by David Landau
It was the effect of his experience as a player on the world stage, Ben-Eliezer believes, that principally accounted for Sharon’s subsequent further transformation, from settlement builder to settlement remover. “I knew he was totally determined to carry through this move. It began long before, with the security fence. Once he’d internalized the need for something, he would go for it, to the end. He was always like that. He had the feeling that the world expected something from him, and from him alone. To make the breakthrough.”17
• • •
While Uri Shani’s boasts—and the old loyalist’s accusation—about Shani’s influence on Sharon’s mind need to be substantially discounted, Shani can justly take credit for running a tight ship at the Prime Minister’s Bureau, imposing iron discipline on everyone, including his boss. The prime minister’s other aides all attribute Sharon’s eventual success and popularity, in no small degree, to the smooth functioning of the bureau, in terms both of its quiet efficiency and of the remarkable—indeed unique in Israeli prime ministerial annals—absence of interpersonal quarrels and rivalries among the close advisers. Years later, still all singing from the same hymnbook, they say of themselves and of each other: We all had big egos; we all left them at the door when we came to work for Sharon; Uri Shani was our model and mentor in this respect.
Even Marit Danon, who faults Shani for overstating his influence on Sharon, praises him as “a very, very good manager. Everything worked. There were no snafus. How does that come about? First, everyone is punctual. Things happen precisely when they’re scheduled. Then there’s the personality of the leader and his relationship to his staff. And finally, the team spirit. This was a very cohesive bureau. None of Sharon’s close aides was sitting there with one eye on his future Knesset career (apart from Gideon Sa’ar, the cabinet secretary). To the present day, we’re almost like one family.”18
Danon’s own presence on the team was due to Shani’s diktat, as he tells it:
When Sharon first came into the bureau, we had a quarrel over the secretary. I’d been there for two weeks ahead of time, organizing things. I decided we want Marit and not Arik’s longtime secretary, Sara Shema. He approved of my other arrangements but balked at that. “What,” he said, “I can’t even have my own secretary?” I said simply, “No, you can’t. You’re the prime minister. You’re not the manager. You’re here to take the political decisions, the military decisions. You don’t run the office.” He agreed. I believed, and still believe, that prime ministers rise or fall on the way their bureaus operate. Of course that’s not 100 percent of the story; but it’s 60 percent at least!
Shani’s despotism extended to the highest officials in the land.
I resolved from the outset that this prime minister would not meet alone, “four eyes only,” with anyone. Not the head of Mossad; not the head of Shin Bet; not the IDF chief of staff—no one. I and the military secretary, or I and the policy adviser, or one of them alone, plus a tape recorder, would be present at every meeting.
Once, after “Gandhi’s”i murder in October 2001, he was sitting with the head of Shin Bet, [Avi] Dichter, together with me and the military secretary and the tape recorder, and the head of Shin Bet says to him, “I’d like to talk to you four eyes only.” The military secretary jumps up and leaves the room. After all, this is the prime minister and the head of Shin Bet. I said, “Sorry, there’s no four eyes.” Arik says to me, “Excuse me, yes?” I say, “You excuse me. There’s no four eyes, Arik. I know what he wants from you in four eyes, and it’s not going to happen.” He went ballistic. He banged on the desk. “I demand to sit with Dichter!” I said, “Look, I’m sorry to have to remind you, but remember Sabra and Shatila? Remember the commission of inquiry? If I leave the room, that’ll be precisely the point on which you won’t be covered at a commission of inquiry. I’m not leaving. Think carefully. If you want me to leave—order me out of the room.” All this in front of Dichter. Arik subsided, and they continued the meeting as though nothing had happened. Arik was crafty; he understood, despite his rage, that I knew something he didn’t know, and wanted only to protect him.
Dichter, in the “six eyes conversation,” asked Sharon to issue a statement explaining that he, as prime minister, had approved the Shin Bet’s not having guarded Ze’evi. Ze’evi had refused to have a close Shin Bet escort, 24/7.
