by David Landau
His tastes were catholic, but one particular favorite was a dish that most of his countrymen intensely dislike: Loof. This is a Hebrew corruption of the original British army’s meat loaf. The Israeli version came in a can and was a staple in the IDF from the early years right through to the 1980s. For Sharon it remained a staple. “I didn’t know it still existed,” says Marit Danon. “But it did, and he had to have it. We all joked about it, and he joined in; but he wouldn’t give it up. We’d get the staff to fry it up for him in slices, and he would eat it with great gusto, as though it were some gourmet dish, munching away, slowly and deliberately.”
Loof, falafel, or cordon bleu—whatever the menu it had to be served on crisp white linen, with white napkins for Sharon and whomever he could get to join him. He hated eating alone and always urged staffers to partake. The staffers, though it wasn’t formally part of their jobs, made sure his appetite was catered to. “We didn’t want him invading Iraq because he was hungry,” Perlman jokes. Conditions at the Israeli prime minister’s office, an ugly 1950s office block, are remarkably Spartan.r There is no private dining room for the prime minister, and Sharon would have his white tablecloth and gleaming cutlery laid out on his office desk. To take the edge off the unaesthetic drabness of the place, he would insist on freshly cut flowers in a vase each morning. “I can’t stand to see flowers thirsty,” he once told Marit when the waterline did not quite reach all the stalks. In the background, a music system quietly played classics or the Hebrew or Russian songs he loved. It had to be on when he walked into the empty room each morning.
Before he walked in, he would pause, without fail, at Marit’s desk and say “Good morning, how are you?” to her and other staffers present. “You could see he grew up in a European household,” says Marit. “There was something hugely dissonant between his behavior in practice and his ‘quintessential sabra’ image. He would not go through a door ahead of a woman. At the beginning, we would both stand inside his room with neither of us prepared to go out first. And he would automatically stand—no mean feat for a man of his girth—when a woman entered the room. It took time before he stopped standing for me or before he stopped protesting if I walked next to him carrying a briefcase, instead of him carrying it for me.”
Sharon’s close aides are still close to each other years later. All of them have nostalgic stories about the interest and concern he showed not only for them but for their families. “I daresay Avigdor has already complimented you on your new hairstyle,” the prime minister gushed to the wife of his director general, Avigdor Yitzhaki.44 “He had to know everything,” says Perlman. “He phoned my wife, Roni, in Paris when she was still my fiancée, to see if she’d found a wedding dress. When she said she had, he asked her to describe it to him. She described it and went on to ask, ‘Prime Minister, why is this of interest to you?’ He said, ‘Because I’ll want to kiss the bride on her wedding day and I don’t want to step on the train.’ ”45
“It was important to him that everyone should get married and have families,” another aide recalled.
The fact that I’d been married for several years and didn’t have any children was a matter of constant concern to him. He and Lily would have had six children if they could have. He kept up the pressure, as though he were my father. When I got pregnant, he was really pleased. He insisted that career was no reason not to have children. During his term, lots of people at the office—secretaries, drivers, aides—got married or had children. There was a real abundance in this area. He had us keep a list of all the births. Big families were important to him, perhaps because he’d come from a small one.46
“I miss him every day,” Marit Danon admitted. “We would talk about books he was reading, books I was reading. Where do you find a CEO in a small company, let alone a prime minister, so caring about the people around him? Once, soon after he took over, he said to me, ‘Go after the tea lady and ask her what’s wrong. Her eyes look so sad today.’ The woman was gobsmacked. She was over her head in personal problems.”
