by David Landau
The putsch, as Sharon’s aides called it, had been brewing behind the scenes throughout the debate. “The only way to carry out this disengagement,” Netanyahu warned the Likud caucus during the first day of the debate, “is to have it endorsed first in a national referendum. Let the people decide. I don’t doubt the result will be favorable. But holding the referendum will defuse the land mine; even the people of Gush Katif will accept the verdict of the nation. The alternative,” he asserted, “is no government and no coalition.”
Later that night, in a Jerusalem hotel, Netanyahu and his ministerial co-conspirators issued an ultimatum for publication in the morning newspapers: either Sharon agreed to hold a referendum, or they would vote in the Knesset against the disengagement plan. In the morning, the National Religious Party published a similar threat: Sharon must pledge to hold a referendum, or their four MKs would secede from the coalition.e To strengthen their own and Netanyahu’s hand, the NRP produced a document signed by prominent rabbis of the national-religious camp undertaking to accept the verdict of a referendum, whichever way it went.
At four in the afternoon, as the debate droned on in the plenary, Sharon did one of his theatrical performances in the members’ dining room. Veritably encased by an extra-thick phalanx of bodyguards, he took just two questions from the throng of reporters. The NRP? He wasn’t handcuffing anyone to the cabinet table, he replied. A referendum? “What are you talking about?” he replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
From the streets and parks around the Knesset precinct, the sound of mournful singing wafted in. Thousands of children from the settlements of the West Bank and Gaza had been bused in, their schools shut for the day, to hold a prayer vigil in the open air as the legislators prepared to vote. “Mercy,” they sang plaintively, “have mercy, O Lord our God, on thy people Israel.” Dressed in T‑shirts bearing the legend “We have love in our hearts, and it will triumph,” the children recited Psalms, led by the two retired chief rabbis of the state Mordechai Eliahu and Avraham Shapira. “The holy Torah says, ‘To your seed I have given this land,’ ” Rabbi Eliahu intoned. “Not to Esau and not to Ishmael. We will not disengage from the Land of Israel. God will confound the plan, and it will not happen.”
Knesset Speaker Rivlin, tears in his eyes, told the children, “We hope the decision will not be taken forcing you to leave your homes and your schools. There, in the Knesset building, fateful decisions are taken. But if, God forbid, the decree is issued against all of us, then, though wearing sackcloth and ashes, we must acquiesce, we must accept it. We will make every effort to prevent decisions that break our hearts. But if they are taken nevertheless, you children must understand that what the government and the Knesset decide is binding on all of us. On you, too, and on your parents.”15
Contrary to parliamentary practice, the Likud rebels and the parties of the Right had refused to pair any of their members with a Shinui member sick with cancer and a pro-disengagement Likud man who had recently undergone brain surgery. At seven forty, ratcheting up the tension, the surgery patient, Eli Aflalo, was wheeled into the chamber, wearing a large wool cap on his head. Led by Sharon, members flocked around him to shake his hand and wish him well. Sharon himself now took his place and began his steely-nerved vigil.
Downstairs, Netanyahu and his friends were still fluttering about, counting and recounting the likely vote, desperately trying to cut a deal with the members of the three small Arab opposition parties. Two Arab MKs, members of Ra’am, were determined to vote in favor. The other six, representing Hadash and Balad, had all made speeches against it. But which way would they vote? Ahmad Tibi of Hadash calmly ate his hummus in the members’ dining room as Labor and Meretz members clustered around him, warning that he and his colleagues, perhaps unwittingly, were about to become co-conspirators in a rightist parliamentary coup.
In the chamber, Rivlin announced the roll-call vote. “But, Mr. Speaker,” a Labor member called out, “you promised you wouldn’t start till all members were here. Where’s Bibi?!” Rivlin replied that all 119 members were present in the building; only Yehudit Naot, the member ill with cancer, was absent. As the names were called, it became clear that two groups of members were not in the chamber: Netanyahu and his followers, still lingering in the corridor outside, and the six Arab MKs from Hadash and Balad, who sidled in as the vote ended.
