Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  The reprisals policy was drastically revised. No longer were Arab civilians and Arab villages and refugee camps to be considered legitimate targets. The IDF’s border war now shifted to focus on the armies of the states flanking Israel. Their regular armies, especially the Egyptian troops in the Gaza Strip, were actively supporting, arming, and encouraging the bands of armed Palestinian infiltrators, known as fedayun. The states, therefore, were responsible. Repeated military discomfiture could bring them, it was held or hoped, to rein in the marauders.

  The exploits of Unit 101, although not public knowledge at the time, were the stuff of word-of-mouth legend throughout the army. So were its off-duty feats, which of course contributed to its dazzling panache in the eyes of less privileged soldiers. Unit 101’s camaraderie was elitist, brash, and brutal. One Friday evening in December 1953, a 101 man driving one of the unit’s jeeps was stopped by military police in Tiberias. He failed to address them with due deference, and they took him to their base, where three of them knocked him about a bit. He reported to his own base. Within hours, a posse of comrades had been rounded up, made its way to Tiberias, stormed the MP base, located the three assailants, and set about them with clubs. All three required hospitalization.

  An inquiry was duly launched; Shaham was carpeted; Shaham called in Arik. Arik penned a fulsome apology to the IDF chief of operations, expressing “the most profound regret in my own name and in the name of every one of my men, for the grave incident that took place … I am confident such an incident will never recur. I do hope this incident will not cast a shadow on the excellent relations between my unit and the Military Police.”39 Back at Sataf, the posse members were sent home on a two-week furlough; when they returned, Arik informed them that they had been confined to base for a fortnight.

  Five months after Kibbiya, Unit 101 ceased to exist as an independent military formation. It was merged with the paratroop battalion. Presumably, both lessons of Kibbiya were at play here: on the one hand, Dayan (who was appointed chief of staff in December 1953) wanted a larger fighting force imbued with the spirit of Arik’s commandos; on the other hand, he wanted that spirit embraced, contained, and rendered more disciplined and less antiestablishment—less prone, in other words, to embarrass Israel by intemperate action.

  The merger was seen as a hostile takeover by the men themselves, and there were murmurs of defiance. Some of the best fighters in the unit had joined it in order to escape the spit and polish of the regular army. There would be no more beating up of MPs when they were part of a proper battalion. Arik invited Dayan to Sataf to woo and win them over. “You have established new standards of combat, new benchmarks for completing missions,” Dayan said, stroking their individual and collective egos. “Now it’s time to instill those standards into the entire army.”

  There was not much enthusiasm for the merger on either side. Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Harari, the commander of the paratroopers, a former British army officer, fully expected to command the enlarged battalion. Dayan disabused him. The paratroopers themselves looked askance at the scruffy crew who sidled reluctantly into their spick-and-span base at Beit Lid, north of Tel Aviv.

  The handover ceremony said it all. Harari, ramrod straight, starched, and buckled, precision marched to his spot on the parade ground, facing the flagpole. He read out a terse parting speech and ordered officers who had asked to leave with him to fall out and line up beside him. Many did.

  Arik quickly distributed the few dozen Unit 101 men among the different companies of the four-hundred-strong battalion. And he sent all the companies off on prolonged training exercises in different parts of the country, so as to dissipate any lingering umbrage. “Within weeks,” a young officer wrote decades later, “it became clear that 101 had not merged into 890 the paratroop battalion but rather 890 had merged into 101.”

  The 101 commandos-now-890-paratroopers ceased their excesses against the military police and, much more important, against Palestinian civilians. But with the new pattern of attacking military targets, and attacking on a much larger scale than previously, the risks inherent in the reprisal operations became even greater, certainly in the eyes of the foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, and the doves in government. Escalation was inevitable, given that the clashes were now between armies. The numbers of soldiers killed, wounded, and captured—Egyptian soldiers, Jordanian soldiers, and also Syrian soldiers—were embarrassingly high for their respective governments. Yet the fedayun infiltrations persisted. The atmosphere in the region steadily, dangerously deteriorated.

