Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  “He genuinely feared that settler resistance could lead to bloodshed,” his cabinet secretary, Arye Naor, explained years later. “And he believed that the only man who could, perhaps, carry out the evacuation without triggering a violent confrontation was Sharon … because the settlers had faith in Sharon. And so Begin reconciled himself to appointing Sharon [defense minister]. And the upshot indeed was an evacuation without bloodshed. There were protests and barricades … but no serious, violent confrontation.”27

  For the settler ideologues and activists at the head of Gush Emunim, Begin and Sharon’s impending, treacherous evacuation of Yamit, a township of some 1,750 people, and of the other, smaller settlements in northeastern Sinai, needed to be carved into the Israeli consciousness as a national trauma never to be repeated. The greater the trauma, they reasoned, the greater its deterrent effect. They and their supporters descended on the Rafah Salient in large numbers, moving into the settlement homes as some of the original settlers moved out to new farming villages built for them inside sovereign Israel, or took cash compensation and left.

  The newcomers were determined to confront the troops, hopefully to fend them off, more likely to be dragged out kicking and screaming and pushed into waiting buses. The less messianic among them knew this battle was ultimately doomed. Begin had solemnly pledged to hand back Sinai settler-free, and Sharon was committed to make that happen. But the Emunim activists wanted maximum media coverage of “the trauma,” and maximum resonance in people’s minds, so that no such “expulsion” was ever contemplated for the West Bank and Gaza settlements.

  Ironically, Sharon himself, having carried out the evacuation smoothly and with relative ease, joined enthusiastically in the “post-trauma,” “never-again” brainwash. “In Sinai, in Yamit we have reached the end of our concessions,” he declared in his order of the day on April 25, 1982, the date Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai under the peace treaty.

  A dozen years on, he was publicly beating his breast over the evacuation of the Sinai settlements. “When I see how it’s exploited to weaken Israel’s position regarding the Golan and Judea and Samaria, I think it was a mistake. We should not have agreed to evacuate the settlements, no matter what. I rejoiced over the peace and supported it. But I made a mistake when I agreed to evacuating settlements.”28 He professed his regret, too, over his famous phone call with Begin at Camp David. “Let’s be accurate: It wasn’t I who phoned him; it was he who phoned me. And I didn’t say evacuate the settlements. I just said I’ll support you whatever you decide. But anyway, today I say it was a mistake on my part. Everyone makes mistakes and regrets them. I regret this one.”29

  In point of fact, stripped of the spin and the hype (including Sharon’s), the evacuation of the Sinai settlements was a trauma only for the settlers themselves and their supporters. The country at large looked on bemused, visibly untraumatized. Moreover, viewed in the perspective of Sharon’s dramatic and hugely more ambitious and significant evacuation of the Gaza and North Samaria settlements as prime minister in 2005, the Sinai evacuation appears not merely as not a traumatic deterrent against further evacuation but actually as Sharon’s own precedent-setting paradigm for effective, nonviolent evacuation of settlements. All his key tactical decisions in 2005 had their antecedents in Sinai in 1981–1982, and Sharon proved the diligent student of his own success.

  The IDF had evacuated “its brothers and sisters not with violence but with love,” he wrote in his April 1982 order of the day, “not with indifference but with empathy.” In Gaza and North Samaria twenty-three years later, the directive to all the evacuating forces, army and police, was essentially the same. The guideline was “With determination and with sensitivity,” and it was rehearsed countless times, from Prime Minister Sharon down to the most junior platoon leader.

  In 1982, Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir demanded at cabinet that hundreds of Gush Emunim settlers and sympathizers from Judea and Samaria who had illicitly infiltrated into the Sinai settlements be arrested and prosecuted. But Sharon urged Begin to cool Zamir’s ardor and leave him to handle the infiltrators by patient persuasion. He insisted that normal life continue in the Sinai settlements until the very last possible moment. The remaining indigenous settlers, who would mostly go quietly when the time came, deserved at least that, he explained. As for the newcomers, most of whom were armed, he was not prepared to believe, he said, that they would ever use their weapons against IDF soldiers. “Lots of people in this country have weapons for self-defense. My mother sleeps with a rifle under her bed. That doesn’t mean she intends to use it, certainly not to attack anyone.”30

  He adopted precisely the same approach in the much more complex 2005 disengagement. Then, too, he refused to be rattled by the infiltration of thousands of West Bank settler families and yeshiva students into the Gaza settlements. The newcomers were led by many of the same Emunim rabbis and lay activists who had “reinforced” the Rafah settlements, now gray bearded and with children and grandchildren in tow.

