Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  More troubling, because more feasible, were various forms of violence that the authorities feared would be launched in order to foil the disengagement. They feared a Jewish terror attack on the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem, intended to trigger a massive military conflagration in Palestine and in the wider region and in that way prevent the disengagement. They feared random Jewish terror attacks on Palestinians, also designed to cause widespread unrest and thus divert troops from the disengagement.

  They feared that small groups of diehards would take up arms against the evacuating forces (or against themselves: there were threats of suicide as the deadline approached). They expected mass resistance by thousands of young people, from the West Bank settlements and from Israel proper, whose religious and political leaders proclaimed openly that they intended to “invade” the Gaza Strip ahead of the army and thwart the disengagement. They feared that violent confrontations between the soldiers and these “infiltrators” would protract the evacuation process and heighten the risk of attacks on both soldiers and settlers by Palestinian militants.

  In addition, the government feared large-scale mutinyd among the troops—that is, refusal on religious grounds to obey orders connected to the disengagement. Some of the nationalist rabbis unequivocally ordered the soldiers to disobey. Some were equally unequivocal in forbidding and condemning such mutiny. But many, like a good number of politicians on the right, wrapped themselves in convenient obfuscation. Hanging over the various scenarios of violence was a fog of deliberate doublespeak that condoned, legitimized, even encouraged some of the violent scenarios while purporting to disapprove of violence. As they broadcast their own mixed messages, some rightist leaders accused Sharon and the army of deliberately hyping the fear of violence as a Soviet-style provocation against the settlers. The settler leaders insisted, moreover, that their planned acts of passive resistance, even if technically illegal, were within the accepted parameters of extra-parliamentary protest. But, as with their determination that Sharon’s behavior was antidemocratic, they determined arbitrarily what the accepted parameters were.

  The army was especially anxious about possible widespread mutiny in reserve battalions. The plans called for units of the border police and of the regular army to perform the actual evacuation, but fairly large reserve forces would have to be called up to take over the deployments of these regular units along the borders and in the West Bank. “We must keep the army out of this ugly contest,” Sharon urged at cabinet in September. “The talk we’ve been hearing is actually intended to foment civil war. I regard with the utmost gravity the threats that have been made against army officers and security personnel.”8

  Benzy Lieberman, chairman of the Yesha Council and a master of the doublespeak, compiled the “Ten Commandments for the Struggle Against the Disengagement.” It contained an ostensibly stern prohibition against “verbal or physical violence against the soldiers who will be sent, God forbid, to illicitly uproot the settlers.” But it immediately continued, “Advancement of the plan by trampling the norms of democracy lays the responsibility on the prime minister for the nation being torn asunder, God forbid.”9

  Lieberman hewed to this zigzag line throughout the months ahead. “We shall do everything in order to cast the ‘expulsion law’ onto the trash heap of history,” he declared. “There are still plenty of actions that can be undertaken, and we believe with unshakable confidence that this law will not be implemented.” If the “day of disaster” came around nevertheless, “thousands of people opposed to the disengagement will flock to Gush Katif and be there with the inhabitants.”

  What would those thousands do there? Lieberman left that vague. Plainly, though, throughout this period the settlers and their supporters were not thinking in terms of protesting a policy that would ultimately, inexorably, be implemented; they fully intended to prevent its implementation. Extremists and moderates “are united by one common denominator,” the Haaretz defense correspondent wrote in October. “They share a profound conviction that they have it in their power still to prevent the prime minister’s plan from being fulfilled.”

  Yoel Marcus, the leading columnist, bared the heart of the problem:

  In the torrent of incitement flooding the land like a hurricane, there is nothing more pernicious than the claim that Sharon does not have a mandate to carry out the disengagement from Gaza. For when you say a leader does not have a mandate, you are depicting him as an impostor who seized power by force. In which case anything he does is illegitimate, and anything his opponents do to rebel against him is permissible, including killing him. The settlers, the rabbis, the extreme Right, have together created a situation in which the critical Knesset debate on the disengagement will be conducted in an atmosphere of putsch, of yearning for the political assassination of a leader who was elected by the majority of the people.

