Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  The reservists’ response to the sudden summonses was dramatically better than the usual turnout for reserve duty, when shirking and bellyaching are fairly widespread. The tanks and armored personnel carriers were “oversubscribed” in many units, and soldiers literally scrambled for a place on board. The army encouraged media coverage; the reservists interviewed all sounded positive about the operation despite their own natural apprehensions and discomfort. Some sounded outright jingoistic. If any further spur were needed, it came in the form of another ghastly suicide bombing, on March 31, this time in a busy restaurant in Haifa. Fourteen people died and forty were injured. Again, as at Netanya, Hamas claimed responsibility.

  Invading the zones ruled by the PA was not in itself a wholly new departure for IDF ground forces. They had been making incursions into the Palestinian towns for several months, in pursuit of suspects or in the wake of a terror attack. Usually, these raids focused on a specific building or cluster of buildings where militants were thought to be hiding. Shin Bet men accompanied the troops, and the initial purpose was to arrest the suspects, though the raids often ended in firefights. The operations were usually wound down at dawn or, at most, extended for a couple of days. If they went on longer, admonitions from Washington helped expedite the withdrawal.

  Defensive Shield was different. Beyond its sheer size, it was open-ended; it embraced the refugee camps as well as the towns; and the initial American reaction was mild, though it got tougher later. The formal goals were vaguely worded. IDF Central Command was to make war on terrorists and those who sent them on their missions. It was to dismantle infrastructures of terror, to hit at terror activists and suspects, and to “levy a price from the Palestinian Authority.” It was unclear from this wording whether the purpose was to bring about the total collapse of the PA and a return to direct Israeli administration of the West Bank. In any event, that did not happen.

  The nighttime raids had never ventured into the hearts of the densely built refugee camps. Run by the various militant groups, which often clashed with each other, they had been virtual no-go areas even for the PA police. At the end of February, however, a month before Defensive Shield, a decision was made to raid simultaneously two important camps, Balata near Nablus and Jenin camp, near the town of Jenin. The two crack infantry brigades, Golani and the Paratroopers, carried out the operation, which went far more smoothly than had been feared. There was armed resistance in both camps. The IDF lost two. The Palestinians lost dozens. “Collateral” killing, the euphemism for civilian casualties, was relatively light.

  To avoid explosive booby traps that the defenders had planted all around the likely access routes, the soldiers advanced through the houses instead of along the streets. This involved drilling or sometimes blasting holes through the walls of people’s homes. A week later, the army surrounded the refugee camp at Tulkarm, trapping some fifty armed militants within. With the memory of Balata and Jenin still fresh, they were persuaded to give in without a fight. They filed out stripped to the waist and holding their weapons above their heads, as television cameras captured the moment.

  This experience and these tactics served the IDF in many of the incursions that made up Defensive Shield. In the words of a UN report, “The operation began on 29 March with an incursion into Ramallah, followed by entry into Tulkarm and Qalqilya on 1 April, Bethlehem on 2 April, and Jenin and Nablus on 3 April. By 3 April, six of the largest cities in the West Bank, and their surrounding towns, villages and refugee camps, were occupied by the Israeli military.” In many of the actions, Palestinian resistance was scattered, disorganized, and ineffective.

  Ramallah fell without much of a fight. By midnight on the night of the twenty-eighth, Israeli infantry had taken over the radio station in the center of town. By dawn, the muzzles of IDF tank barrels were pointing at Yasser Arafat from virtually under his office window. The tanks had smashed down the main gate of the muqata complex. The soldiers first swarmed over the prison wing, where the PA was ostensibly holding the killers of Minister Rehavam Ze’evi; the man who sent them, Ahmed Saadat; and Fuad Shubaki, who Israel believed was behind the Karine A. But they had been spirited away to Arafat’s own suite just minutes ahead of the invading force. The Israelis freed twenty-six men held in the prison cells as collaborators, then blew up the building. They shelled and bulldozed other buildings in the compound and shut off water and electricity supplies to the central block where Arafat and some four hundred aides and guards were holed up, effectively under siege. Sporadic shooting continued for four days, until a group of Israeli and foreign peace activists managed to slip through the army’s lines and join the beleaguered rais and his motley forces. Their presence deterred further gunfire.

