Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  To Sharon and the Likud, this was “the retreat of a victorious army, led by a defeated government.” Sharon poured scorn on Dayan’s assertion that Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader, seriously sought to make peace with Israel. If Dayan was mistaken, “it could cost us thousands of lives. We’ve just ended a terrible war caused by the government’s mistake … You can’t base a disengagement accord on one side’s sudden belief that the other side wants peace.”3

  From the press conference he drove on to a massive antigovernment demonstration nearby. Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and he were the main speakers. Afterward, he was mobbed by well-wishers. “Arik, king of Israel,” was on everyone’s lips.

  Despite the fulminations from the Right, the disengagement with Egypt was not unpopular. It ended the desultory exchanges of fire along the cease-fire lines that had continued since the war, and it enabled many thousands more reservists to be demobbed at last. (On the Golan, a mini-war of attrition rumbled on until April, when, again after persistent shuttle diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, a separation of forces agreement was signed there, too.)

  But popular outrage over the war itself did not abate; the returning soldiers gave added impetus to a swelling tide of disaffection. “It was not just my resignation or Dayan’s that was being called for in that storm of protest,” Golda Meir recalled in her memoirs. “It was a call to eliminate from the scene everyone who could possibly be held responsible for what had happened and to start all over again with new people, younger people, people who were not tainted by the charge of having led the nation astray. It was an extreme reaction to the extreme situation we were in, and therefore, though it was very painful, it was understandable.”4

  She hoped to fend it off, nevertheless. In March, she presented her new government to the Knesset. Dayan had offered to quit, but she insisted that he serve again. However, she was on borrowed time, and it ran out in less than a month. On April 2, the commission of inquiry that the government had appointed to examine the lead‑up period to the war and the first two days of fighting submitted its interim report. The five-man panel—Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, another justice of the Supreme Court, the state comptroller, and the former chiefs of staff Yigael Yadin and Haim Laskov—recommended the dismissals of Chief of Staff Elazar, Chief of Intelligence Zeira, and other intelligence officers. It severely censured the CO of Southern Command Gonen and recommended that he be suspended pending its final report. The commission cleared Golda and Dayan of “direct responsibility” for the intelligence blunder and the delay in mobilizing and deploying the troops. As for their indirect responsibility, the commission said it would not pass judgment on the accountability of the civilian leadership because ministerial responsibility was a matter for parliament and the electorate.

  These findings were tantamount to an invitation to the political opposition, and, more important, to the extra-parliamentary opposition that was daily growing on the streets of the cities, to redouble their pressure for the government to go. The commission stoked the public anger, moreover, by its ruling exonerating Dayan of direct, personal responsibility for the debacle. This was bitterly and publicly attacked by Elazar in his resignation letter. “In fact and in practice,” he wrote, “the minister of defense was the level of authority above the chief of staff.”

  The commission’s report and the public response sealed Dayan’s and Golda’s fates and brought down the weeks-old government. “On April 10, I told the party leadership that I had had enough,” Golda wrote. “My decision is final, irrevocable,” she said. “I beg of you not to try to persuade me to change my mind. It will not help.”

  Labor quickly set about choosing its “new people, younger people” to lead a new government. While Golda stayed ostensibly above the fray, her finance minister and close ally, Pinchas Sapir, threw all his considerable weight behind Yitzhak Rabin, the Six-Day War victor who had just recently entered politics after his stint as ambassador in Washington. During the war, Rabin had put on his uniform, toured the fronts, and sat in on the key meetings. He appeared in many of the photographs, looking glum and smoking incessantly. But he was not involved in the “war of the generals,” nor was he tainted by the prewar negligence and arrogance that had brought on the disaster.

  He was, however, tainted by rumors that as IDF chief of staff he had suffered a nervous breakdown before the Six-Day War—rumors that were now given new credence by his then deputy, now a hawkish and vindictive Likud figure, Ezer Weizman. Weizman urged Labor central committee members to prefer the rival candidate, Shimon Peres. Rabin, he advised them, could not be relied on to stand firm under pressure.