The Knesset clerk, following protocol, repeated the names of the absentees. “Mohammad Barakeh.”
“Later,” the Arab MK replied.
Speaker Rivlin: “There is no ‘later.’ This is the second round. I’ll register you as absent.”
Clerk (repeating): “Mohammad Barakeh.”
Barakeh: “Abstain.”
At that moment, the tension suddenly gave way to stifled shouts of relief and rejoicing on the left—the Left now incongruously but incontrovertibly led by Arik Sharon—and muttered acknowledgments on the right that any hope of an alliance of opposites to topple Sharon had just died. One after another, the Arab members now took their places and replied “Abstain” to the clerk’s query. If the Arabs abstained, Sharon was home and dry, regardless of what Netanyahu and his allies did. Sheepishly, the discomfited putschists filed in, too, and, in swallowed undertones, whispered their replies.
CLERK: Yisrael Katz.
KATZ: For.
CLERK: Limor Livnat.
LIVNAT: For.
CLERK: Danny Naveh.
NAVEH: For.
CLERK: Benjamin Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU: For.16
Sharon, surrounded by ecstatic members, stood and slowly made his way out. At the exit he stopped and surveyed his young aides, bright-eyed and exultant. “Learn a lesson,” he said. “Never, never give way to pressure. You can change your mind. You can be persuaded. But never fold before threats.” Back in his Knesset suite he immediately summoned Uzi Landau and Michael Ratzon, the Likud minister and deputy minister who had voted against the disengagement, and handed them their letters of dismissal. Identical letters had been prepared for Netanyahu and his friends. “I’m not rejoicing,” he told select journalists over the phone as he rode home to the ranch. “This wasn’t a happy decision. It was an important decision, but a sad one.”
Netanyahu, meanwhile, compounding his discomfiture in the chamber, held a hasty press conference in the corridor outside where he categorically undertook to resign from the government within two weeks unless Sharon agreed to hold a referendum. This was also carried live on television, and he was shown perspiring freely. The contrast between the sweaty, harassed-looking Bibi and the cool and in-control Arik etched itself on the minds of the viewers.
Despite his huge victory that night, Sharon’s government was still threatened and his disengagement policy still uncertain of final political success. To stay in power, he needed to pass the budget. But to stay in power, he clearly needed a more stable coalition—in other words, a coalition with Labor back inside it. The two goals seemed incompatible: Labor was opposed to the budget, and the Likud was opposed to Labor. The architect of the budget, moreover, Bibi Netanyahu, was now openly threatening to quit over the disengagement. If he did, would that not bring the Likud rebels to oppose the budget? Sharon could end up without Labor and without a budget. First, though, another moment of gratification: on October 27, the day after the Knesset drama, the government submitted its disengagement compensation bill to the house, and a week later it passed its first reading by a majority of 64 to 44 with 9 abstentions.
“Even those of you who oppose the disengagement shouldn’t oppose this bill,” Sharon reasoned at cabinet. “It’s designed to make things easier for the settlers who will lose their homes and businesses.” It provided up to $750,000 compensation for farming families for their homes and farms. Some MKs complained that these sums were overly generous by any realistic standards. But there was little appetite in the house, among supporters or opponents of the disengagement alike, to fight the Gaza settlers head-on over money, and the rates of compensation w
ere not pared down.
The government did not detail the anticipated expenditure in the legislation. But the explanatory notes prepared for the MKs suggested an overall outlay of 2.5–3 billion shekels excluding the costs of the military-police operation—a very large sum, but not debilitating. Pro-disengagement advocates asserted that the sum would soon be made up by a surge in exports as Israel’s general international situation picked up as a result of the disengagement.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, was wrestling with his own rash ultimatum. His co-conspirators had quickly detached themselves from the failed putsch. Netanyahu knew that if he walked out, he would walk alone. It was Yasser Arafat’s dramatically deteriorating health that provided him with the pretext he needed to climb down. The Palestinian leader, still cooped up in the muqata, had been growing weaker since mid-October. At first, he seemed to be suffering from a stomach condition. Later, doctors diagnosed a disease of the blood. Now he lay dying in a hospital outside Paris. With Arafat gone, there might be radical changes in the region, Netanyahu explained to the prime minister on November 9, hours before his two-week deadline expired. He had therefore decided to remain in the cabinet.