  Bethlehem also fell easily, but there, too, the IDF was dragged into an extended siege situation. Due to a snafu by a heli-borne commando unit that was to have surrounded and sealed off the Church of the Nativity, more than two hundred Palestinian militants, retreating before the invading force, were able to take refuge inside the ancient Christian shrine. Thirty-nine days of complicated negotiations followed, accompanied by sporadic exchanges of rifle fire that took its toll of the venerable stonework. The church, with its web of subterranean chapels, suffered other damage and desecration, too. The Greek, Latin, and Armenian monks who share the shrine according to rigid, time-encrusted rules tried to continue their sacred rites despite the siege. Some donated food to the hungry militants; others surrendered it less willingly. The Israelis allowed in some food, sometimes. Palestinian civilians managed to boost supplies by throwing packages from the surrounding rooftops into the church precincts. European and American diplomats labored to bring the episode to a bloodless end.

  If the Palestinians holed up in the church showed disregard for its historic treasures, some Israeli forces displayed callous contempt, and in some cases outright covetousness, for the property of Palestinian civilians caught up in the fighting. The couple dozen indictments filed in military courts after Defensive Shield hardly did justice to the widespread looting and vandalism that some units, particularly reservist units, left in their trail. Tanks in some cases made no effort to avoid crushing cars, electricity pylons, and water hydrants under their treads.

  In Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank, the IDF scored its smoothest military success. The old casba of the town was seen as a formidable militant stronghold, and the IDF pitted against it top-flight infantry regulars backed by tanks. Over four days of street fighting, the Israelis pushed hundreds of militants into a small area of the casba where, on April 8, they eventually surrendered. Just one IDF officer was killed in the fighting and more than seventy Palestinians. Most of the dead were fighters, but the figure included a family of eight, wiped out by a stray tank shell.

  In nearby Jenin refugee camp, meanwhile, the Israeli operation was anything but smooth. Hamas and Fatah activists set aside their ideological differences to fight together under the command of a former PA officer, Abu Jendal. He divided the camp into small zones and sowed each of them with mines and booby traps. His fighters, operating in small, well-coordinated groups, put up dogged and effective resistance to the cumbersome advance of an IDF reserve division. The Israelis called in attack helicopters, but their daily forward movement was still slow and labored, and they were taking casualties.

  With Defensive Shield still in train, Arafat in palpable peril, and Jenin still unvanquished, Bush began to signal that his forbearance was running out. He had been unequivocal in his initial, sympathetic support of the operation and had made it clear that for him the Israeli action was part of the global war against terror that he had declared after 9/11. But now he had an announcement:

  I’ve decided to send Secretary of State Powell to the region next week to seek broad international support for the vision I’ve outlined today … an immediate and meaningful cease-fire, an end to terror and violence and incitement; withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah; implementation of t
he already agreed upon Tenet and Mitchell plans, which will lead to a political settlement.

  Tony Zinni, still in the region, went to see Arafat ahead of the secretary’s arrival. “Sharon didn’t object. So my security guys saddled up in their SWAT gear—black helmets, Kevlar, the whole deal—and off we went … By then, Arafat’s Muqata headquarters had been turned into Berlin in the spring of 1945.” The Americans had to clamber over rubble and file into the beleaguered headquarters one by one, under the rifles of nervous Palestinian guards. “The place smelled bad,” Zinni recalled. “Things were grim. I met Arafat in a dimly lit little room; there was a semiautomatic weapon by his side. All his aides looked like drowned rats, stressed out and beaten; but he was in his glory, upbeat and animated, more alert and fired up than I had ever seen him. The siege had brought out the fighter in him. ‘I am under siege,’ he announced dramatically, enjoying the hell out of the moment.”39

  Sharon made it clear to the secretary of state that the reoccupation of the towns was not going to be indefinite. “But there are some objectives that still have to be achieved.”40 One of these objectives was taking Jenin refugee camp, where the Israeli reservists were still being held off by the well-organized defenders. On April 10, the IDF took its worst casualties in the campaign when an infantry unit was ambushed in the heart of the camp and suffered thirteen dead. After that, the army used armored bulldozers to smash its way through wide swaths of densely populated alleys and courtyards. Helicopter gunships and tanks rained fire on the defenders.

