by David Landau
The judge in the Tel Aviv District Court, Moshe Telgam, declared himself impressed by the “sincere and knowledgeable tenor of Dr. Benny Begin’s evidence.” He held against Sharon both on grounds of fair comment and on grounds of truth.
The Supreme Court swept this away on appeal. It took another five years, but eventually Sharon achieved, if not victory, then at least a backhanded affirmation from the highest court in the land that the historical facts of the Lebanon War were not quite as straightforward as Benziman and Benny Begin made out. Sharon lost the case in the Supreme Court, too—but solely on grounds of fair comment. All three justices held that Judge Telgam should have confined himself to this defense of fair comment, which was adequate to decide the case. The presiding justice in the Supreme Court, Eliahu Matza, was elaborately careful not to take sides on the historical issue. “It must not be deduced that I accept, or do not accept, in whole, or in part, the lower court’s findings. For my part, I prefer to ignore them, not only because of my usual desire to avoid unnecessary obiter dicta, but also, and mainly, because of the nature of the historical argument. As far as I am concerned, determining historical truth is best left to historians.”
The second justice, Eliezer Rivlin, joined with Justice Matza in ticking off Judge Telgam. “The means at the judge’s disposal could not enable him to find his way through the thickets of the factual questions that he chose to grapple with.” The third justice, Ya’acov Turkel, was the most censorious. “A judge should curb his desires and confine himself—in his judgments and not only in his judgments—exclusively to the issues that he is duty-bound to rule on in order to reach a decision in the case before him.”
Turkel concluded with a one-sentence “final comment” that gave Sharon’s side cause for gratification. “To remove any doubt, the dismissal of this appeal does not imply endorsement of the district court’s conclusion that the defendants are protected by the defense of truth—about which we have said what we have said.”
Benziman, in his book, reacted with bad grace, suggesting that the Supreme Court took account of the fact that Sharon was now prime minister. Ironically, though, his own honest reporting in the book provided abundant reason why the justices would have been uncomfortable to rule for either side on the historical issue. Benziman even confided to his readers that Mozer, his lawyer, tended to believe at one stage that Sharon and Begin conspired together, behind the cabinet’s back. Benziman reported, too, that several leading journalists held that view and tried, therefore, to persuade him to drop his suit. And he reported at length the categorical testimony of Begin’s longtime close aide and friend, Yechiel Kadishai, that Begin did take into account the possibility that the war would extend beyond the original forty kilometers and that he said so explicitly to a number of people. Kadishai testified that he himself had told Begin, early in the war, of the rumors already then circulating that Sharon was deceiving him—and Begin brushed them aside.
On the strength of my deep and intimate knowledge of Menachem Begin over many years, of his opinions, his positions, and his reactions, and in consideration of the close relations that prevailed between us, I assert categorically that if he had thought that Sharon deceived him, I would have known.c
NEW WAR, OLD WARS
After five years, “stab in the back” was wearing thin as the platform from which Sharon proposed to storm his way back to national leadership. However cogent his arguments seemed to be, in his own mind at any rate, they suffered from the inherent political weakness of casting other people’s minds back to the Lebanon War. While Sharon felt he had convinced at least some of the public that the war was not his responsibility alone, he could hardly claim to have persuaded many Israelis that it was a success, as he continued doggedly to assert. It was fortunate for him, therefore, if to be cynical, that the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out when it did, at the end of 1987. The intifada breathed new life into the frustrated general, who seemed to be fading away as a frustrated politician. It was, after all, a new war, and he was an acknowledged master of the art of war. Better yet, it was nothing like the Lebanon War.
Granted, his contention that driving Arafat from Lebanon would render the Palestinians of Palestine placid and compliant had been debunked long ago. The incidence of violence in the occupied territories had not fallen off, even at the height of the war, and it had remained fairly stable in the subsequent years. Stones were frequently thrown at army and civilian cars; more rarely, Molotov cocktails.