  In 1982, as the moment of evacuation approached, Sharon flooded the Rafah Salient with fifteen companies of frontline IDF troops and auxiliary units of medics and firefighters and a strong police contingent. The last holdouts, mainly rightist students and Emunim youngsters, battled the evacuating forces from the rooftops of Yamit. They hurled an assortment of nonlethal objects at soldiers trying to climb up scaling ladders. They succumbed, in the end, when cell-like cages were deposited on their rooftops by crane and they were hustled inside. Threats of suicide by bombs and gas proved so much empty posturing.

  The scenes of destruction that followed the withdrawal also presaged the disengagement of 2005. With the last of the protesters out, Israeli bulldozers began systematically demolishing Yamit (though not the agricultural settlements, which were handed over to Egypt intact). “The infrastructure we had built there,” Sharon explained, “could serve to transform the place very quickly into a population center of 100,000 … It was important that we not have Egyptian centers of population near our borders.”31

  Finally, the Sinai withdrawal served as a precedent for the Gaza disengagement—but this in the negative sense—in the way that state compensation for the settlers grew and grew until it reached wholly inflated and inequitable dimensions. Sharon was not solely to blame, but he was more to blame than anyone. “Arik could refuse them nothing,” the director general of the Ministry of Agriculture, Avraham Ben-Meir, recalled.

  Sharon was now at the zenith of his brief, bizarre, and ultimately disastrous term as minister of defense. It was a bizarre term because, drunk on his own success and more arrogant than ever, he seemed to lose touch with his own place and his country’s place in the reality of world affairs. But he did not lose touch with Begin; the prime minister was right there beside him, stoking the same dangerous fantasies.

  On an official visit to Washington with Begin in September 1981, the prime minister asked President Ronald Reagan if Sharon might brief the American side “with some ideas that might give form to the relationship” between the two countries. Sam Lewis, the long-serving U.S. ambassador to Israel, provided a graphic recollection of what followed:

  Reagan agreed; so Sharon stood up with a set of maps of the Middle East and proceeded to give an absolutely hair-raising description of the ways the Israeli Defense Forces could be of assistance to the U.S. in contingency situations. It would have taken Israel as far east as Iran and as far north as Turkey. I could see [Secretary of Defense Caspar] Weinberger blanch visibly … Everyone on the American side was shocked by the grandiose scope of the Sharon concept for strategic cooperation. It even included use of Israeli forces to assist the U.S. in case of uprisings in the Gulf emirates.32

  The formal purpose of Begin’s visit was to begin discussions on a memorandum of agreement on strategic cooperation between the two countries. Sharon at this period made a tour of several African countries, and he wove his experiences in Gabon, Central African Republic, Zaire, and South Africa i
nto the ongoing strategic dialogue with the Pentagon. Israel, he suggested, could be helpful in Africa too, in combating Libyan subversion, in countering Soviet influence. Weinberger’s team remained unimpressed. Begin, monitoring the talks from Jerusalem, ignored the American lack of enthusiasm. For him, in Lewis’s words, “that signed piece of paper was much more important than the content. He wanted a symbol of the alliance.”

  Eventually, a document was drawn up, lean in practical content. Sharon and Minister of Foreign Affairs Yitzhak Shamir, visiting Washington together in November 1981, attended the signing ceremony, which Weinberger contrived to hold in the basement of the Pentagon, without media coverage.

