Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  “Sharon had a great idea,” writes General Bren Adan, then the Armored Corps commander and no admirer as a rule of Sharon. “Through relatively minor engineering work, he was able to enlarge the small Ruafa’a Dam, located in the middle of the desert in northern Sinai, which absorbs the flood waters that flow through the el-Arish wadi during the winter rains. Thus a small water obstacle was created that would enable us, despite the limitations of its location and its size, to conduct a ‘wet’ crossing operation combined with a live fire exercise.”43

  CASTLES IN THE SAND

  The exercise at Abu Agheila, code-named Oz (Power), was not an unqualified success. It underscored the huge logistical problems involved in deploying bridging craft to get a large force of armor across the canal.

  After the 1967 war, Adan writes, the IDF had purchased “floatable iron cubes—uni-floats—each of which measured 5 x 2.5 x 1.2 meters and weighed three tons.” A large crane was required to unload them. Engineers then assembled them in the water in groups of nine, with hydraulically operated ramps on the front and back ends and outboard motors on the sides. These lumbering giant rafts could ferry tanks across. Assembling them took about an hour, Adan writes. Once there were several of them in operation, they could be linked together to form a bridge across the waterway.

  After Oz, Adan writes, he worked with the deputy chief of staff, General Tal, to develop “a roller bridge.” This monster “consisted of more than 100 iron rollers, two meters in diameter, which were attached together to make one rolling bridge 180 meters long. The main advantage of a roller bridge was that it could be pushed into the Canal.” Among its many disadvantages, however, was that it took three days to build, it weighed four hundred tons,m it required an entire company of sixteen tanks to drag it along, and it could only travel in a straight line.

  Given these drawbacks, the IDF wisely decided to invest, too, in a batch of fairly ancient amphibious bridging tugs, called Gilowas. These, Adan explains, were “very large vehicles with correspondingly large wheels that were capable of moving to the water, floating, and—by means of hydraulic power—opening up two treadways suitable for tank tracks…[T]hree such vehicles formed a raft unit capable of traveling across the water from bank to bank while carrying one tank. Six of them joined together would … carry two tanks.” If there were enough of them, they could form a bridge. Their disadvantage was that they floated on inflatable rubber sleeves, easily perforated by enemy fire. “This problem could be overcome by filling the floats with a light foamy material.”

  Above all, Oz demonstrated that the army and the government were committed, should war come, to the basic strategy of crossing the canal and carrying the battle to the Egyptian side. This was the unanimous assumption and the unanimous intention. When war did come, and bitter fights erupted between Sharon, Adan, and other generals, the issue was never whether to cross but only when and how. The misconception in some popular quarters that Sharon initiated the canal crossing was just that—a misconception (eagerly propagated by Sharon). By the same token, Oz demonstrated that the Bar-Lev Line was never envisaged as a war winner in itself, even by its most ardent advocates. There was never any illusion of the attacking Egyptians dissipating their strength against a line of Israeli fortresses. Everyone on the Israeli side agreed that to win the war, the IDF would need to counterattack on the western bank of the canal.

  President Nasser had died suddenly in September 1970 and was succeeded by the uncharismatic-looking Anwar Sadat, a more junior member of the original 1952 Free Officers’ coup. Sadat announced publicly that he was prepared to make peace with Israel but got no commensurate response from Prime Minister Meir. Moshe Dayan had been promoting the idea of an interim agreement between the two countries. Israel, he suggested, would pull back from the Suez Canal to a distance of several miles, and Egypt would reopen the waterway and restore civilian life to the deserted towns on its banks. The Egyptian army would not be allowed back into Sinai, but civilian personnel, including police, would cross over in order to operate the waterway. Once the canal was pulsing with commerce again, Dayan reasoned, Egypt would have much less incentive to resume hostilities.

