Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  The result, eventually, was a compromise, and Ariel Sharon, the prime minister’s adviser and the settlers’ champion, was instrumental in securing it, shuttling busily between Sebastia and Jerusalem. Thirty settler families were to move in to the nearby IDF artillery training base, Camp Kadum, “pending a cabinet decision” in their case. This ostensibly provisional solution was in fact a huge victory for Gush Emunim and an ignominious defeat for the government. The temporary lodgings at the army base steadily grew into a sizable civilian settlement, which eventually dwarfed the base. It was subsequently named Kedumim. It was the forerunner of many other settlements throughout the populated Palestinian heartlands of Samaria and Judea.

  When the deal was concluded, at Minister of Defense Peres’s office in Tel Aviv on December 8, the settler leaders pulled out a bottle of brandy and drank toasts. Rightly, they saw this outcome as a watershed: the Labor government’s policy restricting Jewish settlement had been breached. Back in Sebastia, a thousand young men danced and sang in fervent rejoicing.

  By the same token, Sebastia represented a fateful moment of irresolution by Yitzhak Rabin. Recriminations flew between the Prime Minister’s Bureau and that of the minister of defense over who had been weak and offered concessions. It seems clear that the original idea of moving a group of the settlers to an army base was Sharon’s.14 He, after all, had been the driving force in situating these army bases in the West Bank in the first place. “For this alone,” Sharon reportedly said at Sebastia after the deal was done, “my service in the Prime Minister’s Office has been worthwhile.”15

  Sharon nurtured the hope that his time with Rabin had somehow rekindled his candidacy for army chief of staff but found himself rebuffed yet again. It was always a vain hope, certainly as far as Rabin was concerned. “As long as I’ve got a say, Arik won’t be chief of staff,” the prime minister was quoted as saying in the left-wing paper Al Hamishmar. He explained that Sharon’s previous high-profile political activity made him ineligible.

  Sharon accordingly turned back to politics. A bizarre interlude ensued during which he haggled with the Likud leaders and at the same time engaged in vigorous flirtations with well-known figures on the dovish left with a view to creating a new party under his leadership. He was to have a hard time living down this not-so-brief spell of political promiscuity once he finally gave it up and reverted to the nationalist fold. His subsequent years are peppered with lame denials and mealymouthed prevarications, but they never quite allayed the suspicions that this dalliance aroused among the religious settlers and the hard-core ideological Right. When he eventually did change his political outlook, as prime minister, his detractors pointed to this inconstancy long ago as the first telltale sign of ideological deviance.

  And indeed, Sharon at this time was less concerned with ideology than with the unsettling thought that he might find himself left out of government again after the next election. He saw that Labor under Rabin was losing popularity: the government was beset by a series of economic scandals involving prominent Labor Party figures. There was also a pervasive feeling that Labor had not been sufficiently punished for the Yom Kippur catastrophe. Nevertheless, Sharon did not believe that the Likud could successfully capitalize on the ruling party’s growing weakness as long as Menachem Begin stood at its head. He frankly doubted that Begin, whom he saw as remote and detached from the public despite his rousing oratory, could win an election after seven consecutive defeats over twenty-nine years.

  Since unseating Begin as the Likud leader was not really a practical proposition, the alternative, he thought, might be to create a third party, between Likud and Labor, to siphon off disaffected Labor voters. But first he went through the motions inside the Likud, baldly proposing that the party hold a primary to choose its candidate for prime minister and hinting that he would run against Begin.

  Sharon continued desultory negotiations over his future in the Likud through the summer of 1976. Matters came to a head in September at a tête-à-tête with Simcha Ehrlich, the Liberal Party leader and thus Begin’s partner at the helm of the Likud. The two met in the coffee shop of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, where both were attending a Zionist conference. “Simcha,” Sharon began bluffly, “let’s forget the past.” “As far as I’m concerned,” the mild but canny Ehrlich replied, peering out through horn-rimmed glasses, “the past begins this morning.”

  SHARON: Let’s talk like a couple of horse thieves.