His own sadness showed through at night. “Perhaps you’ll come upstairs and have a bite to eat?” Perlman recalled the prime minister asking late in the evening at the Jerusalem residence. “We go upstairs and we eat and it’s twelve, twelve thirty, one, and I can’t go. We’re talking on and on. What about? About anything. Just gossiping. I must have left eventually after two, and I remember thinking to myself, he’s a powerful man and he’s the prime minister, but at the end of the day he’s all by himself.” Kaplinsky, too, sometimes found himself called into the office at ten or eleven o’clock at night “just to have someone to talk to before going home, alone. What did we talk about? About everything. It always began with the army and spilled over to everything. Everything. Conversations in the night between two people.”47
There were rumors that he would marry Michal Modai, the widow of his old friend, army comrade, and political colleague Yitzhak Modai, the former finance minister who had died in 1998. A onetime beauty queen, she was still a stately head turner and had made her own public career as the president of World WIZO, a women’s Zionist organization. The Sharons and the Modais had been friends for decades.
“Sources?” Modai said.
There were all sorts of sources! My driver at WIZO told me that in his synagogue one Saturday the people were talking about Sharon being alone and needing to get married. Someone said that not every woman can be the wife of the prime minister; you need a representative sort of woman. Someone else said, “What about Michal Modai?” Soon, people started asking my secretary when’s the wedding date. A good match, eh? I know the public thought so. But it was complete poppycock. Once we met at an event where he spoke. I went over to him, and of course he kissed me. I said, “Right, we’ve been photographed together. Now there’ll be more rumors.” But we’d known each other long enough not to have to stop kissing when we met just because of rumors … Did I know he was lonely? I knew from Yitzhak that politics is a tough job and being at the top is that much tougher. But it keeps you busy around the clock, so I really didn’t think that loneliness was his problem. Anyway, I wasn’t going to drive up to Jerusalem to entertain him.48
For Marit Danon, everything in Sharon’s character, both the toughness and the introversion, went back to his childhood in Kfar Malal.
He was very talkative; I’d never had a boss who talked so much. Always about Kfar Malal, always about how hard it was. I’m no psychologist, but his pain sounded authentic, no matter how often he retold the same stories: how his mother’s hands were worn rough from work; how he himself had to work so hard with his father in the fields; how his family was ostracized; how he never went to other kids’ houses and always wondered what they were like inside. He told me that his mother would shut herself away one day each week to write home to her family in Russia from whom she’d been torn away. I found that genuinely moving. I felt the loneliness of this fat little boy coming through. He was always a bit of a fatty, I think. One day, a year or more before he collapsed, we got a letter from the Aharonowitz School in Kfar Malal. They were celebrating their seventieth anniversary, and would the prime minister please write a few words of greeting. The letter sat on his desk for weeks. They kept phoning. He kept asking me, “What should I write?” and I said, “Just write about something nice from third grade or something.” He replied, “Marit, don’t you understand? There wasn’t anything nice there.”
* * *
a “Those who didn’t want him as chief of staff got him back as minister of defense; and those who don’t want him as minister of defense will get him back as prime minister.” See p. 216. Dan’s 1983 prediction had since entered Hebrew idiom as a byword for hubristic, revenge-filled fantasy.
b The final figures were 1,698,077 votes for Sharon, or 62.38 percent; 1,023,944 votes for Barak, or 37.62 percent; the margin—674,133 votes, or 24.67 percent. Voter turnout was the lowest ever in an Israeli election: 62.28 percent, compared, for instance, with 78.7 percent in 1999. But
this was the only ever Israeli election just for prime minister, not for the Knesset.
c Four months later, Marit Danon walked into Sharon’s room and “apologized ‘for the terrible opinion I had of you.’ I didn’t blame the media or anything. I laid it on myself. I said, ‘Prime Minister, I need to make a confession.’ I felt I had to do it; it was really weighing me down. Because he’d been beyond the pale for me. Absolutely beyond the pale. He was dumbstruck.” Her eyes mist over as she recalls this scene. In the 2003 election, though, she says, she voted, as always, Meretz.
d Particularly encouraging for Sharon to recollect was then governor Bush’s reaction to the view from the air of pre-1967 Israel’s ten-mile “waistline.” According to Mel Sembler, a Republican activist who organized the 1998 trip for Bush and three other governors, Bush remarked: “We’ve got driveways in Texas longer than that” (Miller, Much Too Promised Land, 324).
