Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (33 page)
By the summer of 1981 the IDF was taking increasing casualties. The north of Israel was close to paralysis. Begin, in his campaign speeches that summer, declared, “Watch out, Assad, Raful and Yanosh are waiting for you.” (Raful was Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan; Yanosh was CO of Northern Command Avigdor Ben-Gal.) The crowds loved it. But Begin’s words rang increasingly hollow after the election as the border war intensified. Israeli warplanes bombed PLO bases in the
refugee camps around Beirut, taking a heavy toll. But the Katyushas and artillery shells continued raining down across the border.
The Americans rushed in their top Lebanon expert, the veteran diplomat (and scion of a Lebanese-American family)
Philip Habib, to negotiate a cease-fire. Sharon, the new defense minister, and Eitan urged a massive ground operation. But Begin bowed to the American pressure and overruled them. A cease-fire—Begin refused to use that term since it implied equality between the two combatants; he referred to a “cessation of hostilities”—went into effect on July 24, 1981. The border war immediately subsided. “I strenuously opposed the cease-fire,” Sharon recalled. “No doubt the PLO would reduce its activity along the Lebanon border in accord with the letter of the agreement, but … it would step up its activities elsewhere.” In the months that followed, Sharon cited every terrorist incident at home and abroad to bolster his case.
39
The cabinet meeting at Begin’s home on December 20 ended with a vague instruction from the prime minister to the generals to come up with an alternative, impliedly less sweeping plan. But Sharon proceeded in the confident expectation that the original one would eventually “ripen” to approval. On January 12, he flew secretly to Jounieh to meet with
Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian
Phalange Party and commander of the
Lebanese Forces militia. The handsome young Gemayel drove his Israeli guest around
Beirut incognito. Sharon was impressed by Gemayel’s obvious popularity. He met his wife, Solange; his father, the veteran
Lebanese Christian leader
Pierre Gemayel; and Pierre’s longtime ally cum rival
Camille Chamoun, a former president of Lebanon.
“ ‘In case there is a war,’ Bashir asked, ‘what would you expect of us?’ ‘The first thing you should do is defend your borders here,’ Sharon replied. ‘We will not be able to come to your rescue if you lose ground little by little. Second, that hill over there, the defense ministry hill [in the Beirut suburb of
Ba’abda]. That hill is vital. If there is a war, take that hill. [The hill was vital because on its slopes ran the Beirut–Damascus highway.] Third, Israel will not enter
West Beirut. That’s the capital, the government, the foreign embassies … West Beirut is your business and the business of the
Lebanese Army.’ ”
40
Sharon reported to Begin and the inner cabinet on his talks in Lebanon. Clearly, the idea of IDF forces linking up with the Christians, and, presumably, helping Gemayel in his bid for the Lebanese presidency, was still very much alive despite the cabinet’s reservations over
Operation Pines. Begin himself met with Bashir Gemayel in Jerusalem on February 16.
On April 3, 1982, an Israeli diplomat was shot dead by a terrorist in Paris, and the inner cabinet decided that from now on any such
attack would bring an Israeli response against the
PLO. On April 21, just days before the Sinai handover, Israeli warplanes were sent to bomb Palestinian targets in Lebanon, for the first time since the July cease-fire, following a mine explosion inside the south Lebanon “security zone” that took the life of an Israeli officer. The PLO did not retaliate; the Americans reportedly warned it that to do so would be to trigger an IDF invasion.
41
On May 7, following terrorist attacks in
Ashkelon and Jerusalem, the air force bombed again in Lebanon. This time PLO guns and Katyusha launchers responded, but all their hundred-odd shells fell wide, and it was clear the Palestinians were trying to avoid escalation.
It was clear, too, that as far as Israel was concerned, the war was just a matter of time. No evidence was adduced linking the explosive charges laid in Ashkelon and Jerusalem to the PLO in Lebanon. The shooting in Paris, too, could not be pinned directly on
Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The specific provenance of specific acts of terrorism was plainly irrelevant. Israel was determined to act against what it saw as the chief source of Palestinian terror: the PLO in Lebanon.
