Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (40 page)

Sharon had his own theory as to why Begin went into seclusion, but he had the political good sense not to publicize it. Privately, he said that Begin had recoiled, terminally, in the face of his (Sharon’s) anguished accusation in the wake of the cabinet’s decision to accept the
Kahan Commission Report. “Menachem, you are handing me over,” Sharon had cried. The words he used, deliberately, were loaded with terrible meaning for the old man.
Ata masgir oti
(you are handing me over) sent Begin’s mind reeling back to the traumatic pre-state days, to the
Haganah’s
saison,
or hunting season, against Begin’s Irgun men when they tracked them down and handed them over to the British police. This was seen on the right as the most despicable act of national treachery.

On September 1, the foreign minister,
Yitzhak Shamir, easily defeated the ambitious minister of housing,
David Levy, in a leadership contest at Herut’s central committee. As prime minister designate, Shamir quickly renegotiated the coalition agreement with the parties that had partnered Begin in government. In the new cabinet Sharon served, once again, as minister without portfolio, with nothing to do but carp and criticize. The
Prime Minister’s Bureau continued to emit toward him the same cold disdain. If anything, it was colder. Shamir, the hard-bitten former underground leader and onetime Mossad operative, never entertained the admiration for Sharon that accounted for half of Begin’s ambivalent attitude to him.
^c

There was a lower nadir still to come. The
Jewish Agency, which had been the government in the making before Israel was set up but bizarrely continued to exist thereafter, retained responsibility for immigration, or aliya. The post of chairman of the
Aliya Department fell vacant in January 1974. By dint of the political agreements that carved up the Jewish Agency between the Zionist parties, it was a Herut Party fiefdom.
^d
Sharon wanted it. He could be both a minister and an agency department head, he argued. After devoting himself for years to defense and then to settlement, he wanted now to devote himself
to aliya. But the Labor Zionists reacted with predictable horror, as did many of the philanthropists in the United States and elsewhere whose largesse kept the Jewish Agency afloat, and Sharon was defeated by 59 votes to 48 in a secret vote in the
Zionist General Council.

Apart from this misguided sally into the arcane and essentially trivial world of Israel-Diaspora intrigue, Sharon, guided by young
Yisrael Katz, was assiduously cultivating the members of the Herut central committee. Increasingly, this 850-man behemoth was becoming
the
arena that mattered in Israeli public life, the pulsating heart of the party in government, the thriving bourse of power and patronage.

Sharon’s basic problem, insisted Katz, who rose to become a Knesset member and a minister, was that he thought like a military man. “He was always looking upwards, towards the commander, towards Begin, whom he naturally regarded as the font of authority and power. But in politics you need to look constantly downwards, to the party activists who are the real base of the leaders’ power. That’s what I had to instill in him.”
¹⁰

Sharon learned how to call central committee members when they were sick, to send a bunch of flowers, to call again to make sure they were recovering. “I cried with emotion,” one small-town party activist recalled with gushing appreciation, remembering how Sharon had telephoned after his son was injured in school. “I told him it wasn’t really serious, but the next day Lily phoned to see how he was getting on. People say he’s a tough general, with no interest in the troops. But who am I? An ordinary guy, a factory worker.”
¹¹

In local elections in November 1983, Sharon crisscrossed the country, making speeches before small audiences with no chance of attracting national media attention. But the Herut candidates for local councils and the party grassroots activists took note. The other ministers rarely bothered to roll up their sleeves and pitch in. Sharon, by contrast, claimed an endless curiosity to see and learn how people lived. He loved to visit their homes, he said, and share their occasions, joyous or sad. Heartfelt or not, he convincingly carried off this new, ubiquitously solicitous persona.

He was lucky, too. Shamir’s government effectively collapsed because of the defection of a small coalition ally, and the major parties agreed on an early general election in July 1984. Neither
David Levy nor Sharon stood a realistic chance of dislodging Shamir, who, though initially seen as a stopgap appointment, had taken a firm hold of Herut and headed a large and loyal camp of followers. Announcing his decision not to run, Levy publicly proposed that Sharon follow suit and close ranks behind Shamir. But Sharon saw his chance. Confounding
the pundits who were unanimously predicting he would barely make double digits, Sharon scored a whopping 42.5 percent of the central committee votes. After the results were announced, the old war chant “Arik, king of Israel,” rose up in a roar from the floor of the hall.
Uri Dan did the rounds of the journalists, reminding them of his fantastic, eccentric prediction just thirteen months earlier. It didn’t sound quite so eccentric now. With just another fifty-four votes, one commentator pointed out, Sharon would have become the Likud’s candidate for prime minister right there and then.
^e

The national election, on July 23, 1984, was inconclusive. The Labor Party emerged with 44 seats, the Likud with 41, in the Knesset of 120. Each side’s first business was to ensure that the other couldn’t form a government by allying with enough of the smaller parties to reach a “blocking majority.” To this end Sharon appointed himself the Likud’s plenipotentiary to the
ultra-Orthodox parties. It was important work. He was shoring up the covenant between the Right and the religious that was the essence of Begin’s political legacy. It was the bedrock of the Likud’s consolidation, first under Begin himself, then under Shamir, and later under Benjamin Netanyahu, as the natural party of power, the leader of the “national camp.”

