by David Landau
Sharon’s action was quickly subsumed into the broader crisis. The broader crisis, moreover, rendered his action, even in the minds of his critics, retrospectively less pigheaded and pernicious than it initially appeared. Even moderate Israelis began to think that the Palestinians had shown by their subsequent behavior that perhaps Sharon had a point. “These events prove that we must not cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians,” wrote Ron Ben-Yishai, the veteran defense analyst of Yedioth Ahronoth and the reporter who first confronted Sharon on the telephone with the horrors of Sabra and Shatila (and subsequently testified against him before the Kahan Commission).l Sharon had acted unwisely this time, too, Ben-Yishai wrote. But the violence on the Mount and beyond had been instigated by the PA’s own security forces. “The man whose security chiefs deliberately ignite a firestorm on the holiest site to Islam and to Judaism is plainly not fit to have the sovereignty over that site vested in him.”37
By the month’s end, Haaretz’s Ze’ev Schiff added his authoritative endorsement to official Israel’s accusation that the intifada had been preplanned. Ironically, Schiff wrote, Israel owed Arafat a debt. “He has brought us back to recognize our strategic reality: Israel is still a nation at war, and it needs to behave like one when it weighs its options and considers the limits of its concessions.38m
Another violent shock for Israelis came on October 12. Two reservists driving in a civilian car mistakenly entered Ramallah. They were set upon by a mob, dragged to a police station, and beaten to death. One of their assailants leaned out of a window and held up his hands, dripping with blood, for the mob to see and cheer. Another phoned one of the men’s wives on his cell phone and announced, “I’ve just killed your husband.”
The country was swept by a paroxysm of anger and impotence. These feelings were not relieved when Barak ordered air force helicopters that night to bomb and strafe the Ramallah police station and other PA offices in the West Bank and Gaza but to give sufficient advance warning so that in practice the attacks were on empty buildings. In a less flamboyant but more effective response, Barak gave orders to the security services that every Palestinian militant involved in this bestial outrage be brought to justice or killed.
Barak had rejected the PA’s demand for a UN inquiry into the Temple Mount episode. In effect, he was protecting Sharon’s action, and his own failure to prevent it, from what he presumed would be a sweeping international condemnation. The most he would agree to was a carefully selected inquiry commission headed by an American, and eventually, after much negotiating, this was appointed. Its chairman was George Mitchell, the former Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate who had won kudos around the world for his role in brokering the peace in Northern Ireland.n
The creation of the Mitchell Commission provided the backdrop conducive for yet another attempt to create a Barak-Sharon unity government. Barak tried to persuade his party ministers, meeting on October 22, that Sharon was much more moderate than he appeared. If he joined a unity government, that wouldn’t spell the end of the peace process. The Sharon of today was not the Sharon of old, Barak asserted. The ministers were unconvinced. So were Sharon’s comrades. Of the nineteen Likud members, fourteen spoke against a unity government at a faction meeting the next day. This was quickly leaked, and it reinforced the opposition on the Labor side. Sharon wasn’t even master of his own house, the Labor doves jeered.
A week later, at a Knesset session marking the anniversary of Rabin’s murder, Sharon spoke of his “yearning for a leadership figure projecting stability and reliability, radiating a deep understanding of events, an ability to analyze and to draw conclusions, and above all to take responsibility.”39 But he still didn’t mean himself. Even at this late date, he was still admonishing the younger man and urging him, in effect, to take him into his government as his deputy.
But Barak, and indeed Sharon, were no longer calling the shots. The Knesset was about to dissolve itself. It could by law do so if 61 of its 120 members raised their hands in favor. Shinui, a small, anti-Orthodox party that broadly supported Barak’s peace policy, joined now with the parties of the Right to ensure that absolute majority. Dissolution meant new elections; Netanyahu looked a shoo-in.
