Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  From London, Arik flew to New York, where his host was his aunt Sana. She helped him get a driver’s license, explaining to the examiner that he was an Israeli army officer and hence his rudimentary English. She flew down to Florida, and he took her car on a leisurely swing through Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, joining her in Palm Beach for New Year’s 1952. “By the time I returned to Israel I felt like a man of the world. More important, the malaria seemed to have disappeared.”

  Back in uniform, he found himself assigned to Northern Command, where once again his path crossed that of Dayan and once again Arik signaled to the famous general that they were two of a kind: single-minded, devious, and resourceful. Two Israeli soldiers had crossed the border with Jordan and been captured. Dayan, now CO Northern Command, asked his intelligence officer whether he thought it might be possible to pick up a couple of Jordanian soldiers to help expedite the Israelis’ repatriation. Arik, careful to sound equally blasé, merely offered a noncommittal “I’ll look into it.” But as soon as Dayan left his room, he phoned one of his officers, Shlomo Hefer, and arranged for the two of them to drive to a remote spot on the border.

  They pretended they were looking for a lost cow and got into a shouted conversation with a Jordanian sergeant and three soldiers, inviting them across to drink coffee under a tree. Arik, in reasonable Arabic, asked the sergeant to send one of his men back to ask about the cow. He sent two. No sooner were they out of sight than Arik and Hefer drew their weapons and bundled the remaining two into their vehicle. The next morning, Dayan found a note on his desk: two Jordanians were in the cells below his office, waiting to be interviewed. Dayan, in a cover note to the chief of staff attached to Arik’s report of the capture, wrote, “In my opinion, this operation, which was carried out with sense and with daring, is worthy of special mention.”26

  “It was the beginning of a complicated lifelong relationship between us,” Sharon wrote later, “that was to be marked by deep feelings of respect, but by suspicion too … He positively relished the idea that someone would do this kind of thing … Typically he would convey his intentions in an ambiguous way, leaving plenty of room for initiative and interpretation … If the result was success, fine. But if it was a failure, well then, the responsibility was not his but yours.”27

  BORDERLINE

  Dayan’s tenure at Northern Command lasted only half a year; he was promoted to deputy chief of staff and moved to the High Command in Tel Aviv. Arik was all the more susceptible to a sustained barrage of nagging from his parents, especially his mother, to continue his education. The army, reluctant to lose a promising officer, suggested a leave of absence for the purposes of study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period he would be commander of a reserve battalion in the Jerusalem Brigade. Perfecting the picture from Arik’s viewpoint, Gali was moving to Jerusalem too. Having completed her studies as a psychiatric nurse, she was to work in a small psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of the capital. The couple married without much ado at the office of a military chaplain whom Arik knew. They found a basement apartment for rent, and Arik began diligently taking classes in Middle Eastern history. “It was a wonderful time,” he writes.28

  But it didn’t last. The situation on the borders was steadily worsening. Ever since the war ended (and indeed, even before), Palestinian refugees had been infiltrating back across the unmarked frontiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some sought to return to their former homes: if one member of a family could establish residency, there was a chance for the others to come back under a family reunification scheme. Others simply tried to harvest the crops, the fruits, or the olives growing on their former lands. Often the land was now worked by Jews: the government deliberately located new settlements close to the armistice lines in order to stake the state’s claim to every inch of the territory that remained in its hands after the war. New immigrants were channeled to these border settlements and encouraged to farm the land. Government instructors gave rudimentary guidance to those who had never been farmers before.

  The infiltration soon gave rise to violent and sometimes fatal confrontations. Some refugee-infiltrators did not confine themselves to their own former farms or villages but scoured the wider area for produce, tools, irrigation pipes, livestock, anything worth taking. Some settlements formed vigilante groups to protect their property, since the border was wide open and the army was plainly unable to patrol its entire winding length.

