Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

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  The elderly rabbi’s ruling meant that the showdown, when it came, pitted just one of the two wings of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel against the serried ranks of soldiers and policemen deployed to seal off the Gaza Strip from would-be “reinforcements” for the doomed settlements. This proved significant indeed. The haredim had shown over the years that they were capable, when aroused, of bringing out tens of thousands, and on occasion even hundreds of thousands, onto the streets to demonstrate. Their young men could be obstreperous, and on occasion violent, when protesting for a cause sanctioned by their rabbis.

  But in the mass protests that took place during the lead‑up to the Gaza disengagement, the haredim were entirely absent. Rabbi Eliashiv’s decision to join the government meant that protesting against the disengagement was not sanctioned. His ruling, moreover, spilled over to the Orthodox Sephardim who saw Shas as their political affiliation and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef as their spiritual authority. They were all absent, too, even though Shas was formally in the opposition.

  As a result, the anti-disengagement demonstrations that took place during the summer of 2005 in the south of the country, while large and threatening, were essentially homogeneous in their composition. Overwhelmingly, the protesters were national-religious people. Almost all the men and boys wore the trademark knitted kippa skullcaps (as distinct from the haredi black ones). And the women, unlike haredi women, demonstrated alongside their menfolk.

  The anti-disengagement movement’s chosen color was orange, in emulation of Ukraine’s pro-democracy revolution then gripping the world’s attention. Orange lit up the land. Orange bunting fluttered from balconies and trees. At intersections, youngsters in orange T‑shirts offered drivers orange ribbons to tie to their cars. Married young women in the national-religious community wore orange in their head scarves. Sharon’s admen friends tried to launch a “counterrevolution” in blue. But the patriotic blue ribbons—Israel’s flag is blue and white—though universally available, failed to catch on.

  Orange’s ubiquity was deceiving, though. The polls told a different story. In March 2005, Sharon’s approval rating in Haaretz’s tracking poll was up in January. It slid slightly in April, but he was still ahead 49 to 19 against Netanyahu. More important, 68.5 percent said they supported the impending disengagement, and only 27.6 percent said they opposed it.

  Asked at this time if he would go down south and take command of the troops himself if the disengagement ran into trouble, an ostensibly unworried Sharon replied breezily, “You worry too much.”20 But beneath the confident facade, he was still worried. He decided to dismiss the army chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, who had spoken of the forthcoming disengagement as “a tailwind for terror.” It was not exactly a dismissal (though Ya’alon took it as such). Formally, the chief of staff is appointed for three years, and Ya’alon’s three-year term was up in May. But the tradition was that chiefs of staff got a fourth year unless they had seriously fouled up. Minister of Defense Mofaz, Ya’alon recalled later, informed him almost offhandedly that it had been decided to do away with that tradition—starting immediately.21

  The man chosen to replace Ya’alon was a former commander of the air force, Dan Halutz, a brilliant, soft-spoken general whom Sharon had reportedly wanted to appoint chief of staff back in 2002 but had been dissuaded. No air force commander had ever gone on to become chief of staff in the IDF’s history.

  The settler lobby, citing this prior preference, immediately began tarring Halutz as a longtime Sharon crony and favorite of the “ranch forum.” The less conspiratorial theory, which Sharon himself seemed quietly to encourage, was that the air force chief was the natural, indeed perfect choice given the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The overriding military priority, it was hinted, was preparing an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities if all other means of neutralizing them failed.

  For the moment, though, the main challenge facing Halutz and the army was the disengagement. “The State of Israel stands on the eve of a major and significant operation,” Halutz declared at his swearing-in ceremony on May 31. “The decision of the government and the Knesset will be carried out with the proper sensitivity and with the requisite determination … No refusal to obey orders will be tolerated … The IDF has one chain of command, and only one: the military hierarchy, which is subordinate to the political echelon.” Sharon and Mofaz looked on in manifest approval.22

  The crucial standoff—and crucial test of the new chief of staff’s mettle—came in mid-July with a huge march toward the Gaza border by anti-disengagement protesters from all over the country. Tens of thousands of West Bank settlers converged on the torrid Negev village of Kfar Maimon, where they were joined by columns of sympathizers from inside Israel proper. Adults took off work; children skipped school. Whole families marched and prepared to encamp at “the gates of Gaza.” Thousands of young men and boys intended to break through police and army lines and head for Gush Katif, where they would join the local settlers and—in vast numbers, as they hoped—offer determined resistance to the forces sent to carry out the disengagement.

  Sharon, Halutz, and the police commissioner, Moshe Karadi, understood that the challenge for them was to ensure there was no such mass incursion. They deployed phalanxes of soldiers and police to block the road to Gaza. They made it clear to the seething, angry mass of demonstrators that no one would be allowed through and that they would use force if need be to impose the blockade.

