Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  So, despite the suspicions, there was not sufficient proof that the political help and the cash from Appel had been bribes. Even if they were, Mazuz went on to argue, there was not sufficient evidence that Sharon understood them to be bribes. He knew that Gilad was receiving a high salary. But there was no evidence to show that he understood it to be linked to his ability to help Appel as foreign minister and later as leader of the opposition. In other words, there was no clear evidence of mens rea, or criminal intent, on the prime minister’s part.

  The same state-of-mind test applied to Gilad, Mazuz wrote. The police tapes showed that Gilad seriously feared Appel might not pay up as agreed. That would hardly have been the case had he thought the salary was intended as a bribe for his father. There was no hint in Gilad’s behavior of any feeling of guilt or need to conceal or disguise the money, nor any hint in the tapes that he was disingenuous in regard to the money.

  Finally, Mazuz analyzed a tapped telephone call between Sharon and Appel in September 1999 in which Sharon asked the developer, “Is the island in our hands already?”d Arbel and her team deduced that Sharon was fully familiar with the details of the project, but Mazuz said the taped conversation showed exactly the opposite. Sharon did not know how far offshore the island was (“Only 700–800 meters? So it’s not a long boat ride?”). He urged vaguely that they build to withstand earthquakes. But he evinced little real interest and kept on trying to steer the conversation back to party politics. “Hasn’t Gilad got you excited about the project?” Appel asks wistfully. “Our boy’s a very discreet boy, you know,” Sharon replied. “He never talks about business.” Appel replied by praising Gilad’s work and assuring his father that he would be making good money out of it. Hardly what he would have said, wrote Mazuz, if they both knew it was a bribe. Appel invited Sharon and Lily to “our new home in Greece,” and Sharon accepted, “but I’ll pay my own way,” he said.

  Sharon’s enemies gulped. It was hard to tar the gauche, straitlaced, somewhat owlish Mazuz with the brush of too-intimate contact with Sharon’s coterie. Still, some whispered that his labored, casuistic opinion was the payoff for his unanticipated appointment as attorney general, a job, they insisted, several sizes too big for him. But that implied the collusion, at least passive, of Tommy Lapid, the Shinui Party leader and minister of justice, who had recommended the appointment. This was thoroughly improbable, as even the whisperers were forced to agree.

  An alternative line of attack was that Mazuz, after a career in the rarefied air of the judicial bureaucracy, was just too naive and unworldly to understand how he had been duped. Repeatedly, he cited the absence of any incriminating material in the thousands of hours of taped telephone conversations as proof that there had been no crime. But didn’t he realize that all the alleged plotters assumed as a matter of course that Appel’s lines were tapped? Sharon himself let the veil slip in a rare unguarded moment in November 1999 when he arranged with Appel to have lunch in Raanana and added, apparently for the benefit of the tappers, “That’s not a code word; it’s the site of a kosher restaurant.”2

  Yossi Sarid of Meretz, Eitan Cabel of Labor, and the Movement for Quality Government all applied to the High Court of Justice to order the attorney general to reconsider. A bench of seven justices, however, decided by 6–1 not to intervene. The majority opinion coldly dismissed the claim that Mazuz had let Sharon’s lofty status influence his forensic decision making. Mazuz’s decision not to indict was entirely reasonable—as was, the judges stressed, Arbel’s recommendation to indict. “It is quite possible that jurists of equal abilities should reach different assessments,” Justice Eliahu Matza wrote in the majority opinion. Chief Justice Aharon Barak concurred, as did all the others—apart from Justice Mishael Cheshin, the judge who shut down Sharon’s TV broadcast before the last election. “I am sorry,” Cheshin wrote in his dissenting judgment, “but I have the greatest difficulty concurring with my learned friends. To my mind, the facts speak for themselves. Gilad Sharon, the son of Ariel Sharon, received huge sums of money from Appel … These vast sums were to be paid to a man who had no prior experience in the business for which he was hired to engage in … Granted, [Ariel] Sharon didn’t know much more than the fact that his son was getting ‘a high salary.’ But that much he knew.”