  The settlement leaders and the extremists who have raised the banner of rebellion have no mandate for anything at all … Nobody empowered rabbis to give orders to politicians or to order soldiers to disobey their commanders, as though we were living under a regime of ayatollahs. But the fear campaign against Sharon won’t work. He’s not afraid. He’s determined to win the Knesset’s approval and to carry out the disengagement as planned. He does have a mandate. And how!10

  Marcus’s powerful defense was perfectly timed; three days later Sharon was to seek the Knesset’s approval for the disengagement plan. The government submitted to the house a package that included the cabinet decision (the “Livni compromise”) on phased withdrawal, details of the withdrawal and compensation plans, and—a key point for Sharon—a copy of President Bush’s letter of April 14.

  The Gaza settlements were divided into four groups, and there would be a separate cabinet decision before withdrawal began from each one of them. The IDF would maintain its deployment, at least initially, along the Philadelphi road, the border zone between Gaza and Egypt. Later, Israel might withdraw from there, too (it did), and might facilitate the building of an airport and a seaport in the Gaza Strip (it did not). Israel would “aspire to” leaving all civilian buildings intact (that was subsequently reversed, and the settlers’ homes were all demolished) and leaving intact, too, all water, electricity, and sewerage infrastructure. Military installations would be dismantled and removed.

  The government pledged to continue building the separation fence on the West Bank in accordance with “humanitarian considerations” as determined by the high court. The proposed removal of the four settlements in northern Samaria would provide territorial contiguity for the Palestinians in that area, the government statement said, and Israel undertook to ease roadblocks and travel restrictions elsewhere in the West Bank.

  As for the Gaza Strip, after the disengagement “there will no longer be any basis to contend that it is occupied territory.” Nevertheless, Israel would continue “to supervise and guard” Gaza’s land borders; it would exercise exclusive control over Gaza’s airspace; and it would “continue to conduct military operations in Gaza’s coastal waters. Israel also reserves the right to self-defense and to the use of force against threats emanating from Gaza.” These provisos did in fact furnish a basis in the years ahead for contentions, by the Palestinians and by much of the international community, that Gaza remained occupied despite the withdrawal of the army and the settlers from its territory.

  It was, in the opening words of Speaker Ruby Rivlin, to a packed house on October 25, “the moment of truth for the nation, and we here in the Knesset carry the responsibility, for better or worse. Each of us must answer to his conscience.”

  “This decision is unbearably hard for me,” Sharon began his speech. “In all my years as a military commander, as a politician, as a minister, and now as prime minister I have never had to take such a hard decision.”

  “So why are you doing it?!” A barrage of catcalls opened up from the Right. Speaker Rivlin gaveled furiously. Sharon let the storm subside and continued:

  I
know full well what this decision means for the thousands of Israelis who have been living in the Gaza region for so many years, who were sent there by previous governments, who built homes there and planted trees there and grew flowers and raised boys and girls who have known no other home. I know full well. I sent them. I was party to this project. Many of these people are my personal friends. I feel their pain, their fury, their despair.

  But as deeply as I understand what they are going through, I believe as deeply in the need to take this decision for disengagement, and I am determined as deeply to carry it out. I am convinced in the depths of my soul and with my entire intellect that this disengagement will strengthen Israel’s hold on territory vital for its existence, will win the support and appreciation of countries near and far, will reduce enmity, will break down boycott and siege, and will advance us on the path of peace with the Palestinians and our other neighbors.

  By this time, the heckling from the Right had become a constant and raucous cacophony. Whenever the row subsided a little, Sharon read on doggedly from his text, which he had spent the whole of the previous day at the ranch writing and meticulously rewriting.