  As dusk fell, the police herded the streams of marchers into the village itself, where, by agreement between their leaders and the police commanders, they were to spend the night. But in the morning they were surprised to find themselves effectively besieged, with the main gates of the village welded shut and thousands of police and soldiers blocking every other possible exit. There was only one way out: back home northward. Rousing rhetoric kept people’s spirits up for two hot and dusty days. “Kfar Maimon is one of the great Zionist actions of our generation,” Pinhas Wallerstein, a prominent settlement leader, assured his wilting cohorts. “We want Family Sharon to go to hell. Our march continues.” On the third day the buses, which the police copiously supplied, began to fill up one after another and head off north.

  It was the settler leaders who blinked first. Sharon and the police chiefs were fulsome in their praise of the “sagacity and responsibility” of these leaders for having prevented a violent confrontation. In fact, though, as both sides knew and neither was interested in trumpeting, the demonstrators had been deterred. Confronted by thick cordons of mounted police backed by thousands of troops, their leaders realized, perhaps for the first time, that Sharon meant business. Until then, various acts of civil disobedience—some clearly criminal, such as scattering nails on main highways and planting fake bombs in public places—had gone unpunished. Mass anti-disengagement demonstrations in Jerusalem in January and in Tel Aviv in March had left the impression that the settler leaders could marshal hundreds of thousands of supporters at will. The atmosphere in the country was of civil disobedience. The standoff at Kfar Maimon started to change that.

  There was a rerun two weeks later, this time centering on the Negev townships and Sderot and Ofakim. Once again, the army and the police deployed in force. They could not close off these sprawling townships. Instead, lines of troops, standing shoulder to shoulder, stretched out across the desert, blocking any mass march on Gaza. Jeep patrols chased youngsters trying to strike out in twos and threes across the dunes and reach the Gaza Strip perimeter.

  On the main road south from Ofakim, blocked by dense rows of mounted police, thousands of demonstrators sat on the asphalt listening to a rabbi rail against “the Amalekites” who, he said, lived across the border in Gaza. The settler leaders “negotiated” with the police, demanding their democratic right to proceed down the highway. Once again, the negotiations were a charade. Once again, both sides extolled the “responsibility” of the settler leaders. In fact, an army and a police force,
determinedly led, had snuffed out an incipient insurrection.

  In essence, that is what happened in the disengagement itself, a fortnight later. It is perhaps heartless to apply the term “anticlimax” to the heartrending scenes of eviction and destruction that played out live on television before a transfixed and sympathetic nation. But sympathy was not to be confused with support. On the eve of the disengagement in August a well-researched poll showed 57 percent of Jewish Israelis supporting it. (Virtually all Arab Israelis were presumed to support it, too.)

  Some 36 percent of those questioned feared that the evacuation would result in bloodshed. But these fears were very quickly allayed as columns of black-clad police and troops moved into settlement after settlement, gently but firmly escorting the settler families to waiting vehicles and out, through the Kissufim crossing, into Israel. The police and the soldiers, both men and women, had been well trained, and counseled by psychologists to inure them to the insults, threats, and pleas directed at them by the settlers.

  The policemen and soldiers went about their unpleasant business with impassive faces, closely monitored by their officers. Whoever broke down—confronted, for instance, by a young child clinging to his bed and wailing bitterly or by the rabbi of a synagogue, wrapped in his prayer shawl, holding a Torah scroll and defiantly imploring heavenly intercession—would quickly be withdrawn and replaced. The supply of replacement troops seemed inexhaustible.

  In effect, it was. Some forty thousand soldiers and police were involved, in one form or another, in the disengagement operation. Resistance was simply swamped by this vast force, massed in effective concentrations, moving steadily through the twenty-one Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. All the prior talk of passive resistance, and indeed of active resistance, evaporated in the face of this display of the state’s physical power.

  Again the claim was made, in real time and later, that the Gush Emunim leaders and rabbis voluntarily prevailed on their young followers to exercise restraint, to eschew violence, to confine themselves to verbal assault, passive protest, and symbolic confrontation. In fact, they backed down in the face of vastly superior numbers. The army, deployed in concentric rings, continued to prevent would-be settler reinforcements from reaching the Strip. Had they discerned weakness or irresolution in the political echelon—Sharon and Mofaz—or among the generals, the settler leaders would doubtless have tried to exploit it and would have urged their followers to resist more vigorously.

  As it was, the drama soon became melodrama. Once it was clear there would be no real violence, the focus turned to the TV cameras. Having finally given up any thought of serious physical resistance, and with even the most messianic among them despairing at last of divine intervention, the settler leaders and rabbis concentrated on enhancing and exacerbating the trauma of the eviction. The word they used was “expulsion,” in Hebrew girush, a term redolent of Jewish suffering through the ages.g “A Jew does not expel a Jew” was another of the slogans coined by the leadership—the Yesha Council was long adept at picking bright advertising agencies—chanted at the soldiers and police by young evacuees, arms locked, clinging to the synagogue pews, prolonging the disheartening chore for their evictors.

  They played to the nationwide television audience, watching live and re-watching evening roundups of the day’s evictions and demolitions. Their purpose was to sear into the national memory the painful scenes of rupture and dislocation, of individual grief and family suffering. This, they hoped, would build broader, more effective resistance to further withdrawals and dismantlement of settlements on the West Bank in the future. They portrayed Gush Katif as a pastoral Garden of Eden that Sharon was brutally uprooting. The television cameras panned one last time across the leafy streets, the red-roofed homes, the long greenhouses full of flowers and vegetables, the synagogues and yeshivas, crowded with praying, weeping men and women. Thousands, probably millions of Israelis wept with them.