  In early 1971, Sadat put forward his own proposals for an interim agreement that in many respects overlapped with Dayan’s. Sadat insisted, though, that the interim accord be integrally linked to a final accord, requiring complete Israeli withdrawal. Throughout 1971 indirect negotiations continued under the UN envoy Gunnar Jarring over ideas for an interim or partial settlement. The Americans, too, tried to build diplomatic momentum on the proximity of Sadat’s and Dayan’s thinking. They had to contend, though, with the sad reality that Dayan’s thinking did not reflect Golda’s and with the no less sad reality that he was not prepared to fight, politically, for his own view. The Israeli prime minister and key ministers around her—Galili, Allon, later Bar-Lev, too—were locked into the mind-set that there must be no withdrawal without full and final peace.

  Sadat made an even more dramatic move in 1972, dismissing the fifteen-thousand-odd Soviet military advisers stationed in Egypt and arresting pro-Soviet figures among the Egyptian leadership. Clearly, he wanted to move Egypt back into the Western camp. Again, Israel read him wrong. The analysis in Jerusalem was that this move reduced the risk of war. In fact, Sadat felt he could not go to war so long as the overweening Russians were embedded in his army, presuming to constrain his actions and dictate his decisions. “Sadat’s purpose was completely misunderstood [by Israel],” Herzog writes, “a fact that contributed in no small measure to the strengthening of the ‘concept.’ ”44

  The “concept,” or in Hebrew conceptziya, was the term coined after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to describe the blind arrogance that suffused the whole Israeli policy elite—the government and the army, but much of academia and the media, too—in the period leading up to the war. “We are all to blame,” the president of the state, Ephraim Katzir, observed as the country grappled with its shock and mourning after the war ended. He was accused at the time of trying to deflect the main blame from the Labor government by dissipating it among the entire nation. But in a deep sense he was right. The hubris broadcast by the government reflected the corruption of the national ethos by delusions of grandeur in the wake of the 1967 conquests. The military intelligence assessment that Egypt and Syria would not go to war was rooted in a much broader national conviction that they would not dare to do it.

  Sharon pretended in later years that he was not part of the hubristic overconfidence that deadened Israel’s senses. “When Anwar Sadat announced in his 1972 Ramadan address that ‘next year I will be blessing you from Sinai,’ I for one had no doubts about his intentions. Unlike many Israelis, I had always considered the Arabs serious people … I had no doubt at all that at some point they would launch an attack.”45

  In fact, he was a pillar of the conceptziya. In July 1973 he assured the public in a newspaper interview that Israel’s security situation was “wonderful.” Israel had become “a middle-sized military power with enormous strength … As long as we stay on the present borders the Arabs have no chance of winning a war.”

  Two months later—and two weeks before the Yom Kippur War—he asserted with sweeping confidence, “Israel now stands before years of quiet in terms of defense. We need to use the time to deal with other issues that concern us. We are in the best possible situation in terms of defense.”

  By this time, the summer of 1973, he was speaking no longer as a soldier but as a prominent politician, the election campaign director of the Likud, a new amalgam of all the parties of the Right that in less than two months he had managed to weld together as the first-ever serious political challenge to Labor’s hegemony. The election was set for October 31. Sharon seriously believed that the Likud could win, or could at least give Labor a much closer run than it had ever faced before. To that end, he had even embarked on a rigorous diet in order to make himself more attractive on the hustings.

  His metamorphosis from grizzled wa
rrior to political charmer came as a surprise to the public but not to him. David Elazar had made it clear soon after he took office as chief of staff the year before that he wanted him to retire from the army on completion of his term as CO of Southern Command. There was not much affection between the two of them.n

  But the new chief could argue that easing out Sharon was not personal: he planned a sweeping change of generation in the General Staff, with all those over forty-five making way for younger men. Sharon saw himself as by far the best-qualified candidate for chief of staff after Elazar. He appealed Elazar’s decision to Dayan and then to Golda. But to no avail: both of them refused to intervene on his behalf.

