by David Landau
A good, lawyerlike case. But not good enough. Not good enough to explain why the rockets and mortar bombs from Gaza were allowed to resume. But also, and more important, not good enough to explain Sharon’s initial decision to go for a minimalist disengagement. Like Rabin at Oslo, Sharon proposed to leap the chasm between Palestinian occupation and Palestinian statehood in two bounds. Granted, he could not have evacuated all the outlying settlements, those beyond the “settlement blocs,” in one sweep. But he could have enunciated a clear and unequivocal plan to do so in stages. That would have dispelled doubts about his own intentions and instilled hope in place of skepticism among the Palestinians and the wider Arab world.
Still, the Gaza disengagement, for all its flaws and limitations, was a monumental change of direction for Israel. After decades of settling in the occupied territories and thus denying the Palestinians the prospect of independence, Israel began physically divesting itself of these territories and thus making space for the Palestinians to have their state, too. Despite subsequent disappointments and disillusionment on both sides, despite well-grounded criticism of how the disengagement was done, one precedent-setting fact stands out as indisputable: settlements can be dismantled and settlers removed. It is politically possible for an Israeli government to do it. Indeed, it is not even that difficult to do—provided there is the will, the strength, and the leadership to do it.
Sharon spent long years building the settlements and abetting the settlers in their drive to impose the Jewish state on its Palestinian neighbors. Then, very late, he understood what this hubristic policy endangered: the very survival of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Despite the frustrating and heartbreaking regression in peace prospects in the years since the Gaza disengagement, the impact of his last, audacious act may yet prove irreversible. And if it does, Zionism will have been saved.
* * *
a See p. 170.
b A Hebrew acronym: Assistance for the Gaza Evacuees.
c See p. 269.
d The Hebrew term used was sarvanut, literally, refusal.
e Two of the party’s original six MKs had already seceded from the coalition.
f Assuming, that is, that they were not responsible for it. In late 2012, French investigators began an inquiry into claims that Arafat died of polonium poisoning.
g Girush Sfarad is the Hebrew term for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in 1492, after centuries of flourishing cultural, civil, and commercial life there.
h See p. 467.
i Labor won 19 and Likud only 12; turnout was a low 63 percent.
j Some fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed, among them hundreds of civilians, and the damage to property was extensive. Thirteen Israelis died in the operation.
CHAPTER 18 · TO SLEEP, TOO SOON
How many children do you have?” Sharon asked his cabinet secretary, Yisrael Maimon, and his director general, Ilan Cohen. “Two,” Maimon answered quietly. Sharon knew the answer, but he was in a jolly, joshing mood. “Only two?! Go home! You heard what the professor said. Why are you wasting your time in meetings?”
The meeting just ended, on the afternoon of December 18, 2005, had been with Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a prominent Jerusalem sociologist who came with a team from a think tank to discuss Jewish demography. The scholar demonstrated with graphs and charts how dramatically Israel would benefit if ordinary (that is, not haredi) families had three or four children instead of an average of just over two. Sharon followed his arguments closely.
DellaPergola was delighted. Earlier in the year he had made an initial presentation to the prime minister and his staff, and Sharon, though friendly and welcoming, seemed to snooze through most of it. Now the prime minister gave the professor a hearty handshake and told his aide Lior Shilat, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “We must meet with these people again.”
The last visitor of the day was Shimon Peres, the vice prime minister, back from a trip to Europe. Later, Peres said he thought Sharon looked a little pale. When Peres left, Marit Danon came into the room with papers for the prime minister to sign. “We were talking. I asked him to decide about some event he was invited to, and suddenly I felt his speech was strange. I knew what it was; my late father had had a stroke.” She summoned Shilat to stay with Sharon while she went into the next room to phone Gilad and Sharon’s doctor, Boleslav Goldman. “Bolek said, straight to hospital. But by the time I went back to his room, a matter of a minute or two, he was over it and behaving like at the end of any normal day. He said his polite good evenings to the girls in the front office and headed out to the ranch. They didn’t notice anything.”1
But as soon as the convoy of cars started driving, Sharon felt dizzy again. Gilad, over the phone, instructed them to drive to Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv, Dr. Goldman’s hospital. But Goldman, also by phone, countermanded that. “He sounds confused,” Goldman said. “Take him at once to the nearest hospital.” The convoy turned around and sped toward the Hadassah Medical Center, on the western outskirts of Jerusalem.
