by David Landau
Schiff, who died in 2007, was not one to fabricate stories. Soon after the 1999 election, he exposed in Haaretz in elaborate detail a long and intricate pattern of secret talks that Netanyahu had conducted with Syria, through middlemen, almost throughout his term. An EU envoy, an Omani minister, and the American Jewish businessman and public figure Ronald Lauder had all shuttled assiduously between Netanyahu and Assad in separate back-channel efforts to broker a deal.17
Three days after this account appeared, Sharon asserted, in a speech to the Likud Party branch in the West Bank settlement town of Ariel, that it was actually he who had prevented Netanyahu from relinquishing the Golan Heights. It was his vigorous intervention, Sharon asserted, that thwarted Netanyahu’s intention to send Assad, through the middleman, a detailed withdrawal map.18
The most intensive mediation effort, through Lauder, apparently took place during August–September 1998.19 It was this effort that Sharon claimed to have thwarted. Netanyahu, however, vehemently denied it. His voice thick with contempt, he insisted that Sharon played no role at all:
QUESTION: Sharon claimed the credit for stopping you from signing away the Golan Heights.
NETANYAHU: That’s false. We had a series of contacts with Hafez Assad that actually Sharon didn’t even know about.
QUESTION: When he became foreign minister?
NETANYAHU: No, I don’t think he knew about them. I don’t think he knew. He was not involved in any of the negotiations. It was done between me and the Defense Ministry and that’s it. I don’t remember ever bringing him to the conversations.20
Both Netanyahu’s version and Sharon’s are disputed in every particular by the then defense minister, Moshe Arens, who was appointed to the post (this was his third stint) in January 1999.
ARENS: I had my suspicions about [Sharon] because when I got into Bibi’s government, [I learned] that these guys had been maneuvering to make a treaty with Hafez Assad. There was only one way to make a treaty with Hafez Assad, right?
QUESTION: Give back the Golan.
ARENS: Give back the Golan!
QUESTION: Bibi claims that Sharon never knew, right to the end.
ARENS: Not true. That’s not true. And it wasn’t Sharon who stopped him.
QUESTION: Who stopped him?
ARENS: Well, first of all he never got to sit down with Hafez Assad. Anyway, I could see that Sharon was in on this deal.
QUESTION: Sharon was in on this deal?
ARENS: I knew he was. Of course he was … When I got into the government, he knew about it. Bibi couldn’t do a thing like that without Sharon knowing it. Sharon was a very dominant figure. Sharon talked to me about it. I said giving up the Golan is a crazy idea. But he wasn’t totally averse to it. He didn’t sound dead set against it. He asked me what I thought.
QUESTION: Bibi said he never knew.
ARENS: Of course he knew. It’s a lie.21
* * *
a Immediately after Oslo, Sharon urged that the Likud and its allies “proclaim before the whole world that when the Likud returns to power, it will not abide by agreements that endanger the very existence of Israel.” In the Knesset a week later he was less definite: the agreement was terrible; it could yet be improved, especially its security provisions; a Likud government would—or might, there was some deliberate obfuscation here—abrogate it. As time wore on, Sharon’s obfuscation deepened. In August 1994 he said a Likud government would honor agreements signed by Rabin. It would not try to turn the wheel back, but would rather focus on ways of preventing further concessions. And later that year, in a wide-ranging interview in Penthouse, Sharon implicitly conceded that Oslo was no longer wholly reversible. Arafat was back, in Gaza at least, to stay. In December 1995, after the signing of Oslo II and the murder of Rabin, the irreversibility had broadened: Sharon told the ultra-Orthodox magazine Hashavua that it would be both impractical and irrational for Israel to abrogate the Oslo Accords, especially now that the Interim Agreement was being implemented on the ground. “I would not now demand that areas which have been handed over to them should be taken back by us.”