Sharon’s response to Arafat’s terminal illness was restrained, especially given his long loathing of the man. At first, the Israeli intelligence agencies, like the doctors the PA brought in from around the Arab world, failed to understand how grave the rais’s condition was.f Sharon was reluctant to let him leave for treatment abroad. “Our people say he’s not so ill,” Sharon told Weissglas over the phone to Europe. He didn’t want Arafat traveling around the world and bad-mouthing the disengagement, he said.
Weissglas, on a train between Brussels and London, went to work quickly. Soon he phoned Sharon back with a firsthand report from one of Arafat’s closest advisers: Arafat was sinking. Sharon ordered the army to facilitate Arafat’s transfer, by Jordanian government helicopter and then French government airplane, to a hospital in France. After his death, the Palestinians demanded that Arafat be buried on the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. Sharon refused, fearing the grave would become a rallying site for Palestinian resistance in Jerusalem. But he overrode the Shin Bet’s urgings that Arafat be laid to rest in Gaza,17 and he agreed to a grave site in the grounds of the battered muqata in Ramallah.
“Recent events could be a historic turning point,” he said in a statement on Arafat’s death. “Israel is a peace-seeking nation … If after the Arafat era ends a new Palestinian leadership arises, a leadership that carries out the Palestinians’ commitments under the road map, then we shall have the opportunity to coordinate various steps with them and also to resume political negotiations.” But he made it clear that while this was his vague hope, his immediate and unwavering intention was to carry out the disengagement unilaterally.
But there would be no disengagement if there was no government, and there would be no government, come March 31, if there was no budget. The Likud rebels still stolidly refused to vote for the budget. Now, however, extremism of another kind gave Sharon his lucky break. In his dogged search for Knesset votes, Sharon had been flirting with the haredim of United Torah Judaism. He promised them 290 million shekels for their schools and yeshivas if they supported the budget bill. It was a fairly modest allurement, but for Shinui’s Tommy Lapid it was a nefarious bribe that he and his party could not countenance. If Sharon went ahead, Lapid warned, Shinui would secede. It would continue backing the disengagement policy, though, from the opposition.
Sharon’s response was instant. If the Shinui ministers voted against the budget, he replied, he would sack them at once and open negotiations with Labor and the haredim to form a new government. His own party, he reasoned, would support him this time—because not to do so would be to trigger the premature end of the Likud-led government.
That is precisely what happened. On December 1, the government submitted the budget bill to the house. Shinui voted against it, and it was duly defeated. No sooner had the voting ended than Sharon summoned the five Shinui ministers and handed each of them a letter of dismissal. His coalition now comprised just the forty Likud MKs, and almost half of them were in profound political rebellion against him. He now called for an urgent session of the Likud convention. There, as he had done unsuccessfully three months earlier, Sharon asked for the delegates’ consent to coalition talks with Labor. To sweeten the pill, he made it clear that he hoped to co-opt the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, too. This time, he won a comfortable majority: 1,410 votes to 856, or 62 percent.
Still moving swiftly, Sharon sent his aides to negotiate with Labor. Every portfolio in the rejiggered cabinet was available, he announced expansively, “except the prime ministership; that’s not vacant.” Peres, in equally lofty tones, declared that his party was “not interested in portfolios, only in policies.” The reality, of course, was less lofty. Not every portfolio was available. In fact, not one of the top ones was. Sharon, for sound political reasons, did not propose to shunt aside either Netanyahu at Finance or Mofaz at Defense. As for the Foreign Ministry, Silvan Shalom threatened that if Sharon dumped him to make way for Peres, “there’ll be no government at all.” He was strong enough in the party to make that come true, or at any rate to cause Sharon serious grief.
