Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (30 page)

Sharon immediately began searching for a site and alighted on a privately owned tract near the village of Rujaib. Yadin, Dayan, and Weizman all objected, but Emunim’s lobbying was stronger. By June the cabinet majority had approved the settlement, and the local military commander had signed an order sequestering the land “on security grounds.” Within hours, a triumphant procession of cars, trucks, trailers, bulldozers, and the other paraphernalia of settlement was en route to the site, accompanied by Sharon and his comrade-in-arms from far-off days,
Meir Har-Zion.

There was an apparent hiccup later in the year when the
High Court of Justice upheld the pleas of seventeen Palestinian farmers and ordered the settlement dismantled. The case was closely followed and celebrated—briefly—in anti-occupation circles at home and abroad as proof of the Israeli justice system’s equity. “There are judges in Jerusalem,” Begin was famously reputed to have responded,
¹⁰
purportedly reflecting his abiding respect for the rule of law.

The upshot was redoubled efforts by Begin and Sharon to encourage Emunim’s settlement energies but to channel them to sites on “state land.” “A large Jewish settlement will surely arise near Nablus,” Sharon told the Knesset on December 12, following the high-court ruling.
“This is essential in terms of security, of policy, and of national interest.” The government would obey the Supreme Court ruling, but the settlement drive would continue.

He wished, Sharon said, that he could “explain to hundreds of thousands of our citizens the importance of our holding the high ground in
Judea and
Samaria.” He was confident that “the day will come, very soon,” when people would hear his message, “the truth of Eretz Yisrael,” un
mediated by the biased media.
¹¹

The day did come soon. Within a year, and with elections on the horizon, Sharon set up We’re on the Map—the media dubbed it “Sharon Tours”—a program offering voters, almost for free, a picnic day touring Jewish settlements on the West Bank. The funding, he told a suspicious press, came from donors abroad, not from the taxpayer. It was all legal and didn’t violate the election financing rules.
¹²

S
haron’s intervention at Camp David had shown that he was by no means a marginal figure in the Begin government, despite the
Shlomzion episode. As time passed, he grew increasingly more central both in the cabinet and in the party. This was due in large measure to the removal from the scene of the two most senior and most charismatic ministers—Dayan, who resigned in October 1979, and Weizman, who followed him in May 1980.

Both quit in despair over Begin’s disingenuous interpretation of the Camp David
“Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” reflected in his approach to the Palestinian autonomy negotiations. He appointed an unwieldy Israeli negotiating team of six ministers (including Sharon), presided over by the minister of interior, Dr.
Yosef Burg, the head of the National Religious Party, to negotiate with the Egyptians. Plainly, their mandate was to drag their feet and get nowhere. An urbane and moderate man himself, Burg was weak and wholly in the thrall of the NRP’s settler wing.

Dayan did not even bother to attend the talks. “After four months,”
he wrote to Begin in his letter of resignation, “I feel that the negotiation is for the most part bogus.” Weizman, when he finally stormed out of the cabinet seven months later, tore a peace poster off the wall of the prime minister’s office, shouting, “No one here wants peace.”
¹⁴

Begin and his legal advisers had the small print on their side. The five-year transitional period was not to begin until the terms of the autonomy were agreed on to Israel’s satisfaction.

It is against that backdrop that Carter’s demand for, and Begin’s rejection of, a settlement freeze for the duration of the autonomy talks need to be seen. For Carter, and vicariously for Sadat, the freeze was to be the tangible, cogent sign that Israel intended real autonomy for the Palestinians, winding down the occupation and leading eventually to some form of independence. That, after all, was the plain meaning of the “Framework for Peace,” the spirit of the text before Begin’s lawyers parsed it into meaninglessness. The transitional period was designed to build mutual confidence. Begin, the Americans hoped, would be able to relinquish his ideological inhibitions, or else his successor would.

“The agreement provides a basis for the resolution of issues involving the West Bank and Gaza over the next five years,” Carter told Congress the day after the
Camp David Accords were signed. “After the signing of this framework and during the negotiations concerning Palestinian self-government, no new Israeli settlements will be established in this area.”

Begin, however, digging in behind his denial of the settlement freeze and his legalistic exegesis, could dismiss that plain reading and keep building his settlements as the tangible, cogent sign that he would never accede to Palestinian independence. Begin’s aides hinted that Sadat was “in on” this twisting of the plain meaning of the agreement. For the Egyptian leader, they nudged and winked, the “Framework for Peace” was merely a fig leaf covering what was in effect a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace. That, indeed, is how much of the
Arab world saw Camp David. Egypt found itself largely ostracized and had to give up the leadership of the
Arab League, which it had traditionally held. Inside Egypt, too, opposition forces regarded the peace with Israel as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

Sharon enthusiastically endorsed the most restrictive interpretations of Israel’s commitment to the autonomy. He loudly and repeatedly demanded a thorough debate in cabinet on this issue. Begin resisted, knowing that that would inevitably exacerbate tensions between the senior ministers. But that was precisely Sharon’s intention. He wanted to shore up his Eretz Yisrael credentials with the settler camp and at
the same time keep hitting at Weizman, whose job he coveted and whom he saw as the chief obstacle on his path to the conquest of the Likud.

Weizman made it easy. He was genuinely undergoing a profound change of heart, from aggressive Herut hard-liner to ardent peace advocate and positive-minded negotiator. And he brought the same uninhibited extroversion to his new political persona as he had to his previous one. He criticized Begin openly and called him behind his back “the late,” a cruel reference to the prime minister’s frequent illnesses and bouts of depression.
^e

Although Weizman himself staunchly denied it then and thereafter, his dramatic departure was interpreted by some pundits as designed to catalyze the government’s collapse and Begin’s replacement.

