by David Landau
In any event, any disturbing thoughts about the impending visit did not cloud the upbeat atmosphere at the dinner or at the talks that opened in Washington a day later. These talks were intended as a final refinement of the parties’ positions, and a final attempt at narrowing the gaps between them, before the United States presented its own package of proposals designed to bridge or resolve all the remaining points in dispute.
Ben-Ami took time out from the talks on September 27 to be briefed over the telephone by his commissioner of police, Yehuda Wilk, as to what was expected the next day on the Mount. “He told me that on the basis of intelligence assessments he recommended allowing the visit to go forward,” Ben-Ami recalled. “He said he had a contingency plan in place to get Sharon out fast if serious violence erupted.” The minister for internal security spoke by phone, too, with Jibril Rajoub, the PA’s head of preventive security on the West Bank. “Rajoub told me that if Sharon did not enter the mosques themselves, he believed there would not be any rioting, and whatever demonstrations did take place would be kept under control.”24
INTIFADA
In Israel, September 27 was a busy day, too. In the afternoon, the radio broadcast the propitious announcement that Benjamin Netanyahu had long been waiting for with great and mounting trepidation. He was not going to be prosecuted for bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust. And his wife, Sara, was not going to be prosecuted for theft. This was good news indeed. His political career would not be hobbled for months or years, perhaps even forever. The couple’s conduct in relation to a longtime family retainer was, in the words of the attorney general, “dismal and worthy of the most stringent criticism.” But that was veritable music to the Netanyahus’ ears. For in the next paragraph of a lengthy report, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein explained that however reprehensibly they had behaved, their actions and omissions did not meet the criteria for a criminal prosecution. He therefore ordered the files against them closed for lack of evidence.g
Netanyahu issued a string of suitably contrite statements. His loyalists could barely contain their exultation. He would come roaring back now, they confidently predicted, to sweep away the debris of Barak’s collapsing coalition and restore the Likud to its rightful place of power. They mocked recently renewed talk of a unity government as the Canute-like last-gasp efforts of the failed prime minister and the over-the-top Likud stand-in leader to turn back the irresistible tide of Bibi’s return in triumph.
That same morning, the reporter Yossi Verter accompanied Sharon on a tour of a bellwether bastion of Likud supporters, the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem. The stallholders were friendly, but their chorused advice to their visitor was “Arik, step aside for Bibi.” “That simple call,” Verter wrote in the next day’s Haaretz, “encapsulates the condition of Sharon, of Bibi, and of the Likud.”25
• • •
By the time most Haaretz readers digested this analysis the next morning, Sharon was on the Temple Mount, and history was changing, though the protagonists did not yet realize it.
Flanked by half a dozen members of the Likud Knesset faction—a pretty poor showing, the electronic media were quick to note—and by phalanxes of police, Sharon spent forty-five minutes on the Mount. He looked over a recently refurbished underground hall that the waqf had inaugurated as an overflow mosque. Some Israeli archaeologists had loudly protested this quasi-excavation, and the academic dispute quickly morphed into a political controversy. Sharon steered clearh of the two Muslim shrines, the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, as Jibril Rajoub had requested. And as Rajoub predicted, the visit passed without serious violence. The police kept a rigorous separation between Sharon’s group and a thousand-odd Palestinian demonstrators, mostly youngsters, who hurled stones and curses at the Butcher of Beirut.i Also prominently present were several Israeli-Arab MKs. They were seen chatting and even joking with their Likud Knesset colleagues, but as soon as the television cameras panned onto them, they let loose a tirade of invective.26
The demonstrations and stone throwing continued after Sharon and his party left. The police fired tear-gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets at the stone throwers. Rioting spread to other parts of the Old City. The Jerusalem police chief, Arye Yitzhaki, asked the Knesset member Ahmad Tibi and Palestinian waqf officials to help persuade the rioters to disband. Some thirty policemen and a dozen demonstrators were reported hurt, none seriously. Sharon issued a press statement that he was sorry about the injured policemen, “but it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount and I was right to do so.” A Labor Party spokesman said it was a miracle that “Sharon’s exhibition of counterfeit patriotism had not ended in bloodshed.”