  Having decided to make his future in politics, Sharon proceeded to harness the ending of his old career to the launching of his new one. At a party in the garden of his home in Beersheba on the night of his formal retirement, July 15, he embarrassed the many serving officers present with a blistering attack on the chief of staff and the “top echelon of the defense establishment.” He had to speak out, he said, because so many people had been urging him to stay on in uniform.46 The subtext was clear: his military career had been stymied because he was not a supporter—but a critic—of the ruling Labor Party. There was a more important insinuation, too—and in a private conversation with Dayan, Sharon had spelled it out—that he did not consider his successor as CO of Southern Command, Shmuel Gonen, up to the job.47

  Such washing of the army’s dirty linen in public was unprecedented. Sharon added insult to insult by informing the chief of staff that he would not attend the traditional General Staff dinner given for every retiring general. They could send the engraved wristwatch in the mail, he wrote. He waived another “tradition”—the right to sum up his years of service at a press conference with military correspondents. He would speak with the press in his own way, he signaled, and in his own time. He did ask, though, to be invited one last time to the General Staff to take his leave of his colleagues there. Elazar agreed and Dayan attended, too, and heaped praise on the outgoing Sharon. This somewhat defused the tension and left no option for Sharon to be curmudgeonly in response. There was also a pleasant surprise for him: Dayan immediately concurred when he asked him for a reserves appointment as commander of an armored division on the southern front.

  The next day, he met with the press, on his own terms. He hired a hall at the Tel Aviv press center and invited political, not military, correspondents to listen to him. But he was headline news and everyone came, including foreign correspondents. “ ‘Loyal opposition’ is not good enough,” he declared. “We need to create an alternative.” This elusive goal he, a civilian of forty-eight hours’ standing, proposed to achieve in time for the election in October. “Israel styles itself a democracy. But there is one area where our democracy is deficient: the realistic prospect of changing the government. It is totally wrong for one party to rule for decades on end, without facing any serious danger of being replaced.”

  He flatly denied reports that he had conducted secret contacts with Labor with a view to becoming a minister after the election.48 Labor, realizing that he was headed to the other side, had nastily leaked the fact that he was a card-carrying member of the party. But Sharon at his press conference turned that to his advantage, demonstratively tearing up his party card.49

  He proposed not a right-wing alliance but a centrist bloc. He would approach “Herut, the Liberals, the Free Center, the State List, and if possible the Independent Liberals too. These are the potential partners in an alignment of centrist parties that will stand against the Labor Alignment.”50o

  In the event, the intricate negotiations, which Sharon mediated with unflagging energy over the following weeks, boiled down to how to splice them all together equitably in a single list of candidates, and on September 13 the formal signing ceremony of the Likud took place at last. “You’ve shown the stubbornness of a mule,” Yigael Hurwitz, the State List leader and a veteran farming man, said, showering compliments on Sharon. “And the belligerence of a bull,” Sharon added, preferring his own farmyard metaphor.

  Sharon spoke as a farmer, too. Not just as a son of Kfar Malal, where his mother, Vera, feisty as ever, was still running the family homestead, but as the proud new proprietor of a vast (by Israeli standards) ranch in the south of the country that he and Lily had named Sycamore Ranch.

  They both wanted a farm, if only as an “insurance policy” given the fragility of a political career. But after twenty-five years in the military, he bridled at any thought of collective discipline, which is an inherent part of moshav farming in Israel. He would grow and raise what he wanted, how he wanted. Private farms in Israel are few and far between, but he alighted on one in the northern Negev near the little immigrant town of Sderot and immediately fell in love with it. It was a four-thousand-dunam holding,p most of it barren, with a farmhouse in fairly run-down condition and a few sycamore trees. Sharon liked the size, but also the remoteness. It had belonged in the 1950s to his old friend Rafi Eitan, who held a long-term lease from the state. Eitan later sold his rights to an Australian Zionist sheep rancher, but now it was on the market again.