How extensive would the Israeli military operation be? There had been a certain scaling back of the military planning in the wake of the December 20 cabinet meeting. Among those in the loop, there was vague talk of “Small Pines” as opposed to “Big Pines.” But as meeting followed meeting of the inner cabinet and the full cabinet, that key question was still unresolved.
On May 16, Eitan submitted a more limited plan to the cabinet, and Begin asked for an approval in principle, with the precise timing still to be settled. But while both Sharon and Eitan spoke in terms of clearing south Lebanon of PLO artillery, the maps displayed before the ministers were essentially those of
Operation Pines, showing the IDF columns striking north toward the Christian-controlled areas. Sharon did not speak explicitly of linking up with the Christian forces. He did say, though, that the Israeli operation would have an influence on affairs inside Lebanon. He also said the IDF incursion would last only twenty-four hours.
42
The ministers knew, of course, that Begin and Sharon’s original plans called for a deeper penetration and presumed it would take considerably longer.
Yitzhak Modai, minister without portfolio (and Sharon’s friend and erstwhile fellow officer), asked: “Given that there are always unexpected developments on the battlefield, would the cabinet be asked for approval of movements farther north?” To this Begin responded that the cabinet could be called to meet at any time such a question came up.
Begin, in a passionate speech, said Israel’s problem was not one of three miles or ten miles but of the interpretation of the cease-fire. The PLO had announced that it would continue its attacks inside Israel. “They are declaring war on the people of Israel, that they will make every form of trouble, massacre and assassination of men, women, and children, all over Israel … Every nation would react to that.”
Sharon now flew to Washington to make essentially the same presentation to Secretary Haig and, hopefully, get a green light from the Americans to proceed. At least now Washington’s fear of Israel not withdrawing from Sinai had been laid to rest.
The question of what color light, green, yellow, or red, Sharon actually received from Haig has been exhaustively discussed over the years. The two men themselves, as might be expected, both denied there was any green light. “They [the Americans] were against. Totally against. I have to admit that,” Sharon said in an interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci during the war. “There was no collusion,” he insisted in a later interview. “The most one could say is that Haig understood our situation better than others in Washington.”
43
Sharon’s report to the cabinet when he returned gave the ministers the distinct impression that the United States would be sympathetic when the IDF struck.
44
Haig, probably apprised of this, wrote to Begin on May 28 urging “complete restraint.” To this the prime minister replied, “Mr. Secretary, the man has not been born who will ever obtain from me consent to let Jews be killed by a bloodthirsty enemy.”
a
One of the Begin team’s first instructions when it came to power was to the Israel Broadcasting Authority to stop referring to “the West Bank” (implying the area was part of Jordan) and use instead the biblical designation “Judea and Samaria.”
b
See p. 82.
c
Carter’s understanding “certainly made sense,” the U.S. ambassador to Israel,
Samuel Lewis, observed years later. “Certainly in Carter’s mind he was talking about a settlement freeze of indefinite length through the period in which you were negotiating over autonomy. And that’s what [U.S. secretary of state Cyrus] Vance thought they were talking about. [Nevertheless,] my hypothesis to this day is that it was a genuine misunderstanding, not a deliberate double cross by Begin. Carter thinks the opposite. He thinks Begin lied to him at Camp David. And he was there” (Sam Lewis interview, Jerusalem, February 2, 2009).
d
The name appears in the Bible (Gen. 12:6).
e
“From the moment the peace treaty was signed,” Weizman wrote in his memoir
The Battle for Peace,
immediately after his resignation,
Begin … turned his back on this chink of hope that had opened for Israel after thirty years of bloodshed. More than anyone else, Begin turned the peace into something banal, something not to be proud of. Instead of surging forward to lead Israel into a new age, Begin preferred to sink back into his fanciful dreams. Perhaps he didn’t truly understand the historic significance of the moment. Perhaps because of conflicts with his lifelong ideological beliefs … It sometimes seemed that the very prospect of peace was depressing him. An air of depression wafted through the corridors of power and spread throughout the land.
