Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (31 page)

In October 1980, Begin convened the full cabinet to argue his case. He gravely listed all the reasons not to strike but said they were outweighed by the dangers of doing nothing until it was too late. Iraq’s war with Iran had forced Saddam to suspend work at the reactor for the moment, he disclosed. That meant an Israeli attack would not risk radioactive fallout over a wide area. Begin asked for a decision in principle in favor of bombing and won a majority vote.

Still the raid was delayed. “Raful, why don’t we carry out the distant, sensitive matter?” Sharon wrote in a note to Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan at a cabinet meeting in March 1981. “Everything’s ready,” Eitan replied. “You’ve got to keep pressing.” Sharon accordingly wrote to Begin: “Prime Minister, why don’t we carry out our decision to hit the ‘distant and sensitive target’? Best, Arik.” “Arik,” Begin wrote back, “I’ll talk to you about it. Best, MB.”
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Three weeks later Sharon wrote again. “Prime Minister, week after week goes by and we’re still delaying … It’s a matter of life and death. I can’t understand these delays.” The next day they spoke by phone. “I can’t sleep at night,” Sharon
said. “Believe me,” Begin answered, “your words are not without influence on me.”

At the beginning of May 1981, Begin asked the cabinet defense committee to formally approve the Israeli raid taking place later that month. The general election was scheduled for June 30, he noted, and if the Likud lost, he did not believe that Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader would be capable of ordering the attack. Meanwhile, a shipment of enriched
uranium had reached Iraq, and the reactor was due to start working again in September. The ministers agreed to empower a small committee—Begin, Minister of Foreign Affairs Shamir, and Chief of Staff Eitan
^h
—to determine the precise date. “Prime Minister,” Sharon wrote fulsomely, “this is the historic decision that you faced. I congratulate you on your success in taking it … No more delay. Best, Arik.”

But there was more delay. On May 10, with the Israeli warplanes poised for takeoff, Begin received a letter from Peres urging him to postpone the operation. The newly elected, not-yet-installed president of France, the Socialist
François Mitterrand, should be given the opportunity to stop supporting Iraq, as he had promised, Peres argued. Begin was not persuaded, but realizing that the secret had leaked to the opposition and fearing that the operation could be compromised, he ordered the air force to stand down.
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The air strike finally went ahead on June 7. It was an unqualified success. The nuclear plant was destroyed. There was no significant radioactive fallout. Just one French technician among the foreign scientists was killed. All the Israeli planes returned safely. There was an international outcry, as expected, but it was mitigated both by a widespread feeling of relief in many countries that Saddam had been defanged and by the unmistakable impression that Washington’s heart was not in its upbraiding and punishment of Israel.

The verdict of history was similarly sympathetic. The
first Gulf War, when a beleaguered Saddam hurled (conventional) missiles nightly at Tel Aviv, and the subsequent unearthing of his chemical and biological stockpiles by UN inspectors made the danger of his nuclear program retrospectively unarguable.

In
Jerusalem, ministers waiting anxiously with Begin at his home broke into shouts of relief when word came through from Chief of Staff Eitan. Begin walked over to Sharon and embraced him.
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Two days later, though, reporting to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee, Begin pointedly denied press reports that Sharon’s threat to resign had forced his hand.

He denied, too, with all the oratorical pathos at his command, the whispered suspicions that he had ordered the raid with the polls in mind. “Would I send Jewish boys to risk death, or captivity, which is worse than death, for elections?! Would I send our boys into such danger for elections?!!”

Begin was at his rhetorical best in this campaign, seizing on an ethnic slur by a pro-Labor popular entertainer to stir up furious resentment among his largely Sephardic constituency. “Is some ham actor hired by Labor to stand on a platform and defile the name of the Sephardic communities?!
Sephardim are among the most heroic of the IDF’s fighters. The bravest Israelis. They crossed the canal with Arik Sharon. Under his command they fought on the other side.”

Though Labor managed to woo back almost all of its supporters (from thirty-two seats in 1977, it pulled back to forty-seven), Likud was up, too, from forty-three to forty-eight, and with the renewed backing of his religious allies Begin had no difficulty forming a new government.