  “But how to buy it? I had received from my parents the greatest spiritual wealth a child could want, but not a penny of money—they had never had a penny free. My whole adult life I had spent in the army living on the subsistence salary of a career officer. So there were no savings to draw on. And now as I made the round of Israeli banks I found that a private person simply could not get a farm loan.”51

  He needed $600,000. He got it with the help of Avraham Krinitzi, the mayor of Ramat Gan, the town neighboring Tel Aviv that had “adopted” the paratroop brigade. Krinitzi had often heard his friend Meshulam Riklis, an ex-Israeli now living and flourishing in America, complaining that the IDF was forgoing bold, rightist generals like Ezer Weizmanq and Arik Sharon. Now, Krinitzi suggested, Riklis could pitch in to help Sharon. Riklis agreed without hesitation. People like Sharon, he replied to Krinitzi, should not have to worry about money. They should worry about one thing: defending Israel.

  Riklis met with Sharon, who was still in uniform, and offered him a standing loan of $200,000, interest-free, to help buy the ranch—but on one condition: that he did not make do with being a rancher but stayed involved in matters of defense and foreign policy. Riklis’s views were of the Right, and he believed Sharon would champion them.

  With the first $200,000 thus generously covered, Sharon was able to raise the rest of the money in the form of a loan from the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, which had recently opened a branch in Israel. Here, too, personal and political sympathies seem to have been interwoven with the lender’s financial considerations: Samuel Sax, Exchange National’s chairman, was a former U.S. Navy Reserve officer who knew Sharon and presumably supported his political ambitions. But his loan, linked to the dollar, was to be paid back at the rate of $50,000 a year, starting immediately.

  * * *

  a He received his law degree in 1966.

  b “Dear and Exalted Arik,” Ben-Gurion wrote to him, “I was glad to hear that you’ve become a general. To me, you were a general years ago. But what has changed is that certain failings which you had then, I believe, you don’t have anymore … My trust has not been disappointed” (IDF Archives).

  c Twelve planes were left behind, Rabin writes. Their job was to defend the whole country for the first few hours of the war.

  d The Wall was to have been accessible to Israelis under a provision of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, but Jordan refused to honor it.

  e See below p. 73.

  f “Specifically, I proposed that we should base our defense on the natural line of hills and dunes that runs parallel to the Canal five to eight miles to the east … A second line with our mobile reserves should be established fifteen to twenty miles from the Canal, where the mountains begin and the Mitla and Gidi passes cut toward the interior …” (Warrior, 220).

  g Acronym for the Hebrew: Bloc (of) H
erut, Liberals.

  h A nasty sideswipe but not inaccurate: within ten weeks of his retirement as chief of staff in January 1972, Bar-Lev was in the Labor government as minister of trade and industry.

  i After the War of Attrition ended, Tal pointed out that a very high proportion of Israel’s casualties had been sustained inside the strongpoints or in the course of supplying them. The other school countered, reasonably enough, that without the strongpoints the casualty figures might have been higher.

  j As prime minister, Sharon appointed Dagan, by then a reserves general, head of the Mossad. He held the post for eight years.

  k In the Rafah Salient, too, as in the adjacent Gaza Strip, a couple of isolated settlements had come into being by this time. The Bedouin landholders were quietly compensated.

  l The High Court of Justice in the Israeli system is the Supreme Court in its role as the court (of first instance) that hears petitions against the executive branch.

  m Sharon and his staff officers in the Yom Kippur War, who grappled with the rolling bridge and eventually laid it across the canal, claimed it weighed six hundred tons.

  n With Bar-Lev, on the other hand, Sharon’s relations had markedly improved. “You are an outstanding commander,” the outgoing chief of staff told Sharon in their parting interview.

  You have strategic understanding and operational ability and the capacity to push things forward. As you know, I criticized aspects of your behavior in the past that were detrimental to the army’s interests and detrimental to you, too. I am glad that in this latter period, as CO of Southern Command, these things have receded and over the past two years you have discharged your duties in a very professional way. I hope that as CO of Southern Command you have come to recognize the wisdom of the concept of holding strongpoints on the shore of the canal and that in the future, too, you will continue to deny the Egyptians any territorial gain. (Gai, Bar-Lev, 212)