  EHRLICH: Well, I’ve never actually tried horse thieving. But you talk and I’ll adjust to your style.

  SHARON: You have to understand, I can’t leave the Likud twice. You have to guarantee me a majority in the Likud.

  EHRLICH: But in a democratic society there’s no guaranteed majority.

  SHARON: I’m thinking of running at the head of an independent party. That way I can be in government whoever wins. I’ll partner the Likud if it forms the government, and I’ll partner Labor if it does.

  EHRLICH: You may end up a mere breakaway fragment … We’ll attack you mercilessly. We know your weak points.

  SHARON: If I don’t get the conditions I’ve asked for, I’ll run as an independent.

  EHRLICH: First of all, we’ve accepted your various conditions. And second, don’t talk to me in ultimatums. Don’t forget that since 1973 there’s been a devaluation not only of the Israeli lira but also of Arik Sharon…

  By November, there was nothing more to talk about. Sharon announced the creation of his new party, to be called Shlomzion, and Ehrlich provided the above embarrassing account of their conversation to Haaretz.16 As good as his word, Ehrlich attacked him mercilessly. “Arik can’t work in a team. His personal ambition is what drove him to leave the Likud. That, and his political volatility. He is not a man of principle. For him, tactics take priority over principles.”

  In a letter written the following April and published only after his death in 1983, Ehrlich was even more damning. “In 1973, I said that I admired those who prevented Arik from becoming chief of staff, because he would have been a disaster. I see him as a danger to democracy and free society. If he were in power, he would be capable of setting up camps for political prisoners. He is a man without principles, without human feelings, and without any moral norms whatsoever.”17

  Sharon for his part proclaimed that he would never return to the Likud “even if the election results are disappointing and Shlomzion emerges as a small party. I have never abandoned my comrades on the field of battle—and I’m not about to do so now.”18 He was spending his mornings at the Tel Aviv home of his new comrade Amos Keinan, a multitalented writer, playwright, sculptor, and prominent intellectual of the Left.e Keinan had lived for years in Paris and had met there with Palestinian activists. Sharon wanted to meet with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Shlomzion, he proposed, should call for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. He himself had long believed that “Jordan is Palestine,” in other words, that King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy, a colonial creation of the British, ought eventually to disappear, leaving the Jewish republic of Israel and the Palestinian republic of Jordan to resolve their territorial differences over the West Bank.f

  The dream of Shlomzion began to come unstuck, according to Keinan, when polling data showed a distinct disconnect between its bold thinking on the Palestinian issue and the much more hawkish inclinations of Sharon’s grassroots admirers. Sharon summarily dumped his leftist friends, Keinan recalled, “and swung 180 degrees rightward,” packing Shlomzion’s list of Knesset candidates with his personal friends and old army buddies.

  The Rabin government collapsed prematurely in December 1976 when the National Religious Party refused to support the prime minister in a vote of confidence. Election Day, originally scheduled for the fall of 1977, was brought forward to May 17. Then, out of the blue, Rabin himself was forced to resign in March 1977 when the attorney general, Aharon Barak, decided to prosecute his wife, Leah, for a currency violation
. Leah had been exposed by Haaretz as holding a (relatively small) account in a U.S. bank, which was forbidden under Israel’s then-still-draconian currency restrictions. Everyone did it, but she was caught, and Barak threw the book at her—and vicariously at her husband. Shimon Peres took over as party leader and acting prime minister, and Labor slid steadily down in the polls.

  On the Likud side, Menachem Begin was struck by a heart attack and spent much of the election campaign in the hospital.

  Sharon realized that his own election battle had been reduced to getting past the threshold—1 percent of votes cast—and making it into parliament. The joke doing the political rounds was that his grand pretensions were all now condensed into the hope that the men of his Yom Kippur War division would come out and vote for him.