  Sharon had got the better of Cheshin again. But he was by no means out of the woods. The Cyril Kern affair had been growing murkier and more impenetrable as detectives followed the trail of mysterious bank transfers to South Africa, to Austria, to New York, and to the Virgin Islands. Gilad was embroiled in an ugly battle to protect his bank records from the prying eyes of police investigators. Omri faced the possibility of prosecution for the election finance offenses exposed in the original front companies affair.

  As the investigations proceeded, Kern increasingly appeared to the police to have been a front himself. In an affidavit to the South African minister of justice in January 2003, Kern indicated that the “money which I arranged be sent to Gilad Sharon to whom I have been known since birth as Uncle Cyril” was not in fact his money:

  On or about October 2001, Gilad indicated to me that his business needed about $1.5 million which he intended to borrow as a short-term loan … I did not inquire about his motives, needs, or reasons, knowing well that he would not ask if he did not really need and if he was not sure he could repay.

  Therefore in January 2002, I arranged for a foreign trust to hand Gilad about $1.5 million without any conditions or qualifying requirements on its utilization or purpose about which I made no inquiry. The loan was extended under the sole condition that it would be repaid as soon as possible in the same currency and would carry an arm-length 3-percent interest rate compounding annually.

  The loan to Kern had indeed been repaid, thanks to a second transfer of money, also from BAWAG (Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft) in Vienna, which had landed in Gilad’s Tel Aviv account in two installments, in November and December 2002. Who had sent it? Gilad was zealously upholding his right to remain silent. The police claimed that Gilad had solicited the second transfer, after he learned that they were investigating the first transfer from Kern. They formally asked the Austrian authorities to be allowed to extend their investigation to Vienna, to interrogate people there and to scour BAWAG bank records. But they were repeatedly rebuffed. The Austrian Justice Ministry, and then the Austrian courts, stonewalled. Raising political donations was not a crime, Austrian law enforcement officials argued, ignoring the Israelis’ suspicion that the moneys were bribes. Anyway, the transfers had gone to Gilad and Omri, not to the Israeli prime minister. Moreover, Austrian banking secrecy protected the transfers. The Israelis concluded that whoever had sent the money from Vienna was not only rich but powerful.

  By early 2004, the police had come to believe there had in fact been a third transfer to the Sharon brothers, also apparently of $1.5 million—making $4.5 million in all—and this last sum seemed to have remained with the family after they had paid off their bank loan and paid back Cyril Kern. The police suggested that Sharon’s old Israeli-American friend Arie Genger, who, it turned out, had lent money to Kern in the past, was involved. So, they believed, was Martin Schlaff, the reclusive Austrian-Jewish businessman and part owner of the casino at Jericho together with the Palestinian Authority, and, as it now turned out, together with BAWAG, too. Were Genger, and perhaps Schlaff, involved in the original donations, through the U.S. front companies, for the 1999 election campaign? If so, the whole saga was an elaborate loop. Genger was questioned and asserted his right to remain silent.3

  With Vienna inhospitable and Genger inscrutable, the police could only try to force the equally uncooperative Gilad to furnish the information they lacked. In June 2003, at police request, a Tel Aviv magistrate had ordered Gilad to produce all the documents in his possession connected with the investigation. He refused. This was an attempt, he argued, to unseat his father undemocratically. In August, another magistrate ruled that he couldn’t refuse. He was asserti
ng his right to stay silent on the grounds that he might incriminate someone else (his father). But the law, wrote Magistrate Daniella Shirizli, recognized only the grounds of not incriminating oneself. He must produce the documents forthwith.

  Gilad obtained from another magistrate a stay of execution pending his appeal from the first magistrate to a higher court. But the second magistrate ruled that he must deposit the documents in a court safe for the time being. Gilad appealed this ruling before yet another court. If he agreed to deposit the documents, he argued, he would be admitting he had them in his possession. But he had made no such admission, insisting on his right to silence. This second appeal was accepted in the Tel Aviv District Court on August 13, 2003. Now the state appealed, and in December 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that Gilad must hand over all the documents to a magistrate, who would decide which of them could be read by the police and which would remain protected by Gilad’s right to silence.

