Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  The gathering gloom on the diplomatic front was exacerbated by another turn for the worse in Israel’s economic woes. Netanyahu’s tough medicine earlier in the year was not working yet; another dose was needed. Many families were hurting badly. People who had managed in the past to keep their heads above water, just, now found themselves slipping into real poverty as vital welfare subsidies for children, for old people, for single mothers, for the unemployed, were all slashed. A single mother from the small Negev town of Mitzpe Ramon, Vikki Knafo, caught the national mood when she struck out, in the blazing heat of July, on a long, lonely march to the capital to protest her inability to provide for her three young children. By the time she arrived, she had become an icon. Some six hundred other single mothers joined her in a tent encampment outside the Finance Ministry. Netanyahu refused to meet her. But his advisers were seriously worried over the image of heartlessness that her protest was tarring him with. Inevitably, it rubbed off on Sharon, too. His poll figures and those of the government began to slide.

  “When sorrows come,” as Sharon the ardent theatergoer must have heard more than once from King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” While the wiliness of Arafat, the weakness of Abu Mazen, and the troubles of the economy were all known or predictable challenges, he now ran into a flurry of awkward and unexpected episodes that sapped his public standing. That pattern was not starkly clear at the time as events moved along in their ragged way. It has been reconstructed subsequently, perhaps too obsessively, by commentators seeking the key to Sharon’s cataclysmic move at year’s end that suddenly changed everything.

  The first unpredicted blow came in September 2003, from an unexpected source. A group of twenty-seven pilots in the air force reserves signed a letter declaring, “We, veteran pilots and pilots still on active service … object to carrying out illegal and immoral attacks … in the territories.” They sent it to the commander of the air force, General Dan Halutz, with a copy to Yedioth Ahronoth, where it appeared as the cover story of the paper’s popular magazine, Seven Days, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “We, for whom the IDF and specifically the IAF are inseparable parts of our lives, refuse to continue hitting innocent civilians. Such actions … are the direct result of long occupation which corrupts all of Israeli society. The continuing occupation mortally damages Israel’s security and its moral strength.” The pilots claimed there was a great deal of “gray refusal” in the air force. Many reserve pilots, they told reporters, and even some still in full-time uniform, found quiet ways to opt out of bombing or rocketing missions in the territories. They ended their letter with a declaration: “We will continue to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and in the Israel Air Force on any mission for the defense of the State of Israel.”

  This inspired another embarrassing and worrisome protest from within the nation’s elite. Three months later, thirteen reservists from the semisecret Sayeret Matkal commando announced that they, too, would “no longer participate in the regime of oppression in the territories.” In a letter addressed directly to Sharon (with a copy to the media), they wrote of their “deep anxiety for the future of the State of Israel as a democratic, Zionist, and Jewish state and for its moral and ethical character.” They declared that they were no longer “prepared to serve as a defensive shield” for the policy of expanding the settlements. “We will not take part in depriving millions of people of their human rights. We will not corrupt our own humanity in the service of an army of occupation. We can no longer remain silent.” They signed off with their unit’s motto, “Who Dares Succeeds,” which had thrilled generations of the best Israeli youth striving to win a place in this most exclusive unit, its exploits shrouded in martial mystique.

  The Sayeret protest was made public on December 22. But it had been in the making for weeks. And meanwhile, if the reserve pilots and commandos could be dismissed or at least pigeonholed as a bunch of leftists, nothing of that applied to another high-profile group who inveighed against the corroding evil of the occupation and the shortsightedness of the Sharon government. They were four former chiefs of the Shin Bet security service: Avraham Shalom (1980–1986), Ya’akov Peri (1988–1995), Carmi Gillon (1995–1996), and Ami Ayalon (1996–2000). They didn’t all especially like each other, as Gillon explained to the Yedioth Ahronoth journalists Sima Kadmon and Alex Fishman on November 14. But they had decided to come together to do this unique joint interview, run across the cover and five inside pages of Yedioth’s weekend political supplement, because they truly believed the country was endangering its future.14

  “If we don’t give up the goal of ‘Greater Israel,’ ” said Shalom, “and if we don’t stop treating the other side in the disgraceful way we do, and if we don’t start understanding that he, too, has feelings and that he, too, is suffering—then we’re on the way to the abyss.” What was “disgraceful”? the two reporters asked. The roadblocks? “Everything. Everything is disgraceful,” Shalom replied. “We humiliate the Palestinian all the time, individually and collectively.” This from the head of a service that had famously honed humiliation into a supereffective technique of interrogation and intimidation. But there was more. All four ex-chiefs criticized the fundamental paradigm of Sharon’s policy: first crush terror, then move to negotiation. It was a mistake, said Gillon. “No, you’re wrong,” said Shalom. “It’s an excuse.”

