Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (39 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
a
The IDF force deployed in the central and eastern sectors comprised some 35,000 men and 800 tanks. Another 22,000 men and 220 tanks fought in the west. Syrian forces
in Lebanon on the eve of the war, according to Bregman, numbered some 30,000 men, 600-plus tanks, and 300-odd artillery pieces. More troops were brought in after the fighting began. The PLO had 15,000 full-time fighting men and additional militiamen recruited from among the refugees. They had only 100-odd tanks but 350 artillery pieces.
b
Air battles continued sporadically until the end of the week, and the Syrians lost another 51 planes, bringing the total to 87, all frontline fighters: MiG 23s, MiG 21s, and Sukhoi 22s. The IAF tally of air losses in the war was two helicopters and a Skyhawk jet downed by PLO rocket fire (Herzog,
Arab-Israeli Wars
, 338).
c
One died, and his body was subsequently returned by the Syrians; another was captured by the Syrians and eventually returned; a third was captured and returned three years later as part of the prisoner deal with Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command. Three more, Zechariah Baumel, Zvi Feldman, and Yehuda Katz, disappeared and were never found.
d
In
Warrior,
Sharon wrote of “serious tactical mistakes and poor staff work” in the army that had resulted in episodes such as Sultan Yakub and had led to the “failure to keep the planned timetable” and reach the road before the Friday cease-fire.
e
Eitan insists in his memoirs that the maps presented to the cabinet at the Saturday night meeting had arrows pointing clearly to the road. “We presented the ‘big plan,’ and the cabinet approved it. The plan explicitly included capturing a stretch of the Beirut–Damascus Road.” Eitan adds that the forty- to forty-five-kilometer line was “never part of the cabinet decision or the instructions of the
General Staff to the commanders in the field … Everything was clear, and the ministers fully understood it.”
f
Relations between Sharon and Habib steadily deteriorated. “As time wore on,” Sam Lewis recalled, “[Habib] became … increasingly an Israel critic, influenced no doubt by the continual Israeli shelling of Beirut. He must have been shaken at the continuing sight of smoke plumes from artillery shells and bombs from planes … The pattern of an anguished Habib reporting at great length to Washington, followed by some kind of démarche delivered either in Washington or in Jerusalem, began at the end of June and continued through the summer until the PLO finally withdrew.”
g
Secretary of Defense Weinberger was far less cooperative with Shultz and Habib when it came to deploying the
U.S. Marines on land. “The Palestinian forces under Syrian command wanted to turn over their positions to the Americans, not to the
Lebanese army,” Shultz writes. “They feared that the Lebanese army would not be strong enough to stand up to the Khataeb, the Christian militia; they were afraid that the Khataeb would take over the PLO positions and attack the Palestinian civilians left behind … The Defense Department … did not want American forces exposed to danger in a situation of mixed command. ‘The U.S. Marines can’t just sit on their ass all the time,’ Habib howled.” Sharon wanted the MNF troops, and especially the U.S. Marines, confined to as narrow and brief an assignment as possible. Shultz could not overcome what he calls this “Sharon-Weinberger co-veto,” even though Habib warned ominously of the dangers ahead.
h
Eitan, in his memoirs, acknowledges that there was “one inquiry” at cabinet “about the possibility that the Phalange would seek revenge. I responded that they [the Phalangist soldiers] appeared to be motivated to fulfill the objective of their mission, and that they had never displayed a tendency toward misconduct.” This, of course, was also a lie at the time it was purportedly said, and an even sillier lie at the time it was published, years after the Kahan Commission Report that condemned Eitan (inter alios) for precisely this disingenuousness.
