Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Shimon Peres pinned his hopes for forming a Labor-led government on the three ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, parties, Agudat Israel (five seats), Degel Hatorah (two), and Shas (six). Doctrinally cool to the whole concept of secular Zionism, most haredi rabbis preferred the relative moderation of Labor to the more assertive nationalism of Likud. This was particularly true of the “Lithuanian,” or anti-Hasidic, rabbis who ran Degel Hatorah and also held considerable sway over Shas. It was an unexpected and devastating blow to Peres, therefore, when, on the night of March 26, Rabbi Eleazar Schach, the ninety-two-year-old doyen of the anti-Hasidic rabbis, told a Tel Aviv sports stadium packed with his supporters that Labor were “rabbit-eaters who have severed themselves from the Jewish people … There are kibbutzim that don’t know what Yom Kippur is. And they raise rabbits and pigs there,” he added, referring to animals whose consumption is forbidden under Jewish dietary laws. “And this is called the Jewish people?”11

  Peres refused to be deterred. He believed he had the five men of Agudat Israel firmly in his camp. He was confident that once he had a government up and running, Rabbi Schach would see the upside, and Degel Hatorah and Shas would join, too. He informed the Knesset that he would present his government for swearing in on April 15.

  But only after Peres and his ministers arrived at the Knesset, all decked out in their Saturday best and with their families in tow, did they discover that two of the Agudat men, vital for their majority, would not be attending. Sharon had gotten to them. One of the two, Eliezer Mizrachi, was in hiding, protected by bodyguards hired by Sharon. The other, Avraham Werdiger, phoned Peres ahead of time to say he could not vote for a dovish government.

  The crestfallen Peres could only apply sheepishly to the president for an extension of his coalition-making mandate. But that, too, proved fruitless, and in the end it was Shamir who presented a new government to the Knesset, on June 11, 1990. It was the farthest right, most religious coalition Israel had ever had, an amalgam of the Likud, the National Religious Party, the three haredi parties, and three ultranationalist parties. None was omitted. Even Moledet, which advocated the “transfer” of the Palestinians out of Palestine, was in; its leader, Rehavam Ze’evi, became a minister.

  Peres’s effort went down in Israeli history as “the stinking ploy,” a phrase coined by his inveterate rival, Yitzhak Rabin, who soon displaced him at the head of Labor. It involved not only wooing the haredim but also trying to winkle away individual Likud members with promises of perks and preferment for them and their supporters. The Likud fought back, Sharon in the forefront, with blandishments of its own to the same for-sale backbenchers.

  BOGEYMAN

  “The telephone number is 1–202–456–1414. When you’re serious about peace, call us.” James Baker, testifying in Congress two days after the new Israeli government won Knesset approval, minced no words. Bush backed his secretary of state with a polite but firm letter to the new-old prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. “What I need to know from you,” he wrote, “is whether you are prepared to go forward without new preconditions on the basis of acknowledging—privately at first, if need be—that you will meet with a delegation of Palestinians from the territories that include a few individuals who fit the deportee and dual-addressee categories.” Shamir, through diplomatic channels, replied that he wasn’t. American peacemaking efforts seemed effectively over, pending, as Baker writes in his memoirs, “a new Israeli Prime Minister and another Secretary of State.”12

  But the real trouble between the two governments was only just beginning. There had been a hint of it earlier in the year when Shamir told the Knesset that the anticipated immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the imploding Soviet Union would require “a big Israel.” The Soviet mass aliya, plus the new Israeli government’s no-holds-barred settlement policy in the Palestinian territories, plus its request from the United States for guarantees for the huge loans it needed to absorb the new immigrants—all these together made for a combustible mix. The invasion of an Arab state by half a million American soldiers and assorted European and Arab armies, plus Israel getting rocketed by Iraq but still staying out of the war at Bush’s insistent request, plus a truculent Ariel Sharon building those settlements as fast as he could, thumping on the drums of war, provoking and insulting all and sundry—all these dramatically enhanced the volatility. It is a tribute to Bush and Baker that out of this dangerous brew they nevertheless did eventually orchestrate a lurch forward toward peace at the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference in October 1991.