When he was admitted, Sharon was still groggy. He couldn’t count his fingers or read his watch.2 But he quickly improved. The CT and MRI examinations showed a brief and minor stroke, a transient ischemic attack in medical language. He seemed to have survived unscathed. Still, for an overweight seventy-seven-year-old, with the burden of a country on his shoulders, a stroke, even a minor one, was no joke.
Nevertheless, he and his team of aides did all they could to make light of it. At 11:15 p.m., barely three hours after his admission—and an hour or so before the newspaper deadlines—Sharon made a series of phone calls from his hospital bed to six key political reporters, three from the print press and three from the television channels. With all of them he slipped in the pun line “We’re going forward.” The word “forward” in Hebrew is kadima, the name of his new party. He seemed to sound fine and said he felt fine, and they took him at his word.
On December 19, the day after his admission, Professor Tamir Ben-Hur, the head of neurology at Hadassah, told reporters that the stroke had passed without leaving any permanent damage. The professor denied, moreover, that Sharon had been confused on arrival. “There have been all sorts of speculations. Sharon did not lose consciousness, he was not half conscious, he did not suffer from any distortion or paralysis. And he was not confused,” though the stroke had affected his speech. He would be discharged the next day, Ben-Hur announced. Hadassah wanted him to stay in his Jerusalem residence, within easy reach of the hospital, rather than returning to the ranch. “We would like him to rest. That’s why we’re keeping him in another night, because we know he won’t be allowed to rest properly once he’s discharged.”
The professor’s statement was made in close coordination with Sharon’s aides, who themselves were working under the tight supervision of Reuven Adler, the advertising and public-relations tycoon and the prime minister’s intimate friend. Guided by Adler, the aides announced that Sharon’s discharge from the hospital, on the morning of December 21, would be open to coverage by the media. “He looks absolutely fine,” one aide said. “We want everyone to see him.” Meanwhile, they reported, the prime minister was conducting the nation’s business from his hospital bed.
When Sharon appeared the next morning before the cameras, flanked by the hospital director and the doctors who had attended him, his face looked waxen, and his neck seemed suddenly shrunken so that it no longer filled out his shirt collar. But he walked unaided and smiled at everyone, and his voice sounded strong. “I would like to thank the hospital staff for their dedicated care. A hospital is not an enjoyable place, but I spent two good days with you. I was moved to see Israelis’ great concern for my health, and I thank them with all my heart. Now I must hurry to get back to work and move forward.” The kadima pun again. It sounded as worn and faux jovial as he looked.
Adler’s strategy was double-pronged: to project, as best he could, a business-as-usual aura around the prime minister
and to persuade voters that Kadima was more than a one-man band. This latter was a tall order, given that the new party’s campaign until that point had been focused on Sharon, on his past successes and the promise he held out for the future. Ehud Olmert, Meir Sheetrit, and other ministers took to the airwaves to assure the public that while everyone was relieved that Sharon was quickly bouncing back, Kadima had a strong and seasoned batting order backing him up.
Of world leaders, Hosni Mubarak was the first to phone in, the Prime Minister’s Bureau reported. Mahmoud Abbas followed soon after, and Elliott Abrams on behalf of Bush and Rice. After Sharon left the hospital, Bush called him at his home. “Watch what you eat, start physical training, and work fewer hours,” the president said. “I worry about you, my friend.”
