by David Landau
The crisis passed, and Sharon won comfortably, on the first round, with 53 percent of the vote, against 24 percent for Olmert and 22 percent for Sheetrit. “His victory was almost entirely grounded on the support of the Bibi camp,” Ofir Akunis recalled. He described a sweaty celebration in the Independence Hall, on the ground floor of the Likud’s rather down-at-heel headquarters building in Tel Aviv, Metzudat Ze’ev.d Smiling and relaxed, Sharon reveled in the congratulations of supporters and opponents alike. Lily was there with him, and she, too, was warm and gracious, but she kept fending off well-wishers who tried to kiss or embrace her. She was under treatment for her cancer and had to beware of infection.
It is hard, in light of how fast he fell, to recall how high Barak seemed to be riding when he came into office in 1999, directly elected with a solid popular majority and seemingly myriad possibilities of putting together a stable and cohesive coalition. He was Israel’s golden boy. Kibbutz-born, a dashing military career, with brain as well as brawn, just four years in politics and already at the summit, committed to making peace, he seemed unstoppable. On election night, a huge crowd gathered at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where the man Barak regarded as his mentor had been murdered. Now Barak proposed to take up his bloodstained mantle. People wept openly as he declared, in sonorous tones, with his familiar, not unattractive lisp, “This is the dawn of a new day.”
Many in the crowd chorused back at him, “Just not Shas.” Shas had become a byword for sleaze. Its leader, Arye Deri, had been convicted of bribery and fraud a month before and sentenced to four years in prison. The trial and conviction, far from deterring voters, had become Shas’s election platform. The slogan was “He’s innocent!” The result was seventeen seats, by far the highest tally Shas had ever attained.
But Barak, like Rabin before him, recognized the crucial need to include at least one religious party in his peacemaking coalition. The national-religious community had become almost homogeneously hard-line, intimately tied to the settlers. The National Religious Party joined the government at first but was certain to secede as soon as serious peace negotiations began. But the ultra-Orthodox, growing rapidly because of their young marriages and large families, were conflicted between their xenophobic anti-Arabism and the instinctive political moderation of their rabbis. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, had ruled back in the 1970s that withdrawal from the biblical territories was permissible if it saved lives. Barak was determined to have him at his side as he set out to make peace, as Rabin had when he embarked on Oslo.
Like Rabin, too, Barak proposed to seat Shas ministers at his cabinet table alongside their most strident foes: Meretz. Rabin, hardly a political charmer, had worked overtime to keep that strange couple together. He managed to do so until after Oslo. Barak, socially gauche and an unconcealed misanthrope toward politicians of every stripe, managed to put both parties’ backs up almost from the start and eventually lost them both. He started, in fact, with the two ultra-Orthodox parties in his mammoth seventy-five-seat coalition,e but lost the five members of United Torah Judaism that first summer in a gratuitous fight over transporting a large electricity turbine to a power station on the Sabbath.
Barak’s political maladroitness might have been mitigated had the new prime minister surrounded himself with politically savvy, smooth-talking aides and used them effectively. He had these in abundance, gifted young people devoted to him, but he managed to set them, too, at each other’s throats. The blood on his office carpet never seemed to dry, and he seemed to take peculiar pleasure in shedding more and more of it. The rumor mills began feeding the political gossip columns, and eventually even the languid torpor and sense of resignation enveloping the Likud and its leader began to give way to a vague consciousness that all was far from well on the other side of the aisle.
All the gossip, of course, and all the seepage of political strength would have been stanched had Barak’s main order of business—making peace—proceeded satisfactorily. Tragically, though, despite his frenetic activity from the get-go, his grand ambitions on the peace front crashed, too. Ariel Sharon, as his luck would have it, was on hand to pick up the pieces.
“Barak’s peace strategy was simple, at least on paper,” writes the historian Ahron Bregman. “He would first strike a deal with Syria, then get Israeli troops out of [south] Lebanon … then—and only then—turn seriously to the conflict with the Palestinians.”3 Regarding the Palestinians, moreover, Barak proposed a radical change from the incremental strategy of peacemaking prescribed by the Oslo Accords, in which the hardest problems were left till last. Instead, he wanted to achieve a final, comprehensive peace agreement in one fell swoop. “We don’t need to waste our time on little issues,” Barak told Yasser Arafat when the two leaders met at the Erez checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, just days after the new Israeli government was sworn in. The “little issues” were Israel’s fulfillment of the Wye agreement.
Such out-of-the-box thinking, although refreshing after three years of Israeli foot-dragging under Netanyahu, set warning bells tinkling among the disappointment-hardened Washington professionals. But Bill Clinton bubbled with enthusiasm. “I’m eager as a kid with a new toy for the meeting I’m going to have with the new Israeli prime minister,” he told a Democratic fund-raiser in Florida on July 13.
They met alone in the Oval Office for two and a half hours, without even note takers present. Clinton unhelpfully swelled Barak’s ego by telling him, “There are only two people in the world who I know are capable of thinking of the third, fourth and fifth steps, it’s you, Ehud, and myself. But you do it better than I do.”4 Later, they flew with their wives to Camp David and stayed up there talking till nearly 3:00 a.m. “It was a night full of hope,” Clinton recalled.
An intensive spate of diplomacy unfolded between the frenetic new Israeli premier and the ponderous Syrian president, who had held power in Damascus for more than three decades and whose health was now visibly failing. The difficulty was apparent right from the start: Barak told Clinton he was not prepared to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, line, as Syria demanded, if Syria insisted that that line ran right along the shore of Lake Kinneret.
Clinton tried to narrow the gaps both on the line and on security arrangements. In October, at Barak’s urging, Clinton wrote to Assad saying he believed the gaps were bridgeable and stressing that an Israel-Syria agreement would mean a new era in America’s relations with Syria. In December, Assad told Secretary Albright in Damascus that he was ready for immediate, high-level talks with Israel without preconditions and was delegating Minister of Foreign Affairs Farouk Shara as his representative. Barak decided that he himself would represent Israel. The talks were set for December 15 at Blair House, the official guest residence opposite the White House.
On December 13, in a hushed and expectant Knesset, Ehud Barak declared with appropriate pathos that peace with Syria and with the Palestinians would be “the apex of the realization of the Zionist vision.” He spoke empathetically of the eighteen thousand Israelis living on the Golan. They would face uncertainty as the negotiations went ahead and the pain of sacrifice if the two countries reached agreement. He promised to submit the agreement to a plebiscite. He was confident it would be approved.
The opposition, led by Ariel Sharon, duly performed its constitutional role. But it was a perfunctory performance. “The Golan is not lost,” Sharon said, winding up his speech. “Our fight for it is just, and therefore we will prevail. I call from here to all the citizens of Israel who fear for the future: Join our struggle. Together with you we will triumph. Thank you.”
Party members knew of Lily’s illness and Sharon’s long and difficult hours at her side through trips to New York and treatments. “He gave her a lot of time,” Akunis recalled. “He was very preoccupied. But beyond that, I had the feeling he was sluggish. The truth is the whole Likud was pretty soporific as an opposition at that time. Sort of groggy, on the ropes.”5
Another Likud source who sat in o
n the faction meetings during this period remembers the MKs delicately ignoring Sharon’s frequent snoozing. “They weren’t troubled,” he says, “because they were all basically waiting for Bibi to come back. They didn’t really regard Arik as their leader.”6
As if to dramatize this low, sad period in his life, on December 19 his beloved Sycamore Ranch burned half down to the ground. There was no question of terror or arson; a bird’s nest near the chimney top caught fire from sparks flying upward. The roof and upper floor were gutted. A lot of the couple’s belongings were lost. They moved into the adjacent home of their son Omri while the long job of rebuilding began.
