Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (10 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Shmuel Scheinerman’s death from cancer on December 31, 1956, added to the gloom that seemed to envelop Sharon at this time. “I felt I had not known him. In my childhood everyone had been too busy. Then came the
War of Independence, then
Unit 101 and the paratroopers. Since the age of seventeen I had hardly been at home. Perhaps it is normal for children not to fully appreciate their parents until later in life. For me, unfortunately, the first intimations of that truth came with the blow of my father’s passing.” Just recently, moreover, he and Gali had bought a home—from General Laskov, as it happened—in the Tel Aviv suburb of
Zahala, brushing aside the sick Shmuel’s imprecations that they build a house and settle on his land at
Kfar Malal. In the hospital, close to the end, Sharon recalled, “[Shmuel] said softly, ‘It’s a pity I’m going to die. You still need my help in so many ways.’ ”
Arik had been able, at least, to gladden the dying man’s heart with the news that he had a grandson. On December 27, Gali gave birth. The couple was overwhelmed with joy: “Both of us had wanted many children. But two years earlier we had been told we would be unable to conceive. The news had put a cloud over our lives.”
74
The circumcision ceremony, on the eighth day in Jewish law, was bittersweet. Shmuel was dead; the newborn was named after him: Gur Shmuel.
a
The
Revisionist Zionist movement, founded in 1925 by Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, became the main opposition to the Labor-led World Zionist Organization and the
Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Jewish state in the making. The Revisionists evolved over the years into the Likud.
b
Yishuv: the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.
c
Like many of the people in Ramot Hashavim, the Steinitzes—both he and she were medical doctors—had fled Hitler’s Germany and were now reinventing themselves as farmers in the Jewish homeland. Their Bechstein grand made the bucolic life a little more palatable for them. “Now your grandfather,” Prime Minister Sharon used to needle the young Likud hard-liner Yuval Steinitz nearly seventy years later, “
there
was a sensible man.” Yuval, a left-wing professor of philosophy turned right-wing politician, was chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Sharon alternated irony and charm in an unremitting effort to winkle him away from the camp of his archenemy, Benjamin Netanyahu, into the dovish camp that supported his disengagement from Gaza. In charming mode, he would recall at Steinitz’s committee how, as a youngster driving his oxen into the fields, he would stop and listen to the music wafting from the open windows of Grandfather Steinitz’s house.
d
This stopped, for security reasons, when he became prime minister.
e
An acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization, commanded by Menachem Begin.
f
Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for Israel’s Freedom, known by the British as the Stern Gang. One of its leaders was another future prime minister—
Yitzhak Shamir.
g
Shimon Peres, then a junior aide to Ben-Gurion, makes the point in
Ben-Gurion
: “[Priority] Number one for Ben-Gurion was Jerusalem. That was his argument with
Yigael Yadin [the deputy chief of staff], who wanted to fight in
Ashkelon because the Egyptians had reached Ashkelon. And Ben-Gurion said no; Jerusalem first. It was the same on the Jordanian front:
John Glubb [the Transjordanian commander] said we’ll cross from Beisan to
Haifa and bisect the Jewish state, and Emir Abdullah said no; first Jerusalem. Interesting, that parallel.”
h
Lahat went on to become a major general in the army and, later, mayor of Tel Aviv.
i
Chief of staff from 1958 to 1961.
j
Israel tried to head off this Anglo-Egyptian agreement by ordering a network of Egyptian-Jewish agents to carry out provocative attacks against American cultural centers and other institutions in Egypt. The idea, breathtaking in its naïveté and irresponsibility, was that such attacks would poison Egypt’s relations with the West and prompt Britain to keep its troops on the canal. The amateurish attacks all failed hopelessly; two of the Jews were executed; an Israeli agent committed suicide in prison; six other Egyptian-Jewish members of the group received long prison terms. What was poisoned as a result, terminally in the view of many historians, was the cohesive solidarity within the ruling
Mapai Party. Ben-Gurion, who was on his Negev kibbutz and out of power during “the unfortunate mishap,” as it was called for years in the censored Israeli press, insisted on a judicial process to determine if his stand-in as defense minister,
Pinhas Lavon, had ordered the operation. Lavon put the blame on the head of Military Intelligence, Binyamin Gibli (no relation to Yitzhak). Luckily for Chief of Staff Dayan, he was out of the country when the order was given. Ben-Gurion’s veteran Mapai colleagues, led by his close lieutenant and eventual successor,
Levi Eshkol, wanted to make do with a ministerial committee that had delivered an inconclusive verdict on who gave the order. After years of simmering conflict, Ben-Gurion eventually resigned from office and seceded from Mapai in 1963, taking Dayan and Peres with him. The labor movement as a whole was seriously weakened by this infighting. In time, this decline helped pave the way for the Likud’s accession to power in 1977, after three decades of Labor rule.