Despite Professor Ben-Hur’s optimism and the breezy hype of the Prime Minister’s Bureau, the press was restless. Other medical experts, not involved in Sharon’s case, sounded more cautious than Ben-Hur when asked to spell out possible complications of even a mild stroke for a man of Sharon’s age and girth. The chances of a recurrence seemed higher than the Hadassah team appeared to admit. There was a nagging sense of guilt, moreover, among journalists. Why had a prime minister deep into his seventies been allowed to rule for five years, and now run for reelection, without providing the public with any serious accounting of his state of health? In other countries that would be unacceptable. Many had laws requiring full disclosure by senior officeholders. The most Sharon ever offered were bragging brush-offs about his family’s longevity genes and sarcastic assurances that his bill of health was sounder than those of his political rivals. But was it?
Now, under the pressure of the sudden, dramatic story, which should have been anticipated but wasn’t, the media swung to the other extreme. Whole hours of airtime and pages of print were given over to analyzing the little that was known, or surmised, about Sharon’s state of health. His war wounds, his bad eye,a the stones he had had in his urinary tract, and above all his obesity were meticulously picked over by experts, hacks, and quacks. At the same time, the media turned all their guns on the Prime Minister’s Bureau and his doctors, insisting on the public’s right to know the facts.
Acceding, ostensibly at least, to this demand, Dr. Goldman and his colleague at Tel Hashomer hospital and fellow friend of Sharon’s, Dr. Shlomo Segev, together with members of the Hadassah team, called a press conference on December 26 to deliver what was billed as Sharon’s “complete medical file” and a “medical summary” of his recent illness. The day before, his first day back at work, Sharon turned in a vintage performance chairing the weekly cabinet meeting. He opened the proceedings by sending Christmas greetings to Israel’s Christian citizens and Hanukkah blessings for the upcoming Jewish festival, a key custom of which is the eating of oily, jam-filled doughnuts and even oilier potato pancakes. “I hope you will all eat doughnuts and pancakes,” he exhorted the cabinet members and the wider public. “Eating them is absolutely permissible. But I strongly advise you not to overdo it.” The ministers roared.3
The next day, the doctors informed the country that Sharon had a hole in his heart from birth that had probably caused the stroke or blood clot to the brain. The signs of the stroke, moreover, though minor, had not fully worn off until the day after his admission. It was a “stroke,” therefore, or cerebral vascular attack (CVA), rather than a transient ischemic attack, because it was discernible in examinations for more than twenty-four hours before finally vanishing. Still, it did vanish, and the doctors were optimistic that it would not recur. Sharon didn’t have high blood pressure or high sugar levels in the blood, and he did not smoke—all factors that increase the risk of a recurrence.
Sharon would undergo an angioplasty procedure to close the hole in his heart and thereby further reduce the chance of clots in the future.b Many people had such holes, and the procedure was fairly common, though not so commonly undertaken for elderly patients. It was a short procedure; it would be carried out under sedation rather than general anesthetic. Sharon would undergo it in a couple of weeks, and meanwhile he was receiving the blood-thinning drug Clexane, administered by injection twice a day.c These would be stopped before the angioplasty procedure, and if that went well, they wouldn’t be resumed.
Other than that, the doctors said, Sharon took pills for gout, which he had contracted twenty years before in his left big toe, and suffered various aches and pains from his 1948 war wounds. Dr. Segev said he weighed 260 pounds before his recent hospitalization, and Dr. Goldman said he had lost six and a half pounds in the past week. “He is significantly overweight, and I’d be happy if he brought it down,” Goldman added. “I’ve been talking to him about it for the past thirty years, and I’ll keep talking to him for the next thirty years.”