f
On one such visit, Sharon was taken to the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. Gazing up at the huge pillars and listening to the guide explain the hieroglyphic annals of the ancient pharaohs, he asked his close aide: “Do you think I’ll be written about too, in the annals of Jewish history?” The aide replied, “It depends what you do,” but remembered thinking how the determination to leave a lasting mark was such an essential part of Sharon’s being (Eli Landau interview, Herzliya, October 30, 2007).
g
Singular:
Mitzpeh,
or lookout post, the name given to these hilltop villages. By 1999, the number of
mitzpim
had grown to fifty-seven, and Sharon took the credit for all of them. In the 2001 election campaign for prime minister, he spoke of settling another half million
Jews in the Galilee, all in the existing towns and villages. There was no need, he declared, to build any more places, just to bring in more people (“The Target: Half a Million More Jews in the Galilee,”
Haaretz,
January 18, 2001).
h
According to some subsequent accounts, Sharon and not Eitan was the third man on the committee. Either way, Sharon clearly stayed intimately involved.
i
The legislation provided that “the law, jurisdiction, and administration of the State of Israel” should henceforth apply to the Golan Heights. This is the same language that Israel used when it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and is tantamount to annexation, though the word “annexation” was not used.
A
bloodthirsty enemy struck in
London on June 3, 1982. His
Jewish victim was the Israeli ambassador to the U.K., Shlomo Argov, shot through the head by a lone assailant as he left a dinner at the Dorchester hotel. The injury left him mentally and physically incapacitated for the rest of his life.
The attack was perpetrated by the
Abu Nidal group, headquartered in Baghdad. Abu Nidal, or Sabri al-Bana, broke away from the PLO years before and was a virulent foe of Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, whom he called “the Jewess’s son” and had tried in the past to assassinate.
1
But none of that was of any interest to the cabinet, which convened in emergency session the next day. “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” Chief of Staff Eitan retorted to the intelligence briefings. “They’re all PLO. We need to f—k the PLO.”
2
He was out of line, but he perfectly expressed the sense of the meeting.
Prime Minister Begin preferred not to grace
Palestinian terrorists with any name or initials. They were all
hamenuvalim,
the swine. No country on earth would fail to respond to an attack like that, he said. Israel had desisted for long enough from hitting the PLO in Lebanon. To continue to desist would be absurd.
3
But Begin did not propose the invasion of south Lebanon at this stage. His decision was to bomb PLO bases and depots in south Lebanon and in the Beirut suburbs. The PLO’s response would determine whether Israel would make do with that or launch its long-planned ground assault.
The Israeli warplanes hit nine targets, including a sprawling sports center in south Beirut that served the Palestinian fighters as a training camp. The PLO “signed its own death warrant,” in the words of Ambassador Lewis, by responding with a massive artillery barrage all across the Israeli border zone. Interestingly, neither Arafat nor Sharon was involved in this preliminary round of hostilities. The PLO leader
was in Jeddah, on a mediating mission to end the Iran-Iraq War.
4
Sharon was on a discreet official visit to Romania.
When the cabinet met again, on Saturday night, June 5, in Begin’s official residence, Sharon was back, and the shelling in the north had continued unabated for twenty-four hours. Begin made it clear that he would ask the ministers to approve the ground assault. “It is our fate in Eretz Yisrael to fight and sacrifice. The alternative is Auschwitz.” He asked the minister of defense to take them through the details of the proposed operation once again, “as though for the first time.” Sharon and Eitan described a short, multipronged incursion designed to clear the entire border region of the PLO. The army would advance some forty to forty-five kilometers, they said, the farthest range of the PLO’s artillery. “What about Beirut?” the always-skeptical Ehrlich asked. “Beirut’s out of the picture,” Sharon replied.
Begin acknowledged Ehrlich’s question by saying, “In war, you know how it begins, but you never know how it ends. But let me state very clearly: nothing will be done without a cabinet decision.” Ehrlich was unconvinced and abstained, as did his fellow Likud-Liberal the energy minister,
Yitzhak Berman. “You know Sharon,” Ehrlich whispered, as they walked out together. “He’ll dupe everyone. He’ll take us much farther than 40–45 km.”
5
The communiqué, meticulously edited by Begin himself, informed the waiting world that
