Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Halevy therefore expected a spirited struggle by Israel to try to change the tenor of the road map. “Weissglas reported that the U.S. would ‘accept’ Israel’s reservations. I’m not sure the Americans even bothered to file them in their archives,” Halevy said. “Sharon signed off on the partition of Jerusalem. Why did he change his mind? Why did he accept a document that he himself had said for months was one of the greatest threats to Israel?

  “I was reminded in some way of what I had read of President Wilson and [his close aide] Colonel House, who became the de facto president. Sharon was no longer seeing people who had been close to him. He was surrounded. He was closeted. He couldn’t reach out to talk to people if he wanted to. Weissglas had a hold over him.”4

  For Ya’alon, “Things started happening that seemed murky and dishonest.” With Abu Mazen installed as prime minister, Israel resolved to hand back security control over several West Bank towns to the Palestinian Authority. One such town was Jericho, and Weissglas met with the Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, to organize the transfer. The Defense Ministry’s intention, says Ya’alon, was to remove the roadblocks around Jericho and enable Palestinians to enter and leave freely. But Weissglas told Erekat the town would be reopened to Israelis, too, Ya’alon asserted.

  He recalled:

  I phone [Minister of Defense] Mofaz. He’s angry. He speaks to Sharon’s office—and Duby [Weissglas] denies it. Then our brigadier meets with the PA brigadier with a view to transferring Jericho, and the meeting explodes. Two weeks pass, Duby’s still denying it, but we’re told, “Try to be flexible toward the PA.” That’s what Mofaz instructs me, but it’s clear that he’s been instructed by the Prime Minister’s Office.

  Now, this isn’t the first time Weissglas isn’t telling the truth. I started suspecting that there are other interests at play here … the casino in Jericho. I remembered the photo from the 2001 election campaign of Duby with Omri and Muhammad Rashid going off to meet with Martin Schlaff in Vienna.c I know that Duby Weissglas represents the interests of Martin Schlaff in Israel, as his attorney. Two years before, when the IDF shelled the casino, he wrote a letter threatening to sue the officers involved.5

  In the event, Jericho remained closed to Israelis, and the casino stayed shut. That incontrovertible fact is cited by Sharon’s supporters to refute the allegations implied by Ya’alon. By the same token, says Avigdor Yitzhaki, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office (2001–2004), a casino ship belonging to Schlaff—and the subject of much anti-Sharon rumormongering—remained empty and abandoned in the Red Sea resort of Eilat throughout Sharon’s term because the owners could not get a government license to operate it. “Hardly proof of Schlaff’s reputed omnipotence in Sharon’s Israel,” Yitzhaki notes sourly.

  Neither Halevy nor Ya’alon was speaking out publicly at this time, and their alternative narrative, focusing on Weissglas, remained, for the moment, relatively muted. The related theory that Sharon was moving leftward in order to curry favor with the media, and thereby somehow ease the pressure of the criminal investigations against him and his sons, was in the air already, but with nowhere near the resonance it was to receive later, when the settlers embraced it as their battle cry. Amir Oren, a columnist on Haaretz and longtime critic of Sharon, suggested in an article in June 2003 that Sharon “has his back to the wall. Two parties will be asking him tough questions: Bush about the future, and the police about the past.”6

  Sharon’s “leftward” turn over the road map was all the more remarkable given the spike in Palestinian suicide-terror attacks during this period. The intifada, though no longer at the level of sustained intensity that preceded Defensive Shield, nevertheless still spread indiscriminate carnage and pain throughout the country. Yet Sharon had cruised to victory in the election in February. His approval rating dropped from May to June, but it still stood at a solid 47 percent and remained at that figure in July.7

  Part of the reason for the Israeli public’s relative optimism despite the continuing terror was a sense, or at least a hope, that things might finally be changing on the other side. Abu Mazen’s public opposition to the intifada’s resort to lethal violence was a matter of public record and could not but impress Israelis, whatever the depth of their skepticism regarding his true powers and Arafat’s true relinquishment of powers.

