Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Sharon’s sojourn in the U.K. was an elegant form of exile, contrived by Chief of Staff Dayan. Sharon had not exactly left his command, but in effect had been fired, at the insistence of the CO of Central Command, Zvi Tzur. The disaffection among the paratroop brigade officers, which reached a crescendo at that day of open recriminations in March 1957, never really let up. Ben-Gurion was aware of it. He wrote to Dayan urging him to “try to overcome these manifestations of small-mindedness that plague our little country.”

  Dayan’s evident failure to overcome the small-mindedness that Ben-Gurion discerned around Sharon, and his recommendation that Sharon spend a year in the U.K. rather than defending the borders, signaled two uncomfortable truths for the acerbic, arrogant, but gifted twenty-nine-year-old who had known nothing but combat since his teens. The first was that Israel’s policy makers looked forward now to a period of peace after the IDF’s success in the Sinai War. The second, even more difficult for Sharon to appreciate, was that life in a peacetime army is not nearly so fast moving and studded with opportunity as it is in an army engaged in constant conflict. Different qualities are required of peacetime officers: less panache and improvisation; more diligence and patient application to training and discipline.

  Camberley drove home the same disquieting lesson. The military life, he discovered from his British comrades, is a long and dogged haul, punctuated by the surges of action and rapid promotions that wars provide. Looking around him, Sharon saw “people who years ago had been brigadier generals in France or Italy or the Western Desert [and] were now climbing slowly up the peacetime ladder. And by and large they accepted it with a casual nonchalance.”3 Casual nonchalance was not his strong suit.

  “Dear Shimon,” he wrote in September 1958 to the director general of the Defense Ministry, Shimon Peres. “Following our conversation several weeks ago about the structure of the IDF, I am sending you my thoughts on the subject.” He believed that Ben-Gurion was grooming him as a future chief of staff, and he seems to have presumed that Peres, the Old Man’s close aide, was privy to this intent. In fact, though, Peres insisted half a century later, “Ben-Gurion would never have appointed Arik. There is no question at all in my mind. Despite his abiding love and admiration for him. No question at all.”4

  Sharon wrote that he and Gali were taking back with them a little car that his uncle had bought them as a gift. “We’re doing this so that Gali can work at the hospital [in Jerusalem] without wasting hours each day traveling up and down [by public transport],” he explained to Peres, apparently feeling the need to justify this conspicuous consumption in the still-austere Israeli environment.

  His anticipated frustration on his return home proved well-founded. There was no field command for Sharon. The best the army could come up with was a desk job in Tel Aviv, in the training branch, as head of infantry training. If he took it, he was told, he would get full colonel, the rank he ought to have got, by his own reckoning, years earlier when the paratroopers became a brigade. In November, Ben-Gurion called him in. “Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth?” Sharon meekly assured the Old Man that he had. “He admitted that he had not told the truth on occasion in the past,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, “but he said he doesn’t anymore.”

  Sharon, at any rate, came away from the meeting with the sense that the Old Man was watching over him and would not let his detractors crush his career.5 But for the present he must keep his head down. He agreed to take the proffered staff posting.

  A few months later, he lost it. The head of training, General Yosef Geva, fired him for failing to turn up at a meeting and then lying about why he hadn’t come. Ben-Gurion stepped in to make sure he wasn’t ousted from the army altogether. “He is brave, original, and resourceful,” Ben-Gurion remonstrated with Geva. “Yes, but he’s not disciplined, and he doesn’t tell the truth,” was Geva’s reply.6 The general agreed to give him another chance, as commander of the army’s infantry school. Here Sharon was to spend the next three years in what he himself called “exile in the wilderness.”