  In eight days, it was all over. The disengagement took less time even than the military planners had hoped. Between August 15 and 22, all twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip were emptied of their inhabitants and given over to the wreckers, whose lumbering mechanical monsters made short shrift of the ranch-style, cinder-block homes. Only the synagogues were left standing, emptied of their Torah arks, pulpits, and pews. The only semi-serious altercation took place at Kfar Darom, where young men barricaded themselves on the roof of the synagogue and threw whitewash and various bric-a-brac onto soldiers clambering up ladders to fetch them down. In the end, helicopters lowered metal cages onto the rooftop, and the youngsters were herded in and deposited in buses that took them to jail. That fracas, too, attended by much screaming and wailing, was staged with one eye on the cameras. In northern Samaria, two of the four settlements emptied out before the army arrived. The other two, reinforced by some two thousand youngsters, put up a show of resistance that was quickly and quietly defused.

  The disengagement did etch a deep and lasting trauma. But it was largely confined to the settler community itself and its ideological-political hinterland—the national-religious camp. Youngsters there who had been swayed by the rabbis’ confident imprecations to heaven were shattered now by God’s apparent apathy. Some of those same rabbis now spoke of an ideological or theological rupture between religious Zionism and the Zionist state (which in their book was Zionist no more).

  But the more striking phenomenon, in the wake of the disengagement, was how manifestly the trauma did not permeate the wider Israeli public, outside the national-religious camp. The tears of sympathy quickly dried. The national mood was not of sadness but of relief over how well it had all gone, tinged perhaps with embarrassment over having been rattled by the settlers’ threats of civil strife. Those who hadn’t been rattled now went around saying, “We told you so”—which added to the general sense of anticlimax. Within days, the story was off the front pages. Israelis who had delayed their vacations now embarked on them with gusto, making the most of the last days of school holidays.

  For Sharon, the following weeks were an untrammeled splurge of gloria mundi. At the UN General Assembly in New York in September statesmen from dozens of countries literally vied for face time and a photo op with the Israeli leader, who, by universal consensus, had taken the Middle East a giant step forward. Bringing peace to the region would be “my calling and my primary goal for the coming years,” Sharon vowed in his speech to the General Assembly. “The successful implementation of the Disengagement Plan opens up a window of opportunity for advancing toward peace, in accordance with the sequence of the Roadmap. The State of Israel is committed to the Roadmap.”

  The general assessment, at home and abroad, given the success of the disengagement, was that more withdrawal and dismantlement of settlements on the West Bank would follow, whether through negotiation with the Palestinians or in further unilateral steps. The original import of the Herzliya speech would be revived. Sharon himself insisted the disengagement was a one-off event, never to be repeated. But this unequivocal assertion itself was then subjected to equivocal parsing by his aides and close advisers. They created a deliberate cloud of obfuscation around his intentions, pumping out contradictory statements on the record and off. Sharon’s wink-and-nod policy, which for so long had characterized the expansion of Israel’s settlement map, was now, it seemed, to be applied to its contraction.

  The obfuscation was designed, at first, to preserve the option of running for prime minister again at the head of the Likud. Sharon’s coterie was divided over this. Sharon himself had signaled repeatedly over the summer months that the time and effort he was spending pandering to his half-disaffected party were increasingly weighing him down. The disparity between his standing in the public and his standing in his own party grew wider and more incongruous in the wake of the successful disengagement. He was determined that things would be different in the next Knesset. Either the party would change, or else he would change parties. Speculation over a new, centrist “Sha
ron party” mounted from day to day.

  Matters came to a head at a rowdy Likud central committee meeting on September 25–26. The issue on the agenda, ostensibly formal, was whether to bring forward the party’s leadership primaries. In practice, as Sharon declared, the move was an attempt by the rebels to unseat him and restore Netanyahu to the party leadership. The Likud primaries would inevitably trigger early general elections. The present Knesset still had more than a year to run. But so determined were Sharon’s party rivals to dislodge him that they were prepared to forgo that year in power. They did not feel, at the end of the day, that their party was in power. The party leader had effectively crossed the lines.

  On the evening of the twenty-fifth, with Sharon on the rostrum and about to speak, the sound system mysteriously failed. Three times the prime minister climbed up, in the hope that the electricity would come on, and three times he returned to his seat amid mounting pandemonium. Eventually, he got up and, with his phalanx of security men and aides, exited the hall. The smirks on some of the faces around him fed media speculation—encouraged by the Netanyahu camp—that the electricity cut was a deliberate provocation by Sharon’s side, designed to portray him as victim and his rivals as thugs.

  Provocation or not, that was indeed the prevalent reaction in the public. Feeding the conspiracy theory was the fact that Sharon’s aides distributed the text of his speech to journalists before he failed to deliver it. So he had the best of both worlds: the speech was published, and he did not have to read it out over the cacophony of pro-Bibi hecklers.