Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  A year later, on the eve of the rotation, and with many in Labor openly urging Peres to seize on Sharon’s latest insult and bring down the government, Shamir was worried. The Likud must “deal with” Sharon’s words, the soon-to-be prime minister told his Likud cabinet colleagues. Sharon’s words this time were particularly vicious. On Saturday, September 6, Palestinian terrorists had killed twenty-two worshippers in an Istanbul synagogue. They shot them indiscriminately with automatic weapons and later tried to set their bodies on fire. That same night, Sharon issued a statement asserting that “this terrible pogrom is the Palestinians’ answer to Israel’s peace entreaties and Israel’s concessions. [Our] concessions to the PLO … have been interpreted as weakness and have spurred Palestinian terror, backed by Libya and Syria … The incessant pursuit of chimerical peace plans … has contributed to the undermining of Israel’s defensive shield.”

  At cabinet the next morning Sharon had his slick letter of apology ready. “It would be absurd to attribute to me any intention.… [etc.]” But Peres was not having it. He wouldn’t negotiate, he said. Sharon had effectively blamed the murders in Istanbul on the government. He wanted a complete and categorical retraction, and nothing less would do.

  The Likud ministers made it clear to Sharon that he was on his own this time. If Peres fired him, they would not resign. Perhaps Shamir and his aides hoped Sharon would dig in and they would be rid of him. But he quickly drew back and signed an apology cum capitulation penned by Peres’s people. “I hereby clarify that there is no connection between our constant and sincere striving for peace and the murder of Jews,” his statement averred.

  Bizarre though it sounds, and despite this baiting of Peres, Yossi Beilin says unhesitatingly that “Sharon was one of our guys.” There were ten men in the inner cabinet, the body that Peres and Sharon had created in their secret conclave to run an evenly divided country.

  It was supposed to be five and five, but in practice it was six and four. Not in terms of policy, but in terms of atmosphere. Labor’s five were either generals or aides to David Ben-Gurion, or both. Shimon was a virtual general, nurturing all the derring-do memories of the BG years. Rabin, Bar-Lev, and Weizman were real generals. And Yitzhak Navon was BG’s secretary. Sharon felt comfortable as one of the six. He didn’t like any of his four Likud colleagues. He disliked [Moshe] Arens. He had contempt for Moshe Nissim. He had the mother of contempts for David Levy! And he didn’t like or respect Shamir.

  Each of the Labor men had his own long and complicated relationship with Sharon. “They all went back a long time,” says Beilin. He felt like one of the hevra (the good old boys). With most of them it was love-hate. With Bar-Lev it was pure hate, but they kept it in check, radiating coldness at each other but rarely baring their fangs. “It was clear to me that Peres and Rabin didn’t see in Sharon what I and my generation saw in him: the father of the settlements, the unprincipled cynic, the epitome of the ugly Israeli. That doesn’t mean they liked him or that they didn’t understand he was a dangerous man. But they saw him as he saw himself—as one of the hevra.”

  By 1985, Sharon was developing his attitude of aggrieved and aggressive victimhood into a comprehensive narrative of the Lebanon War and of his role in it. He published three lengthy essays in Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest-circulation newspaper by far, reexamining the Lebanon War and concluding that it had been a major triumph. But then came the stab in the back.5

  Between the outbreak of the war and the massacre at the camps, “the Israeli Left, with Labor at its head,” cast aside consensus, preferring instead an opposing doctrine “that might best be called, in the language of our times, ‘nowism.’ ” This of course was Sharon’s slighting reference to Peace Now, the dovish ginger group that had spearheaded protests against the war culminating in the huge demonstration in Tel Aviv after Sabra and Shatila. “ ‘Nowism’ means: peace—now, concessions—now, withdrawal—now … It is the product of non-Zionist Jewish leftism, a conflation of cosmopolitanism, communism, and self-hate … It totally rejects Jewish nationalism and fights against it while giving blind support to Arab nationalism and snivelingly kowtowing before the worst of its leaders.”

  The Zionist Labor movement had always rejected “nowism,” Sharon continued. But now Labor had betrayed itself, its past glory, and its ideological heritage because that was the only way it could attack and malign those who were conducting the war, oust them from power, and get back into power itself.

  In his second essay, Sharon turned to the accusation that he had led the country into a “war of choice” (Hebrew: yesh breira) in Lebanon, whereas all of Israel’s previous wars had been wars of no choice (ein breira). This was sometimes put in terms of Lebanon having been a “political war” while all the others were wars of national defense. This spurious distinction, Sharon argued, was a deliberate perversion of Israel’s history, indeed of all history. Clausewitz himself had determined that war was in essence an extension of policy.

  The Left had simply brainwashed public opinion into believing, or at least mouthing, an assertion that wasn’t true. The truth was that 1982 was a war of yesh breira—and so were the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. “The only war of ein breira was the war in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the war aim was to prove that Jews can die fighting.” In all the subsequent wars fought by the State of Israel, there had been a choice, between fighting for political goals and forgoing those goals. That was the choice that confronted the leadership under Ben-Gurion before Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And, indeed, “the precursors then of today’s nowists” had advocated deferring the declaration or even making do with something less than statehood.