  Despite the American cold shoulder, Sharon maintained that the memorandum was significant. “Though not a vehicle for joint Israeli-American activities of the kind I had been recommending to [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig and Weinberger, it did acknowledge explicitly the threat of Soviet-inspired military activity in the region and provided channels for closer military and intelligence coordination between the two countries.”33 He never tired of unfurling his maps and delivering his briefings on Israel’s role as a regional superpower and as America’s strong and willing surrogate. Foreign statesmen, Israeli politicians, military men, academics, and journalists—all were treated to his sweeping presentations during this period.

  One far-fetched scheme, which was kept out of the briefings, involved two Israeli businessmen-friends of Sharon’s and their Saudi Arabian partner who were to supply large quantities of American arms to Sudan. These were to serve the son of the exiled Shah of Iran to mount a revolt against the ayatollahs who had taken over his country. The arms would also be useful to foment rebellion against Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi. There was a clandestine meeting—Sudan and Israel had no formal diplomatic relations—in May 1982 in Kenya, between Sharon and Lily and the Sudanese leader, Jaafar Numeiry. Also present were the two Israeli businessmen, the Saudi partner, and the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, David Kimche, who had recently resigned from the Mossad. Perhaps it was fortunate that the Lebanon War intervened before this particular piece of megalomania could get off the ground.34

  No African adventures or Asian wars actually resulted from Begin’s posturing and Sharon’s strategic bombast. They are important, though, as indicators of the two men’s shared mood as they conceived the Israeli strategy that led to the Lebanon War. They both reveled in Israel’s military power and potential, recovered now after the Yom Kippur setback. They both regarded Israel as an outpost of American power in the global confrontation with the Soviet bloc and its Arab satellites. And they were both convinced that the Reagan team, fundamentally, saw things the same way.

  Did they both, in their exhilarated assessment of Israel’s capabilities and America’s sympathies, conceive a sweeping military move designed not only to defeat the PLO and the Syrians in Lebanon and install a pro-Israel government there but also to drive the Palestinians from Lebanon to Jordan, where they would overthrow the king and set up their own state? Sharon, as we have seen, had long believed that regime change in Amman was the key to solving the Palestinian problem. Some of his critics suspected him of harboring this undeclared agenda when he launched the Lebanon War.

  Lewis was one of them. But “Begin and Sharon had the same goals,” he insisted. “The basic strategy was shoving the PLO out of Lebanon … maybe back into Jordan. I believe Begin and Sharon had the same strategic goal. Their strategic hope was that Jordan would become the Palestinian state. They never intended giving up any of the West Bank.”35

  This is an important perspective from a key observer who was at the heart of the unfolding drama. Begin, in years to come, was to deny Sharon’s claim that as prime minister he supported and encouraged the “Jordan is Palestine” thesis that Sharon openly espoused. Begin’s apologists argued that Begin could never uphold that thesis because he still believed, at least theoretically, in the Revisionist Zionist doctrine that both banks of the Jordan belong to the Jewish people. Lewis, familiar with all this, nevertheless asserted that Begin “no longer really held ideologically that Jordan is Israel. He thought it was the place where the Palestinians ought to be.”

  Having achieved his cherished U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Agreement, Menachem Begin was beside himself with rage when Lewis called at his home on December 20, 1981, barely a fortnight after it was signed, to inform him that it was suspended.

  Washington was infuriated by Begin’s sudden decision to effectively annex the Golan Heights.i Begin had slipped in the bath the previous month and broken his hip, a painful injury that laid him up in the hospital and then convalescing at home for several weeks. Worried by the gathering storm within his political constituency over the Sinai settlements, and angered by some intemperate rhetoric from Syria’s president, Hafez Assad, that he heard on the radio, Begin came up with the Golan annexation as a dramatic political palliative. He got the cabinet to approve it on December 13. Then, from a wheelchair, he rammed the legislation through its three Knesset readings on one day, and the annexation became law.