But now Barak suddenly announced that he was resigning as prime minister. Since the dissolution of the Knesset had not yet been approved on three readings, Barak’s resignation overrode it. Instead of general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, there would be an election for the prime minister alone. It would be held in exactly sixty days from the date of Barak’s resignation. That would be February 6, 2001. By law, only sitting MKs would be eligible to run. Netanyahu was not a sitting MK.
Sharon insisted he was as surprised as everyone else. No, there had not been any collusion between him and Barak to keep Bibi out, he retorted angrily to the many Likudniks who claimed that there had.
Netanyahu’s supporters drafted an amendment to the existing legislation to enable a non-MK to run for prime minister. Sharon immediately announced that he would support it. Netanyahu, confident that it would pass, called a press conference in Jerusalem where he formally announced his candidacy for leader of the Likud and for prime minister. Two days later, on December 12, the Likud central committee endorsed the party’s support for the “Netanyahu Law” and voted to hold the party’s leadership primary a week later, on December 19. Sharon, in a speech laced with sarcasm but also with a bitter, between-the-lines recognition that this might well be his swan song, pointedly ignored the probability that Netanyahu would displace him. He would run against Barak, Sharon told the rowdy hall, and he would beat him. “After the elections, there’ll be a country to govern,” he kept repeating. The delegates got the point and roared their displeasure.
Netanyahu made a hero’s entrance into the crowded hall, hugging and kissing ecstatic delegates as he progressed slowly to the podium. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you,” he began his speech. Their adulation was almost palpable. He spoke like a candidate confident of triumph. But there was a vaguely discordant note, which the rapturous delegates did not pick up. There ought to be general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, Netanyahu remarked. “The present Knesset is fractured, divided, splintered.”
On December 18, the day before the Likud primary, the Knesset voted. By a majority of 65 to 45, it passed the “Netanyahu Law” enabling a non-MK to run for prime minister. The bill was rushed through all three readings and the committee stage in one afternoon. The proceedings stopped briefly while members crowded around television screens to watch Netanyahu, at an impromptu press conference, inveigh against the law bearing his name and insist that he would not run even if it were passed. They ignored his fulminations, all presuming he himself would ignore them, too.
The prime ministership was his for the taking, but he declined to take it. True to his word, and dumbfounding backers and critics alike, Netanyahu confirmed that he was standing down. “I will not stand as a candidate in elections that … offer the winner the title of prime minister but deny him the tools to effectively lead the country,” he declared.o
• • •
Barak still had one potential trump card in his hand: the peace process. Right up to the last minute, Sharon continued to believe—and to fear—that Barak and Arafat would reach a deal. The territorial issue had now narrowed to around 5 percent of the West Bank, with swaps, and both leaders gave Clinton to understand they were “in the ballpark.”40 Dennis Ross quotes the veteran Saudi Arabian diplomat Prince Bandar, responding to a briefing on the state of the negotiations on December 19: “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy; it will be a crime.”
On December 23, in a last-ditch effort, Clinton presented U.S. bridging proposals to negotiators from the two sides. On territory, he suggested “a solution that provides between 94 and 96 percent of West Bank territory to the Palestinian state with a land swap of 1 to 3 percent.” On Jerusalem, the “
Clinton Parameters” followed “the general principle that what is Arab in the city should be Palestinian and what is Jewish should be Israeli; this should apply to the Old City as well.” On the Temple Mount, the president proposed “Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram and Israeli sovereignty over … the Western Wall and the space sacred to Judaism of which it is part. There would be a firm commitment by both not to excavate beneath the Haram or behind the Western Wall.” On refugees “our guiding principle has to be that the Palestinian state will be the focal point for the Palestinians who choose to return to the area, without ruling out that Israel will accept some of these refugees.”
