Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  For Netanyahu, there was no more wiggle room. Years later, he looked back with disarming frankness:

  NETANYAHU: It wasn’t a particularly insightful thing of me to do. If you don’t want to appoint him, don’t appoint him.

  QUESTION: So why did you?

  NETANYAHU: Well, because essentially I had no coalition [without David Levy, who led a three-man faction].

  QUESTION: And when you said to David Levy, look, you’ve been in cabinets a long time, you know it’s impossible to work with this person—what did he say?

  NETANYAHU: I didn’t say that.

  QUESTION: You didn’t?

  NETANYAHU: No.

  QUESTION: But Levy must have asked you, why are you taking this position, why can’t you give him a job?

  NETANYAHU: He didn’t say that either.

  QUESTION: He must have. There must have been a rational conversation between you two.

  NETANYAHU: There was no rational conversation. This is Israeli politics.20

  In the Knesset on July 8, Netanyahu took the rostrum to introduce the new ministry and explain why it would make the work of governing smoother and more efficient. As he stepped down, sarcastic cries went up from the Labor benches: “Sharon! What about congratulating Sharon?!” “Three weeks you’ve been torturing him.” Netanyahu turned and climbed back onto the podium. Sharon’s accession to the government, he said, would be beneficial “not only in developing those important areas over which he will be in charge, but also in the areas of defense and foreign policy, where he has much experience.” He stepped down again, walked over to Sharon, and shook his hand.

  That handshake was the minimum that good manners and basic parliamentary etiquette required. It signified nothing. Sharon headed for the members’ dining room, where aides and friends laid on an impromptu party to celebrate his appointment. “I want to thank one man in this government who has shown there’s really such a thing as true friendship,” Sharon gushed. “This man stood up tall and firm at the critical moment … It has been a demonstration of friendship in the deepest meaning of the word.” Levy beamed. “We’ll work as a team,” he said, “in loyalty and harmony.”21

  Within a year, the two were at daggers drawn. The first crack in their lovefest came inside of a month. In August, Netanyahu asked the full cabinet’s consent for the creation of an inner cabinet—the Hebrew sobriquet was “kitchenette”—comprising himself, Levy, and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Mordechai. Sharon, who sat almost opposite the prime minister at the center of the long cabinet table, could hardly contain his fury. Without looking across at Netanyahu, he said, “This is inconceivable. This is what I’ve joined the government for. I’m the most experienced man here. I’m not prepared to receive reports on defense and foreign policy in chance conversations in corridors.” “It’s what I’ve decided,” Netanyahu replied coldly. “And it’s what’s going to be.” Levy said nothing.

  But Sharon’s cup of mortification had not yet brimmed over. The following summer, Netanyahu effectively forced Dan Meridor to resign as minister of finance, which seemed to open up a promotion for Sharon to one of the top three cabinet posts. Sharon’s condition: a seat in the “kitchenette.” Levy called a snap press conference to propose that the prime minister scrap the inner cabinet altogether. Its very existence caused tension among the ministers, he explained piously. The prime minister’s aides let it be known that there was no way Netanyahu would let himself be pushed around by Levy. The finance post was Sharon’s. The next day, Netanyahu announced he was giving it to his longtime lawyer and political consigliere, Ya’akov Ne’eman.

  This episode combined the two themes that would dog and dominate Sharon for the remainder of his political life: his profoundly conflicted relationship with Netanyahu, and his indefatigable striving to attain—and then to retain—a central role in shaping the most fateful policies of the country. If he could somehow thrust Bibi aside and replace him as prime minister, then so much the better. But, at nearly sixty-nine and serving under an energetic party leader aged forty-eight, he was under no illusions. The chances of his vaulting back over the younger man, who had vaulted over him and his generation of political aspirants, were slim at best. But that hardheaded assessment did not dim his zeal to get back into the heady realm of defense and foreign policy. He had done his time, he felt, after Sabra and Shatila, winning neither pardon nor remission for good conduct. Ten years as a middle-ranking minister and four more on the opposition benches had earned him a comeback to the senior echelons of decision making.

