by David Landau
The American proposal had three parts: a ninety-day cease-fire and “standstill” in place for thirty miles on either side of the canal; a statement by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan that they accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and specifically its call for withdrawal from occupied territories; and an undertaking to resume peace talks through the UN peace envoy, Sweden’s Gunnar Jarring, which had been conducted on and off since 1967 without registering any progress.
Golda Meir was under heavy international and domestic pressure to accept. Casualty figures mounted relentlessly. Since the end of the Six-Day War, 367 IDF soldiers had been killed on the canal front and 1,366 injured.38 Almost daily, the black-bordered death notices appeared in the newspapers. The fact that Egyptian casualties were much higher was of no comfort and little strategic significance. As Nasser and his generals had rightly discerned at the outset, a war of attrition for a small, tightly knit society was much more damaging than for a country of tens of millions.
For the first time since the waiting period before the 1967 war, searching questions began to be aired not just on the leftist margin but in the political mainstream. In late July–early August, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all announced their acceptance of the U.S. proposal. The cease-fire on the canal went into effect on August 7, 1970. Begin pulled his Gahal bloc out of the government, ending three years of unity rule.
Egypt, with Soviet connivance, immediately began advancing its SAM anti-aircraft batteries toward the canal bank, in brazen violation of the “standstill.” The Egyptian push began on the very night of the cease-fire and continued in the days and weeks ahead. Israel strenuously protested to Washington, but the administration was reluctant to upend the cease-fire. Nixon preferred to step up the supply of advanced warplanes to Israel as a means of mollifying the anger and anxiety in Jerusalem.
Egypt’s War of Attrition was supported by its Six-Day War allies, Syria and Jordan, through the activities from their soil of Palestinian guerrilla groups. Immediately after the war, the Palestinian nationalist group Fatah, under Yasser Arafat, tried to establish itself inside the occupied West Bank and lead resistance there. But it was eventually pushed out and forced to conduct its operations against Israel on a hit-and-run basis from over the border. Soon, Arafat was acting in defiance of Jordanian constraints. Increasingly, the armed Palestinian presence on the East Bank began to pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.
In September 1970, after two attempts on his life, King Hussein of Jordan lashed out at the armed PLO units that were running the border areas and the Palestinian refugee camps inside the kingdom as a veritable state within a state. The Arab Legion, comprising Bedouin tribesmen loyal to the royal house, crushed the PLO men and took a bloody toll of civilian camp dwellers, too. Hundreds of the armed Palestinians fled across the river, where IDF troops were ordered not to shoot them or send them back but to disarm and arrest them, “although,” Sharon writes with evident disapproval, “these were the very terrorists who had carried out who knew how many murderous raids into Israel.”
He voiced strident disapproval when Israel acceded to an urgent American request to mobilize its army in the face of a Syrian invasion of northern Jordan in support of the hard-pressed Palestinians. Israeli armor moved demonstratively into the Beisan valley, poised to cross into Jordan. The Syrians withdrew. “The resolution to this crisis was considered a success by the Americans and the Jordanians,” Sharon writes. “Most Israelis were also pleased with the outcome. But I was not one of them.” To most Israelis, guided by their government, the Hashemite house, formerly a British fiefdom and now an American client, was infinitely to be preferred as a neighbor to a Soviet-backed radical Palestinian state. But not to Sharon, as he argued vehemently but to no avail in the army High Command. Granted, he said, a Palestinian state in place of Jordan would probably remain hostile to Israel. “But the discussion will be about where the border should be. We will be arguing with them about territorial matters. We will no longer be dealing with the issue of Palestinian identity and about their right to a political expression of their identity.”
