Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Israel’s targeted assassinations had sometimes occasioned sharp rebukes from the administration. But after 9/11, U.S. officers were sent to spend time with IDF field units in order to study Israeli techniques and experience in carrying out targeted assassinations.6

  Sharon himself was an eager advocate of these operations. “I hear the noise of helicopters over the ranch,” he would sometimes shout into the phone to a sleepy aide. “Does that mean we can expect good news from Gaza?”7 Over the first thousand days of the intifada, according to an IDF document, Israel carried out ninety-five targeted assassination operations, more than half of them against Hamas men. In a very high percentage of the attacks the target was killed. In some half a dozen cases he was injured; in another six he escaped unscathed. In one-third of the attacks innocent people were killed.8

  Over time, and in the face of repeated applications by human rights groups to the High Court of Justice, a rough code of legal and moral conduct evolved to govern the decision making: the targeted assassination must be preventive, not punitive; the target must be “a ticking bomb,” poised to commit an imminent terrorist attack; the method chosen must be “proportional” and designed to minimize collateral casualties; and other methods of neutralizing the target, such as arrest, must be either unavailable or too dangerous to the lives of IDF troops. Army lawyers were often involved in the planning. Plainly, though, the term “ticking bomb” was open to interpretation, and there was constant pressure to extend it beyond the man who actually strapped the bomb belt to his body to those who sent him out to kill and die.

  Meanwhile, the White House was increasingly committed to making war on Saddam’s Iraq,9 and the road map was seen as a means of enlisting support, both in the Arab world and in the West. Britain’s Tony Blair, at the head of a Labour government distinctly less warlike than its leader, was particularly insistent in his pressure on President Bush to demonstrate determination in the Israel-Palestine diplomacy. Bush “hastily blessed the … Road Map,” writes Martin Indyk, “only as a sop to … Tony Blair, who needed the president’s endorsement of an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative to bolster support within his Labor Party for the Iraq War effort.”

  A less sour interpretation of the diplomacy during the latter half of 2002 gives at least some of the credit to King Abdullah of Jordan and to his prime minister, Marwan Muasher, for nudging President Bush to translate his two-state “vision” into a practical and detailed blueprint for progress. “We assume you’re going to take military action [against Saddam]…We will do everything we can to support you,” the king told the president in the Oval Office on August 1. “But we need more cover on the Palestinian issue. We need a roadmap on how we’re going to get from where we are now to realizing the vision that you have laid out.” Muasher added bluntly: “Frankly, Mr. President, most Palestinians are skeptical that this vision will be realized … We need to define a roadmap. That starts with security, institutions, the humanitarian situation, but also outlines the remaining steps till mid-2005, so that people can know exactly what they are getting.”10

  The various drafts of the road map that now began to circulate differed from the Mitchell plan and the Tenet plan in their explicit insistence that the parties perform their various requirements in each phase in the road map simultaneously instead of sequentially. There could be no more demands by Israel for seven terror-free days on the Palestinian side before it began to rein in its own forces. “The parties are expected to perform their obligations in parallel.”f Thus, in the first phase, the two sides were to end violence and resume security cooperation; the Palestinians were to “undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood … including free, fair and open elections”; Israel was to withdraw to the pre-intifada lines and freeze settlement building. The international community, which stood behind the road map, would expect Israel to get on with its withdrawal and freeze (including the immediate dismantling of the outposts built since Sharon came to power), while the Palestinians got on with their program. There was to be no conditionality between the two sides’ performances.

  But such conditionality had been the linchpin of Sharon’s policy hitherto. He had accepted the Mitchell plan, which required a settlement freeze, on condition that the Palestinians moved first on security. He doubted that they would in fact move, and hence never expected to actually have to implement the freeze. This time, if he accepted the road map, there would be no such comfortable cushioning. He sent Weissglas to Washington time and again to try to soften the text and above all blur this key question of simultaneity versus sequence.