What Eitan in fact said at cabinet, according to the stenographic account published by the Kahan Commission, was that sooner or later, in the wake of the assassination, there would be “an eruption of revenge” on the part of the Phalange. “It makes no difference if we are there or not.” In his testimony to the commission, and in his memoirs, Eitan insisted that he was referring in this last remark not to the Phalange force that entered Sabra and Shatila that night but “to other militias that had less direction and were not tightly structured.”
i
The Kahan Commission accepted Sharon’s testimony that no such notification reached him.
j
In January 1984, Major Hadad died of cancer. In April, General Antoine Lahad took over the SLA. He was a Maronite Christian and a retired general in the Lebanese army. Under his command, the SLA grew to 2,500 men. Most of the soldiers were
Shiites; most of the officers were Christian. All of the arms and equipment were Israeli. Being in the SLA often meant that members of one’s family were allowed into Israel daily to work in factories and
kibbutzim in the
Galilee. In 1996, Lahad was tried in Beirut in absentia for treason and sentenced to death. After Israel’s final withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, he lived for a time in
France, then moved to
Tel Aviv, where he opened a Middle Eastern restaurant.
k
The civil war was eventually brought to an end in 1991. By this time the balance of power in Lebanon had greatly shifted, with Syria wielding untrammeled influence and
Hezbollah, the fundamentalist
Shiite militia, a growing force both in Beirut and in the south.
T
his is the only country in the world,” Sharon often said ruefully during the months that followed his ouster from the Defense Ministry, “in which the minister of defense is sent home to drive his tractor because of what the Christians did to the Muslims.” That was spurious, of course. There
was
no other comparable country that had got itself into a situation in which its duty was to keep blood-crazed Christians and helpless Muslims apart and had woefully failed to discharge that duty.
But just as Sharon’s self-centered lament was bound to deepen the shame and loathing for him on the left, it was calculated to elicit sympathy in the center and to shore up support on the right. The words deliberately harked back to the bitter remark, also disingenuous but arresting nevertheless, attributed to Begin soon after the massacre (he denied its accuracy), “Goyim [non-Jews] killed goyim, and we are held to blame.”
a
Sharon was calibrating the catastrophe for anyone who would still listen to him, putting it “into proportion,” as he said—both in terms of Israel’s history and international standing and in terms of his own interrupted career. His traducers had wickedly exaggerated. They were wrongly condemning Israel and him. The Kahan Commission
had perpetrated a terrible injustice “against the Jewish people and against me personally.”
1
It wasn’t time, yet, to do battle against this injustice. But that time would come. “This is something that I believe must be dealt with in the future.”
Meanwhile, he was back at the ranch, ostensibly doing what he always said he wanted to do. When he was still in uniform, Lily had often said she looked forward to the day when she would tell callers, “He’s out in the fields, riding his horse; he’ll be back for suppertime.”
2
Sharon writes in his book, “The next day [after his ouster] I was out in the fields on the tractor, looking down on the crops, on the sheep and lambs.” He proudly records how he crossed indigenous Awasi sheep with imported merino ones. “The resulting crossbred ewes combined the Merino’s propensity for twins and the Awasi’s milk production and excellent maternal behavior. Experimenting with hormones, we developed techniques of inducing three births every two years rather than the usual one a year.”
In later years, Sharon would insist that he was wrongly perceived as driven by politics and the pursuit of power. He was philosophical, he claimed, almost fatalistic, about his chances of ever making it to the top. “My secret weapon,” he was fond of saying, “is that I’m actually much less ambitious than people think.”
3
He could afford to be, he explained, because, unlike so many of his colleagues and rivals, he had a rich life waiting for him beyond politics, after politics. If he were ever pushed off the greasy pole, he would not undergo a single day of suffering or remorse. “The next day I’d be out working on the farm, and truly enjoying it … I’ve never had enough time for all the things I want to do. Experiments in
agriculture, for instance. And travel to the many places I’ve never visited. Meeting people I’ve always wanted to meet; and reading all the books I’ve never had time to read.”
4
It wasn’t from the world of politics that he drew his strength, he insisted. “People don’t understand the source of my strength,” he told an interviewer for the popular women’s magazine
La’isha
. “Hard, physical work, agriculture, flowers, trees, the farm animals, and the fields—those are the source of my strength … People don’t know that if I’m not a politician, I won’t be miserable. I’ll look after an injured bird, a nest of chicks. My strength doesn’t come from politics. It comes from the land.”