The doctors insisted, at that time and subsequently, that neither Sharon nor his staff had told them what to say and what not to say to the public. They did not explain, though, why political correspondents had been invited to the press conference rather than medical correspondents, who might have asked them informed and pertinent questions. In the event, a surge of such questions flooded the media as the medical correspondents, aided by outside medical experts, tried to analyze what had been disclosed. Haaretz’s veteran medical correspondent, Ran Reznick, cast doubt on the purported disclosure of Sharon’s weight offered at the press conference. An unnamed “senior doctor” whom he had consulted noted that first-year medical students were taught to estimate patients’ weight by looking at them. In this doctor’s estimation Sharon weighed between 285 and 310 pounds.4
For Reznick, this was the tip of the iceberg of suspicious secrecy, if not outright deceit. He had felt from the outset that the doctors were cooperating with Sharon’s aides and associates to deliberately play down the seriousness of the medical setback that had befallen him just when a truly historic election victory was within his grasp. (They angrily and bitterly deny this to the present day.) On December 20, Reznick cited unnamed outside doctors who criticized the original, upbeat press briefing at Hadassah as premature. Damage assessment could not seriously begin until seventy-two hours had elapsed after a stroke, one expert said.5
Whatever the image the staff tried to project to the outside world, behind the thick glass doors of the “aquarium,” as the Prime Minister’s Bureau is known, there was a certain atmosphere of understated trepidation. “He wasn’t quite the same,” Marit Danon recalls. He was working less: following doctors’ orders, the staff pruned his schedule, paring down the workload and carving out time for him to rest. But that wasn’t it. “He kept saying to me, ‘You know, Marit, it happened to me at the wrong time.’ I said, ‘Prime Minister, we can’t pick our times. The main thing is you’re back on your feet, back at your job.’ But he seemed withdrawn throughout those two weeks, kind of pensive and a little sad, really.”
Others, too, found him downcast and irritable during this waiting period. People who had seen him close‑up in battle, or in political battles, supremely cool and controlled when all around him floundered were frankly surprised at his apparent nerviness over what was being billed as a relatively common medical procedure. Uri Shani remembers calling Sharon on Wednesday, January 4, the day before the scheduled angioplasty. “He sounded scared. Unlike our usual, brief conversations, this one went on for a long time. I tried to sound cheerful. ‘If anything goes wrong, Omri and I will come around to look after you,’ I said. But he was really worried.”6
Part, at least, of Sharon’s bad humor that day may have been attributable to a news item broadcast on Channel 10 TV News the night before. The police, according to this report, now suspected that Martin Schlaff, the Austrian millionaire, and his brother, James, had funneled $3 million to the Sharon family in the wake of the original election financing shortfall that gave rise to the Cyril Kern affair. Part of the money, they believed, had been used to pay back the illegal campaign contributions, and the rest had remained in the Sharons’ hands.
This latest twist
in the still-grinding investigation came on top of the knowledge that Omri, who had taken the rap for the election finance offenses, would in all likelihood serve time. Three weeks earlier, Omri had signed a plea bargain with the state prosecution. The punishment was to be determined by the judge, but the prosecutors were demanding a jail term and would not make do with a suspended sentence or a period of community service. Just a week before, Omri had resigned from the Knesset in preparation for his sentencing.d
“In the afternoon,” Marit Danon recalled,
Arik called in Ehud Olmert, and in the presence of Yisrael Maimon, the cabinet secretary, he formally transferred his authority “for the three hours or so that I’ll be under sedation.” It was a bit embarrassing for everyone, and I suppose to relieve the embarrassment, Olmert joshed, “Tell me, Prime Minister, during these three hours can I fire all your people?” Sharon replied, “You can fire the lot of them, but not Marit. Don’t touch Marit.” Later, after it happened, Olmert phoned me at the hospital. “Marit, you remember what he said. As far as I’m concerned, what he said is like a will.”
It happened at 8:30 that night, at the ranch. When the second cerebral vascular attack struck, Sharon was twenty-five minutes from the nearest hospital at Beersheba, a full fifty-five minutes by speeding ambulance from Hadassah in Jerusalem. But from the moment he felt ill till the ambulance began its journey, another precious hour and a half elapsed. “If he had been close to the hospital, we could have saved him,” Professor Chaim Lotan, the Hadassah head of cardiology, said four years later. “The whole story of him having been at the ranch, and without a doctor alongside him—it’s all a very sorry business.”7
But that merely begs the question: Why didn’t the Hadassah doctors insist that their patient stay close to the hospital until his angioplasty? Why didn’t they insist on attaching a qualified doctor 24/7 to his immediate personal staff? Why didn’t they forbid him to go to the ranch, at least on the night before the angioplasty? And his sons? And his aides? And his friend Reuven Adler? Why weren’t they proffering the advice that plain common sense dictated?