This kind of bold, heterodox thinking about the Palestinian problem was the province in Israel at that time only of the Far Left. Prime Minister Meir blithely insisted that there was no Palestinian nation and therefore no need to grant it political expression. In the eyes of almost everyone in government and in the defense establishment, the disposition of the West Bank continued to be the business of its two neighbors: Israel and Jordan. Sharon’s dissent from this article of faith would have reinforced his image in the eyes of the Labor old guard as a maverick, and a dangerously unpredictable one at that. Certainly it would not have improved his prospects, which he believed still existed, of ever being appointed chief of staff.
BRUTE FORCE
While the Suez front was the most significant area of Sharon’s responsibility as CO of Southern Command, his tenure in that key post was overshadowed by two high-profile controversies that erupted far from the canal front line. The pattern was something of a throwback to the 1950s: Again he was carrying out government policy. Again he was doing so with excessive, wanton brutality. Again he was the convenient lightning rod to absorb and deflect criticism. And again his superiors—most especially Dayan—covered for him and protected him from serious fallout. Another episode in which his behavior was even crueler and more culpable never even became a controversy: it was hushed up at the time and has remained suppressed ever since.
With the canal front (deceptively) quiet after the August 1970 cease-fire, Sharon could spend much time during the next eighteen months focusing on Gaza. He had the territory mapped into small squares and deployed infantry teams in each square. “It is your job to know this square inside and out,” he told them, “and it is your job to find and kill every terrorist in it.” A shadowy unit, Rimon, commanded by a longtime Sharon acolyte, Meir Dagan,j drew veiled—and largely censored—criticism for shooting or hurling grenades first and asking questions later, or not at all. A particular source of criticism and controversy was the widespread use that Sharon’s troops made of bulldozers, both in the fields and orchards and in the narrow alleys of the refugee camps. Trees and crops often fell before the bulldozers, as did many hundreds of modest homes, often hardly more than hovels, of many thousands of innocent people who found themselves in the path of Sharon’s drive against the terrorists. The curfews clapped down on the camps, often for days on end as the soldiers went about their search-and-destroy missions, and the hours-long lineups imposed on the menfolk were also widely seen as forms of collective punishment.
In February 1972, Dayan publicly praised Sharon for the Gaza operation. But he went on to announce that the Strip would now come under the aegis of Central Command, effective immediately. Ze’ev Schiff wrote in Haaretz that “there may be reservations about Gen. Sharon’s military methods, but the fact is that this commander has eliminated terror in Gaza … Sharon’s determination, and perhaps, too, his lack of consideration of many things, have immeasurably improved the security situation there. Militarily, he leaves Gaza victorious.”39
When ministers and Knesset members would come visiting Gaza, Sharon took them to the sand dunes overlooking the coast and urged the creation of blocs of Jewish settlements—“fingers,” as he called them—between the major centers of Palestinian population. The concept evolved in government and military circles, moreover, that Israel needed to plant a permanent presence in the Rafah Salient, westward beyond the Gaza-Sinai border, in order to create a cordon sanitaire between Gaza and Egypt. Sharon claims that he was the progenitor of this strategic theory. It was vital for Israel, in his words, “to create a Jewish buffer between Gaza and the Sinai in order to cut off the flow of smuggled weapons and—looking forward to a future settlement with Egypt—to divide the two regions.”
Progenitor or not, Sharon was the enthusiastic executor of the first stage of the scheme: ejecting the existing tenants. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing if the
re were no Arabs here,” Dayan mused to Sharon one day as they both flew over the Rafah Salient by helicopter. “Then we could fence the whole area and turn it into a security zone.”40k That was enough for Sharon. Within days, some ten thousand Bedouin, most of them members of the Romeilah tribe and most of them not nomads but sedentary farmers long established in the area, were summarily ousted by soldiers of Southern Command.
The soldiers arrived unannounced at dawn on January 14, 1972, nine Bedouin sheikhs later recounted in their petition to the High Court of Justice.l They ordered the entire community to leave at once. They cited security grounds. That same day, according to the court depositions, the soldiers began physically demolishing the Bedouin’s homes and outhouses. People were pushed around, and property was smashed and ruined. The eviction took several days. Once the Bedouin were all out, the army fenced off an area of some nineteen square miles to prevent them from getting back in.