  All four agreed that there would have to be a showdown with the settlers. But they maintained that the great majority of settlers, if treated empathetically, if praised for their pioneering spirit and offered reasonable compensation, would leave quietly. “Arik Sharon’s the one who can do it,” said Peri. “The man who built the settlements is the man who can dismantle them. He keeps talking about painful concessions. This is the painful concession he must make: taking down the settlements.” Ayalon added: “The obsession of today’s policy making about whether we have a partner on the other side is a huge mistake. In the present terrible situation, with people being killed in restaurants and buses, the only way forward is unilaterally. If Israel, tomorrow morning, got up and got out of the Gaza Strip, and seriously started taking down illegal settlements [on the West Bank], I believe, based on many years of intimate knowledge, that the Palestinians would come to the negotiating table.”

  The Shin Bet chiefs’ presentation was an analysis of rare honesty and arresting cogency from people who knew what they were talking about. It laid out, unvarnished, the rock-bottom fundamentals of Israel’s condition. Yet it did not massively succeed in the one immediate and practical call that the four men made. They asked people to sign on to Ayalon’s “People’s Choice,” a grassroots peace initiative that he was promoting together with the Palestinian intellectual and political leader Sari Nusseibeh. This called for two states for the two nations, based on the 1967 borders and with each having its capital in Jerusalem. A quarter of a million Israelis eventually signed on, not enough to force the government’s hand.

  But any relief in government circles was short-lived. A separate but similar initiative promoted jointly by Yossi Beilin, the architect of Oslo and now the leader of the left-wing Meretz Party, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former PA minister, won support and plaudits from all around the world. Their “Geneva Accord,” signed under Swiss government auspices on December 1, also envisaged a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with one-to-one swaps of territory to enable Israel to annex the larger blocs of settlements adjacent to the border. Sharon fumed. “They are trying to do what only a government can do—negotiate and sign agreements,” he told reporters. “They’re causing only confusion and damage.”

  Basically, the document filled out the agreements almost reached at Taba in the dying days of Ehud Barak’s government. Those in turn had been based on the Clinton Parameters, and indeed Bill Clinton sent warm greetings to the nongovernment Israeli and Palestinian delegations and guests gathered in Geneva for the signing. Another former American president, Jimmy Carter, attended the signi
ng ceremony himself. And—much more troubling from Sharon’s standpoint—the current American secretary of state, Colin Powell, received his “old friend” Yossi Beilin at the State Department a few days after the signing.

  There was more trouble for Sharon. In December, an emergency session of the UN General Assembly resolved to refer Israel’s separation fence to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. This action followed the cabinet’s approval, on October 1, of plans for the still-unbuilt sections of the fence that entailed deep incursions into the West Bank in order to encompass Jewish settlements. Tens of thousands of Palestinians would be encompassed, too, under these plans. Many of them would be cut off from their own fields and have to pass through IDF-manned gates as they went about their daily lives.

  This was already the case, on a much smaller scale, with the first section of the fence, between Salem and Kassem, which had been completed during the summer and had already proved its effectiveness as a barrier to terrorists. Abu Mazen complained of the fence’s nibbling of West Bank lands, and of the much more extensive incursions now being planned, when he visited the White House in July.

  In ostensible deference to American objections, the October 1 cabinet decision left gaps in the proposed incursive sections of the fence, as though to indicate that they were not final. But Washington refused to buy so transparent a ploy. “The gaps in and of themselves do not satisfy me,” Powell told The Washington Post. “The question is what becomes of the gaps in due course.”

  Sharon faced a two-pronged legal fight over the fence, one at home and the other in The Hague. Regular demonstrations at points along the fence by Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign peace activists began to attract international media attention. A UN Security Council resolution condemning the cabinet’s October 1 decision was vetoed by the United States, but the General Assembly could not be blocked in this way. The assembly asked the International Court of Justice “whether Israel is legally obligated as an occupying Power to dismantle the barrier.” The answer seemed predictable, and while it would not have binding force, it was nevertheless another looming cloud on Sharon’s darkening horizon.

  Sharon’s response was a bombshell: he announced Israel’s unilateral disengagement from all of the Gaza Strip and from a part of the northern West Bank. All the settlements in these areas would be dismantled. All the soldiers stationed there would be withdrawn.

  Everyone spoke of it as a bombshell, and yet, strangely, everyone claimed to have seen it coming. And they were right: it was clearly discernible in Sharon’s public statements over a period of months. He did not seek to hide it and then suddenly spring it on the public. On the contrary, he deliberately “floated balloons” with the words “unilateral” and “disengagement” emblazoned on them, to gauge, presumably, how people would react. And yet, however much they had, or should have, anticipated or feared or hoped for the unilateral disengagement, depending on their views, when Sharon finally announced it, everyone was stunned. Peaceniks were stunned and ecstatic. Settlers were stunned and distraught. Most important for Sharon, the broad mainstream was stunned and supportive. The polls never wavered on that, from the day the disengagement was announced till the day it was carried out, eighteen months later.