  Rabin desperately needed a military figure of equal military prestige and comparable nationalistic credentials to step forward and defend him before Weizman’s allegations hit the headlines. Arik Sharon, who remembered how Rabin had saved his career in 1963 when he was in the deep freeze, did not hesitate. He called around to every national newspaper, offering his unequivocal confidence in Rabin’s leadership qualities.5 On June 3, Rabin’s government was sworn in. Reluctantly, but unavoidably given his rival’s clout in the party, Rabin named Peres minister of defense.

  Sharon, watching from the Likud benches while the Labor leaders took their places around the cabinet table, was almost visibly chafing in his seat. As long as Golda and Dayan had hung on, there was enough adrenaline coursing through the political system to make life in the opposition bearable. There was a real prospect of forcing new elections. But once Rabin took over, the postwar waves of political pandemonium abated. The vista of four more years of Labor rule and Likud speech making was too arid for Sharon to contemplate. Yet his path back to the professional army was effectively blocked now by the appointment of Mordechai Gur—another general untainted by Yom Kippur; he had been serving as defense attaché in Washington—as the new chief of staff in place of Elazar. Sharon and Gur were enemies from the time of the paratroopers’ revolt back in 1957.

  Sharon tried to get his reserves command restored. Labor ministers and members of the Knesset (MKs) were vociferously opposed to this, but Rabin insisted. They responded, though, with a draft amendment forbidding senior officers with field commands to serve in the Knesset. There were other MKs serving as officers in the reserves, but only Sharon had—and now sought again—a field command. In December 1974, the cabinet endorsed the measure. Sharon, always courting victimhood, naturally saw the legislation as aimed specifically at him. This time he was probably right. But he had not been enjoying backbench life much anyway, nor been fully engaged in the Knesset, though he did chair an important and top secret subcommittee that supervised defense spending. He announced his resignation from the House.

  The Likud faction convened for a requisite outpouring of outrage at the government’s arbitrary injustice and grief over losing Sharon. “If I’d known how much you all love me,” Sharon said archly, “maybe I wouldn’t have resigned.”

  As for Labor, “they’ve achieved exactly the opposite of what they intended,” wrote Yoel Marcus in a Haaretz column. “They wanted to stop him becoming a general again and to stymie his political career by gagging him. But now he’ll be both: three days a week an officer, and the rest of the week a public statesman. Forcing him to quit the Knesset was the biggest favor. If he had stayed there, he’d have slowly sunk under the gray grind of party politics, which he is totally not cut out for.”6

  In another turn of good fortune, Sharon was able to project himself to the public as vindicated, indeed extolled, by the Agranat Commission over the grave and politically devastating charge of insubordination in the face of the enemy. As part of his postwar, pre-politics media blitz a year before, Sharon had told the newspaper Maariv in January that he regretted obeying the High Command’s orders to attack Missouri on October 21.b “I should have disobeyed an order I knew was wrong,” Sharon said. “I should have disobeyed and accepted a court-martial for my disobedience.”7

  This triggered a firestorm of criticism and controversy. The Agranat Com
mission, whose remit effectively ended on the third day of the war, was asked nevertheless to take up this crucial question of obedience in wartime. “When is it permissible for a commander, of whatever rank, to disobey orders?” Sharon was asked bluntly by Justice Moshe Landau, a commission member.

  Sharon replied that as a basic rule all orders must be obeyed. But special situations could arise, and October 21 was one.

  You’re in the field, and no more senior commander is with you, and you receive an order which you know that, if executed, will result in the deaths of a great many of your men but will produce only the most negligible gain. If you have no one to address your arguments to, then perhaps you need to take a decision yourself. Such situations are very rare indeed. But I was in such a situation at that time, although I did carry out the order. But to this day I believe I should not have done so. It indeed resulted in very heavy casualties and in virtually zero gains. In my view this was the classic case in which a commander needs to say, “We are not carrying out this order, no way.”8

  In February 1975, in the published section of its final report—the vast bulk of which remained secretc—the Agranat Commission effectively exonerated Sharon, though at the same time did not endorse his rationale.

