and the Indepe
ndent Liberals (stable at 4 seats)—made their mathematical calculations and slid back into the familiar postelection mode of negotiating a new coalition with Labor.
But the new political arithmetic did not fully articulate the public mood. The people had preferred Labor to the Right, but they did not want the prewar leadership to continue in office. They wanted new men to head the new Labor government. Lone demonstrators back from the front lines attracted angry throngs. The streets seemed to seethe with resentment. Sharon, newly elected to the Knesset and about to take his seat, contributed to the gathering storm with a parting order of the day to his 143rd Division. The canal crossing, he wrote, carried out by their division had won the war. It had been achieved “despite blunders and mistakes, despite failures and obstacles, despite hysteria and loss of control.” Now, he continued, the war was over, and talks were taking place with Egypt. “I feel the need to fight on another front … That is why I am leaving. I want you to know that I have never before served with fighters like you. You are the finest of them all … If we have to come back and resume our fight—I promise you that I will be with you.”a
That same afternoon, Sharon called a news conference at the press center in Tel Aviv. No longer in army fatigues but still striking a photogenic pose in a black turtleneck and leather jerkin, he blasted the disengagement of forces agreement just concluded with Egypt.
Under the prodding of the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, Israel had agreed to withdraw from the west bank of the canal, and Egypt had agreed to pull back most of its forces from the east bank. Some lightly armed Egyptians were to remain on the east bank in a narrow “limited forces zone.” An adjacent strip of desert would be held by a UN Emergency Force, and a third strip was designated another “limited forces zone” in which IDF troops would be restricted to light arms.