In other words, Dichter was saying, “Give me a rope and I’ll hang you!” I didn’t wait for Arik to answer. I said, “The prime minister will not do that. But I will help you, because you are an excellent head of Shin Bet and we’re in wartime. If we were at peace, Dichter, I’m looking you in the eyes and saying quite frankly, you’d have to go, because the Shin Bet screwed up and a minister was murdered. What do you mean, ‘He didn’t want to be guarded’?! You screwed up. But we’re at war. So you and I together will deal with this thing and fix it. But it won’t touch the prime minister.” Arik just listened. We got up and left the room. I issued a statement in my own name. It was the first I’d ever issued. And there was no commission of inquiry into how and why Gandhi was murdered, which is remarkable when you come to think of it.19j
• • •
After the Dolphinarium, Sharon’s efforts and his time were devoted almost entirely to fighting “the war” and conducting the diplomacy surrounding it. The U.S. administration sent the head of the CIA, George Tenet, to negotiate an immediate cease-fire and implement the Mitchell proposals. After hours of argument, he handed out a “working paper” and demanded a yes-or-no answer.
Sharon said yes. Tenet spent hours with Arafat in Ramallah, lying on the floor of the rais’s office with crippling back pains and haggling with him from this supine position. In the end, Arafat said yes, too, though he wrote Tenet a letter emphasizing the linkage between the Tenet Paper and the Mitchell Report, particularly the section of the report that required an Israeli settlement freeze.
On June 13, the two leaders each announced to his own people a new cease-fire and his acceptance of the Tenet Paper. Arafat’s staff contacted a few of the key Fatah-linked activists and instructed them to hold their fire. Orders were transmitted to the Tanzim youth movement and the al-Aqsa Brigade cells across the Palestinian territories. But the PA did nothing to impose the cease-fire on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Islamist militias. In the ten days following the joint announcement, six Israelis were killed in shootings and bombings in the territories. Within weeks, Tenet’s effort had sunk into oblivion, and the country was in the throes of a new wave of escalation.
Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was under heavy pressure from the Saudis to toughen its stance against Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. Crown Prince Abdullah sent the president a stern letter, calling in question the entire American-Saudi relationship.20 In his response, Bush committed himself, for the first time, to a “viable independent Palestinian state.” In the State Department, too, work was under way on a major Middle East policy speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell, later in the fall, that would signal a more energetic and more evenhanded American approach to Middle East peacemaking.
For Sharon, says the then U.S. ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, this Saudi-U.S. exchange exacerbated his constant anticipation and fear of vigorous U.S. diplomatic intervention in the conflict. This was the ambassador’s explanation of the Israeli leader’s bizarre, provocative—but somehow ultimately canny—behavior in the period following 9/11.
Like every head of government, Sharon put in a condolence call to the president on watching the fall of the Twin Towers. He was called back about twenty-four hours later. He offered his sympathies and solidarity. Bush thanked him and said that now more than ever the United States understood what Israel is up against in its fight against terror. “Then,” Kurtzer recalled, “Bush says, listen, you can do me a favor. I know you’ve authorized Shimon Peres to go meet Arafat. Well, this would be a good time to do it. Sharon says no, I’m not ready to do this now. He gets off the phone, and now you have a split screen: In
the Oval Office, they’re pissed, because Sharon is the first person in the world to say no to the president after 9/11, on something that they don’t think is very cosmic. Sharon is pissed because the truck seems to be coming down the highway at him faster than ever.”
The next day, Sharon held a conference call with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “His anxieties and the anxieties of some of the people on that call fed off each other,” Kurtzer recalled.
