Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  All together, they accounted for barely 30 percent of the territories. This proportion was to grow in subsequent presentations of the plan. But for Sharon’s detractors, both Israeli and Palestinian, then and thereafter, the proposal became known, and deprecated, as “Sharon’s Bantustans.” The allusion to South African apartheid was used advisedly, and it stuck. It was meant to accentuate the effects of the separated enclaves on the Palestinians’ freedom of residency and of movement.7 In later elaborations of his plan, Sharon suggested an elaborate network of roads, bridges, and tunnels to link the Palestinian enclaves.

  OLD SOLDIERS

  “Eitan, we both raised our voices. We shouted at each other.” Eitan Haber, Yitzhak Rabin’s longtime bureau chief, recalled his boss emerging from long, one-on-one meetings with Arik Sharon in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. “He would be red-faced with anger after Sharon left, visibly agitated.” Why, then, did the prime minister inflict on himself these tongue-lashings from a bitter political foe? “He always had a soft spot for Sharon. Don’t forget, they went back decades together. ‘Ate from the same mess tin,’ as old soldiers say.”

  Sharon agreed. “Our relations are built on a completely different background [from politics]; they come from another world. In that world, too, there were clashes between us. But we marched together, in lockstep, over decades, on tough missions and in life-and-death situations. My assessment now is that on key national issues Rabin has completely reversed his positions. I consider this reversal dangerous. But that doesn’t affect our relationship.”8

  The turnabout in Israel’s diplomatic direction, in the fall of 1993, was indeed breathtakingly sharp. For years and years, the focus of its policy and public advocacy had been directed at how to spurn the Palestine Liberation Organization and all it stood for. And now Rabin of all people was extending a hand of peace to the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, the man a generation of Israelis had been taught to hate and fear as a cunning and vicious terrorist.

  True, on the left, and even among moderate Likudniks, beneath the public facade of rejection—the law of the land had until recently made it a criminal offense to meet with a PLO officialc—many talked privately of the inevitability of an Israel-PLO deal. This was the case before King Hussein turned his back on the West Bank in 1988, and all the more so thereafter.

  Nevertheless, when the turnabout came, it took everyone by surprise. Peres and Rabin succeeded in keeping the months of talks in Norway secret.d The initial agreement, signed on the White House lawn and sealed with that famous handshake—Rabin reluctant, Arafat eager, Clinton fairly forcing them to clinch—was called “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements.” The aim was to put in place an “elected Council for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.”9

  The five years were to begin “upon the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho area.” The two sides would negotiate an “Interim Agreement” providing for a “transfer of powers and responsibilities from the Israeli military government … to the Council.” “Permanent status” negotiations were to begin “no later than” the third year and were to cover “issues, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors.”

  The declaration was accompanied by an exchange of letters between Rabin and Arafat. The PLO recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” committed itself to resolve “all outstanding issues through negotiations,” renounced “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence,” and affirmed “that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist … are now inoperative and no longer valid.” Rabin wrote simply, in response, that “Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.”

  Sharon never ceased excoriating Oslo as a historic mistake of monstrous proportions. For him, Arafat was and would always remain a base murderer, an unreformed terrorist, an inveterate liar, implacably committed to Israel’s destruction. Nevertheless, the gradual transfer, under the Oslo Agreement, of parcels of territory to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority offered, in Sharon’s mind, an opportunity to advance his own ideas on the shape of Palestinian-Israeli peace. Thus, while protesting vehemently in speech and in print against the initial “Gaza-and-Jericho First” phase of the Oslo process, Sharon was also boasting, “In Gaza, Rabin is basically implementing my plan. What he’s done is pretty close to what I’ve been proposing.”

  Sharon meant that Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the establishment of Arafat’s rule there had left all of the Jewish settlements in the Strip intact and undisturbed. They sat on nearly 20 percent of the land.10 They would continue to be protected by the army. The newly formed Palestinian Authority was to exercise its self-rule, for the time being, over the remainder of the Strip. Sharon wanted that “time being” to go on indefinitely. And more important, he wanted the same sort of arrangement to pertain in the West Bank.