The Israeli negotiators Ben-Ami and Sher, diligently transcribing the president’s words, found the time to exchange furtive glances and scrawled notes in Hebrew. “We can live with this,” they both wrote. Ben-Ami noted worriedly, though, that their Palestinian negotiating partners were looking glum.41
The Barak cabinet voted on December 27 to accept the Clinton Parameters. There were reservations, but they were “within the parameters, not outside them,” in Ross’s words. Arafat, on the other hand, “was never good at facing moments of truth,” Ross writes caustically. He came to Washington but rejected the president’s proposal.
Like Clinton and Ross, Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, lays the main blame on Arafat for the failed peace process. He calls him “the artful dodger.” Indyk writes: “President Clinton formally offered Arafat Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif as one of the parameters for the final agreement. If that is what he had been holding out for at Camp David, why did he turn down Clinton’s offer? The answer, to my mind, is straightforward: rather than breaking through into a new world, he clung to what he knew best—the ways of the old Arab order.” It needed courage, Indyk adds, for Arafat to tell the Palestinian refugees “that they would not be going back to the homes of their forefathers, few of which existed anymore, even though they had known that in their hearts for a long time … Arafat was too scared to tell them the truth.”42
Even with Clinton gone, Barak sent Ben-Ami and Sher, boosted by the dovish ministers Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, and Amnon Lipton-Shahak, for a week of negotiations at Taba beginning January 21. Ben-Ami in his book writes of Israeli intelligence assessments in January that Arafat was suddenly and belatedly waking up to the prospect of Barak losing to Sharon on February 6 and the new Bush administration turning its back on the Middle East peace process. Hence his urgent instruction to Abu Ala to get an agreement at Taba. Sadly, the Israeli foreign minister adds, the new instructions were not accompanied by serious new flexibility.
In the months before this final denouement, Barak had been working fitfully on an alternative policy option: unilateral separation. Separation, that is, between Israel and the Palestinians, or, more accurately, separation by Israel from the Palestinians. If there was “no partner” on the Palestinian side for the foreseeable future, given Arafat’s obduracy and the mounting violence, then Israel must act alone in its national interest by separating itself from the Palestinians along the lines of the agreement that the Palestinian leader was rejecting now but that his successors, it was to be hoped, would be prepared to negotiate at some time in the future.
The tangible expression of this new unilateralism was to be a security fence, a barrier of barbed wire and, in places, concrete wall, dotted with watchtowers and flanked by a patrol road. The IDF, no longer reliant on or desirous of cooperation with Palestinian security forces, would deploy this barrier as its bulwark against terrorist incursions from the West Bank.43p The fence was to incorporate the settlement blocs along the pre-1967 border, which Israel intended to annex in an eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians. This would mean enclosing some Palestinian areas that Israel would ultimately not wish to annex. They would be “returned” in negotiations that would one day resume. Similarly, Israel would unilaterally designate the whole of the Jordan valley as a security zone for the foreseeable future, with the understanding that this arrangement, too, would end once a negotiated final agreement came into sight again.
With each new crisis in the post–Camp David negotiations, Barak would return to these still-inchoate ideas. As elections began to loom, he tried to project them to the public, to demonstrate that Arafat’s intransigence and the intifada violence would not leave Israel powerless. “Us here; them there” was his slogan. His campaign strategists’ difficult job was to inject this unilateralism into the national debate while at the same time leaving room for a dramatic return of “bilateralism,” should the final, frenetic negotiating efforts yield an agreement after all.