  But Sharon and his smooth-talking emissary were given a stern reminder at this time that even with their sympathizers in the highest places in Washington they could not have things all their own way. After a suicide bombing on a bus killed six and injured seventy at an intersection in the heart of Tel Aviv, Sharon ordered the siege of Arafat reimposed, tighter than ever this time. IDF tanks and APCs charged back into Ramallah, spraying machine-gun fire. They surrounded the muqata again and began demolishing PA administrative buildings with bulldozers and explosives. Arafat’s own suite of rooms and offices filled with dust and debris. His aides called the White House on their cell phones, seriously scared this time that Sharon meant to take out the rais.11

  The renewed siege was an exercise in brinkmanship. The Americans, involved in their pre–Iraq War diplomacy at the UN and in the region, were not taking chances. On September 20, Condoleezza Rice called Weissglas to remonstrate. The next day, Ambassador Kurtzer helicoptered to Sharon’s ranch to deliver the hands-off-Arafat message. Secretary Powell followed up with a phone call to Sharon. And, with Bush’s approval, he instructed the U.S. delegation not to veto a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning the renewed siege.

  In Washington, Rice lectured the for-once-silent Weissglas: “Israel has had no better friend than this administration, and you’ve had no better friend in this administration than me. But I’m telling you, if you do not end this siege in Ramallah, if you don’t withdraw your forces from the compound, you are going to have a public rift with the President. This needs to end now. If you and I are having this same conversation a week from now, you are going to have a serious problem.” Their aides started working on a withdrawal schedule. On September 29 the IDF armor and earthmovers revved up and drove away.

  The wrangling over the road map proceeded desultorily until, almost as a relief, the government in Israel imploded and elections loomed. Sharon asked for a time-out: hold off publishing the road map until after the election, scheduled for January 28, 2003. This time, Weissglas was successful, and the administration, despite Blair’s chafing and the Jordanians’ increasing skepticism, put publication plans in abeyance. And Sharon could justly bask in the comfortable assurances he had received from Bush during his visit to Washington in October that U.S. and allied forces would make every effort to smash Iraqi Scud missile launchers at the outset of the looming war. They would bomb airfields in western Iraq, and they would beef up Israel’s ground defenses with more batteries of Patriot missiles. Sharon, who tongue-lashed Shamir during the last Gulf War for his U.S.-dictated passivity, undertook now himself to do nothing to surprise the United States. If Israel were attacked and decided to retaliate, it would inform America first.12

  That was not the only historical irony of that October visit. President Bush could hardly have been more outspoken in support of the still dangerously teetering Israeli economy. “I understand what terror has done to economy,” he told reporters. “Terror has affected our economy; terror has affected the Israeli economy. But we’ve got great confidence in the Israeli economy. We’ve got great confidence in the Israeli people. The greatest asset Israel has is the brainpower and ingenuity of her people. And I’m convinced that the economy will be strong.”13

  Bush 41 had denied Likud-led Israel loan guarantees, largely because of Ariel Sharon’s provocations, and thereby he
lped Likud lose an election. Now his son was holding out the promise of such guarantees to the same Sharon, knowing that it would help the Likud under him to win another term in power. Bush and his advisers knew, too, that the president’s public backing and the prospect of the guarantees were powerful ammunition for Sharon in his upcoming battle with Netanyahu, who would surely attack him on economic policy.g

  Pollsters and pundits all agreed that the interesting fight was the one inside the Likud. Whoever won in there would almost certainly defeat whoever won in Labor. In the countrywide vote by Likud Party members, Sharon romped home by a margin of more than 16 percent. Still, Netanyahu’s 40 percent entitled him to the No. 2 spot on the Likud Knesset list, as agreed. The two camps now made ready to fight over the rest of the list. This contest was decided by the three-thousand-odd members of the central committee, gathered in Tel Aviv. The result was a stinging blow to the prime minister. His key lieutenants were all punished by the central committee members, while Netanyahu’s top loyalists took the prime spots on the list, followed by an eclectic assortment of newcomers, few of whom owed the prime minister any particular fealty. Omri squeezed in, just. But his vaunted sway over the party activists proved a hollow myth: candidates whom he had sponsored did almost uniformly badly.