“There are rumors that Arik is pushing me into war,” Begin told the cabinet in May 1981, just before the election, when tensions with Syria were running high. “I have stated that I am not easily pushed.”
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Not all the ministers were convinced.
Simcha Ehrlich and
Yigael Yadin, who had warned Begin against giving Sharon national security responsibilities back in 1977, warned him again in 1981. Moshe Dayan, gravely ill with cancer, went to Begin to voice his trepidation. “I hear Arik’s going to be minister of defense in the new government. I am seriously worried that if he gets the job, he will embroil us in a war in Lebanon. I know him.” Begin tried to allay the sick man’s concerns. The whole cabinet, he pointed out, not the defense minister alone, was constitutionally responsible for the army. Moreover, he himself would make sure to stay in close touch with the chief of staff. “What!” Dayan retorted. “Raful? He’s no better!”
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The most eerily accurate of the real-time admonishers was the former chief of staff and longtime Sharon foe,
Mordechai Gur, now a senior Labor figure, who delivered his message in a newspaper interview. “I’ve sat with Sharon in dozens of meetings about Lebanon, and his mantra has always been ‘We’ve got to march into Lebanon and smash the Syrians!’
When people asked him what we do after smashing the Syrians, he had no answer. This man mustn’t become minister of defense.”
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Why did Begin, strengthened by his election to a second term, weaken now in the face of Sharon’s pressure and agree to appoint him defense minister, despite all the warnings and reservations? Lebanon was certainly part of the prime minister’s thinking, though it was not yet front and center in the Israeli public’s mind in the summer
of 1981. As Begin began his second term that summer, the main challenge on his horizon was carrying out the final, painful phase of the peace treaty with Egypt by the following spring and pulling out of Sinai. Begin needed Sharon, above all, to evict the Sinai settlers.

“He genuinely feared that settler resistance could lead to bloodshed,” his cabinet secretary, Arye Naor, explained years later. “And he believed that the only man who could, perhaps, carry out the evacuation without triggering a violent confrontation was Sharon … because the settlers had faith in Sharon. And so Begin reconciled himself to appointing Sharon [defense minister]. And the upshot indeed was an evacuation without bloodshed. There were protests and barricades … but no serious, violent confrontation.”
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For the settler ideologues and activists at the head of Gush Emunim, Begin and Sharon’s impending, treacherous evacuation of
Yamit, a township of some 1,750 people, and of the other, smaller
settlements in northeastern Sinai, needed to be carved into the Israeli consciousness as a national trauma never to be repeated. The greater the trauma, they reasoned, the greater its deterrent effect. They and their supporters descended on the Rafah Salient in large numbers, moving into the settlement homes as some of the original settlers moved out to new farming villages built for them inside sovereign Israel, or took cash compensation and left.

The newcomers were determined to confront the troops, hopefully to fend them off, more likely to be dragged out kicking and screaming and pushed into waiting buses. The less messianic among them knew this battle was ultimately doomed. Begin had solemnly pledged to hand back Sinai settler-free, and Sharon was committed to make that happen. But the Emunim activists wanted maximum media coverage of “the trauma,” and maximum resonance in people’s minds, so that no such “expulsion” was ever contemplated for the West Bank and Gaza settlements.

Ironically, Sharon himself, having carried out the evacuation smoothly and with relative ease, joined enthusiastically in the “post-trauma,” “never-again” brainwash. “In Sinai, in Yamit we have reached the end of our concessions,” he declared in his order of the
day on April 25, 1982, the date Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai under the peace treaty.

