Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Shaul Mofaz, then IDF chief of staff and subsequently Sharon’s minister of defense, recalled a clandestine report that reached him on February 11 of a meeting between Arafat, his security chiefs, and key Hamas leaders at which the rais asked, “Why do the Jews not have more deaths?” And he added: “You know what to do.” “That was the day,” said Mofaz, “when he unleashed the wave of suicide assaults inside Israel that grew more and more devastating until it climaxed in the Passover seder attack in the hotel in Netanya a year later.”5

  When Arafat asked his question, the Palestinians had sustained more than three hundred dead in the intifada and Israel around sixty. Not all intelligence experts concurred as to the hierarchical nature of the intifada and the measure of blame and responsibility that should be attributed to Arafat. When the suicide bombings multiplied, some argued that individual motivation, especially revenge over the killing or wounding of a close relative, needed to be factored in alongside ideological and organizational aspects to fully analyze and understand the spectacular growth of this ghoulish form of terror.6

  Sharon roundly blamed Arafat for everything on the Palestinian side of the intifada, including the suicide bombings. His preoccupation during these early months was over the growing mood of helplessness among the public as the bombings took their arbitrary toll of Israeli civilian lives. But above all, he was concerned about the army’s ability to fight back and win. “In my day, we didn’t know how to do these things,” he observed caustically when treated to a state-of-the-art computer presentation by senior IDF officers early in his term. “But I’ll tell you what we did know how to do. We knew how to fight.”7

  He seriously feared that despite the almost immeasurable disparity of military power, the army was incapable of defeating the Palestinian armed uprising. “He felt the army, for all its might, was helpless,” Uri Shani recalled. “Something had gone seriously wrong. The main problems, as Sharon saw it, were unsuitable commanders and inadequate training. The elite units were brilliant, but the regular forces deployed in the West Bank and Gaza—he wasn’t sure they had the capacity to defeat the intifada. For years, Lebanon had been seen as a fighting front, whereas the Palestinian territories were a policing assignment.”8

  The prime minister’s concerns were not just tactical. “He felt the IDF, in addition to its operational weaknesses, lacked a basic understanding of the ripple effect of losing … of the need to demonstrate effective military strength if you were going to show flexibility on the diplomatic front.”

  In June 2001, after a ghastly Friday night suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv seafront that left 21 teenagers dead and 132 injured, Sharon ordered the army to prepare to enter the casbas, the Palestinian inner cities, in pursuit of terror cells. Chief of Staff Mofaz noted that the soldiers’ lives would be in danger because there weren’t enough ceramic bulletproof vests to go around. Sharon retorted that the emergency stores were full of these vests, so much so that Israel had been supplying them to neighboring Jordan. Mofaz replied that these stores were intended for war. “Kaplanh and I exchanged glances,” Shani remembered. “We knew what was coming. ‘This is war, in case you haven’t understood till now,’ Sharon thundered. ‘We are at war!’ ”

  Sharon did not see the hardy and usually aggressive Mofaz as his problem, but rather the echelon of field commanders below the chief of staff. His solution was to take to the field himself. “There were dozens of visits to units in the West Bank,” said Arnon Perlman, Sharon’s close aide and spokesman. “He focused on the colonels and the lieutenant colonels, the men who commanded the brigades and battalions. He would spend hours with them, going over ideas, poring over maps. He would come away feeling the army was not prepared, conceptually, for winning this war. That he needed to shake it up himself.”9

  Sometimes he would invite groups of field officers to his office in Jerusalem. He would regale them with accounts of the exploits of Unit 101 in the 1950s and of his anti-terror operations in Gaza in the 1970s. His message never varied: surprise the enemy; throw him off balance; come at him from an unexpected angle; attack, always attack.

