Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  They responded by kicking the Likud and its allies out of office, after fifteen years in power. Shamir miscalculated the Russian immigrants’ reaction to his steadfastness, and that was part of his undoing. The newcomers pouring into the country from the disintegrating U.S.S.R. were indeed hard-line on the whole: they wanted Israel big and strong and had little sympathy for the Palestinians, long backed by the Soviet regime. But essentially they were pragmatists. The messianic sentiments of the Emunim settlers were alien to them. They looked askance at the worsening relationship with the United States, especially as it threatened the funding for their housing and absorption. In significant numbers, they voted for Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor. Bush and Baker finally recommended to Congress to award Israel, under Labor rule, the $10 billion in loan guarantees.

  HOUSING BOOM

  For Sharon, the vicarious battle against Bush and Baker was just one bruising fight among the many that filled his two frenetic years as housing minister. Challenged with a sudden, hugely welcome, but also hugely daunting influx of Soviet immigrants, Sharon fought against building regulations, he fought against planning laws and zoning commissions, he fought accusations of cronyism and political preferment, he rode roughshod over budgetary restraints and fought the minister of finance and his mandarins who held the purse strings—and in the end he fought a bitter, ugly brawl with the state comptroller, Miriam Ben-Porat, a stern ex-judge charged with supervising proper governance and administration.

  By now Sharon had become something of a fixture in the annual state comptroller’s reports, just as he was a regular target of newspaper investigations, of parliamentary questions, and of criminal complaints to the attorney general and to the police. Stories of pork-barrel politics blurred and fused with allegations of personal malfeasance.g

  In countless allegations against him over the years, his line of defense was that contrary to the suspicions about him he had acted solely in the public or the national interest. He or his aides would usually bolster this defense by asserting that those impugning his motives or besmirching his actions were themselves politically motivated.

  Time after time, Sharon emerged from his legal scrapes unscathed, having been granted the benefit of the doubt. Public reaction ranged from admiration to disgust. Many Israelis came to associate Sharon with corruption. A leading academic jurist, looking back, said he loathed Sharon for single-handedly undermining the ethics of Israel’s public life. In his youth, this professor admitted, Sharon was his idol. Others, perhaps less starry-eyed about Sharon earlier, and certainly less starry-eyed about Israeli public life, tended to conclude that Sharon did what other politicians did—only more so.

  Sharon evoked this full range of reactions in his constant tussles over political appointments as minister of industry and trade. With his disarming forthrightness, he said it was in the public interest to see Herut people appointed to top jobs in government companies, because they had been discriminated against in the past. Apart from directorships and top jobs, a solicitous political patron like Sharon, installed in a powerful ministry, could also help clients, supporters, and other favorites with more oblique forms of preferment. Thus, for instance, in late 1985 two newcomers suddenly surfaced among the select coterie of iron importers, and both, according to newspaper reports, were devoted Herut Party activists. “These particular licensees don’t seem to have any knowledge of the iron business at all,” an opposition Knesset member observed. “The only thing they know how to do is to sell their iron licenses to someone else. The licenses are worth $150,000.”

  Sharon asserted, “These licensees are not close to me personally, and quite frankly I don’t even know if they’re close to me politically … I don’t even know these people.”16

  Some of the allegations cut closer to the bone. Sycamore Ranch was one of the country’s largest producers of mutton and lamb. Muslims particularly like to eat mutton or lamb for the iftar, the meal eaten at sunset after a day of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, and during the three-day feast of Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan. The price of mutton and lamb regularly rose by some 25 percent during this period. To keep it from rising even more, governments in the past had always permitted the import of up to a thousand tons of frozen lamb ahead of Ramadan. In September 1986, Haaretz noted that Sharon had forbidden such import ever since he became minister of industry and trade, and this despite repeated appeals from importers. The director general of the ministry, Yehoshua Forer, was quoted as saying, “There’s nothing to talk about. The minister won’t allow any lamb import.”

  In January 1987, Forer’s successor, Yoram Belizovsky, was quoted as admitting privately that Sharon had vetoed an interministerial committee’s proposal to permit the import of six hundred tons of lamb. Unnamed mandarins in the Treasury volunteered that the decision would profit Sycamore Ranch to the tune of $60,000 for each Ramadan season. Sharon had already been in office for three Ramadans. The Meretz Knesset member Ran Cohen went to State Comptroller Maltz and to the police.

  The police were reluctant to open a criminal inquiry against Sharon. Cohen petitioned the high court. Not good enough, said the justices. “There’s got to be meat on it.” This attempt at humor signaled to Sharon that once again he was off the hook. He redoubled his attacks on the “petty political foes” who had latched onto his beloved sheep and lambs in order to impugn him.17h

  The sheep were back under public scrutiny three years later. This time the issue was milk. The Milk Council, which carefully controlled production across the country, allotted a generous 33,000-liter quota of sheep’s milk to Sycamore Ranch for 1990. Other, more veteran sheep farmers wanted to know why, especially since they had had their own annual quotas cut back by the council because of a surfeit of sheep’s milk and sheep’s cheese flooding the Israeli market at the time.