I heard about it and asked to see him alone. I’d only been here two months, and we didn’t yet have a relationship. But this is what ambassadors do. I tried to explain to him American politics and life after 9/11, which is my job. I told him, you understand what happened to us intellectually, but you don’t understand it emotionally. Because you’re a country that’s been attacked. You’ve been at war for sixty years. We were attacked once, in 1941 … three thousand people is huge. It’s not like anything happened to us, but everything happened to us. And in that context, I said to him, for you to say no to Bush on anything … If he asked you for the moon, the answer had to be yes. Well, he got angry at me, and the answer was no. And this built up and built up and built up to his Munich speech.21k
In the weeks between 9/11 and the Munich speech, both Bush and Sharon made public statements voicing their support for the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state. Sharon, aware that this was the thrust of Bush’s letter to Crown Prince Abdullah, made his statement on September 23 to a gathering of teachers at Latrun, the site of his 1948 brush with death in the bloody, failed battle against the Jordanians. “Israel wants to give the Palestinians what no one else gave them—a state. Not the Turks, the British, the Egyptians, or the Jordanians gave them this possibility.”
In hindsight, this speech was the harbinger of the transformation to come. “His end goal was clearly partition,” says Avi Gil. “That’s why he accepted publicly the principle of a Palestinian state.” But the speech made little impact at the time. No one in Jerusalem or in Washington took Sharon’s declaration too seriously because it was assumed that the borders he was contemplating would be rejected by the Palestinians as inadequate and the security conditions he proposed to demand of them would be unacceptable. No one was thinking at that time in terms of unilateral action. On the far right, nevertheless, the speech deepened suspicions. When Bush spoke, a week later, some of Sharon’s hard-line critics blamed his Latrun speech for the president’s public espousal of Palestinian national aspirations.
Bush’s “vision” of an independent Palestine living at peace alongside Israel was articulated at a press conference in the Oval Office on October 2. “The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision, so long as the right of Israel to exist is respected,” the president said. That was doubtless true, at least since the United States began a dialogue with the PLO in the late 1980s. But it had never been spelled out before so explicitly. The administration was at pains to stress that the new policy pronouncement had been in the works before 9/11. The pundits all presumed, nevertheless, that the decision to go public now was linked to Washington’s efforts to garner Muslim world support for the imminent military assault on Afghanistan.
Then, on October 5, Sharon lashed out at Bush with a pathos and ferocity that left the world aghast. “I appeal to the Western democracies,” Sharon proclaimed in prepared remarks to journalists in Tel Aviv, “and first and foremost the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the terrible mistake of 1938. Then, the enlightened democracies of Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia in return for a temporary, comfortable solution. Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense. We will not be able to accept that. Israel is not Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight against terror.” He went on to review the failed cease-fire efforts and ended: “We can rely only on ourselves. And from today onward, we will rely only on ourselves.”22l
Washington was livid and demanded an immediate retraction. Within a day, Sharon’s office sensibly issued a statement explaining that his words had been misinterpreted. Sharon himself bawled out Ambassador Kurtzer on the phone. “It’s your fault. You stirred things up in Washington. Your reporting of the speech shaped their thinking.” When he finished, Kurtzer replied coldly: “Mr. Prime Minister, you created this crisis. I didn’t even hear your speech, let alone report it.”
In the Munich speech, Sharon’s near-compulsive apprehensiveness over American diplomatic involvement in the conflict seemed to sweep aside all other considerations. His own aides were aghast. “He wrote the speech alone,” one staffer recalled, “in his own hand, and sent it by fax from the ranch. As soon as I read it, I started sweating. I rushed over to Shani, but he said that Sharon was insisting. I phoned him and got shouted at: ‘That’s what I’m going to say, and that’s all there is to it!’ ”
But Sharon read Bush right. Their relationship soon pulled out of this trough and developed into a closeness rarely achieved between leaders of the two countries. “That the president liked Ariel Sharon wasn’t the point,” Aaron Miller explained. “When it came to fighting terror, seeking peace, and promoting democracy, Israel was on the right side of the line. Arafat and the others had chosen the wrong side.”23
Arafat moved with desperate speed not to be caught wrong-footed by 9/11. Initial outpourings of joy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were quickly smothered, on his orders, by the PA’s security forces.24 He called in TV crews to film him giving blood in a Ramallah hospital for those injured in the al-Qaeda attacks. That same evening, a close aide met with three prominent Hamas figures in Gaza to deliver an unequivocal message from the rais. “From now on, you must do nothing that can damage the Authority. If Sharon succeeds in portraying us as terrorists, no one on earth will support us.” The Fatah-linked Tanzim, too, was sternly warned to rein in its men. “We all heard,” the Gaza Tanzim boss, Sammy Abu Samadana, recalled later. “But everyone went back home and did as he pleased.”25
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) certainly did. On October 17, two of its activists trailed the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam “Gandhi” Ze’evi, to his hotel room in Jerusalem and shot him dead. It was an act of revenge for the assassination by Israel of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP leader, ten weeks earlier, and it was a great coup. Ze’evi was not merely the highest-ranking Israeli to be assassinated by Palestinians; he was a symbol and spokesman of the most extreme anti-Palestinian sentiment in Israeli political life. When Sharon, in the run‑up to the election, had sent a greeting card to Arafat for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, Ze’evi commented that he, too, “would have sent Arafat an envelope, but not with a greeting card inside.”26
“The era of Arafat is over,” Sharon declared after Ze’evi’s death, laying the blame on the rais.m The Shin Bet caught two members of the assassination squad and tracked down the others, including the man who masterminded the plot, Ahmed Saadat. They were holed up in Ramallah. Israel gave precise information to the PA and the United States. Arafat ignored the demands that he arrest them.