Peres grandly waived his claim to the Foreign Ministry. Instead, he proposed, he would just have the title of vice prime minister, with no ministry of his own. Sharon received a list of the areas that his would-be vice prime minister wanted to run. It included relations with the Arab world; relations with the donor states to the Palestinian Authority; responsibility for peace negotiations with the PA; responsibility for all the diplomacy surrounding the disengagement both with the PA and with the wider world; responsibility for the secret intelligence agencies; and responsibility for the national security council. It would have left both Sharon and Shalom largely unemployed. But Sharon made light of it. Peres wasn’t going to back out now, he reckoned, because of strife over turf. But Shalom was less philosophical. He insisted that Sharon defend him from the Labor leader’s intended depredations. He demanded a paper from the prime minister enshrining his areas of responsibility as foreign minister.
“You don’t know how to work!” Yisrael Maimon, the cabinet secretary, remembers Sharon bawling at him and Weissglas. “You just have no idea of how to work! Get a piece of paper and start writing. Write to Silvan as follows, yes. Write to him, eh, that he is responsible, eh, for relations with Togo. And, eh, with Equatorial Guinea, yes. And with all of the Scandinavian countries. Fill up three whole pages, yes, with areas that he’s responsible for. Every country. Look on the map. Then he’ll have lots of responsibilities. When are you two going to learn how to work?!”18
No less hilarious—and the whole country shared this one—was the fact, turned up by government lawyers, that the law did not allow for two vice prime ministers. Ehud Olmert had the title already, and he wasn’t about to give it up for Peres. Say something happened to Sharon, God forbid. The prime ministership would fall into the Labor leader’s hands for ninety days, until new elections were held. That could be disastrous for the Likud. The law would have to be amended. That would take weeks. Peres was adamant: the seven other Labor ministers would not be sworn in until he, too, could be sworn in as vice prime minister (II).
It took till the second week of January. But the delay was a blessing because it enabled Sharon to bring United Torah Judaism (UTJ) in, too, despite desperate efforts by the settlers and the Likud rebels to persuade the haredi party to stay out. UTJ had only five seats, paltry compared with Labor’s nineteen. But it was important beyond its number. The haredi party’s accession to the coalition meant, in effect, a political schism within Orthodoxy. Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the ninety-four-year-old spiritual leader of a key faction in UTJ, explained that Sharon had enough votes to ensure the disengagement anyway. He didn’t depend on UTJ’s five. He had Labor and Shinui and Meretz and the Arab parties lined up behind the policy, apart from the majorit
y of his own Likud Party.
But that was naive, and there was nothing naive about the aged rabbi. He knew that UTJ’s entry eased the way in for Labor, thereby salvaging the budget and giving the government a new lease on life. The national-religious rabbis’ cry, moreover, that the disengagement was heresy would ring hollow now that the black-garbed, bearded MKs of the ultra-Orthodox UTJ were part of the disengagement government.
The haredim were still deeply resentful of the economic reforms that had drastically cut back child allowances and plunged thousands of their families into penury. They had not forgiven Sharon for keeping them out of his government in 2003 so that Netanyahu could go ahead and make those cuts. These people, moreover, many too poor to own cars, had been savagely hit by the bus bombings in Jerusalem during the years of the intifada. Many ordinary haredim sympathized with the Gaza settlers. Left to their own devices, many might have taken to the streets on the settlers’ behalf.
But haredim are never left to their own devices. Haredi politics is tightly run by the rabbis, and the rabbis, in the main, still cleave to the old ideological-theological ambivalence toward the Zionist state. This means two general rules for rabbinical decision makers: that haredi parties should not be the ones to determine Israel’s defense and foreign policy, but that if they nevertheless find themselves in that role, they should support a moderate, unaggressive policy that does not “stir hatred among the nations.” Hence Rabbi Eliashiv’s somewhat disingenuous claim that the UTJ would not have the casting votes on the disengagement. Hence, too, his decision, wittingly taken, which in effect enabled the disengagement to happen. The settlers sent delegations of their own rabbis to importune the haredi sage. But he had made up his mind. “The waiting period is over,” Yossi Verter wrote on January 7, when Rabbi Eliashiv’s decision was announced. “Nothing now stands in the way of Sharon carrying out his disengagement plan. Nothing but the madness of the extremists.”19