  With Labor now out of the government, the Americans feared a splurge of land confiscation and settlement building. Worse yet, in terms of Arab world sensibilities, they feared Israel would channel its abundant new infusion of Jewish immigrants into the Palestinian territories. But they had—or they hoped they had—a means of leverage: Israel had asked for $400 million in loan guarantees. The request would subsequently grow to $10 billion. Bush and Baker took the position that they would not fund, even obliquely, the expansion of Jewish settlement on Palestinian land. Shamir and his government, girding themselves with righteous outrage, insisted that the “humanitarian” issue of immigrant absorption never be linked to—much less conditioned on—the “political” question of the territories.

  Sensing the strength of feeling on the American side, and aware of the serious financial need on their own side, the Israelis tried at first to fog and fudge. Minister of Housing Sharon declared in June 1990 that there would be no deliberate encouragement of the immigrants to make their homes in the settlements. The State Department said this statement was encouraging and “a step in the right direction.” But the spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler noted that Sharon’s statement had been reported in several different versions, and Washington awaited clarity.

  But clarity was one commodity that would be hard to come by in everything to do with settlement building and settlement policy during the next two years. In July 1991, the newspaper Davar disclosed that would-be settlers could obtain parcels of land free from the government to build their homes on. In addition, easy mortgages were made available in the settlements, and infrastructure—water, sewerage, and electricity—was laid for free.

  There was a pall of unclarity, moreover, surrounding the number of homes that were being built in the settlements. They were, after all, a small part of a vast, countrywide building program presided over by Sharon and designed to provide every newcomer from the former Soviet Union with a roof over his head. American diplomats on the ground, and, Israel assumed, satellites in the sky, kept trying to tally the houses and trailers in the settlements as they went up. Leftist Knesset members, aided by Peace Now, published their own count—for which they were excoriated by Sharon as snitches and traitors. In fact, construction in the settlements quadrupled during 1991. In the first nine months of that year, according to official Israeli figures collated much later, 6,435 new houses (most single-family, some multiple-family) were begun in the settlements, compared with 1,820 during all of 1990 and 1,410 in 1989. In October 1990, Baker announced that he was postponing a visit to Israel by U.S. officials tasked with wrapping up details of the loan guarantee.

  Desert Storm provided something of a hiatus in the gathering tempest with Israel over the settlements and the loan guarantees. The war against Iraq generated tensions of its own in the U.S.-Israel relationship, but the sides were aligned differently. The president and the secretary of state persuaded Shamir that his country’s deepest interest lay in staying out of the conflict and not responding militarily to the Scud missiles that began falling on Tel Aviv once the American attack on Iraq began. The Americans feared that any Israeli involvement would disrupt their coalition of Western and Arab armies. “There is nothing your air force can do that we are not doing,” Baker assured Shamir. “If there is, tell us and we’ll do it.”13

  Arrayed against Shamir’s policy of restraint were Sharon, Modai, and other hard-line ministers who demanded that the IDF act, and also Minister of De
fense Arens, who was eager to order Israeli air and ground attacks, but only in coordination with the U.S.-led allied forces.

  In all, thirty-nine Scuds hit Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli cities during Desert Storm. They wrought considerable damage to property but directly caused only one death (several deaths during this period were attributed to missile-induced heart attacks and to asphyxiation from wrong use of gas masks) and left some three hundred injured (from assorted causes, some related only indirectly to the rockets),14 also a relatively low figure. This was, however, the first time in Israel’s history that the Jewish state was attacked and failed to respond. As such, it produced a major national trauma, over and above the huge dislocation of civilian life as large numbers of Tel Avivans and Haifaites sought refuge each night in less targeted areas of the country.

  Arens kept up a solid front of loyalty with the prime minister throughout the nearly two months of conflict. The Americans knew that Arens’s incessant pressure for an air corridor to western Iraq, and for the allied air forces to “deconflict” while the IDF engaged, could always be deflected by a direct appeal to Shamir for yet more forbearance and gritting of teeth. Arens let none of his reservations leak out to the depressed Israeli public, many of whom never stopped worrying till the very end that Saddam Hussein might tip a Scud with a chemical warhead.