But Begin flatly refused to appoint Sharon
as defense minister. He approached Minister of Foreign Affairs Shamir, who declined to swap jobs. He tried
Moshe Arens, a U.S.-raised aeronautical engineer who served as chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. But Arens turned him down, too, on the grounds that the new defense minister would have to supervise the evacuation of the Sinai settlements and he was not prepared to do that.
¹⁵
Begin finally decided to keep the post for himself; he would serve as both prime minister and defense minister, as Ben-Gurion had done.

Begin was heard muttering to the finance minister,
Simcha Ehrlich, that if Sharon were defense minister, he might well send
tanks to surround the prime minister’s office. He had to apologize for that, explaining to Sharon that it had been “men’s talk … just a jocular moment.”

For Sharon, Begin’s hawking the defense post to Shamir and Arens when he was eagerly available for it was a searing insult and, he charged, an act of irresponsibility to the nation. For Begin then to
keep it for himself was downright charlatanism. “The Defense Ministry is not some political boon or payoff,” he hurled at Begin across the cabinet table on June 1, 1980. “Prime Minister, you are assuming very grave responsibility indeed if you do not appoint the man most suited for the job.”

(Sharon stomps out of the cabinet room but soon returns.)

It hardly helped that Weizman, before his resignation, took to referring to Sharon as
wazir al-bandura
—Arabic for minister of tomatoes.
¹⁷
This was a slighting reference to Sharon’s frequent visits to Egypt to supervise an Israeli show farm at Sadat’s home village and other projects in agriculture and irrigation.
^f

In his time as minister of agriculture, Sharon left two momentous marks on the history and geography of his country. One, the Jewish settlements all across the Palestinian areas, was a fateful national blunder that he finally understood and set out to correct toward the end of his life. The other, a network of Jewish villages spread across the hilltops of the
Galilee, became a popular success story. It aroused controversy among
Israeli-Arabs—its declared purpose was to “Judaize” this part of the country—but enjoyed broad praise in the Israeli Jewish mainstream. By Sharon’s count, twenty-two new kibbutzim
and
moshavim and another thirty-four
mitzpim
^g
were founded during the years 1977–1981.
¹⁸

“I didn’t come here to change the
demographic balance,” a longtime resident of Mattat, the first
mitzpeh,
said, looking back. “I’m an individualistic type, and I wanted to live in a place where I don’t have to be in close contact with other people. Our motivation was to live this sort of life; the motivation of the authorities was ‘to Judaize the Galilee.’ The two ideas melded together and the State of Israel benefited.”
¹⁹
In Klil, another early
mitzpeh,
the nine founding families built their homes in 1979 on two and a half acres each. They were rugged, eco-friendly types, into organic agriculture and sheep rearing. “I remember riding my horse to a meeting at the first house we built,” one member recalled. “Sharon came to visit … We asked him from where to where, in his opinion, we could build our
mitzpeh
. Arik, being Arik, replied, ‘From the Mediterranean to the Kinneret.’ But we didn’t really need all that.”

“One can only imagine what would happen if the American government announced that it was worried about the demographic situation in
New York because there were too many Jews living there and too few Gentiles,” Arab Knesset member Talab el-Sana observed. “When forty Jewish families want to set up a
mitzpeh
in the Galilee, they get all the licenses at once, because they’re ‘Judaizing the Galilee.’ The Arabs have to build houses in the fields—and then they get them demolished by the local authorities because they’re ‘illegal.’ ”
²⁰

In part, Israeli Jews were broadly receptive to the strategic thinking behind Sharon’s
mitzpeh
program because of a traumatic jolt the whole country experienced on March 30, 1976, when protests over Arab land grievances in the Galilee escalated into a bloody standoff with the police and the army. Six Arab citizens were shot dead. It was a moment when the fabric of coexistence between majority and minority threatened to tear apart. There were fears expressed that parts of the Galilee could become permanent no-go areas for Jews. In the
Israeli-Arab community, Land Day has been marked ever since with marches, demonstrations against discrimination and land requisitioning, and commemorative events.

•   •   •

B
egin’s firm refusal to give Sharon the Defense Ministry was tempered over time by his need for and reliance on Sharon’s support for his decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor before it became operational. Secret arguments within the cabinet and the defense establishment over whether to bomb or not to bomb began in the months before Weizman’s departure in May 1980 and did not cease until the operation took place, in May 1981.

Saddam Hussein was working feverishly to complete his reactor, the ministers were told during early 1980. He had an agreement with France to supply weapons-grade
uranium and contracts with Portugal and Niger for further quantities of raw uranium.

Weizman himself, the celebrated air ace, was flatly against an Israeli Air Force operation, chiefly because of its possibly catastrophic effect on the peace process with Egypt. The head of
Mossad, the head of
Military Intelligence, and the deputy prime minister,
Yigael Yadin, were also all against bombing. The naysayers pointed to intelligence assessments that Iraq would not have a bomb available for years. They maintained that close cooperation with Western intelligence agencies would ensure that Saddam Hussein never reached that point, or at least that Israel had full information in real time. But Begin was unconvinced. For him, Saddam’s bombastic threats to destroy the Zionist state raised all the
Holocaust associations. Sharon strove mightily to manipulate this ongoing drama to his advantage.