  Gilad grudgingly turned over some documents, but the prosecutors claimed they were ones that the police had anyway, whereas the ones the police wanted, Gilad had failed to provide. Among these latter were documents and bank statements relating to a company called Charnington Ltd., which Gilad and Cyril Kern had apparently set up in 2002 as a vehicle for doing business together (or, as the police suspected, for transferring illicit moneys).

  In February 2004, the Tel Aviv District Court ordered Gilad to instruct BAWAG to send him all the relevant statements regarding the money transfers and regarding Charnington Ltd. and to hand them over to the police. Yet again, he appealed to the Supreme Court. There, finally, on March 29, 2004, five justices held against him and ruled that he must hand over documents and tapes connected to both the Cyril Kern affair and the Greek island affair. His lawyer announced that he would have to contact “various third parties such as the Austrian bank” and ask them for the documents. “But no one says they’re going to give them to us.”

  The police, meanwhile, raided the offices of a lawyer and an accountant in Tel Aviv thought to have set up Charnington Ltd. for Gilad and Kern and impounded documents and computers. In April 2004, the prosecutors were back in Magistrate Daniella Shirizli’s court, arguing that lawyer-client privilege should not apply to at least some of this material. For the first time, they referred explicitly to Martin Schlaff, who, they said, was believed to have paid money into Charnington ostensibly for “consultancy work” undertaken by Gilad and Kern. The material they wanted could throw light, they said, on the intimate relationship between Schlaff and the Sharons.

  On May 6, 2004, Gilad informed the court that he had no written record regarding consultancy services he had performed in return for $3 million that had been deposited in his account in Austria. The contract had been verbal, he explained. “Three million dollars are deposited in your account,” asked the prosecutor, “and you don’t remember seeing any document relating to the source of this fee?” Gilad: “There is no such document because all the agreements were made orally, but …” “Don’t say ‘but,’ ” Gilad’s lawyer, David Libai, cut in. “Nothing in writing?” the prosecutor persisted. “After all, it is $3 million.” “Well, maybe it was mentioned in a fax. I don’t remember.”

  On July 4, Judge Shirizli ruled that Gilad had fulfilled his duty under the court order to hand over the documents in his possession regarding the Cyril Kern affair. The yearlong battle in the courts seemed to have ended, at least for the moment. Gilad had emerged unscathed, or at any rate unprosecuted.

  But in the court of public opinion, in the salons and the streets of Israel, and most especially among the settlers and their political hinterland, the suspicions against the Sharons became the shrillest battle cry against the prime minister’s disengagement policy. Settler activists who for years, indeed for decades, had celebrated Arik Sharon as their hero and their leader, regularly dismissing all his various brushes with the law as the lies and slanders of the Left, now embraced the latest slew of allegations against him with holy zeal.

  Zvi Hendel of the National Union, the only Knesset member who actually lived in a settlement in the Gaza Strip, captured this upsurge of righteous indignation with a sound bite that became an instant slogan: “The depth of the disengagement is as the depth of the investigation.”e Sharon, he explained, was “a base and corrupt man.” Sharon had only dreamed up the disengagement when it seemed that the family would be prosecuted over the Greek island affair. Hendel laid it on with all the rancor of a jilted lover. “For years he [Sharon] called us the salt of the earth, and now he spits in our faces and kicks us in the head with a great muddy boot.”4

  So prevalent did this alleged nexus between the “affairs” and the disengagement become, especially on the political right, that when the attorney general announced his decision in June 2004 to close the Greek island file, the joke around the Knesset was that Sharon responded: “If I’d have known that, I’d never have started with this disengagement.”

  The campaign to impugn Sharon’s motives was to continue unabated long after Sharon himself had physically collapsed and his government had come to a peremptory end. In the settler community and its hinterland, his corruption and its purportedly causal effect on his policy making became axiomatic, almost articles of religious faith.