5
But for all these paeans to bucolic bliss—and they were not entirely insincere—Sharon suffered pangs of frustration and boredom during his exile at
Sycamore Ranch. “I was now minister without portfolio,” he writes. “But without a portfolio there was nothing for me to do … I was completely isolated in the government. Work of any sort
was kept out of my hands, even the kinds of projects that are ordinarily given to ministers without portfolio … I used to sit in on the cabinet meetings, then go to my office, which was in an unused government building—an empty office in an empty building.”
Important political figures in Israel had sometimes wound up as ministers without portfolio, but they usually served as intimate advisers to the prime minister, sharing some of the burden of his office. There was no more intimacy between Begin and Sharon, and he was effectively frozen out. The people around Begin were pleased and relieved to be rid of him and fully intended for him never to return to a position of influence.
S
haron’s strategy for a return would entail a dogged, single-minded march along three parallel tracks. First, he resolved to hang on to his ministerial status, however reduced. By his own account, his loyal and loving aide
Uri Dan played an important role in his decision not to quit but to stay on in cabinet as a demeaned and reviled junior minister. Dan had famously assured reporters on the day Sharon resigned that “those who didn’t want him as chief of staff got him back as minister of defense; and those who don’t want him as minister of defense will get him back
as prime minister.”
6
This prophecy achieved instant immortality in Israeli popular annals. People laughed at it, but they remembered it. Dan persuaded Sharon that as long as he was in the game, his fortunes could rise again, but if he cashed out, the ranks of pushy politicians would close behind him, and he would quickly be forgotten.
Second, Sharon began assiduously to build his own political base within the Likud. Here, much of the credit goes to a young student leader with a sharp eye and political pretensions of his own. “I sat at the ranch with Arik and Lily,”
Yisrael Katz recalls, “and I kept saying, ‘Arik, you don’t understand the first thing about politics. Let me help you build a camp …’ He was fuming, but Lily said, ‘Listen to him. What have you got to lose? He means it for your good.’ ”
The third track toward rehabilitation opened up the very day Sharon left the Defense Ministry.
Time
magazine, in a rambling cover story on the Kahan Commission findings, asserted that Sharon, the day before the Sabra and Shatila massacre, had discussed with the Lebanese Phalangists “the need to take revenge” for Gemayel’s assassination.
7
Here, too, a young adviser, the lawyer
Dov Weissglas, who had represented him before the commission, was key in Sharon’s decision to sue the magazine and in the epic legal battle that followed.
• • •
S
haron was not present at the tail end of a long cabinet meeting on August 28, 1983, when Begin, without warning, announced that he was resigning “for personal reasons … I cannot do this job any longer.”
8
Sharon had stormed out of the cabinet room earlier, slamming the door behind him, after vehemently attacking his successor at Defense,
Moshe Arens, over policy in Lebanon. Begin, who took little part in the proceedings before delivering his bombshell announcement, showed no reaction to Sharon’s antics. Two days later, at the meeting of the coalition leadership with Begin, Sharon took the floor to advise his colleagues “that we put things in proportion.” With all the deep regret that they all felt at Begin’s decision, it did not mean the Likud was disintegrating or losing its way.
The Likud, and with it the whole political community, were naturally seething with rumor and speculation over why Begin had quit, and much of it focused on Sharon. Increasingly, people were saying that Begin felt he had been led, or perhaps misled, by Sharon into disastrously dragging out what should have been a brief border war into a long, costly, and ultimately unsuccessful campaign. There were more than five hundred
b
IDF dead at that point.
Begin had been sinking into a deep depression, not for the first time in his life. In the weeks prior to his announcement he hardly went to the office at all, receiving ministers and officials at his home. After his announcement, he stopped going out altogether. Even his formal resignation letter to the president of the state was delivered by the cabinet secretary. Begin, it was explained, had developed a skin condition that prevented him from shaving, and he would not appear before the president
unshaven.
9
For the next eight and a half years, until his death in March 1992, he hardly ever appeared in public, rarely spoke on the telephone, and met with only a handful of his closest relatives and aides.