All in all, Sharon was pleased with himself. The idea—it was a gimmick really—to visit the Mount had not been unanimously popular with his friends and advisers in his informal “ranch forum.”27 Omri thought it was “not intelligent” and declined to accompany his father. Gilad went instead, while Omri drove to the cemetery outside Tel Aviv to ensure that all was ready at his brother Gur’s graveside for the annual family memorial gathering the next day.28
By afternoon, the Likud was fully preoccupied again with Netanyahu’s exculpation and the looming leadership contest. The morning’s escapade was fading. Sharon had sent a message of congratulation to both the Netanyahus, adding the hope, at once unctuous and ironic, that Bibi would henceforth “be able to join us in the struggle against … the Barak government.” Now, at a pre–Jewish New Year toast at party headquarters in Tel Aviv, he was in fighting fettle. “No gifts!” he proclaimed. “There’ll be no gifts here.” If people expected him to make way for anyone else, they were going to be disappointed. The gifts metaphor was not lost on his audience. None of the three leading newspapers made Sharon’s visit their lead story the next morning. Yedioth Ahronoth wondered whether Sharon had hoped to rob Netanyahu of the limelight on his day of exoneration and celebration.29
In Jerusalem and Washington, too, officials allowed themselves to breathe easy as the ominous fallout of Sharon’s visit seemed to die quickly away. Warnings by a lone police officer in Jerusalem, Nisso Shaham, and by a lone former security officer then in Washington, Yisrael Hasson, that more and worse trouble was yet to be expected fell on strangely desensitized ears. Intelligence reports that pointed to a possible eruption of violence after prayers on the Mount the next day, Friday, resulted in an almost routine decision to reinforce the regular police presence there. Even the murder, at dawn on that Friday morning, of an Israeli officer by his Palestinian comrade on a joint patrol near Kalkilya set no alarm bells ringing.j
Ben-Ami flew home overnight. From the airport he made his way straight to national police headquarters in Jerusalem—not, however, with a view to taking personal control over a potentially explosive situation, but rather to announce his choice of the next police commissioner. He had written a speech on the plane explaining to the assembled senior officers why he had decided to appoint Shlomo Aharonishki, commander of the Tel Aviv region. The Jerusalem commander, Yitzhaki, grievously disappointed, left at once for the Mount, where some twenty thousand worshippers had gathered and where the young men among them were reported to be piling up stones, bottles, and other projectiles.30
Yitzhaki was one of the first to be hit. Despite his helmet, a stone caught him on the back of the head. He passed out. Blood streamed from the wound. He was evacuated, and rumors started to spread among his men that not only had he been unfairly passed over for the commissionership but he was dead. (He was not, nor badly hurt.) Stones rained down meanwhile on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall plaza below the Temple Mount plateau. Yitzhaki’s deputy ordered his men to charge the rioters. Police sharpshooters began firing live ammunition. Other policemen shot rubber-coated bullets from close range. The result was seven Palestinian dead and more than a hundred injured. Blood spattered the flagstones of the holy site. Only the advent of Mickey Levy, the levelheaded and authoritative police commander of the West Bank
, brought a modicum of calm. He made contact with waqf officials and with Jibril Rajoub, and together they worked out a “cease-fire”: the police would withdraw from the Mount, and the Palestinians would rein in the rioting and stone throwing. By mid-afternoon the Mount was quiet.
But the morning’s events had been carried live on Voice of Palestine, the PA radio, and screened on Al Jazeera. The sermon was always broadcast on a Friday; this time it had become a running commentary on the carnage. Grief and outrage swept Palestinian communities on both sides of the green line.
What should have happened next was that the police, under their minister and senior commanders, should have assessed that the wave of protest could spread through the Israeli-Arab community and lead to riots and acts of violence inside the country. They should have ensured, above all else, that their units were deployed at likely flash points in sufficient force and properly equipped with nonlethal riot-control gear as befits a civilian police force preparing to confront demonstrating citizens of its own country almost certain to be unarmed.
What should have happened, too, was that the army under its minister, Ehud Barak, and chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, should have anticipated that the protests could spread from the Mount to engulf the occupied territories in a torrent of raging violence.
What should have happened long before the bloody riot on the Temple Mount was serious thinking and planning in the army for how to confront mass popular unrest in the territories. After all, that had been the nature of the first Palestinian intifada (1987–1993), which the IDF, under Yitzhak Rabin for much of that period, had such great difficulty combating and curbing in a humane way. The state comptroller, in his 2000 annual report, severely criticized the fact that the IDF had made no serious attempt to develop nonlethal or less lethal methods of riot control.
Ideally, too, after thirty-three years of occupation, the IDF should have trained special units for riot control, instead of assigning whatever infantry or armored regiment—conscripts trained to fire rifles or guns—happened to be deployed in the specific area at the specific time of a riot. When the entire West Bank and Gaza were swept by violence, as they were now, virtually all units deployed there were pressed into these police duties, for which they were both unsuited and unprepared.
On the day after the Friday deaths on the Temple Mount, the army, confident in its preparations for a low-grade war, gave battle to the young Palestinian rioters who massed at road junctions and outside military bases across the territories. There was some sporadic shooting at the Israeli troops. And that night, gunmen in Ramallah opened fire on the outlying houses of the nearby Jewish settlement of Psagot. The army’s response in many of the clashes, with sharpshooters and sometimes other soldiers, too, firing large quantities of live ammunition,31 inevitably felled unarmed rioters alongside the gunmen. At least six Palestinians died on the West Bank that first day and four more in Gaza. More than a hundred were wounded.32 A twelve-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Dura, was filmed by a French television cameraman caught with his father in the center of a vicious firefight at the Netzarim junction in Gaza. They ducked behind a barrel. The father tried to shield him with his own body. To no avail. Mohammed’s death was screened throughout the world that night; instantly it became the iconic image of an intifada that was taking scores of young Palestinian lives for hardly any Israeli ones.k
The next day, the serious violence reached the Israeli-Arab sector. Rioters blocked a major highway to the north. They burned banks and government offices and vandalized other public property. Thirteen Arab men and youths, all but one of them Israeli citizens, were killed by police gunfire on that Sunday and Monday. The outbreaks of violence did not finally subside until a week later.
The death of a dozen citizens at the hands of the police was a national trauma. But even more traumatic, and with farther-reaching effects, were the widespread horror and fear that pervaded Jewish Israel in the wake of the Israeli-Arab rioting. For the first time since the creation of the state—and this unblemished record included all the various wars and the first intifada—the Israeli-Arab minority appeared to be rising up in rebellion, out of solidarity with the Palestinians beyond the sovereign borders of the state. The unrest even reached Jaffa, the mixed Arab-Jewish part of Tel Aviv where the two communities had lived for decades in reasonable harmony. These were days of near panic. The unspoken but ever-present nightmare of Arab irredentism seemed to be unfolding. The intensity of this trauma experienced by the Jewish majority inside Israel increased the level and intensity of lethal violence employed by the army—and condoned by the public—against the Palestinians across the green line during those early days and weeks of the intifada.
Two arguments broke out in Israel immediately: Had Arafat planned the intifada in advance? Did Sharon cause it by his visit to the Temple Mount? On the face of it, the two positive propositions seemed mutually exclusive: if Arafat had planned it, Sharon didn’t cause it. But that immediately begged the important question, what was “it”? Sharon could incontrovertibly be said to have caused the fairly minor fracas that occurred during and immediately following his visit. But did he “cause” the next day’s tragic events on the Mount? Could those events have been avoided, or at least mitigated, by greater moderation on the part of the police? And even after the deaths on the Mount on Friday, could Barak and Mofaz and Ben-Ami have contained the spiraling violence by a more judicious deployment of the army and the police—even if Arafat or lower-level Palestinian figures were avidly fanning the flames of this, their preplanned intifada?