  Lewis was ushered into the prime minister’s bedroom, where he found Sharon and Shamir flanking the prime minister, his face gaunt with pain and indignation. After terse pleasantries, Begin launched into a seventy-minute diatribe, which, he said, was his “message” to President Reagan. “Do you think that we are teenagers to be punished, slapped on the wrist? Do you think Israel is a vassal state of the United States? Are we just another ‘banana republic’? Let me tell you, Mr. Ambassador, that this is not Israel!” Lewis was allowed five minutes at the end to make his remonstrances, then was ushered out. As he walked down the stairs, he was intrigued to see the entire cabinet and top army brass assembled in the reception room for what was clearly going to be an important cabinet meeting.

  Begin was then carried downstairs, with Sharon and Shamir attending, and took obvious satisfaction in recounting to his ministers how he had proudly upheld the dignity of their country in the face of the condescending superpower. He then proceeded to acquaint them, for the first time, with his plan for the invasion of Lebanon.

  The IDF, he said, must go into Lebanon and clear out all the terrorist bases. The invasion was necessary because the PLO, despite an American-brokered cease-fire in south Lebanon the previous July—after months of cross-border rocket and artillery exchanges—was relentlessly attacking or trying to attack targets elsewhere in Israel and Jewish targets abroad.

  He wanted a decision in principle from the cabinet authorizing the proposed operation. He asked Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan to present the plan in greater detail. They said the invasion by armor and infantry would extend up to the outskirts of Beirut. Amphibious units would land at the Christian-controlled port of Jounieh, north of Beirut, and link up with the Christian militias. Sharon said they did not want war with Syria and hoped the cease-fire between Israel and Syria could be preserved. But the army would be ready to fight back if need be against any Syrian intervention. The proposed operation was code-named Pines.

  The ministers were gobsmacked. They had not previously been exposed to Begin and Sharon’s planning, much less to the army’s detailed preparations. But Ehrlich, Burg, and some of the other moderates quickly assimilated the scene: Begin dangerously euphoric, Sharon assiduously egging him on, Shamir silent but approving, the army zealous for a new war to excise the trauma of Yom Kippur. They put up a spirited resistance. One after another, they spoke against the plan, emphasizing the complications that could arise from an invasion and trying, albeit deferentially, to cool the prime minister’s ardor. Begin, suddenly deflated, realized he would not have a majority. Abruptly, he ended the discussion without putting his proposal to a vote and had himself carried back upstairs.36 “You see,” he was heard explaining to Sharon and Eitan, “it’s not yet ripe for a decision.”37

  Though genuinely taken aback by the scope of Begin’s war plan, the ministers could hardly pretend to be surprised by the prime minister’
s preoccupation with Lebanon. Lebanon, and specifically the PLO’s activities there, had been on this government’s agenda since the beginning of its first term in 1977. Always Israel’s quietest frontier, the Lebanese border had gradually become a hotbed of terrorist violence in the early 1970s, following the forcible eviction of the PLO’s forces from Jordan in September 1970 and the relocation of many of them to south Lebanon. In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon as the long-dominant Christian communities lashed out at the other, increasingly assertive confessions—Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and Druze. The PLO fanned the flames. It claimed to speak for, and protect, the more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees, many of them second- and third-generation, living in refugee camps around the country.

  Israel traditionally maintained discreet ties with the Christians; Ben-Gurion back in the 1950s had seen them as potential allies. In 1976, Syrian forces entered Lebanon and joined the fighting on the Christian side. Soon, the Syrians were deployed across much of the country and were dominating its politics.

  Yitzhak Rabin regarded Syria’s intervention as essentially a favorable development from Israel’s standpoint and willingly acceded to U.S. requests that Israel not interfere. Rabin believed that the Syrian army would now be extended across two fronts, the Golan Heights and Lebanon, making it more vulnerable and less threatening should war come. Together with U.S. diplomats, he drew a “red line” across southern Lebanon that, by unwritten understanding with Damascus, was to mark the limit of Syrian deployment acceptable to Israel. Rabin always insisted that the serious threat to Israel’s security was from Arab regular armies—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The PLO, he maintained, was a nuisance, albeit a painful one, but not an existential military challenge. Rabin and his defense minister, Shimon Peres, began arming and funding local Christian and Shiite militias in the border area of south Lebanon to serve as a counter to the growing PLO presence there.