  The Milk Council, it turned out, had been pressured by the director general of the Ministry of Agriculture, Yehezkel Zakai, who just happened to have been given a guided tour of Sycamore Ranch by the owner shortly before the decision was made. Zakai explained that Sycamore’s sheep dairy was so well run that the ministry wanted to hold it up as a model for the industry.

  All these dubious episodes were small potatoes compared with the vast budgets that Sharon was accused of squandering and the huge contracts that he was suspected of channeling to political supporters when the gates of the Soviet Union suddenly burst open and hundreds of thousands of Jews flooded into Israel, needing to be housed. He was accused of casting to the winds every principle of basic good administration, with the resulting wastage of taxpayer millions. Stories of mismanagement on a massive scale blended with tales of misfeasance by the minister and his acolytes as hundreds of new housing projects went up around the country. None of the accusations and suspicions against Sharon himself gelled into a criminal investigation, much less an indictment. He brushed them all off as vicious and petty, leveled by small-minded people with chips on their shoulders, people incapable of rising to the historic occasion of the miraculous, unanticipated Soviet aliya.

  He had a point: the dramatic reemergence of the huge Soviet Jewish Diaspora, after decades of isolation behind the Iron Curtain, was an event of sufficient import for Israel that even hallowed zoning laws and building regulations might be bent a little in the rush to house them. And he was probably right, retrospectively, in that he couldn’t have known in 1990–1991 that the huge wave of immigration would actually peak in 1991 and fall sharply the following year.i No one knew at that time how many Jews there actually were in Russia and its satellite states, let alone how many of them wanted to leave, or how many of those wanted to come to Israel, or indeed how many of those who did come would want to stay.j

  He had only himself to blame, though, for the almost instinctive suspicion among many Israelis that he was exploiting these lofty goals for his own base purposes. His incessant brushes with the law enforcement agencies over the years now fed a widespread presumption that if Arik was embarked on a splurge of co
nstruction, a lot of hangers-on would be making a lot of money on the side, and he himself would be amassing, if not money (though some whispered that he was), then naked political power. His political enemies were aghast at the thought that the thousands of new arrivals might come to regard him as their savior and their champion.

  Sharon’s task on assuming his new post in the new government, in June 1990, was compounded by a rash of tent cities that sprang up around the country at this time, populated by homeless young families. Many of the tent dwellers were unemployed, but even those in jobs found it hard to get a mortgage and harder still to keep up the interest payments on it. Almost all were Sephardic, whereas almost all the Soviet Jews now beginning to pour in were Ashkenazick—a fertile furrow for ethnic tension to grow. Sharon, in a series of sweeping statements, undertook that everyone would have a roof over his or her head before the winter. He set his ministry officials to renting two- and three-star hotels and youth hostels in kibbutzim. These were to provide temporary accommodation pending the arrival of thirty thousand trailers and prefabricated homes that he proceeded to order from producers around the world. At the same time, tens of thousands of new apartments would begin to be built by private contractors, to government specifications, at government-selected sites around the country.

  The Treasury mandarins insisted that imported trailers and prefabs would cost too much foreign currency. And the prefabs would wilt under strong Israeli sun and rain and turn into instant slums. At a stormy cabinet meeting in August they got the order reduced by one-third. But the fight went on. The Treasury warned importers that it would not pay for the foreign homes if the Housing Ministry did not ensure they met official Israeli building standards. The same would apply to domestic construction companies, Minister of Finance Modai ruled.

  By this time, would-be importers and would-be constructors were flocking to the trough, sensing the rich profits to be made from the imminent splurge of government contracts. Some were neither importers nor contractors; they were small-time artisans—plumbers, plasterers, electricians—looking to get into the big time. In place of knowledge or experience, they deployed their membership in the Likud central committee, or their links to friends or relations who were members, to further their candidacies for the ministry tenders now pouring out. Quick-witted political aides became builders overnight, or, if not builders, then at least middlemen, arranging deals between builders and the ministry.18 Many of the large and established construction companies elbowed their way forward, too, determined to take their rightful place in Israel’s biggest-ever building bonanza.

  “The Treasury is not letting me work,” Sharon complained in an interview in September 1990. The officials there were willfully undermining his efforts, he said. They were phoning the builders and the importers and warning them that they wouldn’t get a penny. All he was trying to do was to shorten processes, cut through red tape, sidestep bureaucracy. But the petty bureaucrats were fighting him.

  Sharon scored a significant victory in November, when the cabinet approved “closed tenders” for the construction projects. This put unprecedented power in the hands of the Ministry of Housing. It could henceforth limit tenders to selected companies or, in some cases, forgo tenders altogether and decide on one particular company for a specific project.

