Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  e When Baker was informed during one of their meetings that his mother had died, Shamir flowed over with sympathy. At their next meeting, he gave the secretary a certificate attesting that trees had been planted in her name in the Jerusalem hills. Baker wept.

  f In 1987, in advance of a report into the affair by an Israeli board of inquiry, Sharon demanded at cabinet that Peres resign, triggering an almighty slanging match between the two of them. Sharon asserted that Peres was to blame for Pollard getting a life sentence. Peres hit back with the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who had gotten a death sentence in the Lebanon War. Sharon, inevitably, retorted that in the Yom Kippur War thousands had died because of the Labor government’s ineptitude. Peres was a minister in that government.

  PERES: You’re to blame for Pollard.

  SHARON: When Pollard was recruited, I’d been back at the ranch for a year and a half. I sat at home as a result of the demonstrations that you instigated against me in order to help the PLO.

  PERES: You’re not the pope! You’re a lousy tenth-rate politician.

  SHARON: I can’t compete with you in offensiveness.

  g An exchange between Sharon and Ben-Porat’s predecessor, Ya’acov Maltz, in 1987 in many ways typifies this side of Sharon’s public life. The issue was possible conflict of interest. His friend and benefactor Meshulam Riklis, who had lent him $200,000 back in 1973 to help buy Sycamore Ranch, was now involved, with his partner and Sharon’s close friend Arie Genger, in the purchase of Haifa Chemicals, a partially state-owned company that the government had decided to privatize. State Comptroller Maltz wrote to the minister of industry and trade asking if it was true that he had been personally active in the government’s handling of the sale, and specifically in the purchasers’ application for a $10 million soft loan from the government. Sharon replied: “Mr. Riklis, an old friend, did indeed make me a personal loan 14 years ago, which I finished paying off in October 1985. That said, I did indeed see great public interest in extending as much help as I could, within my ministerial authority, to a group of overseas investors which has invested more than $50 million in an Israeli company. I faithfully assure you that I was guided solely by these legitimate considerations.” In that case, the comptroller wrote back, “you should have declared your private interest … and transferred all further conduct of this matter to a ministerial committee.”

  h He would sometimes pose for photographers nuzzling a sheep or cradling a lamb in his arms. While his love for them did not extend to forgoing their eventual slaughter, he never offered guests roasts prepared from his own flock. “We don’t eat friends,” he observed in a television interview in February 2005.

  i Some 184,000 Soviet Jews landed in Israel in 1990 and 147,000 in 1991. In 1992 the figure dropped to 65,000. It remained at about this level for the rest of the decade (Government of Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics).

  j An internal government assessment in 1990 anticipated 200,000 Soviet immigrants a year for the next five years (State Comptroller’s Report No. 42, 242).

  k The exceptions were Jews from the central Asian republics, many of whom belonged to ancient oriental Jewish communities.

  CHAPTER 10 · BACKWOODSMAN

  If you go to them, you become their leader! Grab the leadership, it’s yours for the taking.” This urgent exhortation, from Ariel Sharon’s political adviser, came within moments of the television exit polls predicting the Likud’s devastating defeat in the June 1992 election at the hands of Yitzhak Rabin. The outgoing minister of housing spent the evening quietly in a suite at the Tel Aviv Hilton, watching the results on television. The party faithful—central committee members, campaign workers, grassroots activists—were assembled not far away, at the Tel Aviv exhibition grounds, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Their mood quickly plummeted to one of profound depression.