  “RESTRAINT IS STRENGTH”

  For all his nostalgic, blustering exhortations to the officer corps, Sharon as prime minister was a very different, much more cautious commander than the brutal major of the 1950s, the ruthless general of the 1970s, or the intemperate defense minister of the 1980s. “He consciously allowed himself to be restrained, by me, by others,” Minister of Defense Binyamin Ben-Eliezer recalled years later. Sharon ranted and bellowed in fury after particularly heinous terror attacks, demanding instant and massive retribution. “Kill the dog” was his mildest demand, often screamed into the telephone, usually in reference to Arafat. But by the time the first meetings took place with the defense minister and senior IDF officers, the prime minister’s wrath was subsiding and cooler councils prevailed.

  Moshe Kaplinsky, who was appointed military secretary to the prime minister in July 2001, said he “quickly discovered that Sharon as prime minister was very different from his image … much more realistic and controlled. He understood that not everything was military force. Yes, I thought restraining him would be part of my job, to the extent that a military secretary can restrain a prime minister. But in intimate consultations I saw how he thought about the ramifications of every move. I saw this was a complex man; not the simplistic advocate of brute force that one had been led to believe.”10

  International diplomacy had moved into high gear with the publication of the Mitchell Report on April 30. As we saw, the commission declined to lay the blame on Sharon for triggering the intifada with his visit to the Temple Mount. Nor did it give succor to the Israeli contention that Arafat had preplanned the uprising. But it also spoke movingly about the need to stop the violence and offered a blueprint for a way forward. This included

  • an immediate end to the violence;

  • an immediate resumption of security cooperation;

  • “the Palestinian Authority [should] make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations and to punish perpetrators”;

  • “the Government of Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements”;

  • “the GOI should ensure … non-lethal responses to unarmed demonstrators”;

  • “the PA should prevent gunmen from using Palestinian populated areas to fire upon Israeli populated areas and IDF positions”; and

  • “the GOI should lift closures, transfer to the PA all tax revenues owed, and permit Palestinians who had been employed in Israel to return to their jobs.”

  The PA announced on May 15 that it accepted the report and supported its immediate implementation. Sharon for his part said Israel accepted the report, too—with two reservations and one condition: it rejected the settlement freeze; it objected to the criticism of the IDF; and it demanded seven days completely free from violence before implementation could begin.

  The Mitchell proposals became the basis of American and international diplomacy, with efforts focused on getting the parties to translate their ostensible acceptance into tangible action. Sharon stuck to his seven-day demand, which, given the chaotic situation in the territories, he could confidently assume would not be met. This conveniently enabled him to ignore the initial requirement from Israel in the Mitchell Report: the settlement freeze. In late May 2001, though, in response to mounting international pressure, he proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire, “save for life-threatening instances.” The IDF stopped initiating operations in the territories and tightened its open-fire regulations. The Americans were to procure parallel steps from Arafat, but the most he would agree to was a resumption of meetings between officers for security coordination. This initial, tentative upturn was blown to smithereens at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv promenade that Friday night in June.

  On the following Sunday evening, Sharon visited the injured youngsters and their families a
t the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. He was not a frequent visitor at hospitals or at gravesides or at the scenes of terror attacks. His aides explained that the security phalanxes around him made such visits burdensome. Not all commentators were convinced. Some recalled pointedly that as defense minister, too, during the Lebanon War, he generally steered clear of hospitals and funeral parlors.

  He was visibly moved by the self-discipline of some of the injured Russian immigrant kids, biting back their pain, summoning up a determined smile when the prime minister swept in trailed by a bevy of cameras. “Restraint, too, is a component of strength,” he proclaimed at an impromptu press conference at the hospital. “We are waging a very hard battle indeed. The behavior of the injured boys and girls is truly admirable, as is the behavior of their families, dignified behavior by people who have only recently come to this country.”11

  There was nothing impromptu in Sharon’s choice of words. The phrase “restraint is strength” instantly became an aphorism, as its author, Reuven Adler, knew it would. It came to articulate what was seen as the quintessence of the new Sharon: prudent, calm, long-suffering, conscious of the complexities of Israel’s predicament. Sharon enhanced the effectiveness of the phrase by appearing to apply it both to himself and to the young patients smiling through their pain. “When will it all end?” Larissa and Victoria, both encased in plaster, asked him as he walked slowly between the beds in the orthopedic ward. “It’s gone on for a hundred years,” he replied. “Only peace will end such attacks,” one of the girls ventured. “I am trying all I can to bring that about,” the prime minister quietly answered her.