A dozen years on, he was publicly beating his breast over the evacuation of the Sinai settlements. “When I see how it’s exploited to weaken Israel’s position regarding the Golan and
Judea and
Samaria, I think it was a mistake. We should not have agreed to evacuate the settlements, no matter what. I rejoiced over the peace and supported it. But I made a mistake when I agreed to evacuating settlements.”
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He professed his regret, too, over his famous phone call with Begin at Camp David. “Let’s be accurate: It wasn’t I who phoned him; it was he who phoned me. And I didn’t say evacuate the settlements. I just said I’ll support you whatever you decide. But anyway, today I say it was a mistake on my part. Everyone makes mistakes and regrets them. I regret this one.”
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In point of fact, stripped of the spin and the hype (including Sharon’s), the evacuation of the Sinai settlements was a trauma only for the settlers themselves and their supporters. The country at large looked on bemused, visibly untraumatized. Moreover, viewed in the perspective of Sharon’s dramatic and hugely more ambitious and significant evacuation of the Gaza and North Samaria settlements
as prime minister in 2005, the Sinai evacuation appears not merely as
not
a traumatic deterrent against further evacuation but actually as Sharon’s own precedent-setting paradigm for effective, nonviolent evacuation of settlements. All his key tactical decisions in 2005 had their antecedents in Sinai in 1981–1982, and Sharon proved the diligent student of his own success.

The IDF had evacuated “its brothers and sisters not with violence but with love,” he wrote in his April 1982 order of the day, “not with indifference but with empathy.” In Gaza and North Samaria twenty-three years later, the directive to all the evacuating forces, army and police, was essentially the same. The guideline was “With determination and with sensitivity,” and it was rehearsed countless times, from Prime Minister Sharon down to the most junior platoon leader.

In 1982, Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir demanded at cabinet that hundreds of Gush Emunim settlers and sympathizers from Judea and Samaria who had illicitly infiltrated into the Sinai settlements be arrested and prosecuted. But Sharon urged Begin to cool Zamir’s ardor and leave him to handle the infiltrators by patient persuasion. He insisted that normal life continue in the Sinai settlements until the very last possible moment. The remaining indigenous settlers, who would mostly go quietly when the time came, deserved at least that, he explained. As for the newcomers, most of whom were armed, he was
not prepared to believe, he said, that they would ever use their weapons against IDF soldiers. “Lots of people in this country have weapons for self-defense. My mother sleeps with a rifle under her bed. That doesn’t mean she intends to use it, certainly not to attack anyone.”
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He adopted precisely the same approach in the much more complex 2005 disengagement. Then, too, he refused to be rattled by the infiltration of thousands of West Bank settler families and yeshiva students into the Gaza settlements. The newcomers were led by many of the same Emunim rabbis and lay activists who had “reinforced” the Rafah settlements, now gray bearded and with children and grandchildren in tow.

In 1982, as the moment of evacuation approached, Sharon flooded the Rafah Salient with fifteen companies of frontline IDF troops and auxiliary units of medics and firefighters and a strong police contingent. The last holdouts, mainly rightist students and Emunim youngsters, battled the evacuating forces from the rooftops of Yamit. They hurled an assortment of nonlethal objects at soldiers trying to climb up scaling ladders. They succumbed, in the end, when cell-like cages were deposited on their rooftops by crane and they were hustled inside. Threats of suicide by bombs and gas proved so much empty posturing.

The scenes of destruction that followed the withdrawal also presaged the disengagement of 2005. With the last of the protesters out, Israeli
bulldozers began systematically demolishing Yamit (though not the agricultural settlements, which were handed over to Egypt intact). “The infrastructure we had built there,” Sharon explained, “could serve to transform the place very quickly into a population center of 100,000 … It was important that we not have Egyptian centers of population near our borders.”
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Finally, the Sinai withdrawal served as a precedent for the Gaza disengagement—but this in the negative sense—in the way that state compensation for the settlers grew and grew until it reached wholly inflated and inequitable dimensions. Sharon was not solely to blame, but he was more to blame than anyone. “Arik could refuse them nothing,” the director general of the Ministry of
Agriculture, Avraham Ben-Meir, recalled.

S
haron was now at the zenith of his brief, bizarre, and ultimately disastrous term as minister of defense. It was a bizarre term because, drunk on his own success and more arrogant than ever, he seemed to lose touch with his own place and his country’s place in the reality of
world affairs. But he did not lose touch with Begin; the prime minister was right there beside him, stoking the same dangerous fantasies.

O
n an official visit to Washington with Begin in September 1981, the prime minister asked President
Ronald Reagan if Sharon might brief the American side “with some ideas that might give form to the relationship” between the two countries. Sam Lewis, the long-serving U.S. ambassador to Israel, provided a graphic recollection of what followed: