Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Meanwhile, he was back at the ranch, ostensibly doing what he always said he wanted to do. When he was still in uniform, Lily had often said she looked forward to the day when she would tell callers, “He’s out in the fields, riding his horse; he’ll be back for suppertime.”2 Sharon writes in his book, “The next day [after his ouster] I was out in the fields on the tractor, looking down on the crops, on the sheep and lambs.” He proudly records how he crossed indigenous Awasi sheep with imported merino ones. “The resulting crossbred ewes combined the Merino’s propensity for twins and the Awasi’s milk production and excellent maternal behavior. Experimenting with hormones, we developed techniques of inducing three births every two years rather than the usual one a year.”

  In later years, Sharon would insist that he was wrongly perceived as driven by politics and the pursuit of power. He was philosophical, he claimed, almost fatalistic, about his chances of ever making it to the top. “My secret weapon,” he was fond of saying, “is that I’m actually much less ambitious than people think.”3 He could afford to be, he explained, because, unlike so many of his colleagues and rivals, he had a rich life waiting for him beyond politics, after politics. If he were ever pushed off the greasy pole, he would not undergo a single day of suffering or remorse. “The next day I’d be out working on the farm, and truly enjoying it … I’ve never had enough time for all the things I want to do. Experiments in agriculture, for instance. And travel to the many places I’ve never visited. Meeting people I’ve always wanted to meet; and reading all the books I’ve never had time to read.”4

  It wasn’t from the world of politics that he drew his strength, he insisted. “People don’t understand the source of my strength,” he told an interviewer for the popular women’s magazine La’isha. “Hard, physical work, agriculture, flowers, trees, the farm animals, and the fields—those are the source of my strength … People don’t know that if I’m not a politician, I won’t be miserable. I’ll look after an injured bird, a nest of chicks. My strength doesn’t come from politics. It comes from the land.”5

  But for all these paeans to bucolic bliss—and they were not entirely insincere—Sharon suffered pangs of frustration and boredom during his exile at Sycamore Ranch. “I was now minister without portfolio,” he writes. “But without a portfolio there was nothing for me to do … I was completely isolated in the government. Work of any sort was kept out of my hands, even the kinds of projects that are ordinarily given to ministers without portfolio … I used to sit in on the cabinet meetings, then go to my office, which was in an unused government building—an empty office in an empty building.”

  Important political figures in Israel had sometimes wound up as ministers without portfolio, but they usually served as intimate advisers to the prime minister, sharing some of the burden of his office. There was no more intimacy between Begin and Sharon, and he was effectively frozen out. The people around Begin were pleased and relieved to be rid of him and fully intended for him never to return to a position of influence.

  Sharon’s strategy for a return would entail a dogged, single-minded march along three parallel tracks. First, he resolved to hang on to his ministerial status, however reduced. By his own account, his loyal and loving aide Uri Dan played an important role in his decision not to quit but to stay on in cabinet as a demeaned and reviled junior minister. Dan had famously assured reporters on the day Sharon resigned that “those who didn’t want him as chief of staff got him back as minister of defense; and those who don’t want him as minister of defense will get him back as prime minister.”6 This prophecy achieved instant immortality in Israeli popular annals. People laughed at it, but they remembered it. Dan persuaded Sharon that as long as he was in the game, his fortunes could rise again, but if he cashed out, the ranks of pushy politicians would close behind him, and he would quickly be forgotten.

  Second, Sharon began assiduously to build his own political base within the Likud. Here, much of the credit goes to a young student leader with a sharp eye and political pretensions of his own. “I sat at the ranch with Arik and Lily,” Yisrael Katz recalls, “and I kept saying, ‘Arik, you don’t understand the first thing about politics. Let me help you build a camp …’ He was fuming, but Lily said, ‘Listen to him. What have you got to lose? He means it for your good.’ ”

  The third track toward rehabilitation opened up the very day Sharon left the Defense Ministry. Time magazine, in a rambling cover story on the Kahan Commission findings, asserted that Sharon, the day before the Sabra and Shatila massacre, had discussed with the Lebanese Phalangists “the need to take revenge” for Gemayel’s assassination.7 Here, too, a young adviser, the lawyer Dov Weissglas, who had represented him before the commission, was key in Sharon’s decision to sue the magazine and in the epic legal battle that followed.

