Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  These military schools usually took over strategically positioned and now abandoned Arab Legion camps. But—and this was the long-term point—they naturally grew in size, and some became in time the nuclei of large civilian settlements in the populated Palestinian heartlands. At first, these civilian settlements were ostensibly mere adjuncts of the army bases, inhabited by people who provided various necessary services to the base. Gradually, though, they filled out, with families, with other settlers more loosely connected to the neighboring base, and finally with settlers not connected at all to the base, which by this time had itself become the adjunct of a swiftly expanding settlement.

  If it had been up to Prime Minister Eshkol, there might well have been a deal with Jordan. King Hussein kept up discreet contacts with Israel despite the “Khartoum Noes.”e But Dayan, the defense minister, was loath to cede the West Bank, theorizing instead about a “functional” sharing of sovereignty. Another key figure in the government, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, compiled a plan for the return of most of the West Bank to Jordan but with Israel keeping the Jordan valley, the area around Jerusalem, and a strip running along the narrow sections of the pre-1967 line.

  The Allon Plan, as it became known, was always rejected by the king. But it became the effective blueprint for civilian settlement in the territories during the ten years of Labor rule that followed the war. Settlement was encouraged along the torrid and inhospitable Jordan valley, around Jerusalem, and at sites close to the former borderline. This was apart from large housing projects for Jews in East—that is, formerly Jordanian—Jerusalem. Israel formally annexed the eastern part of the city and sizable swaths of land around it immediately after the war, declaring the much-enlarged municipality its eternal and indivisible capital.

  The “national camp,” still a minority but growing, never acquiesced in the Labor governments’ limitations on Jewish settlement. Partisan settlement efforts were sporadically attempted in areas beyond the Allon Plan, and, as we shall see, some took root during Yitzhak Rabin’s first government (1974–1977). Sharon’s training bases with their seeds of civilian adjuncts grew to become a means for the government and the army to circumvent their own Allon Plan restrictions.

  Though severely mauled and deeply humiliated, Egypt was not giving up the long-term struggle against Israel. The occupation of Sinai and the paralysis of the Suez Canal—once again, as in 1956, Egypt deliberately sank ships in the waterway—made that struggle now all the more pressing. On June 22, 1967, barely two weeks after the defeat, Nasser told the Soviet president, “Because the Israelis are now in Sinai, we are building up our defences on the west bank of the Canal. If the Israelis refuse to leave peacefully, sooner or later we’ll have to fight them to get them out.”33

  Even before the war was over, Nasser’s Soviet patrons began pouring in new arms to replenish Egypt’s stockpiles. New and better planes and tanks arrived in the following months, accompanied by more than a thousand Soviet advisers to help assimilate them. In September, the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum, vowed “No recognition, No negotiation, No peace” with Israel.

  As if to demonstrate how vigorous and unbowed they still were, the Egyptians torpedoed and sank an Israeli destroyer off Port Said on October 21, 1967. Israel retaliated by shelling oil refineries and petrochemical plants at Suez. After this exchange, a tense quiet settled on the front for the following year. But President Nasser and his generals made it clear that once their army was fully refurbished, they intended to resume active hostilities and engage Israel in a sustained “war of attrition” on the canal front.

  The first installment came unannounced on September 8, 1968. “The Egyptians launched a massive artillery attack on the sector from Kantara northward,” writes Major General Avraham “Bren” Adan in his Yom Kippur War memoir, On the Banks of the Suez. “Our troops entered their defensive bunkers, but these had been prepared very amateurishly. Many were easily penetrated by the Egyptian artillery shells. So we suffered ten killed and eighteen wounded in one day, a heavy price by Israeli standards. This artillery barrage came as a surprise and jolted the IDF Headquarters … On October 26 there was another massive Egyptian artillery barrage, this time across the entire front line and over a period of nine hours. Fifteen of our men were killed and thirty-four wounded.”34

  Chief of Staff Bar-Lev now ordered General Adan, “at the head of an inter-service team, to bring to the General Staff a proposal for the creation of a defensive system in Sinai.”35 Chaim Herzog, a leading military historian and a future president of the state, treads ever so carefully as he recounts the beginnings of the “Bar-Lev Line,” the defensive system in Sinai that was the focus of huge controversy four years later, at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War.