  Not getting the Treasury, and getting publicly ridiculed by Netanyahu to boot, was reminiscent of his mortifying rejection as head of aliya at the Jewish Agency back in 1984. Then, it was American Jewish philanthropists who turned their noses up. This time, anonymous officials in the Clinton administration and in European chanceries voiced fears that Sharon as Israel’s finance minister would squander the country’s treasure on the West Bank settlers.22 From this last indignity, Sharon’s political fortunes began to surge, first slowly and then dramatically. But the younger man’s shadow never quite lifted from over him, until the end.

  “Sharon’s attitude to Bibi was always one of contempt and revulsion, but it was always blended with admiration and with fear,” says a senior Likud figure who was very close, at different times, to each of the leaders. “It was a complex attitude—and an attitude of complexes. He admired abilities that Bibi had and that he knew he didn’t have. Like his rhetorical skill. Sharon always warned the people around him: Don’t make light of Bibi; don’t take him for granted. Yet he himself, during the ’90s, would always refer to Bibi as ‘the male model.’ He had a basic lack of trust in him, of confidence, of credence.”

  In the halcyon days of their relationship before the 1996 election, Netanyahu promised Sharon that if they won, he would appoint him minister of defense. Neither man ever explicitly confirmed this in public, and one wonders how the High Court of Justice would have responded to arguments that the Kahan disqualification was for life. But a senior Likud figure, a man with a long record of credibility, insists that he himself heard from an unimpeachable source that the commitment was indeed made. His account underscores the enormity of Bibi’s post-victory betrayal. Not only did he break his word; he tried to reduce Sharon from defense designee—the apogee of his rehabilitation—to nothing. And even when that plan failed, he vindictively kept his former defense designee out of his inner cabinet, where matters of defense were decided.

  But Netanyahu was learning the art of survival. As crisis followed crisis, his staying power seemed to strengthen. The British ambassador spoke of him as “a drunk who lurches from lamppost to lamppost.”23 But Sharon was closer to reality when he urged his own supporters in the Likud to “stop all this talk” of dumping the prime minister. “I am hardly suspected of being his friend or close political ally,” he declared in June 1997. “But this is the prime minister whom we all worked so hard to get elected. Now—let’s everyone get on with his job, and let’s let him get on with his.”

  Granted, Sharon’s words of allegiance came the day after the finance portfolio opened up, and he was to voice very different sentiments about Netanyahu when he was not appointed to it. Nevertheless, the speech marks an acknowledgment, however grudging, that this nervy and jumpy prime minister was digging in and would not be so quickly or so easily dislodged. Better, then, to join him than to expend fruitless energy on beating him. “Let’s show a little bit of restraint,” Sharon advised his loyalists, whose anti-Netanyahu catcalls threatened to drown out his speech. “Let’s stand behind the government, change and improve what needs to be changed and improved. But let’s all stop whining from morning to midnight.”24

  Sharon’s opportunity to put his new loyalty into practice came in September, when Netanyahu blundered into his largest and most painful lamppost yet.25 A Mossad team, working undercover in neighboring, friendly Jordan, botched the assassination of Khaled Meshal, a prominent leader (in exile) of Hamas,
the Palestinian Islamist movement. Two agents smeared a powerful poison onto his neck, and he duly lost consciousness, but they then got involved in a street brawl with his bodyguard and, subsequently, with a Jordanian policeman, who arrested them. A backup team of four other agents bolted to the Israeli embassy in Amman. King Hussein, feeling outraged and betrayed, threatened to sever relations with Israel.