  • • •

  Sharon was not present at the tail end of a long cabinet meeting on August 28, 1983, when Begin, without warning, announced that he was resigning “for personal reasons … I cannot do this job any longer.”8 Sharon had stormed out of the cabinet room earlier, slamming the door behind him, after vehemently attacking his successor at Defense, Moshe Arens, over policy in Lebanon. Begin, who took little part in the proceedings before delivering his bombshell announcement, showed no reaction to Sharon’s antics. Two days later, at the meeting of the coalition leadership with Begin, Sharon took the floor to advise his colleagues “that we put things in proportion.” With all the deep regret that they all felt at Begin’s decision, it did not mean the Likud was disintegrating or losing its way.

  The Likud, and with it the whole political community, were naturally seething with rumor and speculation over why Begin had quit, and much of it focused on Sharon. Increasingly, people were saying that Begin felt he had been led, or perhaps misled, by Sharon into disastrously dragging out what should have been a brief border war into a long, costly, and ultimately unsuccessful campaign. There were more than five hundredb IDF dead at that point.

  Begin had been sinking into a deep depression, not for the first time in his life. In the weeks prior to his announcement he hardly went to the office at all, receiving ministers and officials at his home. After his announcement, he stopped going out altogether. Even his formal resignation letter to the president of the state was delivered by the cabinet secretary. Begin, it was explained, had developed a skin condition that prevented him from shaving, and he would not appear before the president unshaven.9 For the next eight and a half years, until his death in March 1992, he hardly ever appeared in public, rarely spoke on the telephone, and met with only a handful of his closest relatives and aides.

  Sharon had his own theory as to why Begin went into seclusion, but he had the political good sense not to publicize it. Privately, he said that Begin had recoiled, terminally, in the face of his (Sharon’s) anguished accusation in the wake of the cabinet’s decision to accept the Kahan Commission Report. “Menachem, you are handing me over,” Sharon had cried. The words he used, deliberately, were loaded with terrible meaning for the old man. Ata masgir oti (you are handing me over) sent Begin’s mind reeling back to the traumatic pre-state days, to the Haganah’s saison, or hunting season, against Begin’s Irgun men when they tracked them down and handed them over to the British police. This was seen on the right as the most despicable act of national treachery.

  On September 1, the foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, easily defeated the ambitious minister of housing, David Levy, in a leadership contest at Herut’s central committee. As prime minister designate, Shamir quickly renegotiated the coalition agreement with the parties that had partnered Begin in government. In the new cabinet Sharon served, once again, as minister without portfolio, with nothing to do but carp and criticize. The Prime Minister’s Bureau continued to emit toward him the same cold disdain. If anything, it was colder. Shamir, the hard-bitten former underground leader and onetime Mossad operative, never entertained the admiration for Sharon that accounted for half of Begin’s ambivalent attit
ude to him.c

  There was a lower nadir still to come. The Jewish Agency, which had been the government in the making before Israel was set up but bizarrely continued to exist thereafter, retained responsibility for immigration, or aliya. The post of chairman of the Aliya Department fell vacant in January 1974. By dint of the political agreements that carved up the Jewish Agency between the Zionist parties, it was a Herut Party fiefdom.d Sharon wanted it. He could be both a minister and an agency department head, he argued. After devoting himself for years to defense and then to settlement, he wanted now to devote himself to aliya. But the Labor Zionists reacted with predictable horror, as did many of the philanthropists in the United States and elsewhere whose largesse kept the Jewish Agency afloat, and Sharon was defeated by 59 votes to 48 in a secret vote in the Zionist General Council.