  The battle reached its inexorable end during Powell’s visit. Most of the Palestinian fighters surrendered. Abu Jendal, their commander, died fighting. But the Palestinians, defeated by overwhelming force, briefly threatened to turn the tables on Sharon as they had done in Beirut twenty years before—with a world-shaking accusation of massacre. For several days, the region and the world were once again engulfed in allegations that Israeli soldiers under Sharon’s command had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Palestinians. Moreover, unlike at Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis were not just vicariously responsible; they had actually shot, bombed, and bulldozed the victims to death.

  This time, though, there was no massacre. In fact, despite the length and intensity of the fighting and the scale of the destruction in the center of Jenin camp, there were relatively few fatalities. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to UN figures, and twenty-three Israeli soldiers. Most of the Palestinians were armed fighters, though some were innocent civilians caught in the imbroglio. Most of the inhabitants of the camp managed to flee to the neighboring town of Jenin before the fighting began.

  The massacre canard had many fathers, among them the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who spoke on television of war crimes and five hundred dead, and the UN envoy Terje Larsen, who went into the camp on April 15 and told reporters, “I am shocked at the sight and smell of corpses and destruction … This is horrifying beyond belief.” But the Israelis themselves carry much of the blame for their own discomfiture. The IDF spokesman, Ron Kitri, spoke of an estimated two hundred Palestinian dead. Worse yet, he and his bosses sealed off the whole Jenin area from local and foreign press coverage for several days. The IDF and Shin Bet commanders on the scene made matters still worse by taking large numbers of Palestinian men away from Jenin for questioning and then releasing them miles from home with no means of communicating with their beleaguered families.

  For Yasser Arafat, beleaguered himself in Ramallah, Jenin was his “Stalingrad,” as he put it, a victory of Palestinian arms and honor. But when Powell came to see him twice at the muqata, much against Sharon’s wishes, he gave the secretary nothing with which Powell could push back in Washington against the neocons, the pro-Israel lobby, and the powerful conservative Christian forces within the Republican constituency that were becoming increasingly vocal against the Palestinian leader. Arafat claimed he had been effectively neutralized by the Israeli attacks on the PA. But Powell said, “You still have influence and authority … and that’s what we’re looking for you to use.”41 He left the region after ten frustrating days, and with nothing to show for them. He spoke vaguely of a possible peace conference and his intention to return, but the administration was not behind him.

  The charge that Israel used disproportionate force in Defensive Shield was powerfully reinforced by the scenes of destruction at the camp, and it resulted in a UN Security Council resolution on April 19 calling for an inquiry into “recent events in the Jenin refugee camp.” Israel initially went along with the UN demand. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” said Sharon’s spokesman for the foreign media, Ra’anan Gissin. The U.S. delegation drafted the Security Council resolution. But soon after, senior army generals persuaded Ben-Eliezer, and together they persuaded Sharon, that they could not afford to cooperate with a UN inquiry for fear that this process might end up with Israeli officers facing charges in an international court.

  The upshot was a convenient trade-off: the Americans engineered the quiet demise of the UN inquiry; Israel lifted the sieges in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Some creative diplomacy by Britain gave Sharon a sufficiently face-saving solution to his demand that the wanted men besieged in the muqata and in the Church of the Nativity not be released. Tony Blair had tried to persuade Sharon back in November that Arafat could never agree to hand over Ahmed Saadat, Fuad Shubaki, and the others but that he might agree to British monitors assisting in their Palestinian imprisonment. “Is that offer still on the table?” Sharon’s aide Danny Ayalon now asked the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, Sherard Cowper-Coles, in an out-of-the-blue telephone call.42 A week later, Andrew Coyle, a former governor of the famously austere Brixton Prison, waited outside Sharon’s office door at midnight while Cowper-Coles and Dan Kurtzer, his American counterpart, argued within over the conditions under which Saadat, Shubaki, and the four others would be held in a PA jail in Jericho, with Coyle supervising. “He wants to see you,” Cowper-Coles came out and told the tough ex-warden. “Tell him exactly what it’s like in Brixton for an IRA prisoner.” It was not going to be quite like that for the Palestinians. But Sharon was apparently satisfied by Coyle’s no-nonsense mien and agreed.43