  He wanted to input his ideas with Rabin regardless of their formal status on opposite sides of the political divide. Rabin, never too busy for Sharon, would hear him out, time after time, just the two of them, in meetings from which even the prime minister’s closest aides were excluded. For Rabin, Eitan Haber explained, “it was a way of reexamining his own positions, by submitting them to the rigorous criticism of someone with mirror-image views, but with experience and detailed knowledge that he really respected … Sharon would say, ‘Why are you giving them this hill? It’s higher than the next hill. Give them that.’ He knew the map like the back of his hand.”11

  The agreement on Gaza and Jericho was signed on schedule, on May 4, 1994, in Cairo. On July 1, Arafat arrived in triumph in Gaza. His long exile seemed over. A new era of peace seemed to have dawned. Later that month Israel and Jordan signed a joint declaration in Washington proclaiming their intention to conclude a full peace treaty. The Israel-Jordan peace treaty itself was signed in October at a colorful ceremony on the Arava border, with President Clinton affixing his signature as witness.

  But the negotiations with the Palestinians over the Interim Agreement dragged on for a further sixteen months. The atmosphere was poisoned by an unprovoked massacre of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosquee in Hebron in February 1994, perpetrated by an American-born settler-doctor, Baruch Goldstein, from nearby Kiryat Arba, and by a series of Palestinian terror attacks, including suicide bombings, perpetrated mainly by Hamas, a fundamentalist organization that opposed any accommodation with Israel. Buses were blown up in Afula (April 1994), Hadera (April 1994), and Tel Aviv (October 1994). In January 1995 a double suicide bombing took the lives of twenty-two off-duty Israeli soldiers waiting at a bus stop at Beit Lid, near Netanya. More bombings followed in Kfar Darom (April 1995) and Jerusalem (August 1995).

  The Rabin government blamed Arafat and his various security forces, which were supposed to have taken full control over Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip, for failing to rein in Hamas. The parties of the Right blamed the Rabin government. They pointed out that under Oslo hundreds of Hamas militants whom Rabin had deported to Lebanon in 1992 had been allowed back home to Gaza. These men, the Right alleged, had learned the ghoulish trade of suicide bombing from the Lebanese Hezbollah.

  The Interim Agreement, or Oslo II, as it was called, was finally signed, in Washington, in September 1995. Israeli forces would withdraw from the six major cities on the West Bank, and these would become “Area A,” under full Palestinian civil and security control. A special regime would be negotiated for the city of Hebron, with the enclaves of Jewish settlement there remaining under IDF protection. Other densely populated areas of the West Bank would become “Area B,” where the Palestinians would have civil and police control but Is
rael would retain “overall security authority to safeguard its citizens [that is, the settlers] and to combat terrorism.” The third and largest, but least populated, area would be “Area C,” where Israel retained civil and security control.

  The natural assumption throughout the region and around the world was that the Oslo process would culminate in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat, in his every public utterance, insisted that this would be so and that the capital of his state would be Jerusalem. Rabin, it is worth noting, never committed himself publicly to this outcome. The five-year transitional period was explained by Rabin government officials as a testing and confidence-building period during which the two sides would learn to live together. These officials explained that in Rabin’s view the Israeli public needed to be conditioned gradually to the idea of a Palestinian state. The trauma of the turnabout on recognizing and negotiating with the PLO was about as much as the public could take at one time. A second trauma, of swallowing eventual Palestinian independence, would have to be administered gradually.