  Again, it was Sharon’s military prowess, tactical skills, and leadership gifts that contributed significantly to the success of the military operations conducted within the revised reprisals policy. Again, though, he did not make the policy. However enthusiastic an executor he was of it, he was only that—the executor, not the architect. He did not conceive it, nor was he ultimately responsible for it. Retrospective discussions of this period that blame Sharon for triggering the chain of events that led to the 1956 Sinai War give him too much credit (or discredit). Granted, his own incessant pushiness, his expansive, extroverted personality, his unbridled, loudmouthed criticism of the moderates, all contributed to his ostensible importance in the scheme of things (and all enhanced the strictures of his critics). Granted, too, he was much coddled by Ben-Gurion. And he for his part took every available advantage of his access to the premier and defense minister. But he was never in the inner coterie, not one of the bright young men like Dayan and Shimon Peres and Teddy Kollek whom the Old Man nurtured and whose company he patently preferred to that of his own old party comrades. They were policy makers, inasmuch as they were present at the conception and formulation of policy. Sharon never was.

  It was Ben-Gurion who required Arik, as he did other officers and diplomats, to Hebraize his diasporic-sounding name. The Sharon is the name of the geographic district around Kfar Malal, and it vaguely emulates the sound of Scheinerman. Vera and Samuil (who had long used his Hebrew first name, Shmuel) readily concurred, although they themselves kept the old family name.

  There is no record of what Gali thought. There are hints, however, of broader dissatisfaction on the part of Arik’s young bride over the dramatic change of course their life had taken. When he went back into the army and started coming home late, or not at all, from raids or training exercises, Gali’s frayed nerves showed through. “She used to give him a hard time,” an army comrade, Gideon Altschuler, recalled more than fifty years later. “My wife and I lived near them in Jerusalem, and we were good friends. The two of them didn’t always live harmoniously. She didn’t understand that when your man comes back from an operation across the border, that’s not the time to pick a quarrel with him.”40 When Arik took over the paratroop battalion, the young and still-childless marriage was strained even more. “He hardly ever came home,” according to one account, “and when he did, it was only for a few hours—during which time he subjected her to long-winded army stories. She asked him many times to be around more often, but Sharon was engrossed in his military life.”41

  One of the revamped paratroop battalion’s earliest operations, in March 1954, followed the murder of eleven bus passengers on a winding road in the Negev called Ma’aleh Akrabim, or Scorpions Hill. The assailants were fedayun from across the Jordan border. The target chosen for reprisal was the West Bank village of Nahalin, where the paratroopers were to blow up houses again. The new policy of attacking only military targets had not yet fully gelled. Arik handed out flashlights to the troops with which they were to scour the homes before demolishing them. In the event, Arab Legion units tried to block their access, and a pitched battle developed between the two forces. The end result was seven legionnaires killed in the operation and three civilians, including the mukhtar, or headman, of Nahalin.

  Three months later, following the murder of a farmer near Kfar Saba, the target was an Arab Legion camp at Azoun, on the West Bank. The dovish Sharett was now prime minister, Ben-Gurion hav
ing retired, at least temporarily, and gone to live on a remote Negev kibbutz, Sde Boker. Sharett approved the army’s reprisal plan. Arik handpicked seven of his men to carry out this mission. The commander was Aharon Davidi, Arik’s deputy. Leading the squad through nine miles of West Bank territory on the dark, moonless night was Meir Har-Zion, commander of the battalion’s reconnaissance company and a man with uncanny navigational skills. Two of the others were also ex–Unit 101 men, Yitzhak Gibli and Yoram Nahari. Sharon sat with the seven as they pored over aerial photographs and maps and saw them off at the border at nightfall. They were kitted out in civilian clothes and armed with non-army-issue tommy guns. Even though the IDF was now beginning to direct its reprisals at the neighboring armies, it apparently still sought to cling to the ostensible deniability of the “vigilante” fiction.