There was a logical flaw in this: In practice, there was no prospect of the fence being built and the new separation policy going into effect unless the miraculous happened and Barak won the election.44 But such a miracle was only conceivable if the negotiations produced a last-moment agreement—in which case the unilateral solution would no longer be necessary…
As leader of the opposition, Sharon opposed all the Barak government’s proffered concessions in the negotiations with the Palestinians. But he regarded the process as unstoppable. And in a vicarious but significant way, reminiscent of his complex relations with Rabin during the Oslo process, he underwent together with Barak the experience of having those concessions rebuffed by Arafat and the slide into violent confrontation. Together with Barak, despite the continuing differences between them, he drew dramatic conclusions from Arafat’s intransigence. Both men concluded that the collapse of bilateral negotiations in the Israel-Palestine conflict pointed to unilateralism as Israel’s sole way forward. Both saw the demographic danger to the Jewishness of Israel inherent in indefinite occupation of the Palestinians. Both believed the United States and the international community would not countenance ongoing low-grade war and diplomatic stalemate. Thus, when Barak lectured Sharon in the Knesset, in his final act as prime minister, on Israel’s existential need to achieve unilateral “separation” between itself and the Palestinians, he was nurturing a seed that had already been planted and was growing.
Barak’s belated unilateralism as expressed in the planned fence—and its conceptual rationale, the demographic threat—were both still ideological anathemas to the Israeli Right. A fence meant partitioning Eretz Yisrael. Even if it were purportedly erected as a temporary step for strictly security reasons, it would become a permanent political reality, the Right warned. Israel would be back on or near the 1967 line, and all the settlements beyond the fence would wither or be forcibly dismantled. As for the so-called demographic threat, with more than a million ex-Soviet immigrants having unexpectedly poured into the country over recent years, only Israelis of little Zionist faith could still brandish that cowardly old canard.
In the Likud, and even more so in the settler movement, there was a vague but uncomfortable sense that Sharon was wobbling. Why did he persist in proclaiming, even after Netanyahu had withdrawn from the race, that his goal after the election was a national unity government with Barak as his minister of defense? Granted, the Knesset arithmetic would make it hard for him to form a coalition. But why Barak? Likud loyalists demanded. Barak was the man who still, even at this eleventh hour, was trying to sell out on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. And what was this vague but troubling talk by Sharon of “painful concessions,” a phrase Sharon began to use in late December? Apart from anything else, this was hardly the way to fire up party activists and get them out on the streets in the weeks before the election.45
Sharon for his part, and his campaign managers, assumed the settlers and their supporters, whatever their doubts about him, would come out and vote for him. On the “Russian front,” Sharon’s team felt confident of crushing victory. Both Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the mainly immigrant party Yisrael Beiteinu, and Natan Sharansky, head of the older and now declining Yisrael B’Aliya, urged their followers to vote for Sharon. His sloganeering in this sector was unsubtly different from the general line. In Russian, the candidate was
“a strong Sharon for a strong Israel” rather than the only man who would bring peace.
The Sharon camp remained anxious, though, over the danger that another large and important constituency, the haredim,q might not turn out to vote at all. No one could confidently dismiss that prospect. There had never been an election solely for prime minister in Israel. The haredim had never before been required to go to the polling stations solely in order to vote for a Sabbath-desecrating, unkosher-eating candidate to lead the Zionist state. Granted, they had voted once before (in 1996) under the new electoral system for a secular prime minister (an overwhelming majority of them voted for Netanyahu in that impressive show of haredi political clout). But then, elections for the Knesset and for the prime minister were held simultaneously. The justification for voting in both was obvious to any Talmud student: We went to vote for our haredi party, which is our religious duty. Once in the polling station and handed two ballot slips, we voted for the (unfortunately secular) prime minister, too.
The key, as always, was in the hands of the rabbis. They had sanctioned—indeed, they had ordered—the vote for Bibi in 1996. Sharon needed them now to extend that Talmudic logic just a little bit further. For many years, he had been well enough liked in their councils. Barak, moreover, was positively disliked, having proclaimed in the fall of 2000 that he was planning a “secular revolution” that would dismantle many of the hallowed status quo arrangements between synagogue and state. But Sharon, too, had queered his pitch by voting and speaking in the Knesset, in July 2000, against the Tal Law, a controversial bill that sought to enshrine in statute the ad hoc exemption from army service granted by the state to yeshiva students. Sharon ensured that the rest of the Likud faction voted against the bill, too, despite mutterings in the ranks.
