by David Landau
Courts, comptrollers, police, and prosecutors—they were all to become an awkwardly familiar presence in Sharon’s public life over the next two decades. But in January 1985, two years into his quest for rehabilitation, he could justly allow himself a moment of grim gratification from a singular judicial victory. Sharon, still balking at the Kahan Commission’s condemnation of his perverse disregard of the obvious danger of allowing the Phalange into the camps, had decided to contest Time magazine’s far more heinous accusation that he had actually encouraged the massacre. Time’s report claimed that the unpublished part of the Kahan Commission Report contained the incriminating evidence against Sharon.
In the Israeli media, Sharon’s case, which rested on the critical distinction between passive negligence and active incitement, was widely recognized as just—but still dismissed as disingenuous. Instead of sympathy for his cause, the press devoted its column inches and its ire to the money that the drawn-out proceedings in New York were costing the taxpayer. Who was footing the lawyers’ fees and the other legal costs? Sharon, Lily, aides, guards, and sometimes Omri, too, crisscrossed the Atlantic, stayed in upmarket Manhattan hotels, ate in chic restaurants. The media, and in their wake the politicians, dissected these doings with increasingly jaundiced eyes.
Sharon began discreetly tapping rich American supporters for help in the summer of 1983. He bolstered his fund-raising efforts with an application to the Exemptions Committee, headed by a retired high-court judge, which considered requests from elected officials and civil servants to earn income outside their official positions. Sharon requested, and received, a green light to lecture abroad for money.
At the suggestion of the New York judge, the parties agreed that Justice Kahan himself be asked to address the core question of whether the unpublished parts of his report provided a factual basis for Time’s allegation. “In none of the documents or testimony,” Kahan replied unequivocally, “is there any evidence or suggestion that Minister Sharon had any discussion with the Gemayel family or with any other Phalangist, at Bikfaya or elsewhere, in which Minister Sharon discussed the need to avenge the death of Bashir Gemayel.”
On January 16, 1985, after two days of deliberation, the jury gave its first verdict, on the defamation question, saying that Time had indeed defamed Sharon. “We find that the paragraph in context states that, in permitting the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila, Minister Sharon consciously intended to permit the Phalangists to take acts of revenge extending to the deliberate killing of non-combatants in the camps.”
The jury held against Time, too, on the question of falsity—the second of the three verdicts that the federal judge Abraham Sofaer instructed it to render. Sharon made the most of the moment, sensing, perhaps, that it would be the zenith for him. “What has been proved now is that Time Magazine lied … They libeled not just a blood libel against me but against the state of Israel and against the Jewish People. We showed clearly that we spoke the truth, and Time Magazine lied … Had I not fought it, their terrible lie would have become unchallenged fact … That is why I see in the jury’s second decision a great moral success for all of us.” He told reporters he would be going home straight after the third verdict, regardless of what it was. If he won on malice and was eventually awarded pecuniary damages, they would all go to a fund to protect Jewish rights around the world. He had not sued to make money and would not keep any of it if he won any.
But on the issue of malice, the jury came down on Time’s side. “To the question, ‘Has the plaintiff proved by clear and convincing evidence that a person or persons at Time Incorporated responsible for either reporting, writing, editing or publishing the paragraph at issue did so with actual malice in that he, she or they knew, at the time of publishing any statement we have found was false and defamatory, that the defamatory statement was false or had serious doubts as to its truth?’ To that question, we find: The answer is no, plaintiff has not so proved by clear and convincing evidence.”g
Sharon put the best face on it, repeating the words of gratification he had voiced after the second verdict. He could draw encouragement from Begin, who, from his seclusion, issued a generous statement: “Ariel Sharon has won a complete moral victory. The issue was never one of monetary consideration, as I believe and as Sharon himself said. From the moral viewpoint, there is no doubt, in my view, that Sharon won an absolute victory.”
American law’s requirement of actual malice in libel cases involving public officials is not shared by most other legal systems, including Israel’s. Sharon’s suit against Time in Tel Aviv, therefore, given the New York court’s verdict on defamation and malice, became at last the slam dunk that he had hoped for when the saga began. Time agreed to an out-of-court settlement, paying Sharon $200,000. This was ten times more than the highest sum of damages ever awarded for libel in Israel to date. This time there was no talk of a fund for the Jewish people; Sharon kept the lot.