The episode might have remained unknown, as Sharon (and Dayan?) apparently intended, had it not been for the protests of a few reservists, members of Mapam kibbutzim along the border who had witnessed the forcible evictions, and for the pointed inquiries of Red Cross officials. In mid-February, David Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as chief of staff on January 1, set up an internal inquiry under General Aharon Yariv, the former head of Military Intelligence, to investigate the complaints.
Yariv focused on the decision to fence off areas of the Rafah Salient. Sharon admitted that he had given that order without explicit authorization from the chief of staff or the minister of defense. Yariv duly submitted his report. Elazar made do with a letter of reprimand to Sharon. A junior officer and a civilian were more severely punished: the officer was transferred; the civilian was dismissed. The military censorship kept a tight lid on the whole affair.
On the left, nevertheless, the controversy rumbled on for months, replete with demonstrations, counterdemonstrations, and angry articles in the press. The editor of the Labor Party’s weekly, Ot, David Shaham, wrote an editorial demanding that the “very senior officer” be dismissed. What would happen in a normal country, Shaham asked, if an army commander went ahead and implemented a contingency plan without getting authorization from his civilian bosses? “Surely he would be appropriately punished.”
This drew a rare and spirited defense of Sharon—still unnamed—by Moshe Dayan. The article was “wild and irresponsible incitement,” he told the party central committee. The author did not know the facts and had not even heard the officer whose dismissal he was demanding. Neither the army’s judge advocate general nor the attorney general had recommended legal or disciplinary action against Sharon.41 Dayan demanded that Shaham, not the “very senior officer,” be dismissed. Golda Meir rammed through a resolution requiring Ot to appoint an editorial board. Shaham was effectively neutered.
The government meanwhile announced that it would pay compensation to the Bedouin and help resettle them on nearby tracts of land, some inside the Gaza Strip. In the Knesset, the minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili, Golda’s shadowy but powerful adviser, said that the government regarded the Gaza Strip and the adjoining Rafah Salient as territory that would remain under Israeli rule forever. Gaza thus now joined Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Jordan valley, and Sharm el-Sheikh in the list of places from which Israel proposed never to withdraw. This was a fairly momentous announcement and a remarkably backhanded way of making it. Within a few years, a string of Jewish agricultural settlements were up and thriving in the Rafah Salient area, along with a regional center, Yamit, which provided schools and services for the settlers.
Once again, Sharon was conveniently, indeed avidly available to “do the dirty work” of government policy and to take the heat from the humane Left. The eviction and the enclosure were decided above his pay grade. His methods of executing the decisions had been gratuitously excessive. But a thick blanket of censorship and political protection ensured that he emerged from the episode unscathed.
An infinitely thicker blanket, still unlifted to the present day, was required to shield Sharon from the consequences of another, much more heinous act of violence that he perpetrated at this same time against other tribes of Bedouin, deeper inside Sinai. Again it was a peremptory, forcible expulsion. Only this time it resulted in dozens of deaths, including of children and old people who died of exposure in the freezing desert night.
This time, there was no inquiry, no public outcry, no angry articles. There was a total, comprehensive cover-up, then and thereafter. The military censorship made sure that nothing was published. The chief of staff and at least one other general, Shlomo Gazit, the IDF’s coordinator of operations in the territories, took no action against Sharon when they learned the shocking details of this episode. Presumably, Minister of Defense Dayan and probably Golda, too, knew of the outrage. Both of them visited the scene where it happened.
It took place on the night of January 12, 1972, with additional expulsions on the twentieth and the twenty-sixth, in the area of Sinai around Abu Agheila, about eighteen miles west of the Israeli border and twenty-eight miles south of the coast at el-Arish. This time the victims were some three thousand members of the Tarabin and Tiya’ha tribes, mainly nomads whose traditional camping grounds were in the area of Abu Agheila, north and south of Jebel Halal.