  The siege in Bethlehem ended a week later, after complicated negotiations involving Muhammad Rashid for the PA, the Tel Aviv CIA station officer for the Americans, and a former British MI6 agent, Alastair Crooke, representing the EU. Thirteen Palestinians with Israeli “blood on their hands” were deported to Cyprus aboard a British RAF plane; twenty-six more were exiled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip; and the remaining eighty-four Palestinians in the church (a hundred-odd had been allowed to leave earlier) were released to their homes.

  Defensive Shield was over. Some 260 Palestinians had been killed,o thousands injured, and close to two thousand arrested. Most of the Palestinian dead were armed men, but there were many innocent deaths and injuries and widespread damage to property. The Israelis had lost 34 soldiers, 23 of them in Jenin. Another 60 Israelis had been killed in terror attacks during the period of the operation. One of the bloodiest, on May 7, was a suicide bombing in a gaming club in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv. Fifteen people died, and 55 were injured in that attack; Hamas claimed responsibility.

  Still, the surge of terror deaths seemed to be receding. April’s figure was lower than March’s, and May’s would hopefully end lower than April’s. Clearly, Defensive Shield had not “solved” the problem. But it had salved the pernicious spread of helplessness and despair within Israeli society. It might not have been a military masterstroke. Perhaps no such stroke is possible in a regular army’s struggle against armed militants. But by seizing the initiative, it restored Israelis’ confidence in their state and their army and, by extension, in their prime minister.

  This restored confidence, which showed dramatically in the polls, stemmed both from the massive deployment of military power and from a notable moderation in its use. This was Sharon’s only war as prime minister, as it turned out, and he ran it
very differently from his past military campaigns. With tens of thousands of soldiers under arms and on the move, the death and devastation in the Palestinian territories could have been of an entirely different dimension. Given the firepower he had mobilized, he unleashed relatively little of it. For all his banging on the table and barking at his generals, he kept Defensive Shield within the confines of his new, prime ministerial weltanschauung: restraint is strength.p

  Arafat marked his release from five months of siege with a stately progress by helicopter and car through the battered towns of the West Bank on May 13. He met with bereaved families, embraced orphans, spoke words of encouragement to injured people. But the public at large was largely absent from the streets. The rais’s return was far from triumphal. Commentators put this down to the unpopularity of the deal he had struck in Bethlehem, especially the deportation of some of the men trapped in the church. One place where enthusiastic crowds did gather was the Jenin camp. But Arafat, apparently fearing local Islamic radicals, declined to leave his car. His convoy swept past the battered camp. In the months that followed, Arafat did not leave the muqata much. He did not go abroad, or even visit Gaza, apparently for fear that Israel would not let him return.

  Arafat owed his freedom above all to Crown Prince Abdullah. He was effectively the Saudi ruler; King Fahd, his half brother, was elderly and not really functioning by this time. Abdullah had flown to Crawford, Texas, on April 25 and virtually threatened Bush with a major rupture in relations if Arafat continued to be besieged by the Israelis.

  Abdullah had recently proposed peace and normalization between Israel and all the Arab countries in return for the creation of a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. The key issue of Palestinian refugees was “to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” “Agreed” meant Israel could not be forced. It signified Arab recognition that most of the refugees and their descendants would not return to Israel. Commentators presumed the plan was floated to curry favorable sentiment in the West following 9/11, in which most of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Nevertheless, this was the first time the Saudis had expressly held out the prospect of Israel’s full acceptance into the Arab region. In normal circumstances, Prince Abdullah’s plan would have had a powerful impact on Israeli public opinion. In fact, it was barely noticed. It was submitted to and approved by the Arab Summit in Beirut on the very day of the suicide bombing at the hotel in Netanya. Instead of a wave of hope and encouragement, Palestine was swept by a new wave of violence. Sharon gave the plan a cautious and perfunctory welcome.