But that was small beer compared with the mayhem that erupted throughout the territories after an Israeli truck plowed into a group of Palestinian workers in the northern Gaza Strip on December 8, 1987, killing four and injuring ten. By all accounts, then and later, it was an accident. But the fifty thousand Gazans who marched from the funeral that evening to the gates of a nearby army camp, hurling rocks and abuse, were not prepared to believe that. The next day, rioting spread like a brush fire up and down the Strip; days later it had broken out all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In the twenty years of Israeli occupation there had never been anything even remotely comparable in scope to this spontaneous, countrywide rebellion, led by youths with stones and slingshots. Quickly, the movement grew a grassroots political leadership. Local committees formed in the Palestinian towns. When members were arrested, others took their places. On the Israeli left, some could say they had warned that a Palestinian uprising was ultimately inevitable, that there was no such thing as “enlightened occupation.”
By February 1988, after just two months of intifada, there were 48 Palestinian dead. By late 1991, the figure was 787. Some 750 of them had been killed by the army, among them 159 minors, and another 37 were thought to have been shot by settlers. Israel lost 13 dead soldiers and another 13 civilians during this period. By July 1993, the Palestinian death toll topped 1,000. Another 503 Palestinians had been killed by their own people as collaborators. The Israeli death toll, from attacks in the territories and inside Israel proper, stood at 165.8
The intifada caught the Israeli government and army wrong-footed. They had not seen it coming, despite the extensive intelligence network that the Shin Bet security service maintained throughout the territories. Yitzhak Rabin took his time to speak out—and, when he finally did, provoked a worldwide wave of revulsion. He ordered the army to “break their bones,” which some of the troops proceeded to do with gusto. Rabin and his aides tried repeatedly to explain that what he had said, and the wooden nightsticks that had been issued to the troops in the territories, were not intended as a license to maim. He had meant club rather than shoot, and then only to put down violent rioting, not to punish. He had been misquoted. Officers or soldiers found abusing their powers would be tried and punished. There would be no sadism in the Jewish army.
Sharon, quick-footed and smooth-tongued, saw his chance and moved with alacrity. He had been planning a festive housewarming for his and Lily’s new town house: an apartment in the heart of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a publicity stunt planned to coincide with the winter festival of Hanukkah. Now it could coincide with the raging intifada, too, making it dramatically more topical. More than three hundred politicians, businessmen, and assorted glitterati of the Right made their way through the tightly guarded alleys of the Old City, braving the catcalls of Peace Now demonstrators, to watch Sharon, in a big black yarmulke, kindle the Hanukkah lights and nail a mezuzah to the doorpost of his new home. His Muslim neighbors had been ordered by the police to stay indoors, behind closed shutters.
Sharon and Lily, elegantly dressed and sparkling with energy, effusively greeted Prime Minister Shamir and the Likud cabinet members. Peres and the Laborites stayed demonstratively away. Yossi Sarid, the left-wing firebrand now in Meretz, best evoked the feeling in the peace camp. “The country is burning,” he cried, “and the emperor Nero goes up to the roof of his new house in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and plays his fiddle. With Sharon-Nero on that roof were three hundred to
adies, hypocrites, arse-lickers, opportunists and adventurers, deluded dreamers and lunatics.”d
For Sharon, the party celebrated not merely the new house—which he barely used thereafter, though its police protection cost the taxpayer 1.25 million shekels a year—but a new lease on political life. “I’ve moved to the Old City of Jerusalem,” he asserted at cabinet, “because you, Shimon Peres, wanted to hand the Old City to King Hussein. I’ve moved there to stop you.”
On television, Sharon explained that “the deteriorating security situation in Jerusalem” was what prompted him to move into his new home. Many more Jews would follow him to the Muslim Quarter, he believed. He had never asked to be guarded; he had spent most of his life guarding others. Menachem Begin had telephoned to congratulate him, he added. What needed to be done now in Jerusalem was to shut down and drive out the PLO-linked political agencies operating there. Years ago he had shown in Gaza how to deal with terror. He had also submitted proposals on how to solve the Gaza refugee problem. But no one listened to him. There was no serious political leadership in this country, capable of making decisions.