  The government for its part ordered the army to maintain a ruthless shoot-to-kill policy along the armistice lines.29 The purpose was twofold: to keep the refugee-infiltrators out for fear of a mass return that could quickly undermine the new state’s conveniently manageable 80/20 Jewish/Arab demographic; and to reaffirm, each day anew, the inviolability of the armistice lines, even in the absence of full peace treaties. Subsequent orders issued by the IDF High Command forbade shooting at women and children. Male infiltrators, too, were not to be shot at without due warning, unless they opened fire first. In practice, even after these limitations were imposed, shoot to kill continued to be the order of the day in some IDF units. In others, nonviolent infiltrators were rounded up and sent back or handed over to the UN observers.

  The harsh deterrent policy against the refugee-infiltrators was the focus of political argument then and thereafter. Also still in dispute is whether the Israeli policy caused or at least catalyzed the next spiral of escalation. Increasingly, the Palestinian infiltrators came in armed bands, out to kill and maim indiscriminately. Israel’s response was to launch reprisal raids across the borders, against the villages or refugee camps from which the marauders were believed to have set out.

  It was the dissonance that developed between that vaunted policy and its execution on the ground that sucked Arik back into the army and catapulted him to military prominence and national fame. Time and again, reprisal actions over the borders ended in frustrating failure. The postwar army seemed to have lost its fighting edge. IDF units were driven off with ease by poorly armed Jordanian militiamen. Often, the raiding party failed to make contact altogether, losing its way in the dark.

  Arik had an opportunity to show how it should be done in July 1953. Mishael Shaham, commander of the Jerusalem Brigade, won approval from the High Command to go after a particularly lethal Palestinian marauder who lived in the village of Nebi Samuel, overlooking Jerusalem from the north. But Shaham could not get a regular IDF infantry unit to take on the assignment. So he called in Arik, one of his reserve battalion commanders, and asked him to undertake the mission with whatever men he could pull together. By nightfall, seven crack fighters were strapping on their webbing and checking their tommy guns. They were a motley collection: not men from his battalion at all, but comrades from war days and a couple of present-day soldiers discreetly wooed out of their units. The fact that Shaham, a regular army colonel, countenanced this semi-guerrilla setup reflected his desperation at the almost daily toll of Israeli lives and property that the infiltrators were exacting in the area under his command.

  In the event, the reprisal raid was a flop. The man was not at home, and anyway the dynamite charge that Arik’s men laid failed to blow off the door of his house. It did, however, rouse other villagers who began firing vigorously at the raiders, who in turn chucked a few grenades and beat a retreat. Yet when they returned to base at dawn and told their story, Shaham was well pleased. At least they had reached the target and engaged it. That was a lot more than most such operations achieved.

  Shaham wrote to Ben-Gurion, prime minister and minister of defense, urging that the army set up a special force to conduct reprisal raids. Asked to recommend a commanding officer, he said he had the very man. Arik, sorely tempted, shrank back at the thought of Gali’s likely reaction, let alone Vera’s. He had an important test in history the next day, he muttered to Shaham. “Why study history when you can make history?” the colonel replied.30 A fortnight later Arik was called before the chief of staff, Mordechai Makleff, and formal
ly offered the task of creating and commanding the proposed special force.

  “I’m dying of hunger. Where’s that porcupine we hunted yesterday?”

  “Coming right up! He’s on the grill with onions as big as a bull’s balls.”

  This gastronomical exchange between Major Arik, big-bellied, silver-haired, but baby-faced commander of Unit 101, and his deputy, Shlomo Baum, is one of the salient memories of one young officer, Moshe Yenuka, who had come for an interview at the elite unit’s base in the Jerusalem hills. The commander, Yenuka recalled, wore sandals on his bare feet and a large pistol strapped to his belt.

  Arik cherry-picked his men from all over the army, often to the chagrin of rival commanders. While he encouraged an atmosphere of informality between officers and men that harked back to the egalitarian traditions of the Palmach, he was demanding and unforgiving in the strenuous training programs that he put in place in Unit 101. And while discipline was lax on base, it was harsh and inflexible on operations. Unit 101’s esprit de corps rested on a new, much higher benchmark of what constituted “mission accomplished.” The officers exhorted the men, and the men exhorted each other, to persevere despite casualties, to drive home their attacks, and always to bring their dead and wounded back with them, never leaving them to the enemy’s mercies.