  One early balloon was flown by Ehud Olmert, plainly with Sharon’s compliance. In the second week of November, the deputy prime minister called in a Haaretz journalist to explain what he “personally” felt about the way things were going. “Very soon,” he confided, “the government is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement—and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement—we need to implement a unilateral alternative.”15

  On November 23, Sharon was questioned at cabinet and replied cryptically that he was indeed thinking about unilateral steps and when he’d decided he would ask for the cabinet’s approval.

  What Sharon didn’t tell the cabinet was that on an official visit to Italy two days earlier, he and Weissglas had taken time out to meet discreetly with Elliott Abrams, the top Middle East man on the U.S. National Security Council, and to fill him in on Sharon’s thinking (in advance of the cabinet’s approval).e

  Olmert, meanwhile, signaled the new thinking to the Israeli public in still starker terms. “The present situation will lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish state,” he told Yedioth Ahronoth on December 5.

  We are approaching the point at which the Palestinians will become the majority and they will forgo their own independent state and demand instead the right to vote in Israel. The day that happens we shall have lost everything … I’m for a state with 80 percent Jews and 20 percent Arabs [roughly the proportions within the pre-1967 lines]. Its borders will not be those of Greater Israel, in which I previously believed. Arik thinks about these things all the time … There has never been a prime minister who has made the intellectual and emotional leap that Arik has made from the settlements to the road map.16f

  At first, the American administration was uncomfortable with whatever it was that Sharon was cooking up. On December 15, Minister of Foreign Affairs Silvan Shalom met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington and came away seriously rattled. “I woke up Sharon in the middle of the night,” Shalom recalled, “and I told him, ‘She says that if you come out with your unilateral plan, it will cause a rift between the U.S. and Israel.’ Because they saw it as a cop-out from the road map. ‘She demands that you say that it’s part of the road map, that it will be carried out in close coordination with the U.S., and that settlers from Gaza will not end up in the West Bank.’ ”

  Sharon decided to put those points into the speech he was planning to give three days later.

  He spoke on Thursday, December 18, the last evening of the annual Herzliya Conference. The conference organizers were told to schedule him precisely in time for the prime-time TV news. Sharon himself spent the whole previous evening and day alone in his “tower” study at the ranch, looking out on his land and writing. He knew that after this speech, nothing would be the same for him anymore.

  Two paragraphs in, he made it clear which way he was headed:

  I do not intend to wait for [the Palestinians] indefinitely … If in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the road map, then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians. The purpose of the Disengagement Plan is to reduce terror as much as possible and grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security. The unilateral steps that Israel will take in the framework of the Disengagement Plan will be fully coordinated with the United States … The Disengagement Plan will provide maximum security and minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians. We are interested in conducting direct negotiations, but … we will not wait for them indefinitely.

  The Herzliya speech did not lay to rest all the speculation about what the prime minister intended to do and when he intended to do it. True, he was now publicly, dramatically committing to a unilateral withdrawal, if, as was virtually taken for granted, the Palestinians did not take the security measures that would satisfy him. But withdrawal from where? From Gaza only? From all of Gaza? From some of the West Bank, too? If so, how much? All in one go, or in stages?

  Sharon himself said, “I know you would like to hear names [of settlements to be dismantled], but we should leave something for later.” Was he being coy? Was he reluctant to end the guessing game to which he was subjecting the whole country, and plainly enjoying? Or was he not yet clear in his own mind about how he wanted his new policy of unilateralism to play out in practice?

  The speech itself indicated an ambition larger than withdrawal from Gaza. In his very first mention of the new key word, “disengagement,” Sharon spoke of it as “disengagement from the Palestinians.” Not merely from the Palestinians of Gaza (from whom, in fact, most Israelis were
disengaged, given that a virtually impermeable security fence surrounded the Gaza Strip and that Gazans were no longer allowed to work in Israel), but from “the Palestinians.” He continued: “The Disengagement Plan will include the redeployment of IDF forces along new security lines and a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population. We will draw provisional security lines, and the IDF will be deployed along them. Security will be provided by IDF deployment, the security fence, and other physical obstacles. The Disengagement Plan will reduce friction between us and the Palestinians.”

  Without question, then, he was thinking of withdrawal in the West Bank, too, and not merely from the four isolated settlements at the northern end of the West Bank, which were the only ones eventually included in the disengagement plan.

  Sharon added: “The relocation of settlements will be made, first and foremost, in order to draw the most efficient security line possible … This security line will not constitute the permanent border of the State of Israel. However, as long as implementation of the road map is not resumed, the IDF will be deployed along that line.” But of course the Gaza Strip border was undisputedly the “permanent border of the State of Israel,” so he must have had in mind some line in the West Bank. He began the next paragraph with “Israel will greatly accelerate the construction of the security fence. Today we can already see it taking shape.” Plainly, he was planning or at least considering a very ambitious disengagement that would bring Israel back to the line of the security fence that he was in the process of erecting in the West Bank. The route of the fence approved by the cabinet in October encompassed some 16 percent of the West Bank.17 This was destined to shrink substantially. But so were the dimensions of the disengagement.