  It was a bonanza without risk. Sharon undertook on the government’s behalf that every apartment built in “the periphery”—that is, the north and south of the country—which the contractor failed to sell would be bought back by the government at its full market value. Here, too, he ran into vehement opposition from the Treasury, which warned, rightly, as it turned out, that he would saddle the state with a huge inventory of unsold homes. The key to the intelligent selection of sites for immigrant housing was jobs, the civil servants argued. Sharon was building in the wrong places. There was no point building in the periphery if employment prospects for the Soviet newcomers were all concentrated in the center, around the Tel Aviv megalopolis. The immigrants could hardly be forced to live in the boondocks, and as a result the homes built there would remain empty.

  But Sharon refused to see this issue from a purely economic perspective. Israel would hopefully increase its population by 20 percent over the next few years, he pointed out. It was important to use this opportunity to build up the outlying areas of the country. He charged around the country in his ministerial Volvo sedan, from building site to building site, welcomed at each site by foremen in hard hats and architects with maps and technical drawings. They spread them out on the hood of the car, or on wooden trestle tables, like in the army. Sharon and his aides pored over them. The ministry’s PR photographers clicked and whirred. Ben-Gurion had dreamed of the Negev as the great industrial and technological powerhouse; this was the chance to make that dream happen. The Galilee had become an area where Arab citizens outnumbered Jews; now was the time to redress that balance. Sharon had long argued for a string of new towns and villages to be built along the length of the pre-1967 border, where a major new highway was planned; the Soviet newcomers could be encouraged to live in these new places.

  A close aide, looking back, said Sharon was consumed at this time with the consciousness that, once again, destiny had sought him out and placed in his hands the future of the country. “He kept repeating that this was a unique opportunity not only to change the demography of the country but to change its geography. And he did what he said. Beersheba in the south literally doubled its population as a result of his policy. Towns in the north like Carmiel, Safed, Upper Nazareth, grew beyond recognition in those two years.”19

  By November 1991, Treasury officials were threatening to prosecute Housing Ministry officials for signing contracts that had not been approved by the Treasury budgets department, and Sharon was sounding the way he did in the Lebanon War. “All the projects were submitted to the cabinet for approval,” he insisted. “Every one of them was marked on a map, and the map was appended to the cabinet’s decision.” The Treasury was a place of “insensitivity, evil, and jealousy.” Moreover, there was no glut of unlived-in homes. Quite the contrary.

  Nevertheless, by the year’s end even Sharon could not completely ignore the shrinking projections for immigration, and he reluctantly agreed to a reduction of the home-building target in the 1992 state budget from forty thousand to fifteen thousand. Burdened but unbowed by a whopping budget deficit, Sharon and his ministry braced for a special report from the state comptroller on their efforts to house the immigrants.

  It was published in April 1992, just weeks before the election. “The ministry did not seriously examine the financial creditworthiness of the companies it was considering for construction contracts,” the comptroller wrote. “It awarded sizable contracts to companies with negligible paid‑up share capital … to companies that did not meet its own criteria … to companies whose ability to honor such contracts was patently dubious, even in the ministry’s own opinion.” The report did not explicitly allege political preference, but that was the obvious implication.

  For Sharon, all this stickling for bureaucratic propriety was part of the petty-mindedness. But the comptroller went on to hoist him with his own petard. Even by his lights, his accelerated building policy had been a woeful mess. Time and again, by offering the construction companies tempting incentives, he had got them to complete the apartment blocks in record time—only to find that the ministry had neglected to coordinate all the requisite infrastructure work. As a result, the homes were not ready to be lived in, despite the speed with which they had gone up. The state had paid over the top for the construction, but it might as well have saved the money.20

  Worse yet, the quality of the building was often inadequate or downright shoddy, even though the ministry had a veritable army of inspectors in its pay whose job it was to ensure that the standards laid down in the regulations were met. Here, again, as with the fly-by-night construction companies, the allegation was between the lines: the inspectors owed their jobs not to any pro
fessional qualifications but rather to their political connections. In one case of a “repairs coordinator,” the comptroller wrote, inquiries by her office had established “that the repairs coordinator had no previous experience whatsoever, either in work in general or in repairs work in particular. He had just recently graduated from university in political science and sociology.” He was, however, “an active member of the Likud Party branch in Jerusalem and regularly attended party conventions.”

  A similar saga of departmental incompetence had blighted the vastly expensive importation of trailers and mobile homes, the comptroller continued. At the end of the day, many of these units remained unlived in, because the ministry had failed to orchestrate all the planning and administration required for their proper installation. They were ordered and shipped over at top speed, with scant attention to their price or to regulations regarding quality—and then “languished on the outside of building sites or in storage centers” for months on end. “The lesson of all this,” the comptroller concluded—and her words resounded through the media—“is that ends do not justify means. There is no justification for a government ministry, using government money, to flout laws and regulations.”

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