e Bentsur insisted, in an interview for this book, that there was no impropriety in the Vienna meeting, at least at the session in which he participated. “The casino never came up. We were trying to weave channels of communication so we could start working together as soon as Sharon came into office. It was entirely proper, and in fact quite promising.” But Bentsur did not dismiss a friend’s subsequent suggestion, purportedly based on an intelligence source, that he was taken along as a front to cover separate talks of an improper nature. “I think Omri and the others are corrupt from head to foot,” he said of Sharon’s close advisers. Bentsur was the first of several high-ranking public officials—we shall encounter the head of the Mossad and the army chief of staff later—who left the government service after clashing with Sharon’s staff and became outspoken critics of Sharon’s alleged corruption, though without being able to adduce smoking-gun evidence to clinch their accusations.
f Published only years later, the draft provided that
• Israel was to pull back its troops within four weeks to their pre-intifada positions;
• final status negotiations would resume by the end of April;
• a Sharon-Arafat summit would be held in March, to be followed within three days by security coordination talks on various levels;
• Israel would carry out the still-unimplemented third further redeployment (FRD);
• Israel would refrain from unilateral actions in Jerusalem and from building new settlements; and
• the PA would commit to fight terror and prevent attacks; Arafat would denounce terror and violence; as a goodwill gesture, Israel would release forty Palestinian prisoners.
g Indyk recounts how Bush pulled him aside and asked, “ ‘Why didn’t Arafat take the [Clinton] deal?’ I responded that there was enough blame to go around. However, if I had to give the most important reason, I would say it was lack of leadership on Arafat’s part. ‘That’s exactly right. No leadership,’ said the president. ‘…Now there’s nothing to be done because Arafat already rejected an offer that Sharon is not going to repeat … There’s no Nobel Prize to be had here.’ He obviously felt he had it figured out” (Indyk, Innocent Abroad, 379). Aaron David Miller, another Clinton Middle East man, conveys the same presidential wisdom more graphically. “Colin Powell summed up the president’s view best for me: ‘I don’t want to do what Clinton did because it takes a lot of time. The prospects of success, rather than fear of failure, are really quite low … and I got two wars going on. Why am I going to fuck around with these people?’ ” (Miller, Much Too Promised Land, 324).
h Sharon’s military secretary Moshe Kaplinsky, later CO of Central Command and then deputy chief of staff.
i Rehavam Ze’evi, tourism minister and leader of the ultranationalist Moledet Party, was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in October 2001.
j Shani was ruthless in winnowing out people he didn’t want—including people to whom Sharon had promised jobs. Eytan Bentsur was one. The veteran diplomat claimed later that he saw that the Sharon team were “amateurs and boors”—and walked out. Shani claimed he showed Bentsur the door because he was “not a team player.” The man appointed foreign policy adviser was Danny Ayalon, a relatively junior Foreign Ministry man on reassignment to the Prime Minister’s Office.
That was just the start of Ayalon’s lucky streak. “I advised Peres not to accept any candidate put up by Sharon for ambassador to Washington who was not a professional diplomat,” Peres’s senior aide and Foreign Ministry director general, Avi Gil, recalled.
Block every proposed political appointment, I said, and then, once they’re exhausted, let’s present them with a list of Foreign Ministry candidates. That’s what happened. There was a big lunch at the prime minister’s residence, and Peres said, “Arik, let’s make a really nonpolitical appointment from among our professional diplomats.” Sharon said, “Whom do you have in mind?” and I immediately produced a list of twelve senior diplomats. Arik started discussing some of the names. He didn’t rule them all out. Just then Danny Ayalon walks in with some document for Sharon to sign. Peres was feeling so triumphant that he exclaims, “Every Foreign Ministry man can be a candidate. Even Danny Ayalon.” Ayalon, needless to say, was not one of the twelve names on the list. But Sharon, like a shotgun, banged his hand down and said, “We’ve got an ambassador!” He’d come to know Ayalon, apparently, and he liked him. I started whispering frantically to Peres, but it was too late. (Gil and Ayalon interviews)
k Sharon’s no quietly turned into a yes, and Peres and Arafat met on September 26, the day before Yom Kippur, at the Dahaniye Airport, close to the Gaza-Egypt border.