  The sole significant test in Israeli eyes, as Abu Mazen well knew, was whether the incidence of violence declined. In his low-key, businesslike way he immediately arranged to meet with Hamas leaders in Gaza and tried to draw them into a general cease-fire. At the beginning of July 2003, against the odds and despite unanimously downbeat punditry, Abu Mazen got all the Palestinian factions to agree to a hudna, or temporary truce. Israel was to respond by stopping its “targeted assassinations” and also by releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. In addition, in accordance with its obligations under the first phase of the road map, Israel began dismantling illegal settlement-outposts in the heart of the West Bank. Television crews duly recorded IDF soldiers exchanging shoves and punches with “hilltop youths,” as the young settlement activists were dubbed.

  Sharon himself had told a part-incredulous, part-hostile group of settler leaders on June 17 that he intended to fulfill Israel’s part of the road map “without winks and nods and without sleights of hand.” These, of course, had been the stock-in-trade of his intimate collusion with these same leaders for the past twenty-six years. He intended to remove fifteen of the illegal outposts at once and more later, Sharon said. The settlers felt he was moving toward the dismantlement of established settlements, too. “For all these years you were our compass,” Pinhas Wallerstein, a veteran and prominent settler leader, wailed. “And now you’re abandoning us.” “I love the hills of Samaria no less than you,” Sharon replied. “Sometimes it’s hard to decide which hill is more beautiful. But a new reality has come into being … We have made commitments, and I am determined to honor them. We must try this new path; perhaps it will lead us to security.”

  The settlers for their part said they would fight him, albeit without violence. Among those present was Ze’ev Hever, whom everyone called Zambish, a Gush Emunim activist who had been close to Sharon for decades and whom, unlike some of the others, Sharon genuinely liked. Unlike those who found it hard to believe that the wink-and-nod days were over, Hever understood that something fundamental had changed in their old champion. Sharon had “lost control” of the road-map process, Hever told his comrades. The prime minister’s sole focus of concern now was Washington, and as Washington’s appetite grew, so Sharon would feed it more and more settlements—first outposts, then established communities. His conclusion, Hever said, was that they must fight him all the way, from the first tiny outpost. No deals, no compromises.8

  With the hudna in place, Abu Mazen was invited to the White House. He met with Sharon in Jerusalem ahead of his U.S. trip. Their talk was businesslike and without rancor. Their aides kept up frequent contact. For the first time in nearly three years, a breath of optimism wafted through Palestine and Israel. The United States sent a full-time peace envoy to the region, the veteran diplomat John Wolf, charged with monitoring progress in implementation of the road map.

  Prodded by the Americans, Sharon gave orders to transfer to the PA responsibility for security in the city of Bethlehem and in the Gaza Strip, apart from the Gaza settlement enclaves and the main north-south highway that runs through the Strip. IDF troops moved out of these areas. July was the least violent month since the intifada began: three deaths on the Israeli side, seven on the Palestinian.9 Talks began on transferring security in four other West Bank cities. “Tensions were reduced,” the U.S. envoy Wolf recorded. “Quality of life in Gaza and metropolitan Israel went up sharply. The Gaza agreement enabled Palestinians to move freely [in the Strip], people could go to the beach … Stores which had hardly been open at all were staying open until ten or eleven at night … So this was a moment of opportunity. It got people’s hopes up.�
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  It was a pitifully brief moment. For Israelis, all the hopes collapsed with a terrible suicide bus bombing in Jerusalem on August 19. The Hamas bomber, a married man and university graduate, was disguised as an Orthodox Jew. He boarded a No. 2 bus on the edge of the old haredi district of Mea Shearim and detonated his explosive belt, obliterating himself and taking the lives of sixteen adults and seven children. Hamas in Hebron took the credit for this atrocity. It was intended, it said, to avenge the deaths of two Hebron activists, one Islamic Jihad and the other Hamas, at the hands of IDF troops. Two days later, Israeli helicopters struck in Gaza again. This time, there was no collateral killing. The target was Ismail Abu Shanab, a senior leader of Hamas. He and his two bodyguards died in their car under a hail of rockets.

  Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced the obvious: the hudna was finished. “Israel has a right to defend herself,” the White House spokesman commented coldly. Secretary of State Powell and John Wolf desperately urged Abu Mazen and his lieutenants to crack down on the Islamist militants and avert a new round of terror and reprisals. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza commander, assured the U.S. envoy. “I’ll start tonight, I’ve got my men ready.” But Arafat would not let him use his men against the militants. Arafat refused to endorse the agreement with Israel transferring security control in four more West Bank cities. Days later, inevitably, Abu Mazen resigned. In a parting speech before a tense and stormy Palestinian parliament in Ramallah on September 6, with angry demonstrators battling his security men outside, the moderate, well-meaning leader laid the main burden of blame for his failure on Arafat, for refusing to forgo his powers and enable the new prime minister to govern.

  Abu Mazen had made a start, however modest, on the huge job of uprooting the corruption and maladministration that had entrenched themselves in Arafat’s PA. Several particularly degenerate police officers were removed. Traffic cops returned to city streets. Jails were fixed up; courts resumed functioning with a semblance of due process. No less important, his minister of finance, Salam Fayyad, a former official of the World Bank and later of the International Monetary Fund, began to forge a rational and effective system of budgeting and administration, with civil servants and security men paid into their bank accounts rather than by cash handouts from their bosses. In many ways, as it turned out later, the short-lived Abu Mazen–Salam Fayyad partnership in 2003 was a forerunner of their much longer and much more effective cooperation—the one as president of the PA, the other as prime minister—later in the decade.

  In later interviews, Abu Mazen tended to soften his verdict on Arafat and to attach more of the blame for the collapse of the hudna and of his prime ministerial experiment to Sharon and the Americans (not, however, to himself). Many Israelis in the peace camp agreed with his criticism of Sharon’s behavior during these potentially transformational—but wasted—months. In June, Sharon knew Abu Mazen was negotiating earnestly with Hamas to achieve a hudna. Yet he referred to him as “a chick that’s not yet grown feathers.” Until he grew feathers, Sharon continued insultingly, Israel would take care of terrorism itself. His aides made sure the slighting remark, made at cabinet, was immediately leaked.

  In another comment about Abu Mazen around this time, no less inane but more telling, Sharon observed that “Abu Mazen, too, is still an Arab.” This provides an unguarded glimpse into the deep reservoir of his distaste and distrust for the neighboring nation. That never changed, even though his policy on an eventual accommodation with the Palestinians changed so radically. It helps to explain—though not to excuse—his shortsighted approach to Abu Mazen’s prime ministership in 2003 and his inexplicable, almost perverse failure to coordinate the Gaza withdrawal with President Abu Mazen—Arafat was dead by then—in 2005. Unilateralism, as we shall see, was presented by Sharon and his aides as a policy of last resort in the absence of a credible negotiating partner. In fact, though, in a very profound way, for Sharon it was a policy of first resort, even of first choice.

  Sharon’s single most frustrating refusal from Abu Mazen’s point of view was to release a significant number of prisoners as part of the hudna package. Israel held thousands of Palestinians in its jails. To the Palestinians many of them were political prisoners or freedom fighters. To the Israelis they were members of illegal organizations or outright terrorists. Sharon laid down as his basic guideline that “terrorists with blood on their hands” would not be freed. That still left plenty of scope for a generous gesture that, more than anything else, would have shored up Abu Mazen’s standing on his own side. In the event, Israel released only four hundred men, most of whom were serving relatively short sentences that were anyway nearing completion.

  The ostensible removal of settlement-outposts, many of which were back in business the morning after their forcible “dismantlement” by the army, was another protracted and gratuitous insult to Abu Mazen of which the Palestinians became quickly and acutely aware. A list of outposts purportedly evacuated turned out to comprise lone shacks, uninhabited, which the settlers themselves offered to take down in “deals” with the Defense Ministry. Sharon’s lofty rhetoric about the rule of law and his solemn promises to the Americans were honored in the breach.11

  With the hudna dead, the tit for tat of terror and reprisal resumed. On September 6, an IAF warplane dropped a half-ton bomb on a building in Gaza City. Israeli intelligence had hard information that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and all the top Hamas leadership would be meeting inside. There were long discussions over the appropriate ordnance; no one wanted a repeat of the Shehadeh disaster.d The bomb destroyed the third floor, where the meeting was understood to be taking place. In fact it was held on the ground floor, perhaps because of the difficulty of getting Sheikh Yassin’s wheelchair upstairs. Yassin and the fourteen others escaped almost unscathed.