  Yitzhak Shamir, an underestimated politician if ever there was one, had managed to hold on to the prime ministership for longer than any of his predecessors apart from Ben-Gurion. But after Shamir lost the election, his term as leader of the Likud was now clearly over. “Whoever gets there first will take the party. Go there; show leadership. That was my advice to Arik,” the adviser recalled. “But he didn’t take it. He blew the opportunity. Why? To this day I don’t know. He always used to say, ‘For me, politics is an option, not an obsession.’ Bibi Netanyahu instinctively understood the situation. He acted cleverly and quickly. Our people were knocked flat. He helped them up. He lifted their spirits. Later I told Arik, if you run against Bibi, it’ll be over my dead body. You’ve got no chance. Bibi’s conquered the Likud.”1

  Realistically, Sharon was not the ideal candidate for the defeated party to choose as its bright hope for the future. He was sixty-four, though that in itself was not necessarily a drawback. Rather, after a decade of sniping at his own party leader, Sharon was regarded as too extreme. Hishuka’ut, or constraining, no longer seemed so cool. The other two “constrainers,” David Levy and Yitzhak Modai, had been working assiduously to soften their images, leaving Sharon alone in his pristine rejectionism. That hardly seemed an election-winning platform, especially as the next election would be fought under a new, reformed system in which the candidates for prime minister would be voted for directly, like American presidents.a In addition, he still bore what he himself called his mark of Cain from the Lebanon War, despite all his ceaseless efforts to erase it.

  The British have a word for the kind of political profile Sharon appeared to be contemplating. They call it the Tory backwoodsman. He is typically a red-faced, tweed-clad country squire, comfortably ensconced in his safe parliamentary seat, a justice of the peace and (until recently) master of the hounds, who descends infrequently on London to thump and blather his far-right fulminations before a bored but tolerant House of Commons. There was something of that same faintly amused forbearance in the Knesset for the periodic eruptions of the formerly all-powerful minister who was now, as all thought, finally on his way to political extinction. Sharon, philosophically unflustered about his present reduced political circumstances and dim future prospects, and always game for mordant parliamentary cut and thrust, joined in the fun.

  “Mr. Speaker, I’ve got a little problem,” he observed straight-faced as the house broke into a cacophony of catcalls following some particularly provocative rhetoric from him two weeks into the new term. “Mr. Speaker, there are so many new members. Who is that screecher over there? I can’t seem to identify him.”

  (Laughter in the chamber.)

  MR. SPEAKER EDRI: I’m sorry, Knesset Member Sharon, I’m going to have to ask you to withdraw that remark.

  (Heckling.)

  ARIEL SHARON (LIKUD): I am ready to withdraw it. I just want to know who he is.

  MR. SPEAKER EDRI: His name is Knesset Member Professor Less. I now instruct that the remark by Knesset Member Sharon be struck from the record. Thank you.

  (Heckling.)

  ARIEL SHARON (LIKUD): I myself request that the remark be struck out. Mr. Speaker, honorable members can calm down: I request that it be struck out. It’s just that I never imagined that a professor could screech like that. It simply never occurred to me.

  (Heckling.)2

  He had the good sense and good fortune to develop a regular relationship with Yedioth Ahronoth, the tabloid-format, middlebrow paper that was then at the apogee of its success. It was printing some 400,000 copies on weekdays and 660,000 on Friday—this in a country with, at that time, a total population of 5.5 million, of whom a million-odd were Arabic readers and had their own newspapers, another three-quarters of a million were Russian readers and had their own papers and magazines, and many other, smaller groups still preferred to read newspapers in their various mother tongues rather than in Hebrew. Yedioth’s penetration of the Hebrew-reading public, therefore, was probably unsurpassed by any newspaper in the free world.

  “There was always a dearth of good writers on the right,” the paper’s then editor, Moshe Vardi, explains.
“Arik was a good writer.” Sharon would usually send his copy from the ranch, by fax, carefully penned in longhand. “People didn’t believe he wrote the pieces himself,” said Vardi. “But he absolutely did. I know, because sometimes I would ask him for a short, quick piece for the next day’s paper—and half an hour later his fax would arrive.” Sometimes they would discuss politics on the phone, Sharon would voice a thought, “and I’d say, Arik, write it. Don’t just talk it, write it. ‘You think so?’ he’d ask. He was actually easy to work with.”