  The question was a classic one: Was the IDF to defend Sinai from the water’s edge, which would mean building much stronger fortifications along the canal, or was it to rely on mobile defensive forces deployed farther back, beyond effective artillery range? Adan’s team was to consult with the CO of Southern Command, Shaike Gavish. But, Herzog hints, Gavish’s mind was already made up. “Gavish came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to hold positions on the waterfront, particularly at all points which were probable crossing areas for the Egyptians. Furthermore, since the Israeli concept invariably called for mounting a counter-offensive into the enemy’s territory, it was important for [the Israelis] to sit in force along the Canal itself and not be in a position which would require fighting before they reached it.”

  Adan’s final recommendation, which was adopted, was “a combination of the two systems of defense”: position defense and mobile defense. He insists in his book that the strongpoints along the canal “were never planned to prevent a canal crossing or serve as a defensive line. They were only a warning line. The defensive role would fall to the armored forces in reserve.”

  Sharon presents a very different story. In his account, Adan’s series of fortifications, or ma’ozim, fortresses, as they were called in Hebrew, were designed both to serve as forward observation posts and “to help stop the Egyptians on the water line, before they could establish any significant presence in the Sinai.” He and Tal, alone among the generals, Sharon writes, consistently and unequivocally opposed this concept and argued in favor of a mobile defense.f

  The crescendo came in April 1969. “During one of our regular Monday General Headquarters meetings … a particularly acrimonious exchange erupted…[F]or Bar-Lev it was apparently the last straw. That same evening he called a second meeting,” Sharon recalls.

  When I walked [in]…I saw Moshe Dayan sitting there together with his deputy. Alongside them were Bar-Lev and every single one of my most vehement critics…

  Gavish … started things off with a wild attack that was personal as well as professional. While he was still speaking, I stood up and said, “I thought we were here to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Bar-Lev Line. That’s the reason for this meeting and that’s what I’m willing to participate in, so that I can tell you again what a dangerous and stupid idea it is …”

  Dayan cut in. “Arik, you’ve been invited to a General Headquarters meeting. It’s not up to you to decide what’s going to be discussed.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but if you proceed with this, it’s going to be without me.”

  When I sat down, everything was quiet for a moment; then Gavish took up right where he had left off. With that I got up again, announced that I wouldn’t take part in it, then walked toward the door. Behind me I heard Dayan’s, “Arik, you can’t do that. You have to come back. Come back!” The door slamming behind me cut off his voice.

  As I walked down the corridor, I knew with absolute certainty that I was right and they were wrong, that the Bar-Lev Line was bound to bring us disaster. But it was no pleasure when four years later it did exactly that.

  A few days after the door-slamming episode, an officer from the adjutant general’s office phoned to ask how Sharon wanted to re
ceive his accumulated leave—as vacation or in cash. Bar-Lev, he learned, would not approve a further extension of his contract. He appealed to Dayan, only to be told, “Bar-Lev doesn’t want you; I don’t see how I can interfere.” Golda Meir, the new prime minister (Eshkol had died suddenly in February 1969), also declined to step in on his behalf.

  Sharon now conducted a brief but very public flirt with leaders of the parliamentary opposition. Was he just posturing in order to put pressure on Golda and the government to overrule Bar-Lev? Or was he seriously preparing to embark on a political career? Unsurprisingly, Sharon himself endorses the latter version. But even if he was being disingenuous, his account is entertaining:

  At the age of forty-one I was not exactly ready for pipe and slippers.

  As I thought about it, political life came to seem more and more attractive. I certainly had ideas … and 1969 was an election year. At that time I had two good friends in the political world with whom I occasionally talked about such things. One was Pinchas Sapir, the minister of finance and an important Labor party leader … He was from Kfar Saba, quite near my parents’ farm, and I had known him from childhood.

  The other was Josef Sapir (no relation to Pinchas), the head of the Liberal party. I had known him too since I was young. He had been born into a family of citrus growers in Petach Tikva … and when I was a child I occasionally went with my father to their farm to get graftings for our own trees.

  Since 1965, Sapir’s Liberals had been in alliance with Menachem Begin’s Herut Party in an electoral bloc called Gahal,g a first attempt at creating a credible alternative to Labor. Sapir took Sharon to see Begin.

  My meeting with Begin and Sapir took place in the King David Hotel, in a chilly air-conditioned room whose windows looked out on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a cordial meeting. But as the talk went on, I began to feel a cold sweat forming on my back. In later years my relationship with Begin evolved considerably. But during this meeting I was more than a little uncomfortable. Although the discussion was friendly, there was something about the way Begin spoke, and especially the way he looked at me. The man had an extraordinarily powerful presence. And as he spoke, from minute to minute I had more of a feeling that I was getting involved in something I could not control…

  He was talking about how I would be included with them in the election, and that if we were successful I would join them in the government, all the things that I had supposed I wanted to hear. But as he spoke, I became more and more aware of the man’s strength and determination. Peering through his thick glasses, his eyes seemed to bore into me. I began to picture myself as Pinocchio when he got involved with the cat who wasn’t blind and the fox who wasn’t lame. But despite my growing if intangible misgivings, the discussion proceeded, and eventually we agreed to go ahead together. With that, Mr. Begin in his gallant way called room service and had a good brandy sent up. Then we drank to our understanding. But even as we raised our glasses, I felt that I was locked in and that I was locked in with someone about whom I had inexplicable feelings of apprehension.

  The date was July 3, 1969. Election Day was October 28, and by law the parties’ lists of candidates had to be submitted a hundred days ahead, by mid-July. As Sharon tells it, the understanding with Begin did not survive his drive back to Tel Aviv. He picked up a soldier-hitchhiker, who, “without paying the slightest deference to my rank or reputation … began telling me that I was making a terrible mistake, that I shouldn’t do it, that I had to stay in the army … Lily was waiting for me, in bed already. I got in and covered myself up with the blanket. ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘I feel as if I need to be protected.’ I had already decided that I was not going to go through with it.”

  The next morning’s headlines trumpeted the Begin-Sharon understanding. Sharon writes that he was in the act of composing embarrassing letters of withdrawal to Sapir and Begin when “fate intervened in my personal affairs…Pinchas Sapir was visiting the United States. When he heard about the newspaper headlines, he was livid. Calling Bar-Lev, Sapir asked the military’s most prominent Laboriteh what he thought he was doing (as Sapir himself told me later)…Sapir told Bar-Lev to get busy and find some way of keeping me in the army and out of the hands of the ‘enemy.’ ”

  A way was duly, and quickly, found. He would be appointed to the hitherto nonexistent post of “lecturer for the IDF” and sent on an extended speaking tour to the United States, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. He would meet, too, with military and diplomatic officials in the various capitals. This eight-week foreign odyssey would end, by happy coincidence, the day before the election. He would thus be conveniently out of the country during the campaign, and everyone could forget his high-profile but now felicitously truncated tryst with the opposition.

  He wrote a formal, pompous letter to Begin and Sapir explaining that after long and hard consideration he had decided that “in these difficult days, when the IDF is at war along the borders and its soldiers are shedding their blood in defense of Israel’s freedom and independence,” his place was “alongside them, and in the front line.” To Josef Sapir he wrote a separate note, apologizing for the embarrassment and hinting at the unfavorable impact Begin had made on him. He was determined, he confided, not to enter political life “in a state of dependence on [Begin].”36

  After the election, with Golda and Dayan and Sapir all safely back in their jobs, Bar-Lev obediently deposited the country’s most fateful front, Southern Command, in the hands of the man he had wanted to fire. “In December,” Sharon writes, “I received orders to take over Gavish’s command.”