  “ ‘Restraint is strength’ worked,” Uri Shani said, looking back, both as a slogan and as a policy, though it was not popular with the Israeli public at the time. Israel did not strike back then. But when it did lash out nine months later, invading the Palestinian cities in Operation Defensive Shield, it enjoyed the broad support of the (post-9/11) Bush administration. “The fact that we restrained ourselves brought us political strength. The image of schoolchildren blown up at a beachfront club touched the world.”12

  The upshot was that within months of his coming to power, the visceral fear of Sharon in Israel and around the world largely dissipated. The many Israelis who were convinced, and terrified, that his advent would inevitably mean a drastic escalation in Israel’s response to the intifada, with the concomitant dangers of igniting a regional war, recognized that that wasn’t happening.

  Abroad, too, leaders and commentators who had excoriated Israel under Barak for its disproportionate and indiscriminate use of military force against the Palestinians, and had warned direly that Sharon’s election would bring a bloodbath, began to concede that they were wrong. The overall level and intensity of Israel’s military activity remained essentially unchanged for the first year of Sharon’s premiership. Targeted assassinations of Palestinians increased. But the overall rate of Palestinian fatalities never returned to the peaks of October and November 2000, while the number of Israeli victims rose toward the end of 2001 and soared in March 2002.

  For many mainstream Israelis, the initial fear morphed into an uneasy distrust. This distrust was never fully to fade. Sharon’s intentions, and even more so his motives, would always be impugned by his detractors and suspected, or at any rate questioned, by the broader public. But the distrust was to be increasingly tempered by two other attitudes that gradually embedded themselves in people’s minds: reliance and, however grudging, admiration. Sharon as national father figure was an image that many people contemptuously eschewed in 2000. Five years later, almost incredulously, they were embracing it.

  For Ariel Sharon to preach, and even more so to practice, “restraint is strength” was every bit as dramatic a reversal of his lifelong policies and lifelong image as the disengagement from Gaza four years later. The drama was less apparent at the time, and is perhaps less easy to pinpoint in retrospect, because, unlike the disengagement, it consisted of omission rather than action. Even when he did finally unleash the army, in Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, he did so with restraint—relative to the IDF’s real strength and relative, too, to the initial fears and dire prognostications about what he would do. This reversal of the whole flow of his public life until then led to a surge in his popularity. It would contribute significantly to the support he enjoyed in the broad center and even on the left of the Israeli spectrum when he eventually embarked on the disengagement from Gaza three years later. “Restraint is strength” paved the way for the disengagement.

  From Shani’s perspective, “restraint is strength” was also the culmination of his own makeover of Sharon during the previous two years, working closely with Sharon’s son Omri. Though a true expression of the prime minister’s policy, it was also a slogan, an extension, in a way, of the sophisticated sloganeering of the election campaign.

  Marketing or reality? Image or substance? For Shani, the etymology seems inextricably blurred.

  I’m not talking about marketing. When a man says, I want to be prime minister, and I’m prepared to change my behavior in order to achieve that goal … I won’t be the same man. I’ll behave differently. I’ll consult with people and listen to what they have to say—that’s not just marketing.