The Likud, in its manifesto for the May 1996 election, declared, “The government will recognize the facts that have been created under the Oslo agreements and will act to minimize the dangers that flow from these agreements for the future and the security of Israel.” Sharon said he was “not happy” with the party’s stand, but since the majority of his colleagues had approved it, he, too, would accept it.
b See p. 366.
c See p. 236.
d The judge in the libel action was less finicky. In his judgment for Haaretz, given in November 1997, he described Ben-Gal’s appearance on the witness stand as “a sorry sight about which the less said the better.”
CHAPTER 12 · SUMMIT
The hope of peace for us Israelis lies in the principle of separation between the Palestinians and ourselves. I feel it is my solemn duty to warn my country at this time: If, heaven forbid, Israel fails in the coming years to implement this crucial principle of separation from our Palestinian neighbors—preferably by agreement, otherwise unilaterally—then it will be putting in mortal danger not only the security of its citizens but its very essence as a Jewish and a democratic state.”
Ariel Sharon’s investiture as prime minister, on March 7, 2001, was such a captivating political and human drama that the packed Knesset had no mind for the parting words of his discomfited predecessor. Yet within three years, Ehud Barak’s message would ring prophetic. It seemed to have portended Sharon’s momentous act of unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Did Sharon recognize the man he ousted as a source of his inspired if ham-fisted lunge at implementing the “principle of separation”? If he did, he certainly never articulated such recognition. Probably he never articulated it even to himself.
But there had been something so uncharacteristically considerate and respectful in Sharon’s relationship toward the soon-floundering and desperate Barak through the nineteen tortured months of his magnificent but mad prime ministership that the tempting conclusion is that he, at least, was listening to the younger man. Listening, and thinking hard. Otherwise, how to explain his constant striving, as leader of the Likud opposition, to enter a national unity government under the Labor prime minister who was single-mindedly trying to dump the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and almost all of the West Bank—all the occupied territories that the Likud has sworn to keep? Would Menachem Begin have countenanced a unity government under this Labor Party leader, whose policies had become those of the hated and despised Peace Now? Would Yitzhak Shamir? They would have tongue-lashed Barak as a military hero turned political coward. Granted, Sharon, too, tongue-lashed him. Granted, too, Sharon insisted that if there were to be a unity government, it would have to be under different policy guidelines. But how different? Sharon’s own evolving ideas of what might be an acceptable unity platform seemed increasingly remote from the Likud’s pristine doctrines.
Granted, politicians and pundits all knew that the autocratic Labor prime minister and the ersatz, temporary, fortuitous, short-term leader of the Likud—for that is how everyone saw Sharon—both never took their eyes off Bibi. The polls all told the same story: during the early months of Barak’s prime ministership, Netanyahu was the only rightist politician who could have given him a reasonable fight. As Barak’s popularity declined, Netanyahu alone was shown beating him while all other Likud possibles still lost to him. Only toward the end of Barak’s tumultuous term, when it became clear that Netanyahu would not run against him, did Barak begin to lose to Sharon in the polls.
The stop-Bibi theory behind the Barak-Sharon axis was much too strong to deny. And yet it was not strong enough to fully account for the political behavior of Barak and Sharon, individually and as a mutually desired, never consummated unity partnership. Barak, his ego as vast as his ambition—and as his political and interpersonal ineptness—swept into power determined to make peace at one fell swoop with Syria and Leban
on to the north and with the Palestinians to the east (the West Bank) and west (Gaza). He believed he could do it and brusquely dismissed anyone who thought he couldn’t.
Sharon thought he could. Almost fatalistically, Sharon, now leader of the opposition, anticipated Barak negotiating a peace treaty with Syria and running with it for reelection. He was convinced during the Camp David summit (July 2000), and then during the negotiations that followed its collapse, that Barak would eventually sign a permanent status accord with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and that the majority of the Israeli public would support it. Sharon did not believe he could prevent it. Rather, as with Rabin’s Oslo Accords, he believed his historic task was to improve it, to mitigate damage and avert danger by helping negotiate the details and the implementation—even while maintaining, rhetorically at least, his fundamental opposition to the far-reaching concessions on which these agreements were to be founded.