Likud politicians were not, by and large, religious. Shamir loved his seafood, Sharon his spareribs, and neither tried to hide it. But the Likud, and especially its Herut component, seemed to feel an easy empathy with the religious, and with the religion, that was conspicuously lacking on the Labor side. Sharon’s particular formulation, which he never tired of rehearsing in conversations with Jew and Gentile alike, was that he was “a Jew first—and then an Israeli.” He would quickly volunteer that he was not himself religiously observant, sometimes adding that he regretted that. The set piece—his aides as prime minister knew it virtually by heart—went on to bemoan the ignorance of the tradition among secular Israeli youth, a growing apathy among young Diaspora
Jews, his envy of the Orthodox, who knew “where their grandchildren would be” in decades hence.

Having blocked each other’s hopes of going it alone, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir resorted to the alternative option, thoroughly distasteful to both of them, of going it together. As Peres recounts it, they would have gotten nowhere without Sharon.

One of the things that was agreed with Sharon that Peres forbore recalling, presumably out of an
omertà
-like discretion that bound these old-timers despite their decades of political rivalry, was that Sharon would be minister of industry and trade. Formally, the job wasn’t Peres’s to offer. He was supposed to appoint the ministers of his own Labor Party, and Shamir those of the Likud. But Sharon, aware of how dearly Shamir and his people would have liked to leave him out, made sure to cut his own deal with the leader of the other party. In return, Sharon vigorously supported Peres’s demand to serve as prime minister for the first twenty-five months, even though virtually everyone in Likud believed the much-distrusted Peres would renege on the deal when the time came to “rotate” and would somehow engineer new elections.

In terms of the greasy pole, Industry and Trade was about halfway up. For Sharon at this time, rehabilitation meant his eventual return to one of the three senior ministries: Defense—which was unavailable for the foreseeable future, given the Kahan Commission’s verdict—Foreign Affairs, or the Treasury.
¹³
But he knew that he would need to amass more power in his own party and more popularity throughout the national camp before he could claim one of those three.

The new government, battling against the raging inflation that threatened to engulf the economy, instituted a price and wage freeze
that was expanded, in June 1985, into a draconian
Economic Stabilization Plan. Price controls are the purview of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. They need inspectors to impose them.
Yisrael Katz, acting for Sharon, made no bones about his quest for loyal Herut men in need of a job to sign on as inspectors. He searched hard and successfully filled all fifty-odd positions with Herut activists.

Sharon urged Katz to make sure the appointments resonated throughout the party. And sure enough, says Katz, they duly impressed not only the favored fifty and their families and friends but the entire rank and file, who took note of the fact that Sharon was a minister who looked out for the party faithful and most especially for his own loyalists.

Allegations of more insidious activities by the minister’s bureau began sloshing around the Ministry of Industry and Trade almost from the start of Sharon’s tenure. A persistent one concerned the appointment of party activists as commercial attachés in embassies overseas that created fierce resentment among career ministry staffers who had been waiting and hoping for years for one of these plum positions. In 1987, the long-entrenched staff petitioned the
High Court of Justice against the appointment of two of Sharon’s political aides as overseas attachés.

By then, Sharon’s stewardship at Industry and Trade had become tainted by persistent allegations of conflict of interest, political but also personal. Sharon and his aides were accused of abusing the ministry’s powers to advance the business interests of party cronies and family friends. In at least one case, the minister was suspected of reaping direct and substantial profit for
Sycamore Ranch from a policy decision he rammed through.
Ran Cohen, a Knesset member of the opposition
Meretz Party, petitioned the high court to order the police to open criminal inquiries.
^f

C
ourts, comptrollers, police, and prosecutors—they were all to become an awkwardly familiar presence in Sharon’s public life over the next two decades. But in January 1985, two years into his quest for rehabilitation, he could justly allow himself a moment of grim gratification from a singular judicial victory. Sharon, still balking at the Kahan Commission’s condemnation of his perverse disregard of the obvious danger of allowing the Phalange into the camps, had decided to contest
Time
magazine’s far more heinous accusation that
he had actually encouraged the massacre.
Time
’s report claimed that the unpublished part of the
Kahan Commission Report contained the incriminating evidence against Sharon.

In the Israeli media, Sharon’s case, which rested on the critical distinction between passive negligence and active incitement, was widely recognized as just—but still dismissed as disingenuous. Instead of sympathy for his cause, the press devoted its column inches and its ire to the money that the drawn-out proceedings in New York were costing the taxpayer. Who was footing the lawyers’ fees and the other legal costs? Sharon, Lily, aides, guards, and sometimes Omri, too, crisscrossed the Atlantic, stayed in upmarket Manhattan hotels, ate in chic restaurants. The media, and in their wake the politicians, dissected these doings with increasingly jaundiced eyes.

Sharon began discreetly tapping rich American supporters for help in the summer of 1983. He bolstered his fund-raising efforts with an application to the
Exemptions Committee, headed by a retired high-court judge, which considered requests from elected officials and civil servants to earn income outside their official positions. Sharon requested, and received, a green light to lecture abroad for money.

At the suggestion of the New York judge, the parties agreed that Justice Kahan himself be asked to address the core question of whether the unpublished parts of his report provided a factual basis for
Time
’s allegation. “In none of the documents or testimony,” Kahan replied unequivocally, “is there any evidence or suggestion that Minister Sharon had any discussion with the Gemayel family or with any other Phalangist, at
Bikfaya or elsewhere, in which Minister Sharon discussed the need to avenge the
death of Bashir Gemayel.”

On January 16, 1985, after two days of deliberation, the jury gave its first verdict, on the defamation question, saying that
Time
had indeed defamed Sharon. “We find that the paragraph in context states that, in permitting the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila, Minister Sharon consciously intended to permit the Phalangists to take acts of revenge extending to the deliberate killing of non-combatants in the camps.”