The message was unmistakable: make him minister of defense instead of Rabin, and the intifada would quickly be crushed. Sharon’s new agenda turned him into Rabin’s most relentless critic. When Sharon lambasted Rabin at cabinet over the state of security on the roads, both in the territories and inside Israel, Ezer Weizman, now a Labor-affiliated minister in the unity government, lashed back, terming Sharon’s purported panaceas “cheap demagoguery … He’s got a glib tongue, and he’s good at arguing. That’s what makes him so dangerous.” On another occasion, Weizman stood up and, red-faced, stormed around the table to Sharon, shouting, “Shut your face. I will chuck you out of the government” (which of course he couldn’t do).
SHARON: One must be sensitive to human lives…
WEIZMAN: You’re talking!!? What about the 650 [IDF fatalities in Lebanon]…?
SHARON: You called me “murderer.”e
Sharon’s rift with Rabin was the more traumatic given their long and close relationship. After one stormy cabinet meeting Sharon was heard phoning Lily. “I’ve had it with that man!” he bellowed, angry but sad, too. “Our special friendship is over forever.”9 It wasn’t over, but it was never quite the same again. Sharon was directly challenging the credentials of the man who in the eyes of the peace camp was the nation’s unrivaled specialist in all matters of defense and security. “Jewish lives are at stake,” Sharon asserted in June 1988. “If the minister of defense is not capable of acting to defend them, he should be replaced.”10
After elections in November 1988, which the Likud won by a whisker, Sharon demanded to be made minister of defense in the new government. He urged that it be a narrow-based rightist-religious coalition and not another alliance with Labor. But Shamir preferred to renew the national unity partnership with Labor, partly to keep Sharon out of Defense. Back at Industry and Commerce, Sharon stepped up his sniping at Rabin, harping now on his penchant—which everyone knew and no one talked about—for drinking large quantities of whiskey. Thus, at one cabinet meeting:
SHARON: You are not fit to serve as defense minister because of your failure in handling the terror in the territories and your failure to defend Jewish lives.
RABIN: You had better be careful with what you say. To date, only one defense minister has ever been removed from office by a commission of inquiry. The Lebanon War and its failure strongly point to your need to be careful about what you say.
SHARON: I don’t want to relate to the style of Rabin’s remarks. This happens to him sometimes. Mainly when he’s not sober enough. When he loses control of himself.
RABIN: Your words barely reach the tip of my ankle.
Sharon’s own proposals for defeating the intifada, which he never tired of repeating, included tightening controls on money transfers from the Arab world, barring men from violent Palestinian villages from working in Israel, and outlawing political and charitable organizations suspected of ties to the PLO. But above all he advocated deportation—peremptory deportation, and not just of the offenders themselves.
“That is the biggest single sin of this government,” he told an audience of government spokesmen in March 1988:
That it hasn’t brought in urgent legislation enabling the deportation of all the rioters, immediately and without delay. Let me remind you that when I brought order to Gaza, there was serious rioting at first. What did we do? We took hold of twenty-five Arabs, cousins and brothers of youngsters who had been rioting, we gave each of them a little money, a hat, a loaf of bread, and a water bottle, and we drove them to the Arava. There we showed them the way to Jordan. After that, total peace and quiet descended on Gaza. Only the sound of the weeping of the riotous youngsters could be heard from afar. No, we didn’t do anything to them. It was their families who beat them, as punishment for having caused their relatives to be deported. That’s what we should be doing now … Believe me, I’ve got experience.11
Sharon’s “bringing order” to Gaza in 1970, it will be recalled, included a more brutal aspect that led, after much controversy, to the Strip being taken out of his hands. He constantly urged the same kinds of aggressive initiatives, using elite commando units, now, too. Armed militants must be hunted, smoked out, ambushed, captured, or killed. The army needed to take the fight to them. Again, the message was simple: I did it then; I can do it now; let me do it.
• • •
Rabin became an easier target for Sharon to attack as the intifada dragged on because his defenders were themselves growing increasingly uneasy with his performance. Rabin talked of weeks, but the intifada went on for months that eventually became years. His initial self-confidence—he was in America when the intifada broke out and refused to cut short his visit and hurry home—began to grate. Much worse, the criticism surrounding his “break their bones” line, whatever its true context, mushroomed into a huge and anguished controversy over the morality of the army’s actions—and the patent immorality of some of its excesses.
Rabin, despite his years in diplomacy and in politics, always remained something of the gruff and honest soldier. He explained to his Labor Knesset faction that “nobody dies” from the kind of “aggressive action” the army was taking to disperse demonstrations and restore normal life. He was aware, he said, that “any confrontation between soldiers and civilians looks bad on camera.” But he preferred such footage to scenes of shooting, of Molotov cocktails and burning tires.
Both kinds of scenes proliferated. Random incidents of IDF cruelty were caught on camera, bringing down on Israel, especially in Europe, a new outpouring of deprecation reminiscent of the Lebanon War. The most ghoulish episodes occurred in the early months. The army’s instinctive reaction to the unanticipated uprising was that it must be quelled fast. Orders were unclear and confused as they filtered down from Rabin to the units in the field. In one case in February 1988 in a Gaza Strip refugee camp, five soldiers from the Givati infantry brigade beat and kicked a forty-three-year-old man to death. They jumped on him, smashing his ribs and banging his head on the ground—all this in front of his twelve-year-old son. In the same month in Nablus, soldiers beat and kicked several young Palestinians whom they had arrested during rioting. One soldier pounded at one of the prisoners with a rock, deliberately trying to break his shoulder, then went at another, trying to break his arm. The whole sequence was filmed by a CBS crew and broadcast around the world. Again in February 1988, also near Nablus, a group of soldiers used a bulldozer to bury four young Palestinians up to their necks in wet earth, as “punishment” after a riot.
In the media, and among soldiers and their families, there was both widespread repression and enormous ambivalence. People preferred or pretended to be ignorant of what was going on. They were also ashamed, but angry too—at themselves, at their sons or brothers in uniform, but also at the Palestinians who were confronting the army with challenges it had not been trained or equipped to confron
t. Why it was not trained or equipped, why after twenty years of occupation, with no land-for-peace deal in sight, did it not occur to anyone in government that a popular Palestinian uprising was inevitable, or at least likely—that question goes to the heart of Israeli attitudes to the Palestinians and to the conflict. It was never directly addressed, let alone answered, even after the intifada had subsided.
Sharon was careful not to be seen as siding too uncritically with soldiers and officers who had committed brutal offenses. At the same time, it was important to him to sympathize publicly with the fighting men and to score points off Rabin. “Soldiers Need Backing,” Sharon headlined an article in Yedioth Ahronoth in March 1988. The episodes cited above were mostly still unpublished then. But rumors abounded, and Sharon himself knew broadly what had been happening on the “front lines” of the intifada. “There is nothing that weakens the military more than the fighting soldiers’ sense that the top echelons are not giving them the backing they need,” he wrote. “There is nothing more destructive to an army’s operations and to its motivation than the soldiers’ feeling that … they are scapegoats for the incompetence of higher echelons.”
When courts-martial finally began to be held, the sentences handed down for acts of savagery usually entailed no more than a few months behind bars. The military judges wrote ringing condemnations of the brutal acts recounted before them and warned in their judgments that pillars of the national ethos were in danger of erosion. But they made a point of stressing, too, how hard and frustrating these young soldiers’ conditions of service had suddenly become, cursed, insulted, and stoned as they were, day in and day out, by Palestinians of both sexes and all ages. The courts often agreed to plea bargains in which charges of aggravated assault were reduced to mere conduct unbecoming, with the punishments similarly mitigated.
In June 1988 a soldier was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and another two years on probation for fatally shooting a Palestinian in Saja’iya, Gaza, at point-blank range. “I told him to stand still and put his hands up, but he refused and cursed me and my mother. I walked up to him and stuck my rifle into his belly. He looked at me. My whole body shook, and I pulled the trigger.” The military judges had harsh words for the army’s induction system, which had not weeded out this recruit, who was clearly unfit to serve. The case highlighted nevertheless the unconscionable fact that the IDF was pitting soldiers trained to shoot and kill against rioters who were in the main unarmed (though there were many armed attacks, too, and instances of shooters mingled in with stone throwers and unarmed demonstrators). Israeli propaganda harped on the killing propensities of stones, which could indeed be lethal if large enough or if fired with sufficient force from slingshots. The soldiers were not permitted, in theory at least, to fire live ammunition at stone throwers unless they felt themselves in serious danger.