Sharon’s relentless assault on Arafat’s credibility with Washington was hugely assisted by the saga of a small cargo ship called the Karine A, which Israeli intelligence had been shadowing for weeks toward the end of 2001. Flying a Tongan flag of convenience and commanded by a Palestinian naval officer, the ship had taken on fifty tons of arms and ordnance at the Iranian island of Kish. The weapons were paid for, according to Israeli intelligence, by Fuad Shubaki, head of finance in the PA and Arafat’s confidant.27 When the ship turned toward the Suez Canal, intent on unloading its cargo off the Gaza coast, Israel decided to act. Chief of Staff Mofaz commanded the interception personally on the night of January 3, 2002, from an air force Boeing 707 command-and-control plane high above the Red Sea.
The first person Sharon told about the combined ops success was a man who he knew would appreciate its finer points: the former U.S. Marine Corps general Tony Zinni. “I asked Sharon if I could
break the news to Arafat,” the general writes in his memoirs. “I wanted to see the look on Arafat’s face when I told him about it.”28 Zinni had been appointed in November U.S. special envoy to the region. He confronted Arafat with the Karine A on the first day of his second trip. “ ‘That is not true,’ Arafat shot back. ‘This was not our ship. It’s an Israeli plot. This is an Israeli setup.’ ”29
Sharon sent Mofaz to Washington with detailed and unambiguous evidence of Arafat’s personal involvement in the illicit (under Oslo) arms purchase. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, saw the Israeli chief of staff as soon as he arrived. She took the evidence to the president that same evening.30 Arafat made matters worse for himself by writing a letter to President Bush strenuously denying any link to the ship. It was transparently untrue, and Bush took it as a personal insult to his intelligence. “The president wrote him off after that letter,” an American diplomat recalled.
By this time, the intifada violence had spiraled to new heights.
On November 27, a Palestinian disguised as an Israeli soldier sprayed bullets around the bus station in the northern town of Afula, killing 3 and injuring 30. Two days later, a suicide bomber on a bus killed 3 passengers at Hadera. Two days after that a double suicide bombing in the center of Jerusalem left 11 dead and 180 injured. On December 2, the following day, 15 died in a suicide bombing on a bus in Haifa. Hamas claimed responsibility for both of these attacks. On the fifth, an Islamic Jihad bomber apparently detonated his suicide belt prematurely on a street in Jerusalem; several passersby were injured. On the ninth, again in Haifa, a suicide bomber exploded himself at a busy junction, injuring 30. On the twelfth, two suicide bombers injured Israelis traveling in two cars to a settlement inside the Gaza Strip. And on the same day, on the West Bank, 10 bus passengers were killed and 30 injured in an attack outside the settlement of Emanuel. Within hours of this last outrage, the Israeli Air Force had bombed Arafat’s headquarters in Gaza and destroyed his fleet of three helicopters.