Despite Barak’s still-undented aura of supreme confidence and the sense of resignation that seemed to hang over the Likud, Sharon’s expressions of tenacious opposition to withdrawal from the Golan seemed to capture a shift of popular sentiment. Public opinion polls, both those published in the media and those commissioned privately by Barak’s bureau, showed that a referendum was by no means a foregone conclusion, after all.
The polls apparently accounted for Barak’s exasperating assertion to the Americans, on the eve of the Washington meetings of December 15–17, 1999, that he could focus only on “procedural issues” at this stage and would not agree to meet alone with Shara. “I cannot afford to discuss substance,” he explained lamely to Dennis Ross. “The risk of leaks is too great … I may be undercut politically and rendered incapable of making the decisions necessary for agreement.”7
“Barak now had a really serious attack of cold feet,” Bregman records. The two delegations reconvened after the Christmas–New Year break at a secluded conference center belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service outside Shepherdstown, a small town in West Virginia.
Three days after the conference Akiva Eldar published in Haaretz, word for word, an American draft peace treaty submitted to the two sides at Shepherdstown in the strictest secrecy. The document referred in detail to provisions for normalization and security between the countries—the two areas in which Israel had pushed for Syrian concessions—but it fudged the critical borderline question, the key question for Assad that Barak was not prepared to answer. A number of other issues still in dispute were rendered in alternative bracketed texts, one reflecting the Israeli position (I), the other the Syrian (S). The leak of Syria’s concessions to Israel without concomitant Israeli concessions, in an Israeli newspaper to boot, confirmed all Assad’s suspicions that somehow the Americans and the Israelis were in cahoots. He told Clinton he would not send representatives to another round of talks.
Barak hoped the Israeli public would have learned from the reports out of Shepherdstown that he was driving a tough bargain. But for at least 150,000 demonstrators, gathered on a chilly night in Rabin Square in downtown Tel Aviv just after Shepherdstown ended, that was not the lesson learned. Their placards and their chorused chants made it clear they still felt Barak was about to sell out. Two of Barak’s ministers, Natan Sharansky of Yisrael B’Aliya and Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, sat on the dais, alongside opposition politicians and Golan mayors. They had both abstained in the Knesset on December 13. But that was a passive demonstration of displeasure. This was an open act of defiance.
The Palestinian track was also demanding attention. The deadline for implementing the next further redeployment was fast approaching. At a meeting early in January, Arafat asked Barak to include three villages close to Jerusalem among the territories that were to become Area A—that is, wholly Palestinian controlled—in the imminent FRD. The villages were effectively suburbs of the holy city. One of them, Abu Dis, was the site of the Palestinian parliament building, still under construction. Barak didn’t say no, which for Arafat was as good as saying yes. In the Knesset, Sharon accused Barak of “lying and cheating, not to the enemy, God forbid, but to our own loyal citizens.”8
On March 26, Clinton, encouraged by Barak, met with Assad in Geneva. He assured the Syrian leader that Israel now accepted the June 4 line, but Barak wanted to be sure “that Israel retained sovereignty over the water of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River and therefore the borderline should not touch either one.” Assad, wan and sickly looking, replied: “Then they don’t want peace … The lake has always been our lake; it was never theirs … There were no Jews to the east of the lake.”9 Clinton later recalled Assad saying, “Look, you and I are friends, but there’s not gonna be a deal if I don’t get to run my feet in the lake.” There was no further reason to sit and talk, and after barely an hour the meeting ended.
Sharon followed some of this from his temporary home alongside the fire-ravaged ranch house. Lily was in bed now most of the time, venturing out almost only to go to the hospital for treatment. “A man gets used to living in a beautiful house for twenty-five years, with her touch all over it,” he told Amira Lam in Yedioth Ahronoth on March 10. “Every plant and vase, the pictures on the piano, the embroidered towels in the bathroom, the table napkins lovingly folded. I would come home, and the music that we both loved was always playing. I would sit in my armchair, and Lily would pour me a drink, and when I still used to smoke, sometimes she might light me a cigar, and we would sit and talk. We don’t have that now, and I really miss those moments.”