  At the camp, they split into two groups. Each stormed a large tent, spraying automatic fire and hurling grenades. As they withdrew, Gibli was hit in the leg. They lifted him and kept running, but he was hit again, this time in the neck. They bandaged him quickly. The surviving legionnaires were firing wildly in all directions. Soon they would come after them. Gibli begged to be left. “Just give me a grenade,” he told Davidi. “When they reach me, I’ll blow myself up with them.” Davidi consulted with Har-Zion. It was against their battle ethic to leave a wounded man in the field. But they decided there was no choice; if they stayed, they would all suffer the wounded man’s fate (which they fully assumed would be death or suicide). But Gibli was not killed and instead was taken prisoner. On his cell wall, he recalled four decades later, he scratched the first letters of Arik’s and Davidi’s names, “to remind myself who I am and where I come from.”42

  Arik for his part, surprised and delighted to learn that Gibli was alive, now embarked on a determined effort to get him back in the way he knew best: kidnapping Jordanian soldiers wherever he could pounce on them. In one instance, he had a jeep painted in white with UN markings and dressed up two of his men as Palestinian peasants and Har-Zion as an Israeli policeman. They were to drive to the border to “return” the two straying peasants. When a Jordanian patrol came to “receive” them, they would grab the officer and head back with him to Israel. The officer in question saw through the fresh paint or the peasant dress and backed away in time. On another occasion, Arik sent two women soldiers across the border to entice legionnaires, also without success.

  He was like a man possessed, endlessly repeating the mantras that the paratroopers don’t leave a man in the field (which they had) and that the IDF does everything possible to bring its men home. He was a lieutenant colonel by now, having been promoted after being wounded leading an attack in July 1954 on a fortified Egyptian army position near Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. “I was hit in the thigh,” he recounted in a nostalgic lecture, as prime minister, forty-nine years later.

  The same searing physical pain. But whereas at Latrun I was a young platoon commander abandoned on the field of battle after a bitter fight and a crushing defeat, this time, despite the pain, I had a feeling of confidence. I’d been wounded again, but in a battle that we’d won. And I was among comrades in a unit suffused with self-confidence and fighting spirit. Above all, I myself was confident in the certain knowledge that I would never be abandoned on the field. That knowledge, that our comradeship would sustain every test, was what gave us all the determination and the strength to carry out every mission assigned to us throughout that period and in the wars that followed.43

  Sharon’s mantras reflected the spirit he inculcated in the paratroopers, and these did in time pervade the whole army as ideals to be aspired to.

  Under Arik, a commander’s decision to leave a wounded man would be justified only in the direst straits, as Gibli’s case proved. For Arik, what also changed was the lengths to which he believed the IDF should go to get its POWs back. His unremitting attempts to seize Jordanians led to serious strains with Dayan and his head of operations, Colonel Meir Amit. Dayan wrote in his diary:

  I called in Arik on August 25 and told him he had no approval to cross the border and grab a hostage to exchange for Gibli … To resolve this business of unapproved operations [I said], there was one single condition: that we worked in cooperation. If he wasn’t satisfied with the approval given for a particular operation, he could always come and present alternatives. I would not be angry or surprised if a particular operation with a particular purpose changed under the circumstances and produced different results. But I would not tolerate the defined purpose of an operation being altered before the operation had begun. Arik said he understood, agreed and promised.44

  The “business of unapproved operations” was never really resolved between the two men. This conversation was a harbinger of many conversations to come over the next two years and further in the future, when Sharon was to lead much larger formations under Dayan’s overall command.

  In his memoirs, Dayan wrote of Ben-Gurion’s “special affection” for three IDF officers: Haim Laskov,i Assaf Simchoni, and Sharon. The founding father saw in all three of them “the antithesis of the galuti, or diasporic Jew. The New Jew was a fighter, bold, self-confident, expert in the art of war, in weaponry, in field craft, in the region, and in the Arabs. Ben-Gurion could not bear casuistry and beating around the bush. He didn’t like the Talmud; his heart rebelled against two thousand years of exile. He yearned for the Israelites of the Bible, living on their land, farming and fighting, independent and proud and building their national culture. Haim, Assaf, and Arik were like those ancient Israelites in his eyes.”45 Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar writes that the Old Man told him he admired two soldiers above all for their bravery and resourcefulness: Dayan and Sharon.