  He took the job seriously, at least at first, planning and implementing strenuous but imaginative training programs for the young officers and NCOs undergoing courses at the school. They all knew his history and regarded him with distant awe. His colleagues in the training department of the General Staff found him creative and stimulating in their discussions on military theory and in their work on training manuals. The staff of the infantry school, on the other hand, suffered from Sharon’s moodiness and short temper. He seemed to take out all his frustration on them. Meetings too often ended with him bawling someone out for no reasonable cause. Time after time, an instructor or administrator would be seen hauling his kit bag to the camp gate, fired by Sharon for a trivial infringement or for nothing at all save getting on the commander’s nerves.

  After a time, he began getting on his own nerves. He registered at the Tel Aviv branch of the Hebrew University Law School. He would have preferred to study agriculture, he wrote later, as his father had wanted. But that would have required full-time attendance.a

  The end of the dour Haim Laskov’s term as chief of staff brought no relief: the new chief was Zvi Tzur, and he stolidly withstood all of Ben-Gurion’s urgings to bring Sharon back in from the cold. “I even went to see Dayan,” Sharon writes. “[He]…was serving as minister of agriculture…‘Arik,’ he said, ‘there is no way for you to get out of it. You will have to wait for a crisis to come along. It’s only then that they will let you out.’ ”

  Sharon enrolled in the army’s tank school, diligently learning his way through all the courses: driver, gunner, loader, radioman, and tank commander. He studied the mechanics of the tank and the tactics for deploying platoons, then battalions, and finally whole brigades of tanks. As a rookie tank officer, Sharon displayed tactical boldness and originality that impressed the top instructor at the school, Yitzhak Ben-Ari. In every war game, Ben-Ari reported, Sharon would come up with novel suggestions that defied traditional armored corps theory. His schemes involved deep thrusts through the enemy defenses in order to precipitate a collapse. But other officers faulted Sharon’s ideas as too risky and too costly in lives.

  In early 1962, he was thrown a crumb of comfort: Chief of Staff Tzur grudgingly assigned a reserve mechanized brigade to Sharon’s command. At least if there was a war he would have a substantial role in the fighting. He declined. “I was holding out for an armored brigade. Tanks were emerging as a crucial element in [Israel’s] strategic thinking.” Eventually, he got one. But his ambitions still soared much higher than that. He asked for the job of IDF chief of operations. This drew from Tzur another predictable refusal.

  “On May 2 all these problems turned suddenly meaningless,” Sharon writes in Warrior.7 Gali was killed in her little Austin car on the winding road to Jerusalem, near the village of Abu Ghosh. She swerved out of her lane and was hit by an oncoming truck. Arik was brought the news by his next-door neighbor, Motti Hod, a senior air force officer. He wept inconsolably, Hod recalled. At the funeral the next day, though, he kept a stiff military bearing. In a deadpan voice, he read out the eulogy he had written, recalling their teenage love and their years together.

  The British car was a right-hand drive, and there was speculation that perhaps that was a factor in the accident. But among Gali’s colleagues and friends there was an acrid undercurrent of suspicion that the cause of her death was to be sought in her growing anguish over Arik’s relationship with her younger sister, Lily. There had been rumors of a romance between them.

  Lily, four years younger than Gali, was strikingly good-looking with long black hair. When she enlisted, Arik pulled strings for her to serve in the paratroop brigade. She was around the Sharon home a good deal, often looking after Gur when Gali was out working. Now she moved in full-time to take care of the orphaned child, who was deeply attached to her. Arik, too, made a point of spending time with his son and came home from his base almost
every night. A year after Gali’s death, Arik and Lily were married.

  “I didn’t go to the wedding,” a close family friend recalled.