On January 12, a couple of jeep patrols from Southern Command cruised around the Bedouin encampments informing whomever they encountered that all the Bedouin were to be out of the area by the following morning. They left before sunset. When units of jeep-borne and camel-borne soldiers descended on the Bedouin after dark to enforce the order, some tried to argue. One sheikh said he would not move his tribe unless he received a formal, written order from the military governor of Sinai. The camel riders began tearing out tent poles and threatening to shoot. The same methods of persuasion were used in other encampments. The Bedouin began their trek the same night.
The temperature in Sinai that night, according to the Government Meteorological Office, was two degrees Celsius. On January 26, when other encampments in the area were expelled in this same way, it was zero. “Most of the Beduin did not possess sufficient animals to carry their families, their tents and their food,” according to a detailed report submitted three months later to the chief of staff by an independent researcher. “As a result, they had to leave much of their property behind. As a result, too, old people were forced to walk. Many had to carry infants on their backs, or the infants had to trudge through the freezing sands. Many just slumped down and wept. When they reached their assigned destination [in one case some thirty-one miles to the south] many were unable to set up any kind of shelter for their families.
“As a result of their exertions and of exposure many became ill. People of all ages died, by rough assessment more than forty. I myself counted 23 fresh graves at Jebel Jahem and five more at Wadi Seiseb. I heard from the Beduin that others were buried elsewhere.”
The author of the report, a young American-born scholar of Bedouin life and lore named Dr. Clinton Bailey, attached a photograph of a line of tiny graves of infants who did not survive the transfer. He took his story first to General Gazit, “but nothing was done.” He took it to a well-known journalist, but nothing was published. The journalist, though, telephoned the chief of staff in Tel Aviv. “I think there is something you ought to hear,” he said.
Elazar read Bailey’s five pages in his presence. He picked up the phone and asked for Sharon. “I understand the people displaced for the maneuvers haven’t gone back yet … I want them back tomorrow! How do I know? There’s a Dr. Bailey here. He’s been there. He’s written a report and submitted it to me.”
A few days later, Bailey received a telephoned invitation to meet with the CO of Southern Command at his headquarters in Beersheba. Sharon positively radiated bonhomie. “We’ve got something in common,” he said, beaming at Bailey, “because I really like the Bedouin.” He regaled the scholar with stories of Bedouin trackers whom he’d fought
alongside. He loved to spend time, he said, with the colorful sheikh Awda of the Azazme tribe, eating mutton and talking in his tent. “I don’t know what happened here,” he added breezily about Bailey’s report. Anyway, the tribes were back on their land. If Dr. Bailey ever needed anything, any help with his research, he was to please feel free to ask.
No sooner had Bailey left than Sharon issued an order barring him from access to any IDF facility anywhere in Sinai. Bailey learned of it from a Bedouin officer-friend. He telephoned Elazar and reported this, too. “Soon they called me back and said, ‘You can go wherever you want in Sinai …’ Why didn’t I press Sharon [about the deaths]? I was barely 30 years old. A kid doing research. He was a big war hero.”
How was this appalling episode successfully hushed up? In part, presumably, it was because the tribes from deeper inside Sinai, unlike the Rafah Bedouin, had no neighborly relationship with the left-wing kibbutzim along the border. There was no one to encourage them to apply to the high court.
But more relevant, perhaps, was the top secret nature of the military maneuvers to which Chief of Staff Elazar referred in his phone call to Sharon and from which the Bedouin were so brutally distanced. On February 20–25, 1972, at the instance of Sharon and in the presence of Golda, Dayan, and the General Staff, the IDF exercised ferrying an entire armored division, under fire, across the Suez Canal. This remarkable war game was conducted at Abu Agheila, near the Bedouin’s encampments.42