  It was going to be a long debate. All 120 Knesset members had registered to speak, plus two ministers, Shaul Mofaz and Natan Sharansky, who were not MKs. Rivlin gave them each five minutes. Like a soccer referee, he stopped the clock whenever the heckling drowned out the speaker. But he warned that any speaker answering a heckler did so on his own time. “I haven’t got to the point yet,” a Shas minister complained when the five-minute guillotine descended on him. “Sorry,” Rivlin replied, “you shouldn’t have argued with them.” He allocated two whole days for the debate, with the vote set for the night of October 26.

  “We do not want to rule forever over millions of Palestinians, whose number doubles every generation,” Sharon declared. A new chorus of outrage erupted from his own party rebels and the parties to the right. “Israel aspires to be a model of democracy. It cannot live with this reality indefinitely. The disengagement plan opens the gate to a different reality.”

  That was the crux of it: bringing an end to the occupation. That was how the disengagement was seen on both sides, by supporters and opponents alike. Sharon’s stress on demography was echoed by the two other grand old men of the house, Shimon Peres of Labor and Shinui’s Tommy Lapid. “In western Palestine today there are 5.2 million Jews and 4.8 million non-Jews,” Peres said.

  In another five years there will be 5.8 million Jews and 6.5 million non-Jews. We will lose the majority. We will destroy Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state. How can we keep a Jewish state if it doesn’t have a Jewish majority?…A hundred years of Jewish history can be destroyed because of the hysteria of one section of the people, because of their false messianism … Ben-Gurion was so right when he said: Better a model democracy on part of Eretz Yisrael than the whole of Eretz Yisrael without a majority, without democracy, without the moral vocation put into practice.

  Lapid said the withdrawal from Gaza was unavoidable. “Nor will it be the last withdrawal. It is unavoidable because none of the self-professed Eretz Yisrael lovers among us has an answer to the unanswerable question: In order to rule over 3.5 million Palestinians we need to forgo the democratic character of the state, or else give them the vote and forgo the Jewish and Zionist character of the state. I myself want a Jewish and Zionist state, and I do not want a state that rules over another nation against its will. What the prime minister is initiating today is the first step in the right direction.”

  This coalescence of statesmanlike logic at the start of the debate augured well for its outcome. Peres was nominally still leader of the opposition, while Lapid was a key partner in the dwindling coalition. Both were clearly determined not to let Sharon fall. Would their support be enough in the face of a fragmenting Likud?

  A fortnight before, things had looked far less sanguine for the prime minister. At the opening of the Knesset’s winter term, on October 11, he suffered a stinging defeat in the house. Fifty-three members declined to endorse his statement setting out the government’s legislative program for the months ahead. Only 44 voted in favor. Most of the Likud rebels left before the vote because of the reference in his speech to the disengagement plan. Labor, which had promised him a “safety net” for the disengagement, voted solidly against him because of his—that is Netanyahu’s and his—economic policy. “Swinish capitalism,” Peres called the regime of drastic cuts and savings. “Six thousand millionaires and six million beggars,” he said, summing up the results of Netanyahu’s exertions.

  Sharon seemed caught in a cleft stick. His coalition supported his economic policies but did not support his disengagement plan in sufficient numbers. The opposition enthusiastically supported the disengagement but decried his economic policy. Worse yet, the new national budget was due up before the Knesset soon.

  Netanyahu, silver-tongued as ever, suggested to Sharon that they keep the disengagement funding out of the budget bill. That way, he argued, the existing coalition could vote for the budget, while an ad hoc coalition of Labor, Shinui, and half of the Likud, with sundry small parties, would pass the disengagement legislation. Sharon demurred. It would mean, in effect, he said, enshrining the split in the Likud.11 How did Netanyahu himself propose to act in the upcoming Knesset vote on the disengagement? The finance minister was noncommittal.