  Sharon himself failed to understand that his easy and frequent access to Ben-Gurion rankled with other, more senior officers. “With the room full of generals and staff officers, he would call me to be next to him … It was a situation that cried out for tact on my part, but at the age of twenty-six I didn’t recognize the need.”46

  Regardless of the tension between Sharon and himself, Dayan was consistent and unequivocal in recognizing the reprisal operations as a key factor in strengthening the IDF. “Dayan saw the reprisals as a means of educating and training the army,” writes his then aide-de-camp, Mordechai Bar-On. “The long series of combat failures during the years before his appointment as chief of staff, and especially during 1953, worried him deeply, and he saw his main task as chief of staff to restore the IDF to fighting efficacy … The reprisal actions were the chief instrument.”47

  Dayan insisted that the army’s regular infantry brigades improve their combat effectiveness and that more units develop the commando skills which the paratroopers expended so much effort acquiring. With time, Dayan records in his memoirs, other units began to take part in the reprisal operations. “The paratroopers ceased to be solely an army formation and became a concept and a symbol—the symbol of courageous combat.”

  The paratroop battalion “has set high standards of combat,” Dayan told the General Staff in February 1956. “It has proved that we can achieve those high standards, and has thereby had an influence throughout the army. It has demonstrated what the level of commitment of the individual fighter can be and ought to be in battle. If one man had succeeded in moving the entire army forward in this regard, it is Arik.”48

  But there were moments of weakness, too, even of cowardice. And there were serious lapses of ethical standards, despite the lessons ostensibly learned from the Kibbiya operation. In February 1955, Meir Har-Zion and three other paratroopers crossed the border and killed five Bedouin in cold-blooded revenge for the murder of Har-Zion’s sister. The sister, Shoshana, and a friend had gone hiking on the Jordanian side of the border, heading for the Dead Sea. They never returned. Har-Zion formally quit the army, enlisted three paratrooper friends, and went after the killers. They picked up six Bedouin, murdered five, and left the sixth alive to tell the tale. Har-Zion maintained that these w
ere the killers, but there was no clear proof of that.49 “The entire episode was a throwback to tribal days,” Sharon writes in Warrior.

  Tribal or not, Sharon provided Har-Zion with a tracked vehicle, a driver to take him right up to the border (“the best I had”—Yitzhak Gibli, now back from Jordanian captivity), and weapons with which to conduct his vendetta. And what’s more, Dayan knew in real time that he had done so. “Dayan called to ask what had happened…‘I tried to persuade him [Har-Zion],’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen. So I gave him some help.’ ‘Can we still stop him?’ Dayan asked. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘It’s too late for that.’ ”50 When the four returned, they were feasted and feted by the paratroopers.

  Prime Minister Sharett demanded that the four men stand trial “or else we will lose the right to demand that neighboring states try and punish murderers [of Jews].” Ben-Gurion, who had now returned from his desert retreat and was serving as minister of defense, agreed. Har-Zion and his friends were arrested. Sharon hired an able young lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, to plead their case. But Tamir was a vocal and eloquent member of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party and a thorn in the government’s flesh. Ben-Gurion was furious, more over the political deviation in hiring Tamir, apparently, than over the killings that Sharon had abetted. Ben-Gurion gave Sharon a stark choice: sever your ties with Tamir at once, without telling him why, or leave the army at once. Sharon chose the former, explaining to Tamir only years later why he had been forced to do so.51

  In a fawning and disingenuous letter to Dayan—disingenuous, it would seem, on both their parts—Sharon vigorously denied any taint of disloyalty. “There is no unit in the army more admiring of and loyal to the chief of staff than the paratroop battalion.” He admitted to “mistakes” in the Har-Zion affair but insisted that he “genuinely and sincerely believed at the time I was doing the right thing … I never intended, Heaven forbid, to embarrass the IDF in any show trial, and I certainly had no political intent regarding the lawyer.”52