by David Landau
c In January 1990, Prime Minister Shamir learned that Ezer Weizman, then his minister of science and technology (and later the president of Israel), had met in Geneva with the PLO representative to the UN agencies there, Nabil Ramlawi. Shamir wanted to fire him on the spot but acceded to Rabin’s plea that he merely evict him from the inner cabinet. Sharon, then at the height of his “constraint” campaign against Shamir, said in a speech to party loyalists that the fact that Weizman had not been properly punished was “just as serious” as his offense itself.
d They were begun by two academics on the Israeli side, working under the loose aegis of Yossi Beilin, who served as Peres’s deputy at the Foreign Ministry. Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia), a senior PLO official, headed the Palestinian delegation.
e Known to the Jews as the Cave of Machpela. Both faiths believe their forefather Abraham lies buried there.
f Mosser: one who hands over Jews.
g See pp. 148–49.
h Unlike the Begin government after Sabra and Shatila, the Rabin government needed no pressure to set up a commission of inquiry into the massacre at the mosque. The president of the Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, headed it, and another two justices (one Jewish and one Arab), a former army chief of staff and an academic, sat alongside him. Within a week, they began to hear evidence.
Sharon wasted no time either. For him, massacre plus commission spelled an opportunity to ratchet up his own unending battle against the verdict of the Kahan Commission ten years earlier. “I am writing to you,” he wrote in a bitter and cynical open letter to Justice Aharon Barak in March, who was widely thought to have been the moving spirit behind the Kahan Commission’s determinations and recommendations, “in order to save Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin and the chief of staff and his generals from the danger of ‘indirect responsibility’ for the massacre in the Cave of Machpela. They face that danger as a result of the ‘principle of indirect responsibility’ which you laid down when you served as a distinguished member of the commission of inquiry into the murder of Muslims by Christians at Sabra and Shatila.”
The Shamgar report found much disorder and sloppiness within the IDF and the police and a “totally unsatisfactory” level of coordination between the two. It found laxity and remissness in the way the law was enforced against the settlers. But it apportioned no responsibility for the massacre, direct or indirect. “We do not believe that anyone can be blamed for not having foreseen the fact that a Jew would plan and carry out a massacre of Muslims in the Tomb of the Patriarchs.” Sharon celebrated this as “a ringing slap in the face to the false standards which guided the Kahan/Barak Commission … The responsible report of Justices Shamgar, Zouabi, Goldberg, and their colleagues is the first nail in the coffin of the Kahan/Barak Report.”
i Dalia Rabin recalled:
While I was deputy minister, cabinet secretary Gideon Sa’ar ordered the removal of photographs of the Oslo process from the walls of the prime minister’s office. I wrote a very long and very strong personal letter to Arik. I wrote that you can’t change history like that. If you take these pictures off the wall of the prime minister’s office, in a way you’re giving legitimacy to the assassination. He didn’t reply. Not a word. When I resigned, he invited me in for a private chat. He tried to persuade me not to quit the Knesset. We discussed politics and many things, and then, at the end, as I stood to leave, he said, out of the blue: “And as regards the pictures—you were right.” But he still didn’t put them back up.
j Temporarily. Netanyahu asked him to head the Mossad in place of Yatom. He agreed and served as director until 2002.
CHAPTER 11 · LAST MAN STANDING
I believe there will be peace. There has to be peace, in my view. We have to make every effort to bring peace about. I have always been depicted as an enemy of peace. But I have never been an enemy of peace, because I witnessed the horrors of war. I believe in peace, and I believe that the day will come when peace will prevail. Thank you.”1
Sharon’s transformation during this period from man of war to man of peace was neither complete nor consistent. He did not become a born-again peacenik, now or later. His detractors, still legion, mocked the intimations of change as a cynical stunt. It was designed, they said, by his admen friends to make him more eligible for promotion, to get him into the kitchen cabinet at last. The talk at the top, in the region and in Washington, was of progress to peace. To get there, therefore, Sharon had to talk the talk. That didn’t mean he would walk the walk.