* * *
a On September 22, Amnon Rubinstein, MK (Shinui), said in the Knesset: “When these things happen to Palestinian children, to Arab children, the only thing he [the prime minister] has to say is that goyim kill goyim. This is outrageous. It will be quoted; it will be recorded and held against us in the annals of history. It is intolerable. Regardless of party affiliation, all of us should regard it as such.” Begin’s reply was that his words had been misquoted. “Dr. Rubinstein … has reached a hair-raising conclusion: that I said—of course this was an inaccurate leak, but never mind—‘goyim murdered goyim’ ” (The Need to Set Up a Commission of Inquiry into the Massacre at the Refugee Camps in Beirut, Knesset Record, September 22, 1982).
b At the first cease-fire the number of IDF fatalities was 214. By the end of the siege of Beirut the figure had risen to some 300, with another 1,500 injured (Morris, Righteous Victims, 705). All told, from June 1982 to June 1985 the IDF suffered 650 dead and nearly 3,000 injured (ibid., 521). Two explosions, one an accident, the other a terror attack, accounted for 103 of the Israeli dead. On November 11, 1982, a gas leak caused an explosion at the Israeli security offices in Tyre that brought down the entire building, killing 75 Israeli servicemen and 15 Lebanese prisoners. Almost exactly a year later, also in Tyre, a car packed with explosives blew up outside the IDF headquarters. This killed 28 Israelis and 31 Lebanese. The bombing came two weeks after the similar attacks on American and French forces in Beirut that took the lives of 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers. All three attacks were attributed to Imad Mugniya, later leader of Hezbollah’s military wing and a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He was eventually killed in a car bombing in Damascus in February 2008, an assassination widely attributed to the Mossad.
c During the Lebanon War, foreign minister and defense minister had barely been on speaking terms. Shamir’s director general at the Foreign Ministry, David Kimche, whom Sharon had come to know in his previous capacity as deputy head of the Mossad, served as the preferred channel of communication between the two senior ministers (Kimche interview).
d Herut and the Liberal Party, though joined in the Likud, still maintained separate structures at this time.
e In the subsequent months Sharon took particular pleasure in pulling up aides who referred to “the 42 percent.” “Er, hm … point five,” he would hector, mock didactically. “Forty-two point five. Don’t let’s forget the point five.”
f See p. 269.
g For a fuller account of the Sharon against Time Inc. trial, please see www.arik-davidlandau.com.
CHAPTER 8 · WARS OLD AND NEW
For much of the decade after the Lebanon War, Yitzhak Shamir served either as prime minister or as vice prime minister. He was finally defeated in 1992 by Yitzhak Rabin, and Labor replaced Likud as the party in power. Three days later, in an uncharacteristic lapse into momentary candor, Shamir admitted to an interviewer that he had always intended to drag out peace negotiations indefinitely while vigorously expanding the Jewish settlements in the West Bank an
d Gaza.1 Later he denied having said it, but everyone, at home and abroad, believed the original story rather than the denial.2 President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz and President Bush and Secretary of State Baker all tried hard to prod things along. But Shamir was rocklike in his intransigence. After Desert Storm, Baker managed to drag him to Madrid, where a Middle East peace conference offered a glimmer of hope for the future of the region.
For the “peace camp” in Israel, Shamir’s decade was a lost decade, a decade of diplomatic disappointments that brought on the Palestinian intifada, or uprising. For the “national camp,” it was time well spent, building up and consolidating the network of settlements that Begin and Sharon had spread across the Palestinian territories during the Likud’s early years in government.
For both camps, the decade was one of intense, unremitting struggle over their very different visions for the future of the country. A remarkable paradox held sway in public life: Likud-Labor unity governments ruled for years (1984–1990), yet beneath that formal, fragile facade there was no letup in the ideological battle that divided Israeli society. If anything, the divisions deepened and widened. They reflected not only politics but religion, culture, and class, too. Increasingly, the “peace camp” represented the better-off, better-educated Ashkenazi middle class and intelligentsia. The “national camp,” led by the Likud, succeeded in bringing together under one political roof groups that felt themselves excluded from “the elite”: the mainly poor, mainly Sephardi working class in run-down city suburbs and small provincial towns; the growing ultra-Orthodox sects; the large modern-Orthodox community whose leaders had abandoned their historic alliance with Labor and whose ideological vanguard, the West Bank settlers, now provided ideological fervor for the whole “national camp.”