  He telephoned Begin in the hospital and humbly pledged that Shlomzion would merge with the Likud after the election. Really, he would have preferred to join before and receive an assured if humiliating entry ticket to the new Knesset. Begin, who still bore warm affection for the all-sabra war hero, asked Ehrlich and Yitzhak Shamir to arrange it—and the two old foxes managed to fudge and stall till the deadline passed and the lists were closed.19

  In the event, Sharon scraped in with two seats—his own and his No. 2, a little-known teacher from Tiberias named Yitzhak Yitzhaki. Some thirty-four thousand people voted for Shlomzion, 1.9 percent of the votes cast. The overall results were a political earthquake for Israel. Labor plunged from 51 seats to just 32, and the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), a new, centrist movement, won an astounding 15 seats. The Likud gained 4, up to 43. The arithmetic was compelling: Labor, for the first time ever, had effectively lost the capacity to lead a coalition. Menachem Begin would be prime minister. Moreover, together with the religious parties and Shlomzion, Begin could build a coalition of 62; he didn’t need the DMC to govern.

  Sharon wasted no time. At 5:00 a.m. on May 18, as the new era dawned over the country, he telephoned to congratulate the jubilant Begin and was enormously relieved to hear the words “Your place is with us.” “How do I make that happen?” he asked ingratiatingly. “Write a conciliatory letter to Ehrlich.” Sharon immediately sat down at the kitchen table of an aide’s home in Tel Aviv and wrote, with all the pathos and contrition he could conjure up. Shlomzion’s two seats were the Likud’s to command, he assured the Liberal leader.20g He sent off his missive by messenger to Ehrlich’s home and sat back to contemplate life in a Begin cabinet.

  * * *

  a In a final act of pettiness, General Avraham “Bren” Adan, now CO of Southern Command, declined to provide a helicopter to take Sharon back up north. “Frankly, I was shocked,” Sharon’s deputy, Jackie Even, recalled. “In the end we smuggled him up on a plane.” A generation later, with David Elazar (1976), Shmuel Gonen (1991), and Haim Bar-Lev (1994) all dead, the “war of the generals” still raged between Adan and Sharon unabated.

  “At the end of the war,” Bren told Yedioth Ahronoth in 1999, “I was sure Arik felt like shit. He hadn’t succeeded in anything. He hadn’t crossed the canal properly; he hadn’t gotten to Ismailia; he had been embroiled in arguments all the time. I felt that our division, on the other hand, had had enormous achievements. After some time I began to realize that people believed the opposite … During the war, I thought it was immoral to spend time briefing journalists, holding press conferences. Big mistake! The journalists went to Arik.”

  INTERVIEWER: But wasn’t it important in terms of morale that Sharon drove forward and reached the other side of the canal?

  BREN: That was a contribution in terms of morale, no doubt about it. But he only appeared to be driving forward. In fact, he crossed the canal on three light motorized barges that could hardly transport two whole divisions. In other words, there was a bridgehead on both sides of the canal—but no bridge! When Sharon’s division tried to move large forces forward, it was unable to do so. The troops were taking hits. A crisis developed. Then my division went into action. First thing, I sent a battalion to defend Sharon from the north, and this battalion knocked out sixty Egyptian tanks. My deputy, Dovik [Tamari], handled the retrieval and concentration of all the rafts, and by Sisyphean effort he brought them to the canal. Meanwhile, our brigades under Natke Nir and Arieh Keren smashed an Egyptian brigade moving up from the south in an ambush that I planned and laid.

  On the seventeenth we started bridging the canal together with an engineering battalion from Arik’s division. We crossed the canal; we took Egyptian positions on the other side, and we destroyed Egyptian missile bases one after another.

  b See pp. 131–33.

  c The report was classified for thirty years, but in 1995 the High Court of Justice lifted the restrictions on all but forty-eight pages of the findings, which remain under wraps. In 2008, the military censorship waived restrictions on many of the testimonies, but not those of Prime Minister Golda Meir and the head of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira.

  d The United States also increased civilian economic assistance and guaranteed Israel’s oil supplies to compensate for the loss of Abu Rodeis.

  e Shlomzion was the name of Keinan’s elder daughter, after a Second Temple–era queen of Judea, Salome Alexandra.

  f Keinan was less focused on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan across the river than on the need, as he saw it, for Israel to come to terms with the Palestinian people in Palestine. He wanted Shlomzion to call for a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank. Sharon, he recalled in later years, was broadly if vaguely agreeable.

  g Ehrlich blocked Sharon’s way back to the Liberal Party, but he could do nothing to prevent the two Shlomzion men’s merger into Begin’s Herut.