  Right at the outset I said to him, if you want to be prime minister, you need to have 60 or 70 percent of the people supporting you. If you’re seen as extreme right-wing, you don’t have a chance. If you plonk down settlements all over the place … Omri kept saying: There is a chance. I wasn’t sure. I was sure, though, that he was prime ministerial timber. That he was a man who could take decisions. I said, every time he talks extreme, or thinks extreme, we’ve got to pour a bucket of cold water over him. Like if you have a child who’s hyperactive, you’ve got to give him Ritalin, and give him a balanced diet, and give him a calming environment, because at the end of the day he’s a brilliant child. But if you allow noise and hullabaloo around him, then he’ll be crazy. I’m trying to construct a colorful metaphor. This is Arik Sharon. When he was surrounded by people who worshipped him, who told him all day long, You’re the greatest; you’re a howitzer, you’re the leader of Israel, which he wasn’t, and they boosted the extremist side of his character, of his behavior, of his policy thinking … Look at his relations with the U.S. when he was defense minister—he didn’t give a damn for them—compared with when he worked with us, before he became prime minister and as prime minister.13

  What Shani depicts as his and Omri’s successful effort “to bring out the inner Arik” was seen by some of Sharon’s old retainers as a veritable kidnap. “After Lily got ill, Arik started to change,” a former aide recalled sadly. “She was his compass; that’s how he regarded her. Without her, Omri started to run riot. He took control of his father. He took his father to bad places. He sent himself as emissary to Arafat. He said to his father, ‘Let me handle it’…The most painful moment was after the Dolphinarium. We’d got carte blanche from the U.S. to act. Here in Israel there was total consensus that we’ve got to act. And … nothing!”

  In this aide’s pained, nostalgia-filled reading, the radical change that took place in Sharon’s policy thinking was brought about by the overwhelming influence of Omri. “ ‘Restraint is strength’? I’m trying to explain to you this joke … The closeness of that family is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate. ‘All for one and one for all’ is a gross, gross understatement of their sense of solidarity. They trusted no one but each other, relied only on themselves.”

  Omri, the ousted aide conceded, may genuinely have changed his own views on the conflict with the Palestinians. But Arik—never.

  When Arik was minister of infrastructures, I once said to him, “Why don’t you say you’ve got no problem with the Palestinians having a state? What do you care if they call themselves a state, as long as they don’t have an army and an air force and we control their borders?” He nearly threw me out of the window! As prime minister, I once said to him on th
e phone, “Why don’t you dismantle Netzarim [an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip]? We need two battalions to defend it. Soldiers are getting killed there. Civilians are getting killed. Take it down …” I nearly dropped the phone from the decibel level of his shouts! And then he went and dismantled all the settlements in Gaza.14

  Omri listened impassively to an account of this bitter indictment and said only, “I was an easy target. Whoever wanted to attack him attacked me.” He phoned later to say, “You’re overdoing my role, my influence, my views … I wasn’t him.”15

  Omri’s diffidence is closer to the truth than Shani’s arrogance or than the spurned aide’s bitter refusal to stomach his adulated leader’s change of heart. “To say that Sharon was an instrument in the hands of Uri and Omri and Reuven Adler is an exaggeration,” Avi Gil, a close aide to Shimon Peres, confirmed. “He was very dominant, very opinionated. Politicians aren’t puppets.” Gil was both an insider and an outsider during the formative period of Sharon’s prime ministership. As Peres’s man, he was not a member of Sharon’s close coterie. And yet the coterie embraced him almost as one of their own, using his professionalism in their diplomatic activities and his interpersonal savvy in helping to keep the Sharon-Peres relationship running smoothly.

  There was an informal atmosphere around the prime minister, Gil said, and people were encouraged to bat ideas around. Sharon felt enormously grateful to the people who helped him present an image of himself to the public that made him prime minister. “And they continued to be around him—Uri and Omri and Adler and others. But I do not believe that Sharon was dramatically influenced, in cardinal issues, against his will. He was clever and cunning and endowed with a healthy sense of humor so that he didn’t really care if someone claimed to have influenced him. He could live with it.”16