  Apart from this misguided sally into the arcane and essentially trivial world of Israel-Diaspora intrigue, Sharon, guided by young Yisrael Katz, was assiduously cultivating the members of the Herut central committee. Increasingly, this 850-man behemoth was becoming the arena that mattered in Israeli public life, the pulsating heart of the party in government, the thriving bourse of power and patronage.

  Sharon’s basic problem, insisted Katz, who rose to become a Knesset member and a minister, was that he thought like a military man. “He was always looking upwards, towards the commander, towards Begin, whom he naturally regarded as the font of authority and power. But in politics you need to look constantly downwards, to the party activists who are the real base of the leaders’ power. That’s what I had to instill in him.”10

  Sharon learned how to call central committee members when they were sick, to send a bunch of flowers, to call again to make sure they were recovering. “I cried with emotion,” one small-town party activist recalled with gushing appreciation, remembering how Sharon had telephoned after his son was injured in school. “I told him it wasn’t really serious, but the next day Lily phoned to see how he was getting on. People say he’s a tough general, with no interest in the troops. But who am I? An ordinary guy, a factory worker.”11

  In local elections in November 1983, Sharon crisscrossed the country, making speeches before small audiences with no chance of attracting national media attention. But the Herut candidates for local councils and the party grassroots activists took note. The other ministers rarely bothered to roll up their sleeves and pitch in. Sharon, by contrast, claimed an endless curiosity to see and learn how people lived. He loved to visit their homes, he said, and share their occasions, joyous or sad. Heartfelt or not, he convincingly carried off this new, ubiquitously solicitous persona.

  He was lucky, too. Shamir’s government effectively collapsed because of the defection of a small coalition ally, and the major parties agreed on an early general election in July 1984. Neither David Levy nor Sharon stood a realistic chance of dislodging Shamir, who, though initially seen as a stopgap appointment, had taken a firm hold of Herut and headed a large and loyal camp of followers. Announcing his decision not to run, Levy publicly proposed that Sharon follow suit and close ranks behind Shamir. But Sharon saw his chance. Confounding the pundits who were unanimously predicting he would barely make double digits, Sharon scored a whopping 42.5 percent of the central committee votes. After the results were announced, the old war chant “Arik, king of Israel,” rose up in a roar from the floor of the hall. Uri Dan did the rounds of the journalists, reminding them of his fantastic, eccentric prediction just thirteen months earlier. It didn’t sound quite so eccentric now. With just another fifty-four votes, one commentator pointed out, Sharon would have become the Likud’s candidate for prime minister right there and then.e

  The national election, on July 23, 1984, was inconclusive. The Labor Party emerged with 44 seats, the Likud with 41, in the Knesset of 120. Each side’s first business was to ensure that the other couldn’t form a government by allying with enough of the smaller parties to reach a “blocking majority.” To this end Sharon appointed himself the Likud’s plenipotentiary to the ultra-Orthodox parties. It was important work. He was shoring up the covenant between the Right and the religious that was the essence of Begin’s political legacy. It was the bedrock of the Likud’s consolidation, first under Begin himself, then under Shamir, and later under Benjamin Netanyahu, as the natural party of power, the leader of the “national camp.”

  Likud politicians were not, by and large, religious. Shamir loved his seafood, Sharon his spareribs, and neither tried to hide it. But the Likud, and especially its Herut component, seemed to feel an easy empathy with the religious, and with the religion, that was conspicuously lacking on the Labor side. Sharon’s particular formulation, which he never tired of rehearsing in conversations with Jew and Gentile alike, was that he was “a Jew first—and then an Israeli.” He would quickly volunteer that he was not himself religiously observant, sometimes adding that he regretted that. The set piece—his aides as prime minister knew it virtually by heart—went on to bemoan the ignorance of the tradition among secular Israeli youth, a growing apathy among young Diaspora Jews, his envy of the Orthodox, who knew “where their grandchildren would be” in decades hence.