Still, talk, however disingenuous, is not just talk. Talk is the stuff of politics. Talk makes the political man. In June 1997, Sharon invited Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat’s deputy in the Palestinian Authority, for a long private talk at Sycamore Ranch. It was leaked two weeks later, probably by Sharon himself. “This meeting,” wrote Shimon Shiffer, a veteran political commentator, “is one of the most important developments that has happened in the process of reconciliation between the two nations.” In an article headlined “Sharon Has Crossed the Lines,” Shiffer wrote that Sharon now recognized the realities that had given rise to the Oslo Accords and that in effect he, too, now recognized the PLO as the authentic representative of the Palestinian people.2a
Cynical or significant, Sharon’s meeting with Arafat’s longtime lieutenant intrigued the Knesset, and most especially the doves, both Jewish and Arab. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter was Sharon’s extemporaneous closing flourish, at the end of a lengthy statement and subsequent exchanges with members. The deputy Speaker, Professor Naomi Chazan of Meretz, granted him extra time to make his replies. “We’re all riveted,” she said, without sarcasm. “Don’t worry,” Sharon said, with plenty of sarcasm on his part, “nothing’s happened to shake my views about our right to Eretz Yisrael. I’ve heard so many worried voices here in the debate. Let me assure all the worriers: they’ve got nothing to worry about!” But then he seamlessly switched into his new, conciliatory vein. “I just think we must find a solution that everyone can live with … I believe that Jews and Arabs can live together in peace and must live together in peace. And I believe that day will come.”
He had met with Abu Mazen, he said, in order to lay out in a straightforward and unvarnished way “what Israel can and can’t do.”
He did not deny reports in the press that he had given Abu Mazen to understand that he accepted, or at least did not dismiss, the Palestinians’ principled demand for an independent state. Even if we set aside for a moment the impossibly narrow borders that Sharon envisaged for the Palestinians, his very countenancing of Palestinian statehood, however hypothetical, was still anathema at that time to much of the Israeli Right (and heresy to the religious Right). This was probably the first time (apart from his ideological swerves during the Shlomzion episode, which he subsequently denied) that Sharon intimated publicly, albeit by insinuation, his pragmatic thinking on this touchstone political issue.
In a way, acceptance of Palestinian independence was less of an ideological leap for Sharon than for the others in his camp and for many in the Labor Party, too. After all, he had always favored Palestinian statehood—but centered on Jordan, not on Palestine. That was the essence of the “Jordan is Palestine” doctrine that he had espoused for so long, in defiance of the political orthodoxy. He therefore did not need to shake off the dogmatic Israeli denial of Palestinian national aspirations that constricted Israel’s policy thinking under both Labor and Likud. He had never donned that particular piece of political and intellectual corsetry.
But while the Palestinians stressed that Abu Mazen had visited Sharon’s home with Arafat’s blessing, Sharon insisted that his attitude to Arafat was unchanged and that he would continue to boycott him. “We know that in war civilians get killed, and we all regret that. But the purpose in war is not to kill civilians. Arafat ordered the killing of civilians—of children, women, old people. That is why I refuse to speak to him.”
He made a point, too, of telling the Knesset th
at Abu Mazen’s visit was fully coordinated with the prime minister, who was “very interested” in it taking place. That was a cruel rubbing of salt into the wounded ego of David Levy, who had vociferously protested being left out of the loop, even though, as foreign minister, he was supposed to be running the negotiations with the Palestinians. The dynamic of Levy’s discomfiture and eventual displacement by Sharon was already under way.
A month later, in August 1997, Sharon met with the U.S. peace envoy, Dennis Ross, in Jerusalem, at the specific request of the prime minister. The envoy briefed the minister on the state of ongoing interim negotiations, and Sharon talked about his ideas for the permanent status negotiations. But more important than the substance of their talk was the fact that it took place at all. It was the first time for years that a high-ranking American official sat opposite Sharon, the bogeyman of the Bush-Baker era (and no special favorite of the Clintonites either). More than anything, it signaled that he was on his way back to the heart of the matters that mattered. In November, he was in the White House, sent by Netanyahu to expound to the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and other key officials on his ideas for eventually parceling the West Bank between the two nations.