  Whatever Justice Agranat and his four colleagues had said or had meant to say about Sharon’s alleged insubordination, their comments were vindication enough for Prime Minister Rabin to be able to do what he had probably been planning to do for some time: hire Sharon as his adviser. The original job definition, “defense adviser to the prime minister,” quickly fell prey to the animosity between Rabin and Peres. So Sharon was called just “adviser.”9 Peres hired Sharon’s old friend, comrade, and rival Yisrael Tal as his defense adviser, although of course, as defense minister, he had the entire General Staff to advise him.

  Sharon understood that in part at least he was being used as a weapon in the escalating duel between Rabin and Peres. This did not deter him, though it would complicate his relations with Peres over the years. What did worry him, though, as he considered Rabin’s tempting offer of a role at the heart of power, was the prospect of his rightist credentials being compromised by his perceived association with the Labor government’s peace policy.

  Under relentless pressure from Kissinger, Rabin was negotiating an ambitious “interim agreement” with Egypt. Under its evolving terms, Israel would withdraw some thirty miles from the canal to a line east of the Mitle and Gidi passes. The UNEF buffer zone separating the two armies under the original postwar cease-fire and separation arrangements, and the two limited forces zones that flanked it, would all shift eastward. The proposed withdrawal meant that Israel would also cede the lucrative oil field at Abu Rodeis, farther down the Gulf of Suez coast. Israeli cargoes, though not Israeli ships, would be allowed through the Suez Canal.

  An important new element in the agreement was a hands-on American surveillance role. The United States would set up watch stations in the UNEF buffer zone, to be operated by two hundred American civilian personnel. Israel and Egypt could also each set up a surveillance station in the zone. In addition, U.S. planes would carry out daily surveillance flights over the area and would supply the data from them to Israel, Egypt, and UNEF.

  Washington sweetened the pill for Rabin by significantly upgrading the quality and quantity of weaponry it undertook to supply to Israel, including F-15 and F-16 warplanes, M60 tanks, hydrofoil naval boats, and intelligence-gathering equipment.10d

  Rabin, having balked at a similar proposal earlier in the year—and having incurred an ominous public “reassessment” of Washington’s policy toward Israel—now recommended the Interim Agreement package to the Knesset as a step toward peace with the largest and most powerful Arab state and a major enhancement of the relationship with Israel’s superpower patron.

  For the Likud and its allies, progress to peace meant progress to withdrawal from the remainder of Sinai, and perhaps from the other occupied territories too. Meanwhile, they argued in the Knesset, Israel was trading tangibles for paper promises. As a Knesset member, Sharon, too, had spoken of the critical danger, as he insisted, of withdrawing from the Mitle and Gidi passes. Now, as Rabin’s adviser, his chief concern was to keep a low profile in the hope that people would not dig up his previous pronouncements.

  Privately, though, as the Interim Agreement evolved, Sharon kept up a barrage of detailed and specific criticism that Rabin found both constructive and honorable. “It was my adviser, Arik Sharon, who recommended, contrary to other views, that the Egyptian early warning station be inside the passes, as close as possible to our forces,” Rabin recalled later in his memoirs. “In general, I drew encouragement from Arik’s approach. He said, ‘I disagree with your position and strongly oppose the Interim Agreement. But as long as I’m your adviser, I’ll give you the best advice possible in the context of your policy.’ In this way, Sharon demonstrated both loyalty and decency.”11

  Rabin went on to contrast Sharon’s “loyalty and decency” with the behavior of one of Peres’s advisers, Professor Yuval Ne’eman, “who, while serving in his official position, turned his house into a meeting place for key people from Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement, who sat there and planned harsh attacks on the prime minister … The comparison between Sharon and Ne’eman exposes the difference between decency and hypocrisy. It was no coincidence that Ne’eman worked for Shimon Peres and Arik Sharon worked for me.”12

  This passage is evidence of the depth of Rabin’s antipathy toward Peres. But it also reflects Rabin’s naïveté—or was it willful blindness, or indeed hypocrisy?—toward Sharon’s own vigorous dalliance with Gush Emunim during his period of service as the prime minister’s adviser. Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), then in its infancy, rose to prominence after the Yom Kippur War and spearheaded Jewish settlement campaigns in the biblical heartlands of “Judea and Samaria,” as the Right pointedly termed the West Bank. Emunim balked at the policy of the Labor-led governments since 1967 limiting Jewish settlement to the Jerusalem area and the Jordan River valley.