  There was a sort of dark cloud hanging over it. I liked Margalit a lot. She was a very serious person. Very professional and accomplished in her work. An impressive young woman. But there was always something sad about her…[My husband] went. He said he didn’t want to judge anyone, especially not a good friend. Many in our group of friends stayed away. But as I came to know Lily better, I changed my attitude toward her, especially when I saw how she brought up Gur … Over the years we grew close. She never mentioned Margalit, though. Not to me at any rate. I never heard her talk about her.8

  In a newspaper interview years later, Lily said she had married Arik “because it was good for Gur. Today, looking back, I can say that in fact I loved him very much then already. But it wasn’t love that decided it. The situation was that we were two people with a shared, sacred goal—to look after a little boy who had lost his mother.”9 The police examiners who investigated the accident, meanwhile, found significant contributory negligence in Margalit’s driving. A suit filed by Arik and Gur against the truck driver’s insurance company was settled out of court. The driver did not admit to any guilt on his part.10

  In August 1964, Gur, now eight, welcomed a little brother into his life. Arik and Lily’s firstborn, Omri, joined the family, living now in a rented home in the northern village of Nahalal. Gur also got a pony of his own, a gift from his father to help him take to life in the country. They often rode out together through the flat expanses of the Valley of Jezreel and the hills of lower Galilee. It was a happy time all around. Arik was back on the fast track. He was deputy commanding officer at Northern Command, serving on the front line directly under a man he respected and liked, General Avraham Yoffe.

  Ben-Gurion handed over both the prime ministership and the Ministry of Defense to Levi Eshkol, and with them a strong recommendation to name Yitzhak Rabin chief of staff after Tzur. Eshkol seemed willing to comply, and Ben-Gurion called in Rabin to tell him. In that same conversation, Rabin wrote later, “he opened his heart to me and said, ‘You know I have a special regard for Arik Sharon. I see him as one of our best military men and one of the finest fighters the State of Israel has had. If he would only tell the truth, that would help him get ahead. I’m asking you, please don’t treat him the way he’s been treated until now.’ ”

  Rabin writes of his “personal commitment to Ben-Gurion…[But] I decided to advance Arik not just to fulfill Ben-Gurion’s wish. In my own previous position on the General Staff, I had been extraordinarily impressed by Arik’s work as a reserves brigade commander: his organization of the brigade, his training schedule, his guidance and leadership of the officers. He created a formidable fighting force. This showed me what he was capable of.”

  Rabin took over on January 1, 1964.

  In my first week as chief of staff, I called him in and said, “Everyone knows you’re a superb military man. Your trouble is, though, that people tend to believe you’re not a decent human being. I don’t know you well enough to say. I want to promote you, but I’ve got to be sure that your accusers aren’t right. I am going to appoint you for one year as deputy commanding officer at Northern Command. If at the end of the year your direct superior, the CO of Northern Command, says that you behaved like a decent human being, then I’ll promote you to general.”11

  Sharon’s seven lean years were over.

  Yoffe was one general who didn’t want to oust Sharon or block his advancement. He accepted the new chief of staff’s challenge, welcoming Sharon to the north but cautioning him—and reassuring his apprehensive staff—that his advent must not entail a purge. He must prove himself by proving he could run Northern Command, and run it well, with the help of all the officers currently serving there.

  No sooner had Rabin (and Sharon) assumed their new roles than a sharp downturn occurred in relations between Israel and the Arab world, and most especially between Israel and Syria. An Arab League summit convened in Cairo in January 1964 and resolved to thwart Israel’s National Water Carrier, a major new project that had been under construction for several years and was now nearing completion. The carrier was designed to siphon off Jordan River waters entering the Sea of Galilee from the north and transport them, by canal and by underground pipe, to the center and arid south of the country, where annual rainfall was much sparser.

  The Zionist dream of “making the desert bloom”—meaning particularly the parched Negev desert, which constituted the bulk of Israel’s territory—depended in large part on the success of this enterprise. The Arab states adopted a “headwater diversion plan” designed to divert much of the Jordan waters before they reached the Sea of Galilee. For Israel this was unacceptable. Eshkol, the new prime minister and minister of defense, made it clear that Israel would act to thwart the Arab plan.