The official Israeli position, from the outset, was that Arafat had been plotting for months to unleash another round of violence in the territories if he did not get his way at the negotiating table. Sharon’s visit, it therefore followed, was not the cause of the intifada; at most it served as a trigger or a catalyst by provoking public outrage that the Palestinian leadership cynically latched on to as a pretext to launch the preplanned violence. By the same token, Arafat could have stopped the violence or at least reduced it, just as he started it.
Barak and Sharon both subscribed to this narrative. For Barak, it explained why the talks had failed: Arafat was not negotiating in good faith. It exonerated him, moreover, for not preventing Sharon’s visit to the Mount. Even if he had prevented it, that would not have prevented the intifada. And it put the lopsided death toll in a more palatable light, at least for the Israeli public. Arafat had deliberately brought on the Palestinian fatalities. He veritably reveled in them; they were his political goal.
For Sharon, of course, this version of events minimized the adverse import of his visit to the Mount. Not that he ever expressed regret or remorse for it. “I find it totally unacceptable that your spokesman was quick to make a false statement that my visit to the Temple Mount ‘may have caused tension,’ insinuating that it ignited the riots,” he wrote to Secretary of State Albright on October 2. “Your spokesman has been swayed by slanderous propaganda on the part of the Palestinian leaders and media.”
In an interview months later to his longtime acolyte Uri Dan, he contended that his ascent to the Mount “would have remained a political gesture—part of my fight against the concessions that the government was preparing to make—if the Palestinians had not deliberately used it as a pretext to unleash their campaign of violence and terror that was in the works since the Camp David summit.”33
Ben-Ami agreed. Writing four years later as a historian again, he professed “no doubt at all” that without Sharon’s visit, which was “the perfect pretext,” the Palestinians would have found another springboard from which to launch their intifada. He cited a speech by Arafat in Nablus on June 25 warning of a possible return to armed struggle. That was the decision that Arafat had made as soon as Camp David ended in failure.
That did not mean, though, Ben-Ami wrote, that Israel was blameless. He listed the settlements, the settler-only roads, the blockades and sieges, the Netanyahu government’s rejectionism, “and the ambivalence of the
Barak government, too, especially in regard to the settlements,” as valid accumulated cause for the Palestinians’ burning resentment.34 He did not list his own performance as the minister in charge of the police.
“No countries and no media subscribe to the Israeli version of events,” France’s president, Jacques Chirac, said, railing at Barak on October 4 at the Élysée Palace in Paris. “The whole world shares the same feeling … Sharon provoked these incidents and he did so with the consent of your government.”35
Chirac certainly spoke for much of the world. “It is hard to believe,” wrote the British newspaper The Independent, “that Mr. Sharon, perhaps the Israeli politician most detested by the Palestinians, did not expect trouble—trouble that, as he is an opponent of further concessions by Israel, can only serve his aims.” At the UN Security Council, Israel was lambasted by delegate after delegate for Sharon’s provocation and for the army’s subsequent use of disproportionate force against the Palestinians’ protests. The Friday fatalities on the Mount were largely elided between Sharon’s visit on Thursday and the splurge of violence across the West Bank that began on Saturday. Sharon was the villain, with Barak and Ben-Ami in supporting roles. Arafat’s part, if he had one, was seen as that of victim.
But some world opinion, even in the first few days, was more nuanced. The New York Times, for instance, though asserting that Sharon’s “provocative and irresponsible visit” had been the “precipitating incident,” warned on October 3 that “now the fighting has taken on a life of its own.”
Israeli public opinion, too, reflected the complexity of what was happening. “Pride and provocation—no matter what. Those were the hallmarks of the visit,” Haaretz editorialized on October 2. Yoel Marcus, the paper’s leading columnist, asserted that Sharon had “caused the conflagration that has led thus far to dozens dead and hundreds injured.”36 But the Palestinians were blamed, too. “The territories are burning, and Arafat is doing nothing to extinguish the flames,” wrote Maariv’s Oded Granot. “Sharon’s visit … provided the Palestinian Authority with the excuse it needed to ignite the battlefield.”