The interview made poignant yet somehow uncomfortable reading. Poignant, because Lily was lying upstairs as he spoke with the reporter, sinking to her death. Uncomfortable, because he was so frank and almost maudlin, but also because he seemed to be parading, not to say exploiting, his personal sadness on the magazine cover of the country’s largest-circulation newspaper. On the other hand, he was leader of the opposition at a crucial time for the country; he legitimately needed to show that he was functioning despite his burden of worry and grief. “I know there is all kinds of talk in the party, that this is affecting my work,” he said.
I admit it’s hard. But it is not impairing my ability to function. I live between concern and hope, but that doesn’t affect my performance.
It was a pretty hefty blow [when Lily was diagnosed with lung cancer]. But we got ourselves together at once. We went abroad. We started treatment there. I never allowed myself to break down even for a second. One must not break down, especially when there are tough decisions to be made … I’ve seen the greatest victories and the most terrible disasters in my life, and I’ve never broken down. But if you ask me if tears didn’t choke my throat when I spoke to the doctors, then that’s not true: they did. And how they did. And now, too, every so often I have a kind of crisis when I see her, this girl with inexhaustible energy, fighting, suffering … But I haven’t lost my confidence. And I do not acquiesce, not for one minute, in her being in this condition.
I told her this morning that at the very first opportunity I want us to go back to the concert hall, to our own seats, which it took us so many years to get to. We started with one ticket in the gods, behind a pillar. Then it was two, slightly lower. And we gradually made our way down. Now we sit in row five. I told her the first thing I’m going to do is take out a subscription to the new concert series.
On March 24, the temporary home became a house of mourning. The entire political community, regardless of affiliation or ideology, turned out for Lily’s funeral on a hilltop near the ranch or for a consolation visit during the seven-day shiva period of mourning. They all knew her personally, because she had always been at her husband’s side. Even during her illness, she had made the effort to be there for him. Shimon Peres spoke for many of them when he said, “Lily was a wonderful woman who fought her illness with uncommon courage and with the same devotion and determination with which she stood by her husband’s side through every one of his battles.”
“You fought till the last moment, with fortitude, with serenity, with dignity,” Sharon said in his eulogy at her graveside. “You left our world loving and enveloped in the love of all your family and friends. They will love you forever.” She was just sixty-three.
During the shiva mourning period Sharon made it c
lear, as he had in the interview, that Lily’s absence would not end his political career. But there was more than that. Though cut off by his bereavement, Sharon discerned that the Geneva denouement might mean that Barak was weakening faster than anyone had expected. To a group of party activists who came to comfort him, Sharon said: “Carry on, carry on—and in the end you will breach the wall.”
“I really liked that,” Ofir Akunis recalled. “I remember it to the present day. Sharon had been party leader for the best part of a year, but this was the first time I felt he was seriously exhorting us to action. The ‘wall’ was Ehud Barak, and the message was, if we keep attacking, we can defeat him. Sure enough, politics seemed to come back to life in the following months as Barak’s popularity continued to drop.”10
Another Likud member, who had feared that Lily’s death would leave Sharon suddenly old and lonely, found himself wondering at the speed and feistiness of his resurgence. “There were more important things to do than to mourn Lily … so he did them,” this man recalled, drily. “Arik dearly loved Lily. He would stroke her hand and gaze into her eyes. But did he love her for herself or out of his overwhelming love of himself? I remember later someone suggested that Arik was so egocentric that apart from his sons he couldn’t actually love another person. He loved to have her with him, because she loved him and spoiled him. When she was no longer around, she was no longer around.”11