  Having blocked each other’s hopes of going it alone, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir resorted to the alternative option, thoroughly distasteful to both of them, of going it together. As Peres recounts it, they would have gotten nowhere without Sharon.

  We met for three straight days, just the two of us, in the royal suite of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The idea was to sit and to talk until a deal emerged. If I tell you that Shamir uttered ten sentences during the whole three days, I’d be exaggerating. He just sat there, silent. And I kept having to think of things to talk about, and to keep talking.

  Finally, [the businessman] Azriel Einav phoned me up. “Sharon wants to meet with you, at my house.” I said okay, and we met. I told him what had been going on and that I was getting tired of talking. Arik asked, “What do you propose?” I suggested an evenly balanced inner cabinet (five Labor Party ministers and five Likud) with the prime ministership rotating halfway through the fifty-month term. He said, “Okay, I’ll fix that up.” He went off to Jerusalem, sat with Shamir, and Shamir agreed to everything. Didn’t change a thing. Shamir was dead scared of Arik. We know that…

  That’s how the government of national unity was created. With Shamir alone it would never have happened. Not a chance in the world. Arik, in this, was first-rate. Absolute straight shooter. Whatever we agreed was agreed.12

  One of the things that was agreed with Sharon that Peres forbore recalling, presumably out of an omertà-like discretion that bound these old-timers despite their decades of political rivalry, was that Sharon would be minister of industry and trade. Formally, the job wasn’t Peres’s to offer. He was supposed to appoint the ministers of his own Labor Party, and Shamir those of the Likud. But Sharon, aware of how dearly Shamir and his people would have liked to leave him out, made sure to cut his own deal with the leader of the other party. In return, Sharon vigorously supported Peres’s demand to serve as prime minister for the first twenty-five months, even though virtually everyone in Likud believed the much-distrusted Peres would renege on the deal when the time came to “rotate” and would somehow engineer new elections.

  In terms of the greasy pole, Industry and Trade was about halfway up. For Sharon at this time, rehabilitation meant his eventual return to one of the three senior ministries: Defense—which was unavailable for the foreseeable future, given the Kahan Commission’s verdict—Foreign Affairs, or the Treasury.13 But he knew that he would need to amass more power in his own party and more popularity throughout the national camp before he could claim one of those three.

  The new government, battling against the raging inflation that threatened to engulf the economy, instituted a price and wage freeze that was expanded, in June 1985, into a draconian Economic Stabilization Plan. Price controls are the purview of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. They need inspectors to imp
ose them. Yisrael Katz, acting for Sharon, made no bones about his quest for loyal Herut men in need of a job to sign on as inspectors. He searched hard and successfully filled all fifty-odd positions with Herut activists.

  Sharon urged Katz to make sure the appointments resonated throughout the party. And sure enough, says Katz, they duly impressed not only the favored fifty and their families and friends but the entire rank and file, who took note of the fact that Sharon was a minister who looked out for the party faithful and most especially for his own loyalists.

  Allegations of more insidious activities by the minister’s bureau began sloshing around the Ministry of Industry and Trade almost from the start of Sharon’s tenure. A persistent one concerned the appointment of party activists as commercial attachés in embassies overseas that created fierce resentment among career ministry staffers who had been waiting and hoping for years for one of these plum positions. In 1987, the long-entrenched staff petitioned the High Court of Justice against the appointment of two of Sharon’s political aides as overseas attachés.

  By then, Sharon’s stewardship at Industry and Trade had become tainted by persistent allegations of conflict of interest, political but also personal. Sharon and his aides were accused of abusing the ministry’s powers to advance the business interests of party cronies and family friends. In at least one case, the minister was suspected of reaping direct and substantial profit for Sycamore Ranch from a policy decision he rammed through. Ran Cohen, a Knesset member of the opposition Meretz Party, petitioned the high court to order the police to open criminal inquiries.f