  The same Arab summit of 1964 also saluted the birth of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), injecting new vigor into the Palestinian cause. The summit created the PLA, or Palestine Liberation Army, and resolved that all the armies of all the frontline states would operate under a single unified command. Palestinian guerrilla groups, among them Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, began mounting attacks on civilian targets inside Israel. Syria gave active encouragement to such attacks. Jordan and Lebanon provided passive support.12

  In November, Syrian tractors and bulldozers went to work on their planned canal. The IDF responded with artillery fire directed at the earthworks. Syrian artillery, high on the Golan escarpment, retaliated by firing down onto the Israeli settlements below. The escalation continued with Syrian attacks on Israeli fishermen out in the Sea of Galilee and Israeli reprisals along the border. Israeli tanks were frequently in action, too, and on several occasions the air force took part, providing firepower that countered Syria’s topographical advantage.

  Compounding the overall tension was incessant skirmishing over three “demilitarized zones” along the Israel-Syria border. Israel insisted on its right under the 1949 Armistice Agreement to cultivate these areas and retaliated forcefully against Syrian firing on the Israeli farmers.

  Rabin writes that many, including Dayan, believed there was no way to stop the Syrian diversion work short of all-out war. He himself, however, believed with Eshkol that a firm but restrained strategy could be effective, both in stopping the Syrian project and in containing the Palestinian incursions. In the event, the Syrians halted their project in the summer of 1965. The sporadic clashes continued, however. They climaxed in April 1967 when Israeli pilots shot down six Syrian MiGs in a dogfight over the Golan Heights.

  Sharon reveled in being back in the thick of things. He seemed to be present at every border skirmish and often took part in the shooting himself. When there was no skirmishing, he would tour the front incessantly and kept the units busy with training and snap inspections. Ehud Barak, a future prime minister and political rival, at the time an officer in the supersecret Sayeret Matkal commando unit, remembered years later “what a pleasure it was to be debriefed by Sharon after a mission across the border, or to be inspected by him before a mission. It was all at his fingertips: how to learn a route, how to prepare weapons and equipment, what would really be needed over there. He knew it all.”13

  Once again, as with the reprisal operations in the 1950s, Sharon was an instrument of the policy, which was determined not by him but by others much his senior in rank and authority. Once again, he was a convenient, prominent, self-aggrandizing target for critics who opposed the policy as excessively aggressive.

  Sharon completed his year’s probation and received a favorable report from Yoffe. “He passed the test without a shadow of a doubt,” Rabin wrote in his memoirs.14 But Yoffe retired at the end of 1964, and when David Elazar took over at Northern Command, Sharon found himself embroiled again in internal rivalries and backstabbing. He asked for time off and flew to East Africa with Yoffe for a long trekking and safari
holiday. When he returned, another deputy had been appointed alongside him. “From then until the fall of 1965 I stepped as lightly as I could through a minefield of bickering and intrigue.”15

  Not lightly enough, though. When he finally left Northern Command in October, he was kept cooling his heels at home for three months between jobs.

  At last Rabin invited me in for a talk—a very blunt talk, as it turned out, with no pulled punches. He let me know precisely how he felt about my performance—the things I had done wrong, my relationship with … Elazar, everything…

  So it was something of a surprise to hear him finish up the litany of my failings by saying that despite the criticisms I was now promoted to major generalb and appointed as director of military training [and] commander of a reserve division.

  I was as happy as I was surprised. Lily prepared a small party … Not too long afterward we moved back to the house in Zahala so that I could be closer to my new headquarters. There, six months later, our third son, Gilad Yehuda, was born. Our dream of having a large family seemed on its way to being fulfilled.

  “Never, in all its wars,” writes Yitzhak Rabin, asking his readers’ indulgence for this rare immodesty, “was the IDF readied for war more perfectly than it was before the Six-Day War.” As head of training from early 1966, Sharon was certainly entitled to take a share in the credit for that amazing military victory, over and above his direct role in it as the commander of an armored division in Sinai. His basic training manual was the “spirit of the paratroopers.” He instituted a commando course for all officers in field units as a way of inculcating the paratroop techniques and traditions throughout the fighting army.