  Making matters even worse for the prime minister was an idiotic interview given by his chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, to Haaretz. The top aide, at his flip and garrulous worst, told the reporter that the disengagement “is really formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde required so that there should not be a negotiating process with the Palestinians.”12 Looking back years later, and attempting to sound sheepish and remorseful, Weissglas disparaged his own ignorance of chemistry. “Elliott Abrams told me I should have said deep freeze,” he recalled. He had meant, he said, preserving the U.S. commitment to the road map as a living organism, not as a dead specimen.13

  The formaldehyde line, which resonated around the world and brought ridicule and obloquy on Sharon, does read more like a trying-to-be-cute misstatement rather than an indiscreet betrayal of his boss’s secret determination never to cede another inch of land. Weissglas never believed that was Sharon’s intention.

  “I’ve got things to say today to our Arab neighbors,” Sharon continued in his Knesset speech. He spoke of

  all the wars, and the wars between the wars, the terror, and the harsh reprisal actions that Israel took over the years. Many innocent noncombatants died in these wars. And grief met with grief. I want you to know that we never intended to build our lives in this homeland on the ruins of yours … We were attacked and we fought for our lives, with our backs to the sea. Many died, and many lost homes and fields and orchards, and became refugees. That is the way of war, but war is not an immutable divine decree. We grieve today the sacrifice of innocent people on your side. We never chose the path of premeditated killing.

  Sharon ended the speech, perhaps the most significant of his life, with a pointed quotation from Menachem Begin about the settler leaders:

  “I once said in an argument with the Gush Emunim people”—I’m quoting Menachem Begin now—“that I love them today and I will go on loving them tomorrow. I said to them: You are wonderful pioneers, builders of the Land, settlers of barren tracts, in the rain and the cold, in conditions of hardship. But you’ve got one weakness: You have developed a certain messiah complex. You ought to remember…[A new barrage of heckling from the Right drowns Sharon’s words.] You ought to remember that before you were born or when you were still small children, there were other days when other men endangered their lives day and night, worked and sacrificed, without an iota of any messiah complex.”

  This was the ultimate insult. Sharon had adopted not only the policy of the Left but also its ideology, built on a deep aversion to the religious-nationalist ethos. Citing Begin, but really taking him out of the context of his
lifelong policy and beliefs, Sharon rounded on the religious nationalists who furnished the flesh and the spirit of the settlement movement that he himself had championed for so many years. It was a poignant moment, and also a deeply significant one. It exposed the brutal rupture with Gush Emunim that lay beneath the decision to disengage unilaterally from Gaza and northern Samaria.

  That rupture is key to understanding the full import and lasting promise of the disengagement. Unilateralism was not merely a default option, dictated by the lack—or, more accurately, Sharon’s firm perception of the lack—of a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. Unilateralism was first and foremost an internal political act, within Israeli society. It was a momentous step to free Israeli policy making from the stranglehold of the settlers, with their religious and nationalist agenda that Sharon now forthrightly condemned as a “messiah complex.” Yuri Shtern, the gifted young immigrant MK,14 understood the enormity of Sharon’s betrayal. “You are the false messiah,” he shouted out. But Sharon, having delivered his bludgeon blow, read on, unmoved. “I call on the whole nation of Israel to unite at this decisive moment and to build a great dam against the internecine hatred that is driving many to a madly irrational stance.”

  It was a historic moment, but it is not well remembered, because it was eclipsed by the drama that was enacted in the Knesset chamber the following night, live before the eyes of the entire nation watching transfixed on prime-time television. This was a drama without words, almost like a silent film. Words were being spoken from the podium, by the final speakers in the marathon, two-day debate. But they served merely as background sound. All cameras, and all eyes, were on Sharon’s face as he sat impassive, no muscle moving, in his seat at the head of the government table, in the center of the Knesset chamber. For more than an hour he sat there, listening to the debate, waiting for the vote, fobbing off various emissaries and go-betweens with messages from Netanyahu and his friends, who were threatening to vote against the disengagement. “Meet? With them? No way,” he was heard to whisper loudly. “If they want to see me, they can come here.”