For Sharon, it was a decade of frustration and fury. The first five years were suffused with bitter recrimination in the aftermath of a war that refused to reach closure. In his relentless pursuit both of rehabilitation and of renewed political power, Sharon exploited the sharpening polarization of Israeli public life. He cast himself as the wounded champion of the Right, unfairly brought down by the Left. Relentlessly, he rammed the controversy around the Lebanon War into that Left-Right, dove-hawk mold. Albeit Begin, the historic leader of the hawks, had ultimately abandoned him, forcing him out of the Defense Ministry, but that was an aberration, engineered by a cabal of closet doves who surrounded the former prime minister. Some of them, Sharon maintained, continued to influence the new Likud leader, Yitzhak Shamir. He, Sharon, was the authentic, reliable, and unswerving leader of the hawks. That was why he had been brought down; that was why he must rise again.
But the Lebanon War and its interminable aftermath reinforced Sharon’s image in the minds of many Israelis, even in the “national camp,” as a warmonger, and not a very astute or successful one at that. Sabra and Shatila added a dimension of monstrosity and of abiding shame. For all their deprecation of this judgment of him, Sharon’s party rivals never balked at using it against him. He was, they snidely opined, unelectable. His unremitting attacks on Shamir, displaying both disloyalty and extremism, made their opinion all the more persuasive.
Sharon’s constant accusation was that he had been betrayed by his political enemies and allies alike, and that in betraying him, they were betraying the most fundamental interests of the state itself. By stabbing him in the back, his detractors were unraveling the fiber of national solidarity. By accusing him of leading the army into an unnecessary war, they were courting the risk of every future war being branded unnecessary by men who lacked the patriotism to fight it.
In a television appearance after the massacre, he steered the conversation away from events at the camps to an earlier, hitherto-unpublished episode: his decision during the war, together with Chief of Staff Eitan, not to mobilize an entire reserve infantry brigade because of mutinous murmurings within its ranks. The interviewer was aghast; this could undermine the whole ethos of the citizen army. That was precisely the point, Sharon said. Criticism was all well and good. He was all for it. He absolutely wanted the massacre to be investigated. All the way. Leave no stone unturned. “Our strength as a nation is our ability to speak freely. I believe in that. But! But there have to be limits. Everything has to have limits. We face a hostile world. We’re still sitting on a powder keg. And I want you to know that this thing makes me tremble. The fact that I had to sit with the chief of staff and decide not to mobilize a reserve brigade of the IDF.”
There, then, was the real danger: the enemy within. A straight line led from criticism to mutiny. From criticizing him to endangering the very survival of the nation. So what to do? asked the interviewer. Ban all criticism? “Criticism is legitimate,” Sharon replied. “But there is a limit to what a nation can take, a limit to what it can accuse itself of. A nation must understand that. It must understand that it has to survive. If we want to keep on living, then, alongside the moral thing—to prevent reprehensible things from happening—there must be a unified stand. We must all stand together. People among us must not help our enemies to destroy us.”3
Part of the “enemy within” was, of course, the media. “You all know what the media are; I don’t need to tell you,” Sharon roared to a crowd of young rightists in downtown Jerusalem in September 1983. “PLO! PLO!” came the answering roar. He told them, nevertheless. The media were “hypocrites, champions of self-destruction, corroders of the nation, suppliers of fuel to anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic machines from Damascus to Moscow.” The Kahan Commission was another of his regular targets. It had “put weapons into the hands of Israel haters throughout the world,” he told the Jerusalem crowd. “A terrible injustice has been done to the Jewish people, to the State of Israel, and also to me personally.”a
“He was simply paranoid. There’s no other word for it.” Yossi Beilin, who served as cabinet secretary for Shimon Peres’s half of the rotating prime ministership (September 1984 to October 1986), looked back bemused at “the kind of friendship” that developed between Sharon and himself during that peculiar government, which Sharon had been so instrumental in creating:
He used to drop into my office almost every week, before the cabinet meeting, sit down, and immediately start slagging off other people. “Yossi, you should know, so-and-so is dangerous. He’s out to get you. He’ll stab you in the back …” It was a friendship grounded in his unshakable conviction that everyone was against him. People were against me too, he explained. But I was too naive to understand, and he, because of our friendship, would warn me and try to protect me. I came to see him as a haunted man. A haunted man. Convinced that the whole world was plotting against him, that he must fight them, constantly fight them.