k
Two more died in separate incidents.
P
lease give our very best wishes and greetings to the Old Man. I hope that in case of need
you won’t forget me here
. I’m particularly asking you this because, regretfully, the relations that have developed between the new ‘court’ and myself might cause some people over there to forget me.” Sharon’s letter from
London, dated July 28, 1958, was addressed to “Dear Yitzhak”—Ben-Gurion’s secretary,
Yitzhak Navon. “Of course you’re too busy with much bigger and more important matters,” the plaintive cri de coeur continued, “for me to trouble you with these little things … But please—don’t forget I’m here, waiting for a summons in case of need. Warm wishes from Margalit, Arik.”
1
He was at the Royal Military Academy in Camberley, Surrey, for a yearlong course for middle-ranking officers from Britain itself and from around the world. Gali lived in a rented flat in London with their newborn son, Gur, and Arik would come home for “weekends of music and theater in London … On the whole, I was happy about it, but I was concerned too. I had left my command, the source of my strength.”
2
Sharon’s sojourn in the U.K. was an elegant form of exile, contrived by Chief of Staff Dayan. Sharon had not exactly left his command, but in effect had been fired, at the insistence of the CO of Central Command,
Zvi Tzur. The disaffection among the paratroop brigade officers, which reached a crescendo at that day of open recriminations in March 1957, never really let up. Ben-Gurion was aware of it. He wrote to Dayan urging him to “try to overcome these manifestations of small-mindedness that plague our little country.”
Dayan’s evident failure to overcome the small-mindedness that Ben-Gurion discerned around Sharon, and his recommendation that Sharon spend a year in the U.K. rather than defending the borders, signaled two uncomfortable truths for the acerbic, arrogant, but gifted
twenty-nine-year-old who had known nothing but combat since his teens. The first was that Israel’s policy makers looked forward now to a period of peace after the IDF’s success in the Sinai War. The second, even more difficult for Sharon to appreciate, was that life in a peacetime army is not nearly so fast moving and studded with opportunity as it is in an army engaged in constant conflict. Different qualities are required of peacetime officers: less panache and improvisation; more diligence and patient application to training and discipline.
Camberley drove home the same disquieting lesson. The military life, he discovered from his British comrades, is a long and dogged haul, punctuated by the surges of action and rapid promotions that wars provide. Looking around him, Sharon saw “people who years ago had been brigadier generals in France or Italy or the Western Desert [and] were now climbing slowly up the peacetime ladder. And by and large they accepted it with a casual nonchalance.”
3
Casual nonchalance was not his strong suit.
“Dear Shimon,” he wrote in September 1958 to the director general of the Defense Ministry,
Shimon Peres. “Following our conversation several weeks ago about the structure of the IDF, I am sending you my thoughts on the subject.” He believed that Ben-Gurion was grooming him as a future chief of staff, and he seems to have presumed that Peres, the Old Man’s close aide, was privy to this intent. In fact, though, Peres insisted half a century later, “Ben-Gurion would never have appointed Arik. There is no question at all in my mind. Despite his abiding love and admiration for him. No question at all.”
4
Sharon wrote that he and Gali were taking back with them a little
car that his uncle had bought them as a gift. “We’re doing this so that Gali can work at the hospital [in Jerusalem] without wasting hours each day traveling up and down [by public transport],” he explained to Peres, apparently feeling the need to justify this conspicuous consumption in the still-austere Israeli environment.