  Arik began pressing Shaham and the High Command for assignments. Among the first was a mission to drive a clan of Bedouin encamped in the Negev back across the border into Sinai. Jeep-borne soldiers of Unit 101 stormed through the encampment firing their weapons at will. A few of the Bedouin were wounded; the rest fled in panic. The Israelis burned their tents and confiscated abandoned weapons. They chased the fleeing Bedouin to the border, where, in a demilitarized zone between Israeli and Egyptian territory, Unit 101’s jeeps ran into a larger Egyptian force. “Get out, or we’ll do to you what we did to you in ’48,” Arik barked at the Egyptian troops. “We’re leaving now. If you shoot, we will immediately turn back and attack you.”

  It worked and gave the guys a lot to laugh about when they got back to base. But some in the unit were uncomfortable with the action against the Bedouin. Meir Har-Zion, a Unit 101 man whom Moshe Dayan was later to praise as the finest soldier Israel ever had, recorded years later in his memoirs a “sense of imperfection” that pervaded him at the time. “Is this the enemy? Is it all justified?”31 Arik tried to persuade them that Israel needed to assert its sovereignty and shore up its borders and this was the only way to do it. Dayan himself, in his memoirs, writes that these Bedouin, members of the Azazme tribe, “served Egyptian intelligence by passing on information and by planting mines and carrying out acts of violence inside Israel.”32

  Shortly after, Unit 101 was ordered into action against the al-Burej refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, and again a dispute arose over the likely fates of innocent civilians. Shmuel Falah, one of the soldiers, refused to take part in the attack. Arik allowed him to switch to a second platoon whose task was to blow up the home of an Egyptian military commander. In the debriefing, defending the deaths of women and children, Arik railed that the women were “prostitutes serving the armed infiltrators who kill our innocent civilians.” The chief of staff, Mordechai Makleff, phoned Shaham to demand an explanation of how fifteen civilians had died in the operation. Shaham called in Arik. Arik explained that a guard had given the alarm; the Unit 101 men found themselves in a tight spot; they had had to shoot their way out of the refugee camp.

  Perhaps it was his cavalier attitude to Arab lives that had persuaded the Jerusalem Brigade commander, Shaham, to recommend Arik for Unit 101 in the first place. Shaham himself once recounted how he had been assigned two new battalion commanders, Arik and Shlomo Lahat, nicknamed Chich, who was also studying at the Hebrew University.h “Chich arrived, took command of a battalion, and the first thing he asked was, ‘Where do we train?’ Arik came and received a battalion too, and his first question was, ‘Where can we fight Arabs, where can we kill Arabs around here?’ That was the difference between him and others.”33

  But Major Arik Scheinerman, aged twenty-five, did not make the policy. He merely executed it more effectively than it had been executed before Unit 101 came into being. His military leadership, first at Unit 101 and afterward as commander of the paratroopers, meant that the reprisal operations achieved greater success than in the past. It also meant that the conflict with the surrounding states escalated; the operations achieved too great success, as Ben-Gurion himself later observed.

  Like Shaham, though, like Moshe Dayan and other top officers, Arik wholeheartedly identified with the reprisals policy. Indeed, time and again at Unit 101’s camp at Sataf, in the Jerusalem hills, the unit commander’s voice was to be heard blasting and cursing the powers that be for not being even tougher in the border warfare and specifically for not approving more cross-border operations for Unit 101.

  On October 12, 1953, Palestinian infiltrators gruesomely murdered a mother and her two children in the Israeli village of Yahud, east of Tel Aviv. General Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, promised to hunt down the killers. He invited Israel to send tracker dogs over the border to help in the search, but they lost the scent. Glubb condemned the murders at Yahud.

