by David Landau
In order to reduce fatalities, soldiers were issued rubber-coated bullets. These are fired in volleys from regular rifles and, unless used from very close range, are intended to hurt but not to penetrate. But there were mishaps. In June 1988, a nine-month-old baby lost an eye to a rubber-coated bullet. She was lying in her mother’s arms inside their home in Jabaliya, Gaza, when the bullet came through the window and hit her. In August 1988, the IDF began issuing plastic-coated bullets. These are fired singly and at a much greater velocity than the rubber ones. Within six months, the plastic bullets had accounted for forty-seven Palestinian fatalities.
By early 1991, 154 officers and men had been court-martialed. Hundreds more had faced disciplinary action within their units. During the same period 75,000 Palestinians had been arrested and 45,000 of them charged before military courts. Sharon joined more than fifty coalition ministers and Knesset members who supported a private member’s bill providing pardons for all IDF soldiers (but not officers) who had carried out illegal orders during the first three months of the intifada. The bill’s sponsors argued that the soldiers, suddenly transformed into untrained policemen, had no mens rea when they stepped beyond the bounds of legality. The bill was opposed by Minister of Defense Arens and by Minister of Justice Dan Meridor and never became law. In practice, generals were commuting any severe sentences and making sure no soldier stayed in jail for too long.
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a Sharon had given vent to an “enemy within” vilification at least once in the past, although less publicly. Yossi Sarid tells of a trip around the West Bank that General Sharon persuaded the powerful minister of finance, Pinchas Sapir, to take with him one Saturday in 1968. Sarid was Sapir’s aide:
The conversation got around to [Minister of Foreign Affairs] Abba Eban, when suddenly Sharon says, “Abba Eban is a spy.” We thought we weren’t hearing right. Or perhaps he was speaking metaphorically: that Eban’s dovish views made it seem to him, Sharon, that he was a metaphorical spy. But Sharon insisted that he was speaking literally.
Sapir went pale. “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” he kept asking. I replied, “He’s saying Abba Eban is a spy.” “A spy?!” Sapir shouts. “Yes, a spy,” Sharon calmly replies. He explained that Eban had been seen in various places, among them the top floor of the Hilton hotel in Tel Aviv, with a pair of binoculars, looking at things and writing notes. For years afterward, Sapir and I would have a private joke: “Abba Eban, the spy.”
b Sharon invested his stab-in-the-back thesis with historical, quasi-academic import. But it was never solely cerebral. In February 1986, he leveled the accusation at two leftist Knesset members, Yossi Sarid and Ran Cohen, who complained to the police on behalf of an (Israeli-) Arab hunter who had allegedly trespassed on Sharon’s land sixteen months earlier. “I was in my car in an unfenced, uncultivated area,” Feisal Tawfiq Younis attested in his somewhat lurid affidavit,
when suddenly a jeep drew up and a young man identified himself as a security man working for Sycamore Ranch. Soon, Mr. Sharon himself arrived … I explained that I had committed no offense and had not violated the conditions of my hunting license. After I gave Mr. Sharon my rifle, he asked me to step aside with him “so that we’re not standing next to the child.” I walked a few steps with him, and he suddenly landed me the most massive punch on my left eye, smashing my glasses and causing a deep cut in my eyelid. While I was shocked and dazed from this blow, Mr. Sharon delivered an extremely forceful kick to my testicles. Mr. Sharon tried to plant another kick in my testicles, but I was able to ward this off with my left hand, whereupon he said, “I will finish you off.”
Sharon’s office said the man and his friends had been illegally hunting on Sharon’s private land and had refused to turn over their weapon to the security man. This had made it necessary for Sharon to take it himself. Sharon had not filed a complaint with the police because the hunters had begged him not to.
And now came the stab in the back: “More than a year after the event, the hunters have complained, egged on by two leftist politicians, shortly before the Herut Party conference is due to convene.”
c There was another witness with unique insight into the Sharon-Begin-cabinet nexus whom the court in Sharon v. Benziman did not hear, because Weissglas neglected to call him. The then minister of justice, Moshe Nissim, as we have seen, denied the claim that ministers were uninformed or misled during the war. He vehemently rejected the notion that Begin was duped. “Begin talked to me more than to any other person. He would pour out his heart to me … I don’t care what Benny Begin says. Those who say, ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t hear,’ they are distorting.” Why, then, did Nissim not testify in the Benziman case? “Nobody asked me to” (Nissim interview, Tel Aviv, January 9, 2008).
d In the Knesset on March 23, 1988, Charlie Biton, a colorful Jerusalem social activist and Knesset member for the largely Arab Hadash communist party, asked as follows: “Was the cost of the minister’s housewarming borne by the state? 1. If so, how many people took part in the housewarming dinner in the Muslim Quarter? 2. What exactly was on the menu? 3. Is it correct that the dinner was prepared by the chef of the Jerusalem Plaza Hotel? 4. What was the cost of the event?” Sharon’s reply, “not read out, but submitted to the protocol,” as the official Knesset Record notes, was “No.”
e Yet two months earlier, at a party, Ezer put his arm around Arik’s shoulder and proclaimed for all to hear: “Listen, fatty. Only you and I can pull this country out of the mud. Only we two can do it.”