  Interestingly, the original Israeli architect of Oslo, Yossi Beilin, was among the first to understand that the process he had devised harbored within it the danger of its own demise. He realized that by deferring the “permanent status issues” to later, Israel and the Palestinians were essentially proposing to leap over a chasm in two steps, a surefire formula for plummeting to destruction. During 1994–1995, Beilin entered into a series of intensive discussions with the key peacemaker on the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and together they drafted the outline of a permanent status agreement. It provided for the establishment of an “independent State of Palestine.” Two national capitals, Yerushalayim and al-Quds, would exist within one undivided city of Jerusalem. The border issue was to be resolved by land swaps. Beilin and Abbas completed their text in late October 1995. Beilin, though close to Peres, decided to submit it to Rabin. But Rabin was assassinated on November 4.12

  • • •

  Throughout this period, political discourse in Israel was debased on occasion by outright incitement and was sullied more frequently by borderline rhetoric that gave rise to heated debate as to the legal limits of inflammatory language in a democracy. Sharon walked the borderline—uninhibited by his private friendship with the prime minister. Ostensibly, he condemned the incitement against Rabin and Peres, but he himself engaged in it. Moreover, he seemed to justify or at least condone it by holding himself up as the victim of similar incitement. “The ministers complaining today,” he asserted, “are the very same people who stood at demonstrations under signs saying, ‘Begin—Murderer,’ ‘Sharon—Murderer,’ in the middle of a war, after Christian Arabs killed Muslim Arabs in Sabra and Shatila.”13

  Instead of the chants of “Rabin—traitor,” he said, he himself would prefer “silent demonstrations, protests that cry out in their stillness.” To this end, in August 1995, he joined a small group of rightist Knesset members and political activists who pitched two tents in the park opposite the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem and declared a hunger strike against Oslo. For eight days, he subsequently claimed—though he hardly looked the worse for it—he subsisted solely on mineral water, which a solicitous Lily brought with her on her exhortative visits.

  The trouble was that apart from Lily and other relatives and friends of the fasters, their sacrifice of body mass somehow failed to attract the masses, and the days passed in relative solitude. Sharon tried to take command, arranging cell phones, radios, and televisions for the fasters. “We must all stay on message,” he urged. The message was “Wipe out terror” and “Think again about Oslo.” It was to be delivered by “a shout of silence.” Sharon hoped the protest would reach out to a broad public, well beyond the settlers and their national-religious hinterland. But the couple hundred well-wishers who turned up to demonstrate their solidarity each day were mainly young men in crocheted kippot and girls in long denim skirts—hard-core settler gear—and a smattering of black-clad Jerusalem haredim.

  But any pretension to dignified, silent protest was giving way by this time to a culture of rabid, violent incitement. It all came spewing out at a huge demonstration organized by the parties of the Right at Zion Square in downtown Jerusalem on October 5, 1995, to protest the signing of the Oslo II accord the week before. Amid a crowd estimated at more than 100,000, Rabin was not merely called a traitor. His photograph was held up on placards dressed in the uniform of an SS officer. The leaders, haranguing the crowd from a balcony, did not react. Later, after Rabin’s murder, some of them claimed they had not seen the offensive signs.

  Sharon, the last speaker, accused the government of “double collaboration—once with a terrorist organization led by a war criminal, and once against Jews. Never in history has a country freely ceded a part of its historic homeland. They are doing it in their own names, not in ours.”14

  Some of the demonstrators then marched toward the Knesset, attacking official government cars as they went. Rabin’s car, without Rabin in it, was vandalized, its lights smashed, and its bodywork dented and scratched. The Knesset Guard, a highly trained force usually deployed for ceremonial purposes, took up positions on the perimeter fence to protect the seat of Israel’s democracy. The police, on the streets outside, were pelted with stones and burning torches. They waded into the crowd and arrested dozens.15

  The buzzword “collaboration,” with all its emotive undertow, was no slip of the tongue on Sharon’s part. He had compared Rabin and Peres to Marshal Pétain in an interview in Penthouse several months earlier. Now he dug up the French national hero turned collaborator again in an interview with the haredi magazine Hashavua. “Their [Rabin and Peres’s] action is even graver than what Pétain did,” he said. “It’s hard to speak of treason in connection with Jews, but the essence of their action is no different [from treason]. They sit with Arafat and plot with him how to deceive the citizens of Israel. And I am choosing my words carefully.”