On the face of it, the Sharon-Barak relationship lacked the special intimacy that fueled the Sharon-Rabin connection. The two of them had not, after all, “eaten from the same mess tin.” And yet, in a way, they had, despite the generation gap. “Ehud Barak is a courageous soldier,” Sharon made a point of saying, not once, but many times in the course of their relatively brief political rivalry. And Barak had served under Sharon’s command in the Yom Kippur War.a Barak’s courage was an objective fact. He was the IDF’s most decorated soldier. But Sharon was not usually generous with his compliments to politicians, especially in matters that he really cared about, like battles and bravery. There was a special relationship here, too, and it transcended the political divide.
In the crowded Knesset that afternoon in March 2001, Barak continued with his meticulously prepared parting speech: “An Israel that controls a little less territory but that has clearly defined borders, and lives within those borders with a solid Jewish majority and with confidence in its character, its purpose, and the justice of its cause—an Israel like that would be stronger and more secure than an Israel which continues to bleed in steadily worsening demographic chaos, and in steadily deepening international isolation.”
If he had talked like that to the Israeli public, boldly and honestly, when he was prime minister and people were listening to him, Barak might still have been prime minister. But that was pointless hand-wringing over profound character flaws in a leader who never really understood the political process in a parliamentary democracy, then or later. The “peace camp,” the taste of missed opportunity acrid on its tongue, braced to face life under the man it had deprecated and feared for decades. The Knesset Speaker, Avrum Burg, a leading dove who was injured by the grenade that killed Emil Grunzweig in the anti-Sharon demonstration in 1983, did signal service to the country that day when he declared: “I address the leaders of the world, in the name of the Knesset of Israel, which represents all of the people of Israel, and I say: From this moment forth, let the world know, and let us know—this is the legitimately elected prime minister of Israel. Right or wrong, he is our prime minister, and no man other than he will henceforth decide who rules in Jerusalem and who speaks for Israel in the capitals of the world.” For Barak, though no friend, Burg had sage words, too. “History,” he said, “will without doubt render a more generous judgment than the voter has just done.”
The excitement was so great in the house that not only did the outgoing prime minister’s prophetic words go unnoticed but Sharon’s speech, too, barely impacted on the collective consciousness of the members and guests. Peace, he said, was going to involve “painful compromises on both sides.” The new government, which would be a Likud-Labor unity partnership (but with Likud’s rightist partners in it, too, and without Barak, who was quitting public life), would seek “realistic arrangements” with the Palestinians on the way to that final, painful peace. He had used the same word—“painful”—during the election campaign. It was hardly vintage Sharon and was vaguely disturbing for the hard-line Right. But it sounded noncommittal enough for them not to worry about it unduly.
Twenty-two months earlier, on May 18, 1999, Ofir Akunis would have bet his bottom dollar that that scene in the Knesset would never, ever be enacted. “I wasn’t 90 percent sure that Bibi would be back,” the young Likud Knesset member, then the party’s spokesman, recalled. “I was 99 percent sure. So were all of us. And if it wasn’t to be Bibi, for whatever reason, then there were younger-generation figures who were jostling for attention. Silvan Shalom, Limor Livnat, Tzachi Hanegbi. All of them looked more likely candidates than Sharon.” That near-certain assessment, Akunis explained, was what moved the stricken party leaders on the day after the election defeat and the scene at the Hilton hotel to offer Sharon the temporary leadership.
Sharon’s chief advantage, in the eyes of his ambitious comrades, was his age. By the time the next election was held—presumably, given the size and confidence of Barak’s coalition, in 2003—he would be seventy-five, hardly the age for a first run at the prime ministership. This comfortable calculation led the Likud leaders to a seemingly logical deduction: Sharon wouldn’t want to run in the primaries for permanent chairman of the party and prime ministerial candidate.