CHAPTER 9 · JORDAN IS PALESTINE?
The intifada was the palpable proof that forcible occupation could not be sustained indefinitely. Eventually, that realization led to the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, which were signed in 1993, and the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Gaza. But Israel, both its rightists and its leftists, balked for long years before finally, reluctantly, agreeing to go down that road. In the eleven years between the Likud government’s rejection of the Reagan Plan in 1982 and the Labor government’s acceptance of Oslo, both parties tried, separately and together, to avoid making a deal with the PLO.
The Likud, under Yitzhak Shamir, sought to avoid making a deal with anyone. Ariel Sharon, though hardly a loyal subordinate or favorite colleague, was an important collaborator throughout Shamir’s years of prime ministerial intransigence. As minister of commerce and trade, Sharon helped ensure the settlements thrived. As minister of housing after 1990, he made sure they grew and multiplied and did his best to frustrate American peacemaking efforts.
But his special contribution during the decade was his unflagging advocacy of “Jordan is Palestine.” This was Sharon’s own exclusive ax that he never stopped grinding until Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein signed a treaty of peace between their two countries in 1994. Only then, and reluctantly, was Sharon finally prepared to set aside his dream of the Hashemite house being displaced by a Palestinian republic, presumably under Yasser Arafat’s PLO, which would then somehow cut a deal with Israel over the West Bank.
This thesis and his dogged devotion to it always singled Sharon out from the dogmatists of the Right, and, back to the days of the short-lived Shlomzion Party, it piqued interest on the far left, where there was always vague embarrassment over Israel’s de facto alliance with Hashemite Jordan, a colonial creation if ever there was one.
“Jordan is Palestine” was mortally discredited by being implicated in the Lebanon War, that is, by the widespread suspicion that beyond “Big Pines,” which plotted regime change for Lebanon, there lurked in Sharon’s secret scheme of things a “Very Big Pines,” which envisaged his long-hoped-for revolution in Jordan, too. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, fleeing that country in the wake of the PLO’s defeat by Israel and the Phalange’s seizure of power, would force themselves on Jordan, reuniting with the Palestinians living there and sweeping out the Hashemite monarchy.a
While the possible place of Jordan in Sharon’s war strategy rema
ined opaque, Sharon left no uncertainty throughout the postwar decade as to his unequivocal belief in “Jordan is Palestine” as the right, indeed the only, long-term strategy for Israel. The PLO, he wrote in July 1985, had succeeded
in downplaying, distorting, and concealing the fact that for the past sixty years an independent Arab state has existed in Palestine. Moreover, even if one accepts that the “Palestinian people” comprises only those originating from west of the river Jordan—even by that definition this state has long become a Palestinian state. I am referring, of course, to the state of Jordan. Some 70 percent of its people are Palestinians, and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria are citizens of Jordan too, and have an outlet for their political aspirations by electing representatives to the Jordanian parliament. This is a political, geographical, and demographical fact that cannot be changed or denied … The Arab world invented the artificial distinction between “Jordan” and “the Palestinians” because its true purpose is not, and never was, to provide the “Palestinian entity” with political self-expression, but rather to remove Israel and the Jewish people from the map of the Middle East … Why should we in Israel be dragged along after the PLO and the Arabs and accept their position as though it were self-evident?1
Sharon’s incessant efforts to subvert Jordan’s Hashemite regime in the Israeli public mind were especially galling to Shimon Peres and the Labor side of the unity government. For them, peace with Jordan, based on some form of sharing the West Bank with King Hussein, was the central pillar of all their political plans and hopes. The “Jordanian option” had been for the best part of two decades Labor-speak for resolving the Palestinian problem without acceding to the creation of a separate Palestinian state under the PLO.
The Labor Party leaders regarded Yasser Arafat’s organization as an implacable foe that could never become a pragmatic partner in a peaceful accommodation. It was not just the terrorism, though, that induced profound loathing. It was the professed ideology of the PLO, which rigidly rejected the principle of a sovereign Jewish presence in Palestine. In addition, Peres always insisted, on the basis of intelligence assessments, that Arafat was “not serious,” that is, not capable of making the hard decisions that a revolutionary leader needs to make in order to transform his revolutionary movement into a sovereign state. He held to his contemptuous view of Arafat even after the PLO softened its ideological stance in 1988 and only relented when the secret negotiations in Oslo, initiated by Yossi Beilin, were well under way.
Before the peace with Egypt in 1979, the hopes of an agreement with Jordan had anyway been somewhat hypothetical since Hussein always made it clear he could not be the first Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Now, though, Egypt had made the breakthrough. But the Likud, still committed to “Greater Israel,” was not prepared to contemplate any concession in “Judea and Samaria.” Peres applied his fertile mind to squaring this circle, while Shamir’s purpose was to keep it unsquared.