  “Israel will pay a high price for this crime,” the quadriplegic cleric warned. Three days later two suicide bombers took fifteen lives: in Tel Aviv, a bomber exploded alongside a group of off-duty soldiers waiting for rides; in Jerusalem, a father and daughter were among the dead in a wrecked café. The next day, Israel struck from the air again in Gaza, rocketing the home of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar. His son and a bodyguard were killed and two dozen others injured; Zahar himself escaped. On October 5, a woman suicide bomber from Jenin killed twenty-one customers in a restaurant in Haifa. Fifty more were injured.

  Sharon suspended all dealings with the PA government. After Abu Mazen’s departure, Arafat installed the much more pliant Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia) in the post of “prime minister with executive powers,” but it was clear to all that real power continued to reside with the rais. Sharon refused to meet with Arafat. He pushed through cabinet a resolution “to remove this obstacle [that is, Arafat] in the manner and time of our choosing.” But the Americans had not removed their objection to Arafat’s physical elimination. The rais remained in the muqata. The road map was turning into a dead letter.

  On October 15, the United States suffered its own casualties from Gazan terror. A massive roadside bomb ripped through an armored van, killing three security men. They were escorting an American cultural attaché whose assignment was to interview applicants for Fulbright scholarships. The State Department promptly banned all further travel by its personnel to Gaza.

  While there had clearly been a disappointing setback on the Palestinian side, Washington was losing patience with both sides. Moreover, as the initial, sweeping success of the Iraq invasion turned to ashes, accusations proliferated that somehow Israel or its sympathizers in America had dragged the administration into the war. Yasser Arafat was one of the earliest to charge that Israel actively “incited” in favor of war against Iraq.12

  It was a charge echoed at the time both on the right and on the left of American politics. Bill Keller of The New York Times ridiculed it. “A less conspiracy-minded observer,” he wrote, “might point out that the long-standing Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the f
act that our interests coincide with Israel’s does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president’s brain … What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is—to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire—good for the Jews.”13 But as the postwar occupation of Iraq went from bad to worse, the innuendo began to hurt. The strategic fallout, moreover, looked less good for the Jews in Israeli eyes. The Mossad feared that terror operatives now streaming to Iraq from all over the Middle East would, in time, filter into Jordan and Lebanon and join the Palestinian intifada against Israel.

  The gathering gloom on the diplomatic front was exacerbated by another turn for the worse in Israel’s economic woes. Netanyahu’s tough medicine earlier in the year was not working yet; another dose was needed. Many families were hurting badly. People who had managed in the past to keep their heads above water, just, now found themselves slipping into real poverty as vital welfare subsidies for children, for old people, for single mothers, for the unemployed, were all slashed. A single mother from the small Negev town of Mitzpe Ramon, Vikki Knafo, caught the national mood when she struck out, in the blazing heat of July, on a long, lonely march to the capital to protest her inability to provide for her three young children. By the time she arrived, she had become an icon. Some six hundred other single mothers joined her in a tent encampment outside the Finance Ministry. Netanyahu refused to meet her. But his advisers were seriously worried over the image of heartlessness that her protest was tarring him with. Inevitably, it rubbed off on Sharon, too. His poll figures and those of the government began to slide.

  “When sorrows come,” as Sharon the ardent theatergoer must have heard more than once from King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” While the wiliness of Arafat, the weakness of Abu Mazen, and the troubles of the economy were all known or predictable challenges, he now ran into a flurry of awkward and unexpected episodes that sapped his public standing. That pattern was not starkly clear at the time as events moved along in their ragged way. It has been reconstructed subsequently, perhaps too obsessively, by commentators seeking the key to Sharon’s cataclysmic move at year’s end that suddenly changed everything.