  He chose similarly scurrilous words in an interview at this time with another haredi magazine, Kfar Chabad. “Rabin and Peres are a couple of collaborators,” he said, “who in any normal country would be put on trial.” Now, though, he moved from Nazi collaboration to Stalinist provocation. The reports appearing in the media about purported rightist threats to assassinate the prime minister and other ministers were deliberate provocations, he asserted. They were like the alleged threats against Stalin published in Russia in the 1930s. Stalin used them to destroy his enemies.

  Compounding his inflammatory references to terrible chapters from history, Sharon added an ancient and uniquely indigenous component. The government was becoming a mosser,f he wrote in June 1995 in an article addressed specifically to the settlers. The government, in its withdrawal policy, proposed in effect “to hand over the settlers to gangs of armed Palestinians … They’ve handed over Jews to non-Jews before,” he continued, alluding to the pre-state saison. “Being a mosser and a snitch is part of the spiritual ethos of the Israeli Left. Don’t forget for a single moment that the members of Peace Now and its various metastases are closer in their souls to the PLO murderers than they are to you.”

  Here, though he may not have precisely intended it—what he did intend was reckless and pernicious enough—Sharon came close to fanning the burning core of fanatical religious incitement that was later held directly responsible for Rabin’s murder. The term mosser had its origins in the religious law, or halacha, of the Jewish Diaspora, where it meant to hand over Jews to the Gentile authorities. That could spell cruel death, and so medieval rabbis ruled that, where possible, the mosser himself should be executed. Settler-rabbis on the West Bank seriously weighed during the summer and fall of 1995 whether the ancient law of mosser applied to Yitzhak Rabin. If it did, the halachic implication was that he must be put to death. It is unclear to this day to what extent, if at all, the young religious assassin Yigal Amir was influenced by these religious deliberations. There is no doubt that many in the
settler community and its political hinterland knew of the deliberations.

  Sharon assiduously cultivated the settler community during his wilderness years. He could no longer direct bulldozers and budgets at their behest. But he was eager to establish himself, though in the opposition, as their leading champion in the public arena and as their dependable bulwark of consolation and encouragement as they absorbed the body blows of Oslo with increasing trepidation.

  He took credit, as we have seen, for Rabin’s retaining all of the settlements in Gaza intact and handing over only the balance of the Strip to Yasser Arafat in the Gaza and Jericho First phase of the Oslo process. There were mutterings on the left over this decision. Some felt it betrayed weakness or, worse, fear of the settlers. Rabin spoke of them disparagingly in private and sometimes in public. But the fact was that since his first government’s climbdown at Sebastiag he had avoided another head-on clash with them. Under his long stewardship at Defense during the 1980s, some restriction was imposed on the creation of new settlements, but the existing ones grew and flourished.

  The pressure on Rabin to confront the settlers came to a head after Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in February 1994. The Hebron settlers could not in all fairness directly be blamed for Goldstein’s wholly unpredicted crime. The man was a doctor by profession and had until the day of the murder discharged his Hippocratic oath toward Palestinian patients in exemplary manner. But these Hebron settlers, or some of them at any rate, were vicious, provocative, and insidious in their relentless efforts to make life miserable for their Muslim neighbors. Even their little children were mobilized in this battle of dispossession: they would be sent to spread thumbtacks on the carpets of the mosque (which doubles as a synagogue), when the Muslims prayed barefoot. Rabin was urged, indeed implored, immediately following the massacre to seize the moment of national outrage and shame and physically, forcibly, remove the couple hundred Jewish Israelis who had made their homes in the heart of the fundamentalist Muslim city. He considered the proposal but rejected it.