The comrades should have sensed that something was amiss in their calculations when it quickly became clear that their temporary chairman was indeed contemplating the prospect of running for permanent chairman, or alternatively of somehow extending his temporary chairmanship into a permanence-like limbo. The nineteen members of the sadly reduced Likud Knesset faction,b convening on June 1 to discuss “lessons of our election defeat,” were surprised and bemused to hear from Sharon that he would probably compete in the primaries. Wasn’t he a bit old, somebody ventured bravely. Sharon rounded on him, at his most caustically sarcastic. “I don’t suggest,” he growled, “that we run in the primaries waving our birth certificates. In general, it’s not a good idea to wave one’s birth certificate. Rather, I say—wave your certificates of achievements.”1
Despite Sharon’s repeated protestations that his grandmothers lived deep into old age and that the genes therefore were on his side, age became a key theme in the race. To parry the crass ageism emanating from his two younger rivals, Ehud Olmert (fifty-three) and Meir Sheetrit (fifty), Sharon proposed, and managed to push through the central committee, a resolution that the Likud would hold another leadership primary before the next general election. The main task of the leader elected now, therefore, would be to rebuild the party after its defeat. Rebuilding needed internal peace and harmony. Sharon, solid and experienced, was the man best capable of providing them.
Sharon had another advantage: his warm personal relationship with Barak. Granted, Olmert was on good terms, too, with the Labor prime minister. But the Sharon-Barak nexus was different. Sharon, it was felt within the still shell-shocked party, might well lead the Likud into four years of partnership in a unity government under the seemingly unassailable Barak. Sharon, it was said, might be minister of finance in this scenario. What remains incontrovertible, at any rate—and needs to be stressed over and over in view of what unfolded less than two years later—is that, whatever Sharon’s own inner aspirations, no one else in the party, or indeed in politics in general, seriously contemplated the possibility that Sharon might become prime minister.
Sharon spent most of the primaries campaign on the road. In his large, worn-out Cadillac, the candidate and his aides, sometimes with a journalist in tow, would be out early. “On Monday, he began his day at 5:00 a.m.,” wrote Danny Ben-Simonc in Haaretz.
He toured the far north, stopping in Ma’alot, where he spoke to a group of Russian-immigrant writers and artists, then on to Beit Jan, a Druze village near Yokneam, then a meeting with supporters in Migdal Ha’emek, and finally a wedding in the family of a Likud activist. He got back to his ranch after midnight. After four hours’ sleep, he was back in his car for another day of hard labor. “Age?” he says, wounded to the quick. “This is the age to begin! What do people want from me? When one sets out
to win, age doesn’t matter at all.”
Everything was going well, until Omri and Uri Shani, the campaign manager, let their hair down—of all places in an interview with a leading Yedioth Ahronoth journalist—and said that the armored Cadillac “makes a huge impression on the Indians.” There were other pearls in the same genre: “All the Likud activists really care about is jobs and money,” and so forth.2 Senior figures in the party demanded that Shani be sacked. They could hardly demand the same for Omri, but clearly he had fouled the nest. Touring the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, a famous stronghold of Likud support, later that week, Sharon and his entourage were greeted by large signs: “Indians and Proud of It.” The visit was not a success, the renditions of “Arik, king of Israel,” less than lusty. Sharon published a statement saying he had “sternly upbraided” the two offenders. “They claim to have said what they said in jest. That, too, is serious. Such sentiments are alien to the Likud, even in jest.”
The crisis passed, and Sharon won comfortably, on the first round, with 53 percent of the vote, against 24 percent for Olmert and 22 percent for Sheetrit. “His victory was almost entirely grounded on the support of the Bibi camp,” Ofir Akunis recalled. He described a sweaty celebration in the Independence Hall, on the ground floor of the Likud’s rather down-at-heel headquarters building in Tel Aviv, Metzudat Ze’ev.d Smiling and relaxed, Sharon reveled in the congratulations of supporters and opponents alike. Lily was there with him, and she, too, was warm and gracious, but she kept fending off well-wishers who tried to kiss or embrace her. She was under treatment for her cancer and had to beware of infection.