  Netanyahu quickly ordered the Mossad to provide the Jordanian health authorities with an antidote to the lethal smear. A doctor had accompanied the hit team to Amman. The Mossad director, Danny Yatom, rushed to Amman and met with King Hussein, and as a result the doctor was enabled to inject the antidote into Meshal and thus arrest his advancing demise.26

  King Hussein, just a few days earlier, had called in a senior Mossad official and communicated to him an offer from Hamas to negotiate a thirty-year hudna, or truce, with Israel. The king had not received any reaction whatsoever to the proposal when the abortive Mossad attempt took place on that Thursday morning.

  Efraim Halevy, who had left the Mossad two years earlier as deputy director and was now serving as ambassador to the European Union, was rushed home to handle the crisis. He proposed that Israel offer to free the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as its gesture of propitiation toward Jordan. The king, in return, would quickly and quietly release the Mossad men. The sheikh, almost blind and a quadriplegic, was arrested in Gaza in 1989 and had been in prison since then. He, like Meshal, an ostensibly political figure unconnected with Hamas’s terror wing, was accused by Israel of direct responsibility for some of Hamas’s most murderous terrorist attacks. To release him would inevitably stir up controversy. Politically, it would be risky. Netanyahu balked at first, but eventually he gave Halevy the green light to go to Amman and open negotiations. The veteran spymaster met with the king and returned with the four agents who had been holed up in the embassy. This was Hussein’s royal intimation that his wrath might be abating.

  At midnight on Sunday, September 28, a contrite Netanyahu helicoptered from Jerusalem to Amman to meet with Crown Prince Hassan, the king’s brother, and General Batikhi, the head of the Jordanian security service. His delegation of ministers and officials included Sharon, who, if he had any reservations about the wisdom of Netanyahu’s original decision to approve the operation, kept them to himself. Seeing Sharon, Prince Hassan wondered acidly if the hit on Jordanian soil had been Israel’s way of weakening or perhaps destroying the Hashemite house.

  The negotiations got bogged down in the following days, and Halevy returned to his post in Brussels.j Netanyahu now asked Sharon to lead the Israeli team, which the minister of infrastructures did with aplomb and to the evident gratification of the royal court in Amman (and to the unconcealed disgruntlement of Minister of Defense Yitzhak Mordechai, who felt that by rights he should have been put in charge of this business). Sheikh Yassin was freed to Jordan, from where he returned to Gaza a week later to an ecstatic welcome from thousands of local people.27 The two Mossad would-be assassins were duly released, too. On October 4, Sharon dined alone with King Hussein at the royal palace in Amman. Four and a half hours of feasting and flowing conversation left him, as he said later, enchanted by Hussein’s blend of “desert magic and British manners.”

  It was all a far cry from his frustrating years of deprecating and disparaging Netanyahu, and an even farther cry from his decades of denigrating the Hashemite house and insisting ominously that “Jordan is Palestine.” Sharon was now effusive in his praise for the prime minister’s handling of the crisis. “He displayed both leadership and self-control,” he told journalists who were used to hearing long and caustic laments from him over Netanyahu’s lack of precisely those two qualities. Netanyahu’s people, in turn, briefed with newfound bigheartedness of their own. Sharon, they said, may have been troublesome and unconstructive in the past, in relatively minor disputes. But when the national interest was seriously prejudiced, he had set aside any petty scores and performed superbly. Jordanian officials told an Israeli reporter that Sharon was someone they could do business with and that he “delivered.”

  The change in Sharon’s standing in Amman was particularly striking in view of the fear and loathing his name had evoked there for so many years. A series of Knesset speeches and newspaper articles during the Rabin years, finally acknowledging the demise of “Jordan is Palestine,” were the first phase of this process of personal and political conciliation, which culminated in that intimate dinner with the king. The second phase had evolved, fortuitously, during the months that preceded the Meshal fiasco and took the form of an act of generosity by the Israeli minister of national infrastructures in regard to that most precious of regional resources: water. “I knew he was going to give in to them,” recalls Meir Ben-Meir, the then water commissioner, “when he didn’t take me with him to meet Hussein and his minister of water at Aqaba in May 1997. ‘Where’s your company commander?’ the king asked. He knew that Sharon and I had been officers together in the 1948 war. ‘I’ve left him at home,’ Sharon replied. He came back and told me he had signed over to Jordan another twenty-five million cubic meters a year.”28

  The water talks between the two riparian owners of the upper Jordan River were anchored in their peace treaty of 1994. Rabin had agreed to allocate fifty million cubic meters per year to Jordan from Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee).29 The water “belonged” to Jordan, inasmuch as it had flowed down the river and into the lake during the rainy season. But Jordan has nowhere to store it, and storage is the key problem of water supply in this semiarid area.