  Other politicians, especially on the right, were jealous when they realized that Sharon was becoming a fixture in Friday’s Yedioth and thereby reaching two-thirds of the newspaper-reading public. “Is the fat man writing again?” Vardi recalls one particular rival asking snidely. When the paper offered space to other politicians, they would want to know if their article was to appear before or after Sharon’s in the weekend lineup.3

  The articles and his Knesset speeches, which he prepared with great care, often overlapped. Sharon would borrow phrases, paragraphs, sometimes whole passages, from one to use in the other. If he felt a speech had not been listened to in the chamber, or had not been paid adequate attention by the parliamentary correspondents, he would repeat it or elaborate on it in his newspaper column. He sent the ones he thought were especially important to The Jerusalem Post, where they appeared in English translation.

  The new columnist’s first article appeared ten days after the election, while Rabin’s coalition building was still under way. “The real political turnabout in the State of Israel,” Sharon wrote, “the truly significant one, took place not in the election of 1977 but in the election of 1992. In 1977, the Likud’s ascent to power merely replaced one Jewish political bloc with another Jewish political bloc. In 1992, however, something entirely different took place, something shocking and perturbing. For the first time in the state’s history, it is the Arab minority, and more precisely the anti-Zionist part of it, that will determine who rules this country and who shapes its future.”

  In the election, Labor under Rabin had won 44 seats to the Likud’s 32. Labor’s ally, Meretz, won another 12. The largely Arab Hadash Party won 3, and the wholly Arab “Arab Democratic Party,” 2. This gave Rabin’s leftist bloc an unassailable “blocking bloc” of 61. The rightist and religious parties, led by Likud, could muster only 59 between them and could not therefore form a government. In the event, after the usual postelection haggling, Rabin was able to woo Shas, the Sephardic-Orthodox party with 6 seats, over to his side. He set up a government comprising Labor, Shas, and Meretz. The two Arab parties did not seek to be part of it, nor did Rabin offer them to be. But Rabin could count on their support “from the outside” against attempts by the Right to torpedo his peace policies.

  The full impact of the Arab voters had been even more decisive, as Sharon calculated it. Votes in Arab areas, he wrote, had provided more than 4 seats to Labor and Meretz, and just 2 to the Likud and its allies. He went on: “The correct and meaningful result of the election, reflecting the true balance of forces within the Jewish sector—is not 61 against 59, but around 57 for the Right against 51 or 52 for the Left.

  “It’s democracy,” he continued, “but it is also the beginning of the road to the gradual dissolution of the State of Israel as the state that was created, according to its Declaration of Independence, as ‘the Jewish state in the Land of Israel.’ ”

  For Sharon, this article was no slip of the pen. It laid out what was to be a consistent and recurring theme in his writing and speaking throughout the Rabin years: the government, which had come into being thanks to Arab voters, lacked the legitimacy to negotiate concessions on the part of the Jewish state. In May 1993, Sharon grabbed the headlines at the Likud’s national convention by baldly proposing that Arab citizens not be entitled to vote in any election or referendum on the future of the West Bank or of the Golan Heights. “It is inconceivable,” he declared, “that such fateful questions should be decided by the votes of the Israeli Arabs who regard themselves as part of the Palestinian nation. Their criterion is the interests of their nation, not those of the Jewish people … The question whether to withdraw from the Golan Heights, or the decision regarding the future of the historic heartlands of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel—these are questions of life and death for the Jews. They must therefore be ours alone to answer.”4

  In his newspaper column that weekend, headlined “Democracy and the Jewish State,” he took issue with

  those who brand me an enemy of democracy on the basis of distorted and partial quotes from my remarks at the Likud convention. What I said was: “Our parents and grandparents did not come here to create a democracy. It’s a very good thing that a thriving democracy has been created. But—remember this!—they came here to create a Jewish state”…I don’t think Yitzhak Rabin’s true assessment of these [Palestinian-Israeli] supporters of his is fundamentally different from mine. But I fear that his weakness, or his political ambition, has smothered his assessment and his misgivings. But giving the Israeli Arabs or their representatives the right to determine the fate of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is too great a price even for ensuring the survival of the Rabin government.