“King Hussein’s position,” Peres wrote in his memoirs, “was that he was prepared to negotiate a peace treaty, but only in the context of an international conference on peace in the Middle East that would bring together the Great Powers and all of the regional protagonists. He was supported in this by the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and, with some hesitation, the United States. Shamir flatly rejected the idea of an international conference. He argued that such a conference would try to impose a solution on the parties.”2
Reduced to vice prime minister and foreign minister after the “rotation” in November 1986 and champing at the bit, Peres arranged a secret summit between himself and King Hussein in the home of a London lawyer, Victor Mishcon, in April 1987. They sat all afternoon and eventually hammered out a document that would have been a momentous success and very possibly changed the face of the region—had it gotten past Shamir. It provided for an international conference, under UN auspices, that would “invite the parties” to negotiate bilaterally between themselves. Crucially, on the Palestinian question the Hussein-Peres “London Agreement” provided that negotiations would take place between Israel and a “Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.”b
In other words—no PLO, or certainly not in a lead role. And, very probably, if the envisaged Jordanian/Palestinian-Israeli negotiations had ever transpired, some form of condominium between Israel and Jordan, with autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza perhaps evolving into Palestinian independence within an Israel-Jordan-Palestine confederation.
But it was never to happen. Peres sent Yossi Beilin to Helsinki, where George Shultz was visiting, to brief the secretary of state’s top aide, Charlie Hill. He himself reported to Shamir, whom he had told of the meeting with Hussein ahead of time. He read him the agreement but, probably ill-advisedly, refused to leave the famously discreet prime minister a copy of the text on the grounds that it might leak. Shamir said nothing but immediately dispatched Moshe Arens, then a minister without portfolio, to Washington to abort the nascent accord. Shultz, discerning the state of discord in Jerusalem, quickly drew back—and let the agreement die. In retrospect, this was probably an egregious error of American diplomacy.
Sharon lashed out both at Peres for making the agreement and at Shamir for not stopping him before and not punishing him after. It was “one of the greatest deceits of all time,” he said, to depict the London Agreement as providing merely for an international “opening” or “umbrella.” Peres and Hussein had agreed on a full-fledged international conference, Sharon asserted, at which the substantive negotiations were to be conducted. The agreement also paved the way for the PLO to take part, he maintained. Moreover, Peres had agreed to Soviet participation in the conference without insisting, as a condition, that Moscow permit free Jewish emigration and without demanding that it restore diplomatic relations with Israel.3c As for Shamir, his letting Peres get away with it betrayed a total “lack of leadership,” Sharon asserted at a steamy Herut central committee meeting in July. Peres was still going around the world persuading people to support the international conference. Why didn’t Shamir fire him?
Shamir himself dubbed the international conference “a mirage,” “a nightmare,” “a slaughter,” “a surrender,” “a suicide,” and “a trap.” As long as Likud was in government, it would never be convened, he vowed. But still, he made it clear that he wanted Peres and Labor to stay in the government alongside Likud, under his prime ministership, and to continue with their strange partnership despite this latest hiccup.
Sharon, speaking at a Likud rally against the London Agreement convened in the Samaria settlement-township of Ariel, called on King Hussein, “who is a brave leader,” to enter into negotiations with Israel. But, he told his audience, there were some things Israel would not concede. Jerusalem was one. And other areas in Judea and Samaria and Gaza were not open to negotiations either. And security would have to remain in Israel’s hands forever. And Jewish settlement throughout the territories must remain free and unfettered. And not a single Jordanian soldier, or policeman, or even civilian official would be allowed anywhere in the territories. “Even so,” he proclaimed, straight-faced as far as is recorded, “there remains a great deal to be negotiated about.”4
While the United States declined to side with Hussein and Peres against Shamir, Shultz made it clear that he favored in principle the idea of a peace conference. Shamir played along, negotiating for long months with the Americans over the format for a conference he had no wish to attend.
Shamir, too, met secretly with King Hussein in England. He sent an upbeat account of their meeting to the U.S. secretary of state.
Hussein came away thoroughly disheartened. For him, Washington’s shortsighted dismissal of his London Agreement with Peres signaled the end of the road. In July 1988 he announced that the West Bank was no longer part of Jordan, either legally or administratively. “We respect the wishes of the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to secede from us in an independent Palestinian state.”
The
PLO now saw its opportunity. At a session of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament, in Algiers the following November, Arafat proclaimed an independent Palestinian state “with holy Jerusalem as its capital” and hinted at recognition of Israel. After further verbal to-and-fro, he produced a statement, in the dying days of the Reagan administration, that explicitly fulfilled long-standing U.S. conditions for dialogue with the PLO: acceptance of Israel’s right to exist; acceptance of negotiations under UN Security Council Resolution 242; and a permanent commitment to desist from terror.
Shultz hardly rejoiced at this development (unlike others in Washington, who saw it as a breakthrough). But he bit the bullet and instructed the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia to begin official talks between the United States and the PLO. Shamir, horrified, could only reiterate lamely that Israel would never have truck with the organization. But his protestations rang increasingly hollow. In a sop to the new Bush administration in Washington, Shamir submitted a new plan for elections in the Palestinian territories that he had jointly formulated with Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin. Israel would then negotiate with the elected, indigenous Palestinian leadership over an interim self-government regime.