  Other government departments were outraged at Sharon’s largesse. The Treasury made it clear that there was no money for a desalination scheme that Sharon had also promised. It would have to be raised abroad—a difficult proposition. Until it was, though, the additional twenty-five million cubic meters per year would keep flowing.

  The flowering of his friendship with Ariel Sharon came late in life for King Hussein. It produced a poignantly memorable tableau. The king, pallid and bald from anticancer drugs, received Sharon and Lily in October 1998 in his suite at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. It was the eve of an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation convened by President Clinton at Wye Plantation, outside Washington. “Stay strong,” Sharon urged the king. “We need your courage, your experience as the most veteran statesman in the Middle East, and your help in promoting and achieving a stable peace in the region.” For sensitive Israeli ears, the subtext was clear: it takes one to know one. For by then Sharon himself was basking in the role of statesman—he was now foreign minister—and man of peace.

  * * *

  a The new election law had been passed on March 18, 1992, the last day of the previous Knesset. It was to go into effect in 1996. Under its provisions, voters would cast two ballots, one for prime minister and the other for the party of their choice. The intention was to strengthen the big parties, whose leaders were naturally the prime ministerial candidates, at the expense of the smaller parties. Advocates of the reform assumed that most voters would vote the same ticket for prime minister and for party. But it backfired badly. Many people apparently felt that having cast one vote for a prime minister who was the leader of a big party, they could allow themselves to cast their other vote for a small party. The result, in 1996, was a shrinkage of Likud and Labor, the two big parties, and a surge among the smaller parties, like Shas, a Sephardic-Orthodox party, and Yisrael B’Aliya, a Russian immigrant party. The Likud had voted against the measure, but Benjamin Netanyahu broke ranks and sided with its proponents—a wise choice, since the new system brought him to power.

  b Sharon’s depiction in this article of the dangers of withdrawing from the Gaza Strip was eerily identical to the arguments used against him by the settlers and the Right when he ordered the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. (They would say it was eerily prescient.) “The too-hasty among us proclaim, ‘Gaza first,’ ” he wrote.

  There are some of them in our own camp. [Sharon was refer
ring to Moshe Arens and Ronni Milo, two senior Likud figures who urged Shamir before the 1992 election to get out of Gaza.] “Get out of Gaza,” they say. “Who needs Gaza?” Well, not to mention the inherent perversity of volunteering to cede a part of the national homeland, which no normal nation would do, I would like to ask them to explain how they think it will be possible to live without a Jewish cordon sanitaire between the Gaza Strip, with its 700,000 hostile Palestinians, and Sinai, an incessant source of weaponry and terror. Without the bloc of Jewish settlement [Gush Katif, in the southern Gaza Strip], who is going to block that traffic? They say: “We’ll put up a fence, we’ll mine the border, we’ll dig canals, we’ll set up barriers and roadblocks. The main thing is to get out.” Well, first of all, it is just not possible to seal off a territory hermetically. In the past, bands of terrorists have infiltrated from Gaza and reached as far as the suburbs of Tel Aviv. But to attack southern Israel, they wouldn’t have to leave Gaza at all. A Katyusha rocket deployed on Falastin Square in central Gaza will easily hit Mohammed V Square (remember the sad national farce of that name?) in central Ashkelon. It will hit Kiryat Gat, Sderot, Netivot, and dozens of kibbutzim and moshavim. What will we do? How will we respond?