l Danny Ayalon, then still in Jerusalem as Sharon’s policy adviser, blames Sharon’s unofficial emissary to Washington, the businessman Arie Genger, and also the long-serving director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, for whipping up “a sincere but unfounded sense that the Americans were going to dump us after 9/11 in order to cozy up to the Arabs. Genger usually read the American scene accurately. But this time he was way out. And Hoenlein, who saw molehills as mountains, nagged him incessantly. A professional diplomat would not have fallen into that rut.”
m This was not far-fetched: the PFLP, though independent, was not an opposition force within the PA. Abu Ali Mustafa’s office in Ramallah, where he was killed by a helicopter-launched rocket, was only a few hundred yards from Arafat’s muqata headquarters.
n By IDF figures, Palestinian shooting attacks were down 75 percent. The Palestinians said the IDF had nevertheless killed twenty-one people in the three-week period following December 16, demolished dozens of homes, and made multiple incursions into Area A (Harel and Isacharoff, Seventh War, 185; Economist, January 31, 2002).
o Harel and Isacharoff, Seventh War. Miller cites a figure of 300 Palestinian dead.
p Sharon declined, moreover, to open a second front in the north, despite strenuous efforts by Hezbollah and Palestinian groups in Lebanon to provoke him into doing so.
q Haim Ramon interview, Tel Aviv, September 2009.
r Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor, planned an office-plus-residence compound near the present office, away from the residential heart of the city. It would have given the incumbent a significantly improved quality of life. But Netanyahu, when he took over in 2009, demonstratively shot down the plan as too lavish and extravagant. As a result, the residents of Rehavia and the adjacent districts are still disturbed at all hours by the sirens and slamming doors of the prime minister’s cavalcade. And he himself and his family are still entombed behind the high walls and reinforced windows of the old residence.
CHAPTER 14 · KING OF ISRAEL
On May 22, 2002, Ariel Sharon lumbered into the members’ dining room of the Knesset without the sardonic grin that he usually reserved for this seething political bourse, where every grin and grimace is minutely analyzed. He sat down heavily. At a sign from his spokesman, a couple of veteran lobby correspondents joined the table. Younger reporters formed a scrum around them, notebooks poised. They expected to
find the prime minister in triumphant mood, firing off quotable one-liners. His government’s controversial package of economic austerity measures had just passed comfortably on first reading. It would soon move smoothly into law. Shas’s seventeen Knesset members, who had voted against the package two days earlier and caused Sharon an ignominious defeat, all meekly abstained this time around. This was because he had peremptorily and publicly sacked the party’s ministers within minutes of the previous vote. He would govern without Shas, he announced to the nation, live on television. The ultra-Orthodox party had thought to strong-arm him; he had swatted it down. Press and public applauded this act of leadership.
Now, beaten and humiliated, Shas was desperately signaling that it wanted to slink back in. By law, Sharon’s letters of dismissal would take effect after forty-eight hours. There was still time for him to withdraw them. But Sharon’s whole demeanor spoke otherwise. Slinking would not be good enough; he wanted to see Shas crawl. The package would go through two more readings. Abstentions would not do. The bearded, black-suited Shas members, self-appointed tribunes of the poor, would have to raise their hands with the rest of the coalition in favor of the painful cuts to child support and government welfare programs. These were no less painful to the Likud than to Shas, Sharon insisted. The Likud was no less authentic a representative of the poor. The intifada had devastated the economy, and fighting it cost money. The high-tech sector, powerhouse of Israel’s recent prosperity, was still reeling from the global downturn and collapse of the Nasdaq.