  The settler leaders’ dissemination of the “depth … depth” theory was all the more cynical and manipulative because it was they themselves, years earlier, who had been the first to sense—and to warn—that Sharon was showing signs of softening on the Palestinian question. Yet that was long before the “affairs” crashed down on him. Moreover, the one man among their leadership who had developed a genuine intimacy with Sharon over the years, Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever, flatly rejected the “depth … depth” theory. In a documentary film made after the disengagement in which he was interviewed extensively, Zambish pointedly refused to support or give any credence to this allegation. Sharon, he insisted, had acted in what he believed—wrongly in the view of the settlers, but sincerely—was Israel’s national interest.5

  By contrast, Sharon found himself suddenly basking in the warm approbation of media at home and abroad—the same media that over the years had expended millions of words criticizing and excoriating him. Soon enough, this unwonted media praise was itself adduced by Sharon’s opponents on the right to reinforce the “depth … depth” theory. The disengagement, they claimed, was a sophisticated ploy designed to play to the largely dovish press gallery in order to soften coverage of and commentary on the “affairs.” The etrogization argument advanced by the former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon became a central part of the public debate surrounding the disengagement.

  Sharon himself, for all his ostensibly contemptuous indifference to the alternative narrative and its various purveyors, did put on record one blunt rebuttal of it as he set out on this last act of his life’s drama. “There is no connection,” he told political reporters on February 4, “between the disengagement from Gaza and the police investigations. I am doing the disengagement not because of the investigations, but in spite of them.”6

  DUE PROCESS

  The political fight to stop the disengagement began within days of the interview with Yoel Marcus. Yisrael Katz, once Sharon’s street-smart political fixer, subsequently a Bibi man, and now the minister of agriculture but trying his best to befriend both rivals, proposed a referendum among the membership of the Likud Party. His reasoning was subtle—subtly insidious, some of Sharon’s advisers feared—and could not easily be dismissed. “We have some 300,000 party members across the country,” Katz argued. (In fact there were just under 200,000.) “A Likud prime minister must be able to show that his policy has the support of the majority of his own voters.”7

  Sharon, assured by his pollsters of the broad national support his new policy was attracting, would ideally have preferred a nationwide plebiscite. He knew that the narrower the voter base, the more susceptible it would be to a pavement-pounding, door-knocking campaign by young settlers and their urb
an sympathizers. He feared their efficacy and their contagious zeal. But there was no provision for an ad hoc nationwide plebiscite under existing law, and Attorney General Mazuz ruled that one could not therefore be held using the existing election machinery. Special legislation would have to be drafted and passed in the Knesset—a veritable invitation for endless filibusters and other foot-dragging contrivances. The Likud, on the other hand, as an independent political party, could organize a referendum among its members without any need for legislation.

  By March 2004, the right wing of the Likud Knesset faction was in open revolt and threatening to withhold their votes from government legislation in the house. The coalition partners further to the right, the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu and the National Religious Party, were already bucking the coalition whip almost daily. A policy statement by the prime minister on March 15 was approved by an embarrassing majority of one: 46 votes to 45. Labor and Meretz were still voting as opposition parties. Shimon Peres, the Labor leader, encouraged Sharon to move ahead with his disengagement plan and expand it to the West Bank. He made it clear to Sharon that when it came to the test, Labor would side with him. Yossi Sarid, the head of Meretz, said he didn’t believe it would ever actually come to the test. “There’s no plan and there never was. There won’t be any disengagement in the foreseeable future.” But Sarid, too, despite his skepticism, promised (hypothetical) support. “If any practical step is actually submitted to the Knesset, if we see a single settlement moving, we’ll vote in favor.”8

  At a session of the Likud Party convention in Tel Aviv on March 30, Sharon, facing Edna Arbel’s recommended indictment, was given a rousing ovation. But when he spoke of his disengagement plan, the clapping turned to boos. Clearly he had no majority for it in this forum. He announced, to general approbation, that he would accept Yisrael Katz’s proposal for a party-wide referendum in the interests of preserving party unity. The result, he declared, “will obligate every representative of the party, starting with me.”