  CHAPTER 5 · HIS WILL BE DONE

  The political earthquake of the election was quickly eclipsed by its dramatic and unpredicted aftershock. No sooner had he been sworn in than Menachem Begin, the inveterate extremist and warmonger in the eyes of his rivals, authorized secret peace talks with Egypt. These were conducted by the new foreign minister, whose accession to the Likud government itself triggered sharp political reverberations—the lifelong Laborite Moshe Dayan.

  In November, the secret burst upon a bemused world and an incredulous Israel. President Sadat announced that he would fly to Jerusalem and address the Knesset; Begin immediately responded with a formal and courteous invitation. On Saturday night, November 19, the enemy leader was received with flags and fanfare at Ben-Gurion International Airport. “Aha, it’s you,” Sadat said, smiling, when he saw Sharon alongside the red carpet. “I hoped to capture you on Egyptian soil in October ’73.” “I’m glad I managed to avoid you,” Sharon replied.1

  It is hard now to re-evoke the feelings that swept the country then; so much has soured since. But for the crowds that poured onto the streets of Jerusalem to wave their welcome to Sadat, for the millions who watched and listened spellbound as he spoke in the Knesset, for the whole euphoric nation, it was a dreamlike moment that seemed to hold out new worlds of hope. After thirty years of hermetic regional isolation and implacable Arab enmity, and only four years after the trauma of Yom Kippur, the president of the strongest Arab state had come to make peace. “No more war” was the pledge on both Sadat’s and Begin’s lips. If that were enshrined in a treaty, with solid security safeguards, the existential threat that Israel had always lived with would hugely diminish.

  The euphoria of the visit was followed by more humdrum diplomacy. Quickly, though, this ran aground. A second Begin-Sadat summit at Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, on Christmas Day 1977, ended in deadlock. Begin signaled that he was ready for far-reaching concessions in Sinai but not in Judea and Samaria.a Sadat, already accused of betraying the Arab cause by seeking a “separate peace,” demanded a meaningful Israeli commitment regarding the Palestinians’ future. The United States stepped up its involvement, to keep the process from stalling. More fitful negotiating followed, but the radiant optimism of the original breakthrough seemed in danger of fading amid a welter of disputes, recri
minations, and misunderstandings.

  For Israel under Begin, the historic breakthrough with Egypt bared a deep contradiction at the core of its policy making. Begin was genuinely committed to peace with the states of the Arab world but not with the Palestinians. Of course he wanted Israel to live at peace with the Palestinian people, too; but not as equals, not as two nations living side by side in a Palestine partitioned into two states. For him, Palestine belonged to the Jews alone. The Palestinians, or the “Arabs of Eretz Yisrael,” as he insisted on calling them, could have autonomy, but not sovereign independence. By the same token, he would not hand back the Palestinian territory to Jordanian sovereignty.

  Begin was not the first Zionist leader conflicted between the desire for peace and the burning belief that Israel must govern all of Palestine. Parts of the Zionist Left, too, especially in the immediate pre-state period, were loath to accept the compromise of partition proposed by the international community and accepted, reluctantly, by Ben-Gurion.

  After 1967, that ambivalence resurfaced, prompting key Labor ministers like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon to advocate and support Jewish settlement in parts of the West Bank while at the same time professing to seek peace and a repartition of the land. They, at least, contended that their limited settlement plans would not prevent repartition. Begin and Sharon, when they came to power, proclaimed unequivocally that their settlement plans were intended precisely to achieve that end: preventing the repartition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan or the rise of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank.