Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (32 page)

The formal purpose of Begin’s visit was to begin discussions on a memorandum of agreement on strategic cooperation between the two countries. Sharon at this period made a tour of several
African countries, and he wove his experiences in Gabon, Central African Republic, Zaire, and South Africa into the ongoing strategic dialogue with the Pentagon. Israel, he suggested, could be helpful in Africa too, in combating
Libyan subversion, in countering Soviet influence. Weinberger’s team remained unimpressed. Begin, monitoring the talks from
Jerusalem, ignored the American lack of enthusiasm. For him, in Lewis’s words, “that signed piece of paper was much more important than the content. He wanted a symbol of the alliance.”

Eventually, a document was drawn up, lean in practical content. Sharon and Minister of Foreign Affairs
Yitzhak Shamir, visiting Washington together in November 1981, attended the signing ceremony, which Weinberger contrived to hold in the basement of the Pentagon, without media coverage.

Despite the American cold shoulder, Sharon maintained that the memorandum was significant. “Though not a vehicle for joint Israeli-American activities of the kind I had been recommending to [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig and Weinberger, it did acknowledge
explicitly the threat of Soviet-inspired military activity in the region and provided channels for closer military and intelligence coordination between the two countries.”
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He never tired of unfurling his maps and delivering his briefings on Israel’s role as a regional superpower and as America’s strong and willing surrogate. Foreign statesmen, Israeli politicians, military men, academics, and journalists—all were treated to his sweeping presentations during this period.

One far-fetched scheme, which was kept out of the briefings, involved two Israeli businessmen-friends of Sharon’s and their
Saudi Arabian partner who were to supply large quantities of American arms to
Sudan. These were to serve the son of the exiled Shah of
Iran to mount a revolt against the ayatollahs who had taken over his country. The arms would also be useful to foment rebellion against
Libya’s
Muammar Ghaddafi. There was a clandestine meeting—Sudan and Israel had no formal diplomatic relations—in May 1982 in Kenya, between Sharon and Lily and the Sudanese leader, Jaafar Numeiry. Also present were the two Israeli businessmen, the Saudi partner, and the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry,
David Kimche, who had recently resigned from the Mossad. Perhaps it was fortunate that the
Lebanon War intervened before this particular piece of megalomania could get off the ground.
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No
African adventures or Asian wars actually resulted from Begin’s posturing and Sharon’s strategic bombast. They are important, though, as indicators of the two men’s shared mood as they conceived the Israeli strategy that led to the Lebanon War. They both reveled in Israel’s military power and potential, recovered now after the Yom Kippur setback. They both regarded Israel as an outpost of American power in the global confrontation with the Soviet bloc and its Arab satellites. And they were both convinced that the Reagan team, fundamentally, saw things the same way.

Did they both, in their exhilarated assessment of Israel’s capabilities and America’s sympathies, conceive a sweeping military move designed not only to defeat the PLO and the Syrians
in Lebanon and install a pro-Israel government there but also to drive the Palestinians from Lebanon to Jordan, where they would overthrow the king and set up their own state? Sharon, as we have seen, had long believed that regime change in Amman was the key to solving the Palestinian problem. Some of his critics suspected him of harboring this undeclared agenda when he launched the Lebanon War.

Lewis was one of them. But “Begin and Sharon had the same goals,” he insisted. “The basic strategy was shoving the PLO out of Lebanon … maybe back into Jordan. I believe Begin and Sharon had
the same strategic goal. Their strategic hope was that Jordan would become the Palestinian state. They never intended giving up any of the West Bank.”
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This is an important perspective from a key observer who was at the heart of the unfolding drama. Begin, in years to come, was to deny Sharon’s claim that as prime minister he supported and encouraged the “Jordan is Palestine” thesis that Sharon openly espoused. Begin’s apologists argued that Begin could never uphold that thesis because he still believed, at l
east theoretically, in the Revisionist Zionist doctrine that both banks of the Jordan belong to the Jewish people. Lewis, familiar with all this, nevertheless asserted that Begin “no longer really held ideologically that Jordan is Israel. He thought it was the place where the Palestinians ought to be.”

H
aving achieved his cherished
U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Agreement, Menachem Begin was beside himself with rage when Lewis called at his home on December 20, 1981, barely a fortnight after it was signed, to inform him that it was suspended.

Washington was infuriated by Begin’s sudden decision to effectively annex the Golan Heights.
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Begin had slipped in the bath the previous month and broken his hip, a painful injury that laid him up in the hospital and then convalescing at home for several weeks. Worried by the gathering storm within his political constituency over the Sinai settlements, and angered by some intemperate rhetoric from Syria’s president,
Hafez Assad, that he heard on the radio, Begin came up with the Golan annexation as a dramatic political palliative. He got the cabinet to approve it on December 13. Then, from a wheelchair, he rammed the legislation through its three
Knesset readings on one day, and the annexation became law.

Lewis was ushered into the prime minister’s bedroom, where he found Sharon and Shamir flanking the prime minister, his face gaunt with pain and indignation. After terse pleasantries, Begin launched into a seventy-minute diatribe, which, he said, was his “message” to President Reagan. “Do you think that we are teenagers to be punished, slapped on the wrist? Do you think Israel is a vassal state of the United States? Are we just another ‘banana republic’? Let me tell you,
Mr. Ambassador, that this is not Israel!” Lewis was allowed five minutes at the end to make his remonstrances, then was ushered out. As he walked down the stairs, he was intrigued to see the entire cabinet and top army brass assembled in the reception room for what was clearly going to be an important cabinet meeting.

Begin was then carried downstairs, with Sharon and Shamir attending, and took obvious satisfaction in recounting to his ministers how he had proudly upheld the dignity of their country in the face of the condescending superpower. He then proceeded to acquaint them, for the first time, with his plan for the invasion of Lebanon.

The IDF, he said, must go into Lebanon and clear out all the terrorist bases. The invasion was necessary because the PLO, despite an American-brokered cease-fire in south Lebanon the previous July—after months of cross-border rocket and artillery exchanges—was relentlessly attacking or trying to attack targets elsewhere in Israel and
Jewish targets abroad.

He wanted a decision in principle from the cabinet authorizing the proposed operation. He asked Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan to present the plan in greater detail. They said the invasion by armor and infantry would extend up to the outskirts of
Beirut. Amphibious units would land at the Christian-controlled port of
Jounieh, north of Beirut, and link up with the Christian militias. Sharon said they did not want war with Syria and hoped the cease-fire between Israel and Syria could be preserved. But the army would be ready to fight back if need be against any Syrian intervention. The proposed operation was code-named Pines.

The ministers were gobsmacked. They had not previously been exposed to Begin and Sharon’s planning, much less to the army’s detailed preparations. But Ehrlich, Burg, and some of the other moderates quickly assimilated the scene: Begin dangerously euphoric, Sharon assiduously egging him on, Shamir silent but approving, the army zealous for a new war to excise the
trauma of Yom Kippur. They put up a spirited resistance. One after another, they spoke against the plan, emphasizing the complications that could arise from an invasion and trying, albeit deferentially, to cool the prime minister’s ardor. Begin, suddenly deflated, realized he would not have a majority. Abruptly, he ended the discussion without putting his proposal to a vote and had himself carried back upstairs.
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“You see,” he was heard explaining to Sharon and Eitan, “it’s not yet ripe for a decision.”
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Though genuinely taken aback by the scope of Begin’s war plan, the ministers could hardly pretend to be surprised by the prime minister’s preoccupation with Lebanon. Lebanon, and specifically the
PLO’s activities there, had been on this government’s agenda since the beginning of its first term in 1977. Always Israel’s quietest frontier, the Lebanese border had gradually become a hotbed of terrorist violence in the early 1970s, following the forcible eviction of the PLO’s forces from Jordan in September 1970 and the relocation of many of them to south Lebanon. In 1975, civil war broke out
in Lebanon as the long-dominant Christian communities lashed out at the other, increasingly assertive confessions—Sunni Muslims,
Shiite Muslims, and
Druze. The PLO fanned the flames. It claimed to speak for, and protect, the more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees, many of them second- and third-generation, living in refugee camps around the country.

Israel traditionally maintained discreet ties with the Christians; Ben-Gurion back in the 1950s had seen them as potential allies. In 1976, Syrian forces entered Lebanon and joined the fighting on the Christian side. Soon, the Syrians were deployed across much of the country and were dominating its politics.

Yitzhak Rabin regarded Syria’s intervention as essentially a favorable development from Israel’s standpoint and willingly acceded to U.S. requests that Israel not interfere. Rabin believed that the
Syrian army would now be extended across two fronts, the
Golan Heights and Lebanon, making it more vulnerable and less threatening should war come. Together with U.S. diplomats, he drew a “red line” across southern Lebanon that, by unwritten understanding with Damascus, was to mark the limit of Syrian deployment acceptable to Israel. Rabin always insisted that the serious threat to Israel’s security was from Arab regular armies—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The PLO, he maintained, was a nuisance, albeit a painful one, but not an existential military challenge. Rabin and his defense minister, Shimon Peres, began arming and funding local Christian and Shiite militias in the border area of south Lebanon to serve as a counter to the growing PLO presence there.

In March 1978, with Begin now in power, a group of nine Palestinian terrorists reached Israel from Lebanon by boat, killed a young woman swimmer, hijacked two buses, crammed all the passengers into one of them, drove it down the coast, and were eventually halted in a murderous firefight outside
Tel Aviv in which thirty-five of the passengers were killed and another seventy-one injured. All nine terrorists were killed. The IDF, under Minister of Defense
Ezer Weizman, launched a swift sweep into south Lebanon,
Operation Litani, aimed at killing or capturing PLO fighters or driving them north out of the border zone. It was a success and ended with the deployment of a UN force in the area. Israel withdrew most of its troops from Lebanese soil
but retained what it called a “security zone,” patrolled by a local Lebanese militia commanded by a Christian officer, Major
Sa’ad Hadad, in close liaison with the IDF.

Gradually, the PLO filtered back into the south, and a guerrilla war developed between the Palestinian fighters and the south Lebanese militia and IDF forces. The PLO’s Soviet-made
Katyusha
rocket launchers and 130-millimeter cannon could fire from north of the “security zone” and hit Israeli towns and kibbutzim across the border. Weizman kept the Israeli response to pinpoint reprisal raids. But after his resignation in 1980, and with Begin now the defense minister, Chief of Staff Eitan steadily escalated the situation with repeated IDF attacks and air strikes against Palestinian bases north of the “security zone.”
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In April 1981, when Christian militia forces in the mountains to the east of Beirut found themselves hard-pressed by Syrian forces—the Syrians had meanwhile switched their support from the Christians to the Muslims—Begin sent in warplanes to shoot down a pair of Syrian troop-transport
helicopters in a signal to Damascus to back off. The Syrians stopped their attack, but they deployed ground-to-air missiles in the Beqáa Valley, threatening Israel’s aerial ascendancy.

For Begin, the
Lebanese Christians were more than a strategic ally; their plight was a test case for Israel’s most profound moral and historical mission as he understood it. The Syrians had turned against them, and they faced a coalition of hostile Muslim forces inside their country. “Yigael,” Begin admonished his deputy prime minister,
Yigael Yadin, his voice thick with drama and pathos. “Yigael, the danger of annihilation hangs over them. They are our allies. We will not behave toward them the way Chamberlain and Daladier behaved.” Yadin, citing intelligence reports and backed by the deputy defense minister,
Mordechai Zippori, and the chief of Military Intelligence,
Yehoshua Saguy, warned Begin that the Lebanese Christian politicians were a feckless and self-serving bunch who “mean to drag us into their war. What interest do we have in supporting them?”