At cabinet, he always fell asleep after half an hour and awoke only when food was brought in. “He would write me cute notes, ‘Yossi, did I miss anything important?’ The subtext, of course, was that in his eyes nothing was important if he wasn’t involved in it, preferably running it. When the food came, however mediocre it was, it focused his entire attention. He would reach out a huge hand and load up with sandwiches or cookies, whatever was on offer, and proceed to eat it all down with deliberate concentration. ‘Eat something. Why don’t you eat?’ he would whisper to me, an expression of his friendship.”4
Three times during Peres’s twenty-five months as premier, Sharon provoked the Labor prime minister into almost sacking him. Presumably, he thought this tightrope trick scored him points inside the Likud. Arguably, he was right. But unarguably, it weakened him in the country, reinforcing his image as an obtuse and foulmouthed extremist. Since Sharon was not obtuse but highly intelligent, and not naturally foulmouthed but polite by instinct and education, a certain mystery hangs over this behavior. Surely he and his advisers understood that at the end of the day the Likud would not vote in as its leader a man who was seen as rude and extreme and therefore unelectable as prime minister? Where was the sophistication behind this strategy of extremism? Or were the perio
dic explosions of spleen not wholly under his own or his political counselors’ control?
In August 1985, Sharon decided to share his impressions of the cabinet room with a group of Irgun veterans. “You cannot imagine the hatred for the settlers in Judea and Samaria that comes through at cabinet meetings,” he told the rightist old-timers. The government, which was trying to stop settlers from taking over more houses in the center of Hebron, was conducting a “white paper policy,” he declared. The reference was to Britain’s infamous White Paper of 1939 drastically limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine, just on the eve of World War II. There could hardly be a more infuriating comparison for this audience, indeed for any Zionists. But Sharon had more. “Peres and his gang can jump as far as I’m concerned,” he asserted, using a Hebrew sexual vulgarism.
Labor ministers urged Peres to fire Sharon. Shamir warned that would trigger a full-blown cabinet crisis if he did. Sharon delivered a wishy-washy apology of sorts. Peres proclaimed that such unbridled attacks made it impossible to continue with the unity government. But he did continue—until three months later, when Sharon struck again, this time blasting Peres’s peace efforts as underhanded and pusillanimous. The cabinet was being kept in the dark. He, Sharon, had demanded that Israel insist on the removal of the PLO offices from Amman as a precondition for talks with Jordan, “but I was answered with cynicism.” It was “no accident” that Peres did not explicitly rule out the PLO as a negotiating partner. Peres’s weak-kneed policies were also endangering the peace with Egypt.
Peres drafted a formal letter of dismissal and leaked a facsimile of it to the press. Shamir again threatened to bring down the unity government, but this time Peres called his bluff. Now it was Sharon’s turn to sweat. “I find it appropriate to clarify,” he meekly announced, “that if things I said were interpreted as a personal insult against the prime minister, I hereby apologize to him.” But he insisted on his right to hold his views “on critical policy issues.” Not good enough, said Peres’s bureau. Sharon duly added, live on camera: “I support the government’s policy as outlined in its Basic Policy document. Of course, I regret the harsh expressions that I used.” Still not good enough. Peres informed a special cabinet meeting of his decision to dismiss Sharon. Behind the scenes, Peres drew up the text of an apology that he wanted Sharon to sign. One key sentence expressed Sharon’s “confidence” in Peres. Sharon said it was “demeaning.” But his support in cabinet was growing noticeably ragged. Nobody wanted to lose their jobs, and risk elections, over Sharon’s lip. Sharon wrote another letter, almost groveling.