  Sharon was not just lashing out wildly. While Rabin’s “true assessment” of the Arab parties was certainly different from his, it was not all that different. Rabin would never have said the things Sharon had said and written, calculated as they were to deepen interethnic divisions and fan the flames of hatred. Such statements were beyond the realm of decent political expression in Israel at that time, and some in Sharon’s own Likud Party squirmed uncomfortably to hear them. But Rabin had agreed to unpalatable concessions to the ultra-Orthodox Shas, in order to have “a Jewish majority” for the peace moves he intended to make. “Jewish majority” was not a phrase coined by Sharon or the Far Right. It was coined—or at any rate uninhibitedly used in everyday political life—by the Labor prime minister and his closest allies.5 Rabin wanted a majority of Jewish Israelis to support his policy. Indeed, he wanted an Orthodox Jewish component in that majority. The Arab parties were good for blocking, not for governing.

  Another key theme that suffused Sharon’s rhetoric and writing in the period following the 1992 election was “Jordan is Palestine.” He was nothing if not consistent. And he had never given up on this thesis, however exotic or quixotic it seemed to others. The fact that Israel had been negotiating since Madrid with pro-PLO West Bank Palestinians (under the gossamer guise of a “Jordanian-Palestinian delegation”) made “Jordan is Palestine” more anachronistic than ever. Not to Sharon. “We should negotiate with the Palestinian state, Jordan, whose ruler, as far as we’re concerned, can be King Hussein or someone else—that’s for them to decide.”6b

  With Begin now dead, Sharon allowed himself a freedom of expression that he had never been bold enough to adopt while the old man lived. Begin’s autonomy had been nothing but a “fig leaf,” he wrote, “to enable Egypt and us to sign our peace treaty. The Egyptians needed this document in order to demonstrate their ‘concern’ for the Palestinian cause. We for our part had the deepest interest in signing the peace treaty with Egypt and precious little interest in any change of the status quo in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.”

  This, of course, had been the unwavering conviction of the peace camp in Israel since back in the late 1970s, when it became clear that Begin intended to fudge and drag his feet about his Camp David commitments on Palestinian autonomy while building—through the assiduous agency of Ariel Sharon—as many settlements on the West Bank and Gaza as he could.

  Sharon’s point, of course, was that with Rabin’s election at the head of a government genuinely committed to peace, the fudging and foot-dragging might stop, and Israel might actually agree to a genuine autonomy regime that would set the Palestinians on the road to eventual independence. “Autonomy in the days of Rabin and the Left is not the same thing at all as autonomy under Mr. Begin and the Likud,�
� he warned.

  This being the case, he wrote, the only way to rescue Israel now from the specter of eventual Palestinian independence, and the armed irredentism that would inevitably go with it, was to limit the autonomy to carefully circumscribed enclaves. These would center on the main Palestinian towns and their immediate hinterlands. The enclaves would be isolated from each other by large, contiguous tracts of countryside that would remain under full Israeli military control. The settlements, with their separate roads linking them, would crisscross this whole area, ensuring that the autonomous Palestinian enclaves remained isolated. Sharon attached a map, which Yedioth spread over a whole page, displaying the enclaves, seven of them on the West Bank and four more in the Gaza Strip.

  All together, they accounted for barely 30 percent of the territories. This proportion was to grow in subsequent presentations of the plan. But for Sharon’s detractors, both Israeli and Palestinian, then and thereafter, the proposal became known, and deprecated, as “Sharon’s Bantustans.” The allusion to South African apartheid was used advisedly, and it stuck. It was meant to accentuate the effects of the separated enclaves on the Palestinians’ freedom of residency and of movement.7 In later elaborations of his plan, Sharon suggested an elaborate network of roads, bridges, and tunnels to link the Palestinian enclaves.