  With the yesh breira canard set straight, by his lights, Sharon now took issue with the gravest charge against him—that he had misled the government and the nation. Another vicious calumny, he asserted in the third and last essay. “Operation Peace for Galilee was the first and only war in which everyone knew, in advance, in full and in detail, what its declared aims were. Everyone understood what the military and political advantages were that we hoped to achieve. Anyone claiming to have been misled (unless he was a complete idiot or completely out of touch) is simply lying.”

  But that, of course, begged—and fudged—the key question. Was the war aim what the government declared or what “everyone understood”? Sharon’s fine distinction seemed to be that Israel didn’t want to extend the war beyond the forty-kilometer line, but it anticipated that that was what would happen, and it made its preparations accordingly, using long pre-laid plans.

  “With the removal of the terrorists from Beirut, Israel achieved a strategic success on the order of significance of the Six-Day War … The defeat of the PLO produced most favorable consequences in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza and among hostile elements within the Israeli-Arab community … Our real strategic and political situation—that based on sober assessments, not on the fads of hostile media—has vastly improved.”

  But the success had starkly eroded, “and the tragedy is that we’ve done it to ourselves. Operation Peace for Galilee succeeded. But it has been made to fail. The blame for this erosion, as for the drawn-out siege of Beirut, as for the demoralization within the army—all that blame rests on the shoulders and on the consciences of the leaders of the Zionist Left.” After the brief period of political consensus at the start of the war,

  the Zionist Left began making common cause with extremist fringe groups. The mass demonstrations they staged, long before Sabra and Shatila, were Yasser Arafat’s one ray of hope. These caused him to stiffen his position, and the result was that the siege went on for longer…

  Collaborating with an unprecedented campaign of slander by the world media, and relying on domestic media that were either bought or cowed, the Zionist Left organized an unprecedented brainwashing campaign against its own government and army. Apart from actually calling on soldiers to refuse to fight, the Left did almost everything possible to undermine the soldiers’ motivation and thei
r belief in the justice of their cause.b

  • • •

  Two years later, in the summer of 1987, Sharon decided to try once again to persuade the establishment and the intelligentsia, if not to see the war his way, then at least to concede that his narrative of it was legitimate. At a lecture marking the fifth anniversary of the war, at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Sharon spoke for three straight hours, reading from a prepared text and referring to large maps he had brought with him. The audience included top army brass, past and present, politicians, academics, and journalists.

  His text purported to be, in large part, his own campaign diary, recording day by day the unfolding of the war and showing how military necessity—and not a nefarious plot—had turned a forty- to forty-five-kilometer, forty-eight-hour incursion into a long and costly war that was still not entirely over. His subtext was an attempt to show that Begin, far from the depressed and introspective hermit he had now become, was fully and vigorously in control throughout the war.

  Sharon was focusing, rightly from his perspective, on what had become by then his critics’ central thesis: that he had duped not only the cabinet but Begin, too, into expanding and extending the war. Begin’s sad decline in the months after the war, the loss of his beloved wife, and his subsequent reclusive retirement and long, poignant silence, all conspired to dramatically improve his retrospective standing in the eyes of the largely dovish intelligentsia. Decades of opposition to all he stood for gave way to sympathy for his personal plight. He shared, it was felt—and indeed suffered—the pain and shame of an unnecessary war.

  And as Begin’s stock rose, Sharon’s fell ever lower. He alone bore the sin of the accursed war, and of the accursed occupation of the Palestinians, too. Begin’s role as the inspiration and the architect of the Likud’s policies seemed to fade, whereas Sharon, who was still on the national stage, albeit not center stage, became “the father of the settlements,” as though Begin were merely their doddery old grandfather, and the sole villain of the Lebanon debacle, as though there had been no prime minister above him, urging him forward or reining him in.

  Twelve times in his lecture Sharon referred to Begin’s decisive role before and during the war. In February 1982, he disclosed, Begin had hosted Bashir Gemayel in Jerusalem. “ ‘It [war] could happen any day,’ ” Sharon quoted the prime minister telling the Phalange leader. “ ‘We won’t be the ones who start.’ There would have to be a provocation ‘that will be clear to the whole world. We have to be sure that the U.S. will support us internationally. For your information, I met yesterday with Mr. Shimon Peres, the leader of the opposition, and we reached a near consensus. If we go into Lebanon, we will have the backing of 105 out of the 120 members of the Knesset. If this does happen, we will advance northward as far as possible.’ This is what Begin said.” Sharon paused to make his point. “And then Begin continued: ‘If your existence is in danger, we will fight … We will act to defend you. I have a consensus with Mr. Peres to this effect, and we have told Secretary of State Haig.’ ”

  On Saturday night, June 5, at the fateful cabinet meeting, Begin had said:

  Today, as the defense minister has said, the intention is to roll back the bastards and to destroy their weapons to a distance of forty kilometers so that no artillery piece of theirs can hit any village of ours. If it becomes necessary to conquer Beirut, the cabinet will decide on it. We must, in this operation, ensure once and for all complete tranquillity for the northern towns and villages.