  Sharon had no such inhibitions. Within days of the outbreak of the war, the whole country knew that Sharon was urging IDF action to silence the Scud launchers and to punish Iraq and that the elderly, overcautious Shamir didn’t have the stomach for it. Sharon had no compunction over disloyally tongue-lashing the government’s passivity as he posed for the cameras clambering around the ruins of homes hit by the Scuds.

  At cabinet, Sharon advised that the air force be instructed to send aircraft over western Iraq on photography missions without obtaining prior American consent. “Notify them and fly!” was Sharon’s prescription. Five days later, he broadened it: Israel should land commando units in western Iraq to search and destroy the Scud launchers, simply informing the Americans “that we are carrying out an operation there, and that for the following three days the area is under Israeli responsibility.” But Shamir did not waver, and the majority of the ministers sided with him. That remained the policy—despite Arens’s persistent efforts to change it—until the end of the war.15

  King Hussein of Jordan seriously damaged his relations with Washington by publicly sympathizing with the Iraqi dictator before and during the war. For Sharon, contemplating the Middle East peace conference that Secretary Baker quickly began organizing on the back of America’s victory, Hussein’s bad bet was added reason why Israel should use the occasion to explain to the world that Jordan is Palestine.

  During a six-week period of intensive shuttle diplomacy in the region in April and May 1991, laying the groundwork for the conference, it seemed to Baker that Sharon announced a new settlement in the territories every time his plane touched down in Tel Aviv. “I am not happy with these statements [of Sharon’s],” Baker recalls Shamir assuring him. “ ‘I’m not asking you to adopt our position,’ I countered. ‘But I am asking you to keep this man from throwing land mines in the way of peace.’ ‘I don’t want to involve you in our internal politics,’ Shamir demurred…‘I will deal with it.’ By now, of course, I felt that he wouldn’t—and he never did.”

  That testimony is important because, as with the Likud government’s original settlement drive after 1977 and as with the Lebanon War in 1982, it sets in proper perspective the relative roles of the prime ministers of the day—then Begin, now Shamir—and the minister charged with executing their policy: Sharon. There was no question in Baker’s mind that Shamir was Israel’s ultimate policy maker, on settlements as on everything else, regardless of his mealymouthed excuses, which the secretary had long stopped buying. Shamir was very different from Sharon. He was amicable, conciliatory, and soft-spoken.e But at the end of the day Shamir chose to acquiesce in Sharon’s settlement provocations because the two of them were of one mind in regard to the settlement issue and in their determined resistance to Bush and Baker’s efforts to impose a settlement freeze using the loan guarantees as both the stick and the carrot.

  Baker flew indefatigably from capital to capital wooing regional leaders to attend a peace conference (both the word “peace” and the word “conference” were the subjects of prolonged and bitter argument among the invitees) that would launch two tiers of negotiation: bilateral talks between Israel and each of its neighbors, and multilateral talks on key issues affecting the entire region. Baker termed his exhaustingly long sessions with President Hafez Assad in Damascus “bladder diplomacy.” Shamir was hardly less obstreperous, but in the end even he realized that he could drag his feet no longer without jeopardizing the foundations of American support for Israel. He carried his decision by a comfortable vote of 16 to 3 in the cabinet. Sharon was the only Likud minister to oppose it.

  The conference took place at the end of October 1991 in Madrid. It was a triumph for American diplomacy and a moment of new hope for the Middle East. After all the delays and nitpicking—the protagonists were wrangling over the shape of the table till the morning the conference opened—the bald and remarkable fact was that Israelis and Arabs sat together, in front of the whole world, and pledged to embark on peace talks. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev opened the proceedings with appropriately momentous speeches, and even though the spell was broken by some crude rhetoric from the Syrian foreign minister, everyone present felt that a window of promise had opened up. Shamir, wary of too exuberant momentum, resorted to Menachem Begin’s tactics after Camp David: to slow things down, he put trusted hard-line aides at the head of Israel’s negotiating teams in the talks with the Syrians and with the Jordanian-Palestinians that now began. Suffice it to say that ten weeks later, the Jordanian/Palestinian-Israeli negotiators were still sitting in the corridor outside the negotiating room in Washington, arguing about whether the Jordanians and the Palestinians were one delegation or two.

  In Israel, Baker’s pre-conference shuttles had been darkened by the resurgent dispute over the loan guarantees. In April, coinciding with a Baker visit, a new settlement, Revava, was founded on the West Bank, and Sharon’s Housing Ministry announced plans to build twenty-four thousand homes for settlers in the territories over the next four years. In May, Sharon visited Washington. Baker refused to see him. “I intervened with the President to block a meeting between Sharon and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp at Kemp’s office. The meeting … was held at the Israeli embassy … Like his settlements policy, Ariel Sharon was an obstacle to peace.”

  The dispute grew more personal with the passing months. Bush was increasingly portrayed on the Israeli right as unsympathetic and his secretary of state as downright hostile. Shamir was seen by Bush as devious and by Baker as straight and honorable but implacably extreme. Sharon was the chief focus of the Americans’ ire. Bush was said to be distressed at the thought that if the United States withheld the loan guarantees and Shamir was damaged politically, Sharon would benefit, whereas if the United States relented on the loans and the settlement building still continued, Sharon would benefit from that, too.

  The antipathy that Sharon had generated in U.S. government circles during the Lebanon War, and his infamy in the American media, had been marginally mitigated by the verdict in the Time trial. But he had kept up his transatlantic sniping throughout the decade, bolstering his chosen political image at home as an unbending nationalist who would not countenance seeing Israel be pushed around by its superpower patron. Thus, for instance, in the highly embarrassing and potentially disastrous “Pollard affair” involving an Israeli spy in the heart of U.S. intelligence, Sharon lashed out at Peres, Shamir, and Rabin for cooperating too readily with Washington—and made sure his strictures became public knowledge. Sharon made much play of having been kept out of the loop while Jonathan Jay Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was transmitting
reams of raw intelligence to Tel Aviv. He was similarly kept in the dark while Israel scrambled to contain the damage after Pollard’s arrest, in November 1985, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.

  Sharon was not in fact completely in the clear, because Pollard was recruited by the Bureau for Scientific Liaison (“Lekem” by its Hebrew acronym), a shadowy organization over which Sharon, as defense minister, had installed an old friend and sleuth, Rafi Eitan, as director. But he berated the top troika with gusto and vilified the United States for its vindictiveness toward an ally. He warned at cabinet that Israel’s decision to send back the voluminous product of Pollard’s espionage was tantamount to ensuring a life sentence for the young Jewish spy. In the event, that is what Pollard received.f

  Inevitably, the U.S.-Israel spat over the loan guarantees became entangled in Washington’s pre–Madrid conference discussions with Arabs, too. The Americans feared that to award the guarantees might deter Arab states from attending, while to refuse them might deter Israel. The administration asked Israel to defer its request until after the conference. This triggered a huge confrontation with Israel’s supporters in Washington, marshaled by the lobbying organization AIPAC. Memorably, at the height of the battle, Bush referred to himself as “one lonely guy” fighting “powerful political forces.”

  In the event, the administration won a 120-day postponement, until after the Madrid conference. When it ended, Baker suggested a compromise, originally proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, whereby the guarantees would be conditioned on a ban on any new settlement construction and reduced by the amount spent by Israel to finish construction of settlement homes already begun. This immediately ran up against the problem of an Israeli smoke screen. How many homes were under construction in the settlements? Baker maintained that according to his information there were 6,000. Some Israeli officials said 13,000. Sharon claimed there were 22,000. But it made no difference, because Shamir rejected the proposed settlement freeze out of hand. No compromise was possible, and Israelis went to the polls on June 23, 1992, in the knowledge that their Likud-led government had been denied the vitally needed loan guarantees because of its settlement policy.