  Nevertheless, Mordechai Makleff, the chief of staff, and his deputy, Moshe Dayan, met the next morning with the acting defense minister, Pinhas Lavon, and with Ben-Gurion, who was vacationing and thus formally not involved in the decision making. They decided on a reprisal operation against Kibbiya, a nearby Palestinian village on the West Bank. Fifty of Kibbiya’s 280 homes were to be blown up. Arik was called to Central Command headquarters at Ramle. Unit 101 was to give diversionary support to the paratroop battalion that would conduct the large-scale operation. The paratroop commander was hesitant, explaining that his men were neither trained nor prepared for the action. Arik stepped in immediately. Unit 101 was trained and prepared, he said. He could take command of the whole force and lead the operation the following night.

  Arik himself led the combined force of a hundred paratroopers and twenty-five men from Unit 101. Returning at dawn, he reported that a dozen Jordanian National Guardsmen and two legionnaires had been killed in exchanges of fire early in the operation.

  “In a few more minutes we were in the village proper,” Sharon recorded in his memoirs.

  As we walked through the streets an eerie silence hung over the place, broken only by the strains of Arab music coming from a radio that had been left playing in an empty café. A report came in from one of the roadblocks that hundreds of villagers were streaming by them … At midnight we began to demolish the village’s big stone buildings … Soldiers were sent to look through each house to make sure no one was inside; then the charges were placed and set off.34

  But there were people inside. Sharon writes that he went home to Jerusalem to sleep and learned only later in the day, from Jordanian radio, that “sixty-nine people had been killed, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  Israel claimed the victims must have been cowering unnoticed in cellars or basements and were killed by mistake in the explosions. The Arab Legion claimed many of the bodies had bullet wounds.35 Ben-Gurion made matters worse by going on the radio several days later to claim that the attack on Kibbiya had been carried out not by the IDF but by a vigilante group of local Jewish villagers enraged by the incessant raids on the border settlements and finally by the triple murder in Yahud. This was not the first time that Israel had denied the IDF’s role in reprisals and resorted to the vigilante canard.36 It fooled no one, especially since some thirteen hundred pounds of explosives had been expertly laid to blow up forty-six buildings in Kibbiya—hardly the work of an enraged posse. Great Britain, Jordan’s patron, voiced “distress and horror” at the outrage. Washington said that “those responsible should be brought to account.” Israel was condemned and excoriated around the world.

  Behind the self-righteous facade there was both shock and worry
in Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion asked to see the officer in charge of the Kibbiya operation. “It was an exciting moment for me,” Sharon recorded later, in unwonted understatement. He was fairly bursting with pride. The “Old Man” quizzed him about the operation and about the men of Unit 101. Perhaps he suspected they were ex-Etzel fighters, prone to massacring and to disobedience. Arik told him they were mostly moshav and kibbutz youth. “They were the finest boys we had, I said, and there was no chance they would ever act except under orders. Then Ben-Gurion said, ‘It doesn’t make any real difference what will be said about Kibbiya around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’ ”37

  Sharon may have been embellishing, but his grasp of the prime minister’s remarks was accurate. Alongside the concern over international fallout from Kibbiya there was a grim gratification in Ben-Gurion’s circle that at last the army could be relied on to deliver a bloody but unmistakable message to the other side. “There were tragic consequences that were nobody’s fault,” Dayan wrote. “But from a purely military perspective, this was a first-class operation … The lesson for the whole army was that the government’s instructions were no longer mere wishful thinking but rather minimal expectations. Instead of army units returning from operations and explaining why they had failed to carry out the assignment, the paratroopers were explaining why they had done more than expected.”

  Still, the worldwide castigation was a sober reminder of Israel’s vulnerability. “The lesson,” Dayan wrote, “was that we must direct our reprisals against military targets. What was ‘permitted’ to the Arabs, and indeed to other nations, was forbidden for Jews and Israelis and would not be forgiven them. Not only foreigners but citizens of Israel themselves and Jews overseas expect from us a ‘purity of arms’ far more exacting than that demanded of any other army.”38