  The vote was ominous. It showed that Netanyahu, though down, was by no means out. It showed, moreover, that the hard core of the party, despite Shani’s and Omri’s efforts to bring in new blood, continued to balk at Sharon’s relative moderation. He was popular among the general public and among the Likud rank and file, as the leadership primary had shown. But the Likud Party activists were not, in the main, his political supporters and probably never would be.

  In Labor, the leadership primary had produced a revolution. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer’s dramatic secession from Sharon’s government failed to convince a dispirited membership looking for fresh, untainted politics. Amram Mitzna, the bearded, soft-spoken ex-general and popular mayor of Haifa, took the party by storm. A man with no experience in national politics, who had never served in the Knesset and never held cabinet office, would now lead them against the battle-hardened Sharon.

  It was not the first time the two men had crossed swords. Mitzna was the highest-ranking officer to resign in protest at the then defense minister’s running of the Lebanon War. His resignation was brief, but it gave him momentary fame. He was back in the public eye in 1987–1989 as CO of Central Command during the first intifada, often sparring with the West Bank settlers. Sharon had objected to his promotion to general. Now, though, their roles were different. “I don’t bear a grudge, and I’m not vengeful,” Sharon told reporters. “It’s not a question of relations between two lovers. It’s a matter of policy and politics.”

  Mitzna, determined not to be sweet-talked into passivity, insisted, “It’s the same Sharon, the Sharon who misled the government and the nation in the Lebanon War. He hasn’t changed, even if he looks like a dear old granddad.”

  Sharon proposed to found the policy of his new government after the election—another unity government as broadly based as possible, he promised—on President Bush’s blueprint for peace first articulated on June 24 and subsequently elaborated in the yet-unpublished road map. In the traditional prime minister’s lecture winding up the annual Herzliya Conference on national security, Sharon provided a somewhat airbrushed picture of the evolving road map. He detailed the many constitutional, administrative, financial, judicial, and above all sweeping security reforms that were required of the Palestinians and skated over the steps that Israel would be required to take. He insisted that the Palestinians would have to make progress on their reforms first, before Israel moved at all.

  But he did spell out the two subsequent phases in the road map: a Palestinian state with temporary borders, and then peace negotiations over final status and permanent borders. He made it clear that as long as he was in charge, it wouldn’t happen fast. But he also insisted that he was committed to the process. He was at pains to persuade his audience of his sincerity: “My long-standing ideological and political beliefs are well-known to you from the many positions I was privileged to fill during my decades of public service. These [new] decisions are not easy for me … However, I have come to the conclusion that in the present regional and international reality Israel must act with courage to accept the political plan which I described. There are risks involved, but also enormous opportunities.”14 A year later, on the same dais, he would shock the world by putting tangible content into those vague but intriguing words.

  Mitzna, in his lecture to the same forum, challenged Sharon’s vagueness and urged a concrete and specific separation plan. The Gaza Strip should be evacuated unilaterally and urgently, he said. In the West Bank, Israel should seek agreement, but if it proved unattainable, then settlements must be dismantled unilaterally there, too, he said. To this Sharon replied repeatedly during the campaign that his rival was “sowing illusions.” Unilateral decisions could not produce a solution, he asserted. “Any unilateral withdrawal or unilateral separation without an agreement means serious disaster for Israel.”15

  Happily for Sharon, many middle-of-the-road voters refused to believe him. “Most of the public back Sharon to carry out Mitzna’s policy,” Haaretz wrote, reporting the findings of an opinion poll. “Without reference to the election results,” the pollster’s question read, “if it proves impossible to reach a negotiated agreement, would you support or oppose unilateral separation, provided Israel could keep the settlement blocs and a solution were found for Jerusalem?” Fifty-eight percent said they would support it. “And here’s the even bigger surprise,” the reporter Yossi Verter added: “The same results were registered among Likud voters [as among the public at large]. This is the paradox that Amram Mitzna needs to think about: the majority of the public clearly supports his plan for unilateral separation, but the majority of the public will vote for Sharon, in the hope that he will implement Mitzna’s plan.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Sharon’s sense of quietly cruising to victory was rudely disturbed. Press reports linked some of the new faces in the Likud’s Knesset list to powerful but shady families whose business affairs were close to criminality and whose influence would now extend to the national legislature itself.

  The police, prodded by the media, began investigating. When they decided to pounce, though, it was on a relatively harmless piece of political pork, allegedly perpetrated by a veteran and thoroughly respectable MK, Naomi Blumenthal, the deputy minister of national infrastructures. A onetime theater star now married to an eminent eye surgeon, she had invited a group of key central committee activists to Tel Aviv on the night before the central committee vote and put them up in a city hotel at her expense. For this infringement of the election finance rules she was arrested. Blumenthal refused to cooperate with her police interrogators, citing “the right to remain silent.”

  Ill-advised by his image artists, Sharon now committed an ignoble act of hypocrisy that earned him scant public approbation and would quickly come back to haunt him. He fired Naomi Blumenthal. Not only did she not have the right to remain silent, he wrote to her prissily on December 31. She had “an absolute duty to disclose the circumstances surrounding her election.” He could not dump her from the list—she had been duly elected—but he sacked her as a deputy minister. This even though she had not, as yet, been prosecuted. She shot back a lawyer’s letter denying his right to interfere in her legal process.

  The thinking among Sharon’s advisers was to distance him from the sleazy imagery projected by the Likud primary and to portray him as a leader of national stature sternly committed to the rule of law, in defiance of seedy party machinations. This supposedly sophisticated strategy sat uncomfortably with Sharon’s long chronicle of close scrapes with the law. It became risibly irrelevant a week later, when Haaretz broke the story that quickly became known as “the Cyril Kern affair” and mushroomed into a gray cloud that hung over Sharon for the rest of his life.
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br />   The prime minister and his son Gilad, wrote the paper’s police reporter, Baruch Kra, were suspected by the state prosecution service of receiving bribes, of fraud, of breach of trust, and of lying to the state comptroller and to the police. Omri Sharon was believed to be involved, too, Kra wrote. The state prosecution had specified all these allegations in an official document sent to the government of South Africa asking permission to interrogate a man named Cyril Kern over his role in the affair. The document was in Haaretz’s possession.

  The Cyril Kern affair did not drop onto Sharon—or onto the Israeli electorate—out of the clear blue sky. Trouble had been brewing for Sharon for more than a year as investigators, first from the state comptroller’s office, then from the police, trawled through the accounts of his September 1999 primary campaign for the leadership of the Likud. He had raised and spent far, far more than the law allowed and done so, moreover, through a shadowy network of front companies created specifically to facilitate, but at the same time to conceal, the flow of funds from Sharon’s American supporters to his campaign managers.16 The Cyril Kern affair was a much uglier mutation of this earlier, multi-tentacled creature that was already being dubbed “the front companies affair.”

  The saga began back in March 1999. Netanyahu was about to lose the prime ministership to Ehud Barak, and Sharon, while publicly demonstrating support for the sinking Netanyahu as his loyal foreign minister, was at the same time preparing for his own bid for the Likud leadership and perhaps, eventually, for the prime ministership. It was against this backdrop that Sharon’s longtime lawyer and adviser Dov Weissglas, on March 3, 1999, set up a company in Tel Aviv named Annex Research. Annex’s goals, as described in its articles of association, were “to work for the inculcation and advancement of democratic principles in public, party-political, and rural life in Israel; to initiate educational activities aimed at imbuing young people and adults with democratic values and the culture of good government; to encourage foreign investments in Israel.” “There was nothing,” as a judge was later pointedly to note, “about Annex handling contributions and expenses for Candidate Ariel Sharon’s primary campaign.”17