  This statement by Begin, at this crucial moment, was powerful corroboration of Sharon’s contention—the leitmotif of his lecture—that Peace for Galilee, with its forty-kilometer limit, was understood by all concerned, and certainly by Begin, to be a first stage in what might develop into a wider war, “Rolling Pines,” as he now termed it.

  Sharon highlighted other key interventions by Begin in the running of the war. On June 10, Begin had complained at cabinet about “people hostile to us” who were accusing the government of cheating over the forty-kilometer line. “It is so typical,” Begin said. “We’re Jews—so we cheated. Whom did we cheat?! What is this nonsense? What do they want? Can you measure a battlefield with a ruler?” Much later, on August 1, after long weeks of siege, Sharon quoted Begin telling the cabinet, “If there’s no choice, we will enter Beirut. It is absolutely wrong for us to say that we will not [enter Beirut].”

  Sharon’s lecture triggered an outpouring of predictable reactions. It was criticized for tendentiousness and selectivity. All the old arguments resurfaced, but this time on the back of a version that Sharon himself had carefully crafted. This was pretty much as he had planned and hoped. A resurgence of the debate would help his long-term rehabilitation: it would remind people that he had a case, that it wasn’t all black-and-white. The whole burden of a war that went terribly wrong could not be dumped exclusively on him. There was a powerful prime minister above him. There was a cabinet. And there was the army, too, which had unfortunately not succeeded in carrying out all its operational plans, certainly not in the time originally allotted by the prewar planning.

  What Sharon neither planned nor hoped for was the duel that developed, in the wake of the lecture, between him and one of his most implacable foes, Menachem Begin’s son, Benny. This was particularly galling for Sharon, because the former prime minister himself, pressed on the phone by reporters the day after Sharon’s lecture, had declined to comment on it. “The time has not yet come for me to say my piece about the war. I am not yet ready for that. When I’m ready, I’ll respond.”6 No denial, no rebuttal. No criticism.

  Benny Begin built his attack solely on the cabinet communiqué of June 5 and on his father’s statements to the leaders of Labor and to the Knesset the next day, all of which referred to the forty-kilometer line. He failed to take up any of Sharon’s references in his lecture to Menachem Begin’s detailed discussion, before, on, and after June 5, of the broader war aims. He did not grapple with the prima facie impression that these references to Begin provided—of an active, informed, and aggressive war leader. In Benny Begin’s version of the war, there was no war leader, no prime minister, just Sharon, duping “the government,” misleading the nation and the world.

  Although Menachem Begin himself said nothing, Ze’ev Schiff, the preeminent military analyst, observed in Haaretz that it was unlikely “that Benny Begin said what he said … without his father’s agreement and consent.”7 But if Sharon read that at the time, four years later he apparently forgot it. On July 11, 1991, out of a clear blue sky, Sharon filed suit for libel against Uzi Benziman, a journalist, for writing in Haaretz that he had duped Begin in the Lebanon War and that Begin knew it. Haaretz was sued as co-defendant. The lawyer, once again, was Sharon’s now-longtime confidant Dov Weissglas.

  There had been over the years—as the defendants pointed out during the trial—846 instances in which journalists and authors had made the same or similar allegations in print. Why Benziman? Mibi Mozer, a leading libel lawyer who acted for both Haaretz and Benziman in this case, had no doubt there was personal animosity involved. Benziman had published a hostile biography of Sharon in 1985, titled (in Hebrew) Does Not Stop on Red, and innumerable articles critical of him. “Our sense was that Sharon had an agenda: to catch Benziman out.”

  Sharon filed suit in the Jerusalem District Court, claiming half a million shekels ($208,000) in damages. The two sides sparred over whether Begin should be called to give evidence early, before the case was ready to go to trial, because of his advanced age and ill health. Before that was resolved, Begin died, on March 9, 1992.

  In his book on the trial, Nothing but the Truth, published in 2002, Benziman describes how his disappointment gradually turned to despair as source after source declined to provide him and Mozer with signed affidavits and begged, citing all manner of reasons, not to be called to give evidence in court. “Public figures, politicians past and present, and senior officers in the reserves all banded together in
a conspiracy of silence over the Lebanon War. They did not want to get involved in giving evidence. They would rather that the deception that had taken place in the war, and that they knew about from up close (some of them had even discussed it in the media), remain unchallenged. Israel’s political and military elites are full of cowards who are afraid to tell the truth about the Lebanon War so as not to come into conflict with Ariel Sharon.” Dan Meridor, the cabinet secretary and close Begin confidant, said he didn’t want to testify and that anyway his testimony wouldn’t help the defendants. “On the face of it, I had good reason to be angry with Meridor,” writes Benziman. “He knew that what I had written was true.”

  Benny Begin came to Benziman’s rescue. He was reluctant at first but eventually supplied an affidavit that, in Benziman’s own words, “was everything I could have dreamed of. It was a complete confirmation of what I had written and a dramatic description of how, for the first time, he had heard his father speak in a way that made it clear that Sharon had indeed deceived him.”