His anticipated frustration on his return home proved well-founded. There was no field command for Sharon. The best the army could come up with was a desk job in Tel Aviv, in the training branch, as head of infantry training. If he took it, he was told, he would get full colonel, the rank he ought to have got, by his own reckoning, years earlier when the paratroopers became a brigade. In November, Ben-Gurion called him in. “Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth?” Sharon meekly assured the Old Man that he had. “He admitted that he had not told the truth on occasion in the past,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, “but he said he doesn’t anymore.”
Sharon, at any rate, came away from the meeting with the sense that the Old Man was watching over him and would not let his detractors crush his career.
5
But for the present he must keep his head down. He agreed to take the proffered staff posting.
A few months later, he lost it. The head of training, General Yosef Geva, fired him for failing to turn up at a meeting and then lying about why he hadn’t come. Ben-Gurion stepped in to make sure he wasn’t ousted from the army altogether. “He is brave, original, and resourceful,” Ben-Gurion remonstrated with Geva. “Yes, but he’s not disciplined, and he doesn’t tell the truth,” was Geva’s reply.
6
The general agreed to give him another chance, as commander of the army’s infantry school. Here Sharon was to spend the next three years in what he himself called “exile in the wilderness.”
He took the job seriously, at least at first, planning and implementing strenuous but imaginative training programs for the young officers and NCOs undergoing courses at the school. They all knew his history and regarded him with distant awe. His colleagues in the training department of the General Staff found him creative and stimulating in their discussions on military theory and in their work on training manuals. The staff of the infantry school, on the other hand, suffered from Sharon’s moodiness and short temper. He seemed to take out all his frustration on them. Meetings too often ended with him bawling someone out for no reasonable cause. Time after time, an instructor or administrator would be seen hauling his kit bag to the camp gate, fired by Sharon for a trivial infringement or for nothing at all save getting on the commander’s nerves.
After a time, he began getting on his own nerves. He registered at the Tel Aviv branch of the
Hebrew University Law School. He would have preferred to study
agriculture, he wrote later, as his father had wanted. But that would have required full-time attendance.
a
The end of the dour
Haim Laskov’s term as chief of staff brought no relief: the new chief was
Zvi Tzur, and he stolidly withstood all of Ben-Gurion’s urgings to bring Sharon back in from the cold. “I even went to see Dayan,” Sharon writes. “[He]…was serving as minister of agriculture…‘Arik,’ he said, ‘there is no way for you to get out of it. You will have to wait for a crisis to come along. It’s only then that they will let you out.’ ”
Sharon enrolled in the army’s tank school, diligently learning his way through all the courses: driver, gunner, loader, radioman, and
tank commander. He studied the mechanics of the tank and the tactics for deploying platoons, then battalions, and finally whole brigades of tanks. As a rookie tank officer, Sharon displayed tactical boldness and originality that impressed the top instructor at the school, Yitzhak Ben-Ari. In every war game, Ben-Ari reported, Sharon would come up with novel suggestions that defied traditional armored corps theory. His schemes involved deep thrusts through the enemy defenses in order to precipitate a collapse. But other officers faulted Sharon’s ideas as too risky and too costly in lives.
In early 1962, he was thrown a crumb of comfort: Chief of Staff Tzur grudgingly assigned a reserve mechanized brigade to Sharon’s command. At least if there was a war he would have a substantial role in the fighting. He declined. “I was holding out for an armored brigade. Tanks were emerging as a crucial element in [Israel’s] strategic thinking.” Eventually, he got one. But his ambitions still soared much higher than that. He asked for the job of IDF chief of operations. This drew from Tzur another predictable refusal.
“On May 2 all these problems turned suddenly meaningless,” Sharon writes in
Warrior
.
7
Gali was killed in her little Austin car on the winding road to Jerusalem, near the village of Abu Ghosh. She swerved out of her lane and was hit by an oncoming truck. Arik was brought the news by his next-door neighbor, Motti Hod, a senior air force officer. He wept inconsolably, Hod recalled. At the funeral the next day, though, he kept a stiff military bearing. In a deadpan voice, he read out the eulogy he had written, recalling their teenage love and their years together.