He knew full well, he told his American hosts, that his original “enclaves” scheme was no longer relevant, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. He knew the Palestinians needed contiguity, and he believed that he could provide it, with tunnels, bridges, and overpasses. He knew above all, he said, that a Palestinian state was inevitable. He wanted, therefore, to reach “strategic understandings” with the United States on the size and nature of the security zones that Israel would need to keep, and also on key issues like water resources. An unnamed senior American official was quoted in the Israeli press as saying that Sharon had left an impression in Washington of “moderation and pragmatism.”3
He was working hard, mainly on himself, to create the same impression in the eyes of the political community back home. “In the past, he was often to be heard voicing uncomplimentary comments on the prime minister’s performance,” wrote Yossi Verter, Haaretz’s political reporter, with his customary understatement. “Not anymore.”4 But Sharon could still not resist an occasional swipe even in his new role as Bibi’s loyal and devoted elder minister. “A few days ago,” he told delegates at the Likud Party conference in November, “the prime minister said to me, ‘There’ll be a tough fight at conference. I’ll need your help.’ And I replied, ‘That’s a bit difficult, because I don’t know whether to help your right hand or your left hand.’ ” The audience roared with laughter. The ministers on the dais smirked and guffawed. The reporters on the side chortled. Only Netanyahu seemed nonplussed and grinned awkwardly. The phrase became an instant perennial, still trotted out whenever Netanyahu’s famous indecisiveness is up for discussion.5
“Bibi confided to me his view,” wrote Dennis Ross, the American peace envoy, “that a leader can never afford to give up ‘his tribe’—those who are fiercely loyal to him, who identify with him because of shared roots, long-standing ties, and emotional connections. Bibi never figured out how to reconcile his ambition to be a historic peacemaker with the reality of his political tribe, which did not believe peace with the Palestinians was possible, and were certainly not prepared to pay the price that a test of peace might entail.”6
Some would say that was too charitable a reading of the tribe and of the leader who strung along the Americans for years and ultimately chose the shortsighted pretensions of this tribe over the nation’s crucial long-term interests. Sharon, at any rate, became his prime minister’s close ally during 1997–1999, both in stringing along Ross and his bosses in Washington and in trying to have it both ways with the Likud’s political base back home.
The Americans understood that Netanyahu’s preference was to cede nothing and play for time. They hoped, nevertheless, that they could engage the other side of his conflicted political persona, the side that craves success. After the Meshal affair, the Clinton administration was intent on seeing Netanyahu pursue the implementation of Oslo II, the Interim Agreement, which Rabin had concluded and Netanyahu had ratified but which remained a dead letter in regard to its provision for three further redeployments (FRDs) by Israel on the West Bank. The second of these FRDs was due to have been carried out in September 1997, but the first remained unimplemented.
Coincidentally, and conveniently for Sharon, the timing coincided with David Levy’s resignation from the Foreign Ministry. Levy had been moving steadily leftward on both domestic and foreign policy and increasingly chafing at Netanyahu. Now he chose to quit over an evolving state budget that he found far too tough on low-paid working people. Netanyahu made no immediate move to replace him at the Foreign Ministry, but Sharon quickly became the leading candidate, at least in his own eyes. He stepped up his public praise of Netanyahu.
There now followed a long period of months during which Sharon performed the most elaborate minuet, dancing between the ostensibly—but only ostensibly—irreconcilable positions of loudly opposing a double-FRD from 13 percent of the West Bank and quietly intimating that he could in fact live with it, if he became the foreign minister who negotiated it. Thirteen percent became the line behind which the Americans decided to dig in, after being pushed steadily back by Netanyahu from the original 20 to teens and then to low teens. It was fairly arbitrary, but they had lined up the Palestinians beside them, and they did not intend to budge.