  Naïveté, blindness, and hypocrisy have characterized the attitudes and actions of a long series of Israeli leaders toward Gush Emunim and its relentless drive to build Jewish settlements throughout the Palestinian territories. Labor “hawks” clandestinely encouraged still-small and inchoate groups of religious-nationalist would-be settlers immediately after the Six-Day War. Men like Yisrael Galili, Golda Meir’s close confidant, and Yigal Allon, her deputy prime minister, hankered for “the integrity of Eretz Yisrael.” Moshe Dayan and his followers in the Labor Party also opposed relinquishing the West Bank.

  Under Rabin, the contradiction deepened: on the one hand, the government fought Gush Emunim’s settlement efforts; on the other, collusion increased between Labor ministers and the young religious activists. Each group thought it was using the other. The ministers thought they could harness the religious zeal and nationalist fervor of these youngsters to create new Jewish settlements in places they considered strategically necessary. The religious youngsters believed they could harness the ministers’ support in order to create settlements everywhere. Their purpose was twofold: to do God’s will by settling the entire land, and to preclude the return of the territories to Arab rule (which, too, they believed was doing God’s will).

  As an opposition backbencher protected by parliamentary immunity, Sharon had joined Gush Emunim’s first foray to an intended settlement site in the heart of Samaria, near Nablus, just days after the Rabin government took power. As soldiers moved in to dismantle the encampment and forcibly removed the would-be settlers, Sharon physically shielded the elderly spiritual leader of the movement, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. “Don’t touch him,” he shouted, shoving the soldiers away. “And don’t touch me.” He urged the young men and women settlers to hug the rocks and refuse to budge.

  Rabin was tough with the would-be settlers on this occasion, but in fact he had already signaled significant weakness on the crucial quest
ion of the West Bank and its future. Presenting his new government for the Knesset’s endorsement on June 3, he gave a solemn undertaking to call new elections before concluding any agreement with Jordan that involved territorial concessions. He noted, rightly, that Golda Meir had given the same commitment when she set up her last, short-lived government three months earlier. It had been squeezed out of her by her coalition partner, the National Religious Party (NRP), and now it was being squeezed out of Rabin in the same way. The NRP, Labor’s longtime political ally and traditionally a dovish party, was steadily being dragged to the right by its young generation of activists who were closely affiliated to Gush Emunim.

  Sharon, while still in the Knesset, zeroed in on this political weak point at the heart of government policy. “What is this talk of ‘priorities’?” he challenged Rabin in a debate in July 1974. “The government purports to uphold the right of Jews to settle everywhere in the homeland, but in accordance with ‘political and security priorities.’ What are these priorities? These priorities are designed to pave the way for restoring Samaria to Jordan. Let’s talk straightforwardly. Tell the truth, why don’t you. The truth is that you want to hand this territory back to Jordan. Say so openly! Say: ‘We have decided to hand this territory to Jordan.’ Don’t talk to us about the right to settle in all parts of the homeland, but the need to do so according to priorities.”13

  As adviser to the prime minister, Sharon could hardly maintain that level of strident political polemic against his boss. But he did keep up his intimate contacts with Gush Emunim.

  The Sharon-Emunim nexus, interacting with the Sharon-Rabin bond, was to stamp an indelible imprint on Israel’s history, as well as on the personal futures of the prime minister and his adviser cum critic. In December 1975, during the festival of Hanukkah, Gush Emunim mounted its eighth attempt—the army had dispersed the previous seven—to found a Jewish settlement in the heart of Samaria. The site chosen was Sebastia, an abandoned Turkish railway station. The timing of this eighth effort was especially propitious: the UN General Assembly had recently passed a resolution defining Zionism as a form of racism. The Israeli ambassador, Chaim Herzog, famously tore up the resolution at the podium. The government convened a gathering of world Jewish leaders in Jerusalem to demonstrate solidarity with Israel. Rabin was loath to give the order for yet another forcible eviction while this conference took place in Jerusalem. He postponed the showdown—a tactical mistake that encouraged more and more sympathizers to stream to Sebastia and bolster the settlement attempt.