  Sharon seems to have persuaded Bar-Lev that whatever his past objections he would abide by the strategy that the High Command had decided upon, and to a large extent had already implemented, with the rapid fortification of the forward positions along the canal. Most of the fortification work had been finished before the War of Attrition began in earnest, in March 1969. Sharon did not abandon the fortress system and based the defense of Sinai on mobile forces, as Tal and he had advocated.i As CO of Southern Command, he tinkered with the Bar-Lev Line and ended up, in the words of Chaim Herzog, with “a form of compromise … which no military concept could accept.” Far from abandoning the line of strongpoints, Sharon ordered many of them rebuilt and reinforced after the battering they took in the War of Attrition. In time, though, he persuaded Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as IDF chief of staff on January 1, 1972, to let him “thin out” the line by closing some—by the end it was fourteen—of the thirty-two strongpoints.

  In addition, he embarked on a massive building program of eleven underground fortifications in the hills some miles to the rear, where the massed armor and artillery were to be deployed that would ultimately defend Sinai in the face of an Egyptian crossing. He called these fortresses “ta’ozim, strongholds, to distinguish them from the ma’ozim, strongpoints,” on the canal bank. “Here I put command and long-range surveillance posts, underground bunkers, firing positions, bases for forward reserve units, and emplacements for artillery.”37

  By mid-April 1970, the Israeli positions were being subjected not only to artillery barrages but also to attacks by Egyptian commando units crossing the canal in fast boats under cover of darkness. Israel responded with commando raids of its own, some deep inside Egypt. In one such raid, on July 28, paratroopers and naval commandos set down on the tiny, heavily defended Green Island, near the southern end of the canal in the Gulf of Suez, and destroyed key Egyptian radar and anti-aircraft installations housed there. This gave the air force freer rein to deploy above the Canal Zone as a sort of flying artillery, targeting Egyptian emplacements and armor.

  In September, a force of Israeli infantry and armor was ferried across the Gulf of Suez to the port of Zafarana, from where it attacked and overran Egyptian positions along twenty miles of coastline in eight hours of sustained fighting before re-embarking. In December, just before Sharon took over, heli-borne commandos dismantled and transported back to the
Israeli side a state-of-the-art Soviet radar system deployed at Ras Arab, also on the west bank of the gulf. And in January 1970, under the new CO a commando force overran Shadwan Island, 155 miles down the Gulf of Suez, killed or captured all of the hundred-man Egyptian garrison, and again made off with radar units and other military hardware.

  Both sides now made moves that dangerously escalated the War of Attrition. Israel, worn down by the incessant toll of casualties on the canal, embarked on a policy of deep-penetration bombing raids against strategic targets throughout Egypt. President Nasser, acutely conscious of his vulnerability to Israeli airpower, demanded from his Soviet patrons a drastic upgrading of Egypt’s own air force and its anti-aircraft defenses, along with Soviet pilots and experts to help man the sophisticated new systems he wanted. In the first months of 1970, the Soviet presence in Egypt doubled and tripled, reaching more than twelve thousand men. Israeli pilots, some of them now flying American-supplied Skyhawk and Phantom warplanes, were ordered to back off from dogfights rather than risk downing Soviet airmen.

  Israel’s deep bombing campaign came to a peremptory end in April, when Phantom jets mistakenly bombed an elementary school, killing forty-seven children and injuring another fifty. The focus of the fighting returned to the Canal Zone, where the Egyptians, with Soviet help, were trying under the cover of almost constant artillery exchanges to deploy their Soviet SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries right up to the water’s edge. On July 30, the undesired but inevitable dogfight took place and resulted in the downing of four Soviet-piloted MiGs and the deaths of the four pilots.

  The escalation added urgency to U.S. diplomatic efforts to reach a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, or, failing that, at least an end of the present round of fighting. The Nixon administration had been actively trying to broker a peace deal through Four Power (United States, U.S.S.R., Britain, and France) and Two Power (United States and U.S.S.R.) talks. These had failed to cut through Cold War rivalry, but in December 1969 Secretary of State William Rogers had announced a comprehensive American peace plan based on Israeli withdrawal from all Egyptian and Jordanian territory barring “minor adjustments” in the framework of a peace settlement. Golda Meir’s government, still a unity coalition with Begin’s Gahal in it, had rejected the proposal. Now, with the war at a global danger point, Rogers came back with a more modest plan, designed to achieve an immediate cease-fire in Sinai.