The crunch came in the fall of 1998, when the Americans issued invitations to the two sides to attend a summit conference in order, at last, to wrap up the FRDs. The hard Right in Netanyahu’s coalition threatened open rebellion. The government was in imminent danger of collapse. Netanyahu finally played his ace: Sharon would be foreign minister. He would be responsible henceforth for the peace process with the Palestinians. And, as a fast-working analgesic for the hard-liners’ angst, Sharon would join the Israeli delegation to the conference. Sharon for his part was still publicly proclaiming his opposition to 13 percent. The implication was that he would carry the fight to the summit. “Tie us up, hand and foot!” he demanded of the cabinet.
On October 14, 1998, the day before the summit was to begin at the Wye River Plantation conference center in Maryland, Sharon’s appointment was formally approved by the cabinet. He flew off after the prime minister to the United States, first to visit King Hussein at the Mayo Clinic, then on to Wye, where he arrived near midnight on the fourth day of the conference. President Clinton asked to meet with him alone, and they sat until nearly two o’clock in the morning. It was the first time they had met, and plainly the American side hoped that Sharon, now that he had achieved his ambition to get back into the center of policy making, would prove an asset in the negotiations.
Sharon’s foremost concern at this relatively early stage of a conference that was to distend into a nine-day marathon was to impress upon the public back home the firmness of his determination not to shake hands with Arafat. No requirements of pomp or protocol attaching to his new office would weaken his resolve. This ultimately non-substantive issue consumed him, and the Israeli media, to an obsessive degree—given, after all, that Sharon had pressed so hard, and for so long, to get into the room where decisions were made and where Arafat sat and talked with Israel’s leaders.
Talking, as distinct from shaking hands, was kosher in the new foreign minister’s book. The very next evening he participated in a dinner that Clinton gave for the senior delegates and held forth expansively to the Palestinian leader on farming and animal husbandry. This, however, as the Israeli press breathlessly reported, was after he had demonstratively ignored Arafat’s gesture of greeting as he entered the room—“General Sharon,” Netanyahu announced to the assembled company by way of introduction—and dexterously contrived to shake the hands of Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Nabil Shaath while avoiding that of Arafat.
The Palestinians, in their briefings, grandly dismissed Sharon’s antics. The rais’s gesture, they said, far
from obsequious, was intended to convey the thought that Sharon had tried to crush him in Beirut, yet here he was, sixteen years later, the American president’s honored guest—and Sharon’s negotiating partner.7 Beneath the posturing, though, Arafat was hurt, and he harped on it long after in conversation with his intimates.8 Arafat’s own behavior had been the opposite of churlish. Sharon had asked Arafat, through a reliably discreet middleman, not to overly decry or condemn his appointment as foreign minister and not to boycott him. And sure enough, the Palestinians’ public reaction to Sharon’s appointment was the least strident of all the Arab states. Arafat himself made do with an anodyne observation that this was an internal Israeli matter. In private conversations with the Americans, the Palestinians pointed to the potentially favorable effect of Sharon’s appointment, if indeed he and Netanyahu intended to push through the FRDs. “The time for moderate leaders will come later,” the Palestinians told their American interlocutors.9
“The Wye River Memorandum,” as it was called, provided for a 13 percent first-and-second FRD. All of it was to be from Area C to Areas A and B, as the Palestinians and the Americans had insisted. “Everyone was euphoric,” Dennis Ross wrote, recalling the predawn moment when the draft was finally approved. But it didn’t last. “The President and Bibi were sitting alone; no smiles, only stern looks. They were barely talking, and Bibi looked positively stricken.” The hiccup that seriously threatened to choke the euphoria was Jonathan Jay Pollard, the U.S. Navy analyst turned Israeli spy who had now served thirteen years of his life sentence. Earlier in the year, Netanyahu had formally recognized—he was the first prime minister to do so—that Pollard had spied for Israel. Now he wanted the president to pardon the spy as part of the Wye package, which included Israel’s release of 750 Palestinian prisoners. Clinton’s CIA chief urged him to resist.