Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (44 page)

Sharon, quick-footed and smooth-tongued, saw his chance and moved with alacrity. He had been planning a festive housewarming for his and Lily’s new town house: an apartment in the heart of the Muslim Quarter of the
Old City of Jerusalem. It was a publicity stunt planned to coincide with the winter festival of Hanukkah. Now it could coincide with the raging intifada, too, making it dramatically more topical. More than three hundred politicians, businessmen, and
assorted glitterati of the Right made their way through the tightly guarded alleys of the Old City, braving the catcalls of
Peace Now demonstrators, to watch Sharon, in a big black yarmulke, kindle the Hanukkah lights and nail a mezuzah to the doorpost of his new home. His
Muslim neighbors had been ordered by the police to stay indoors, behind closed shutters.

Sharon and Lily, elegantly dressed and sparkling with energy, effusively greeted Prime Minister Shamir and the Likud cabinet members. Peres and the Laborites stayed demonstratively away.
Yossi Sarid, the left-wing firebrand now in Meretz, best evoked the feeling in the peace camp. “The country is burning,” he cried, “and the emperor Nero goes up to the roof of his new house in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and plays his fiddle. With Sharon-Nero on that roof were three hundred toadies, hypocrites, arse-lickers, opportunists and adventurers, deluded dreamers and lunatics.”
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For Sharon, the party celebrated not merely the new house—which he barely used thereafter, though its police protection cost the taxpayer 1.25 million shekels a year—but a new lease on political life. “I’ve moved to the Old City of Jerusalem,” he asserted at cabinet, “because you,
Shimon Peres, wanted to hand the Old City to King Hussein. I’ve moved there to stop you.”

On television, Sharon explained that “the deteriorating security situation in Jerusalem” was what prompted him to move into his new home. Many more Jews would follow him to the Muslim Quarter, he believed. He had never asked to be guarded; he had spent most of his life guarding others. Menachem Begin had telephoned to congratulate him, he added. What needed to be done now in Jerusalem was to shut down and drive out the PLO-linked political agencies operating there. Years ago he had shown in Gaza how to deal with terror. He had also submitted proposals on how to solve the Gaza refugee problem. But no one listened to him. There was no serious political leadership in this country, capable of making decisions.

The message was unmistakable: make him minister of defense instead of Rabin, and the intifada would quickly be crushed. Sharon’s
new agenda turned him into Rabin’s most relentless critic. When Sharon lambasted Rabin at cabinet over the state of security on the roads, both in the territories and inside Israel,
Ezer Weizman, now a Labor-affiliated minister in the unity government, lashed back, terming Sharon’s purported panaceas “cheap demagoguery … He’s got a glib tongue, and he’s good at arguing. That’s what makes him so dangerous.” On another occasion, Weizman stood up and, red-faced, stormed around the table to Sharon, shouting, “Shut your face. I will chuck you out of the government” (which of course he couldn’t do).

Sharon’s rift with Rabin was the more traumatic given their long and close relationship. After one stormy cabinet meeting Sharon was heard phoning Lily. “I’ve had it with that man!” he bellowed, angry but sad, too. “Our special friendship is over forever.”
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It wasn’t over, but it was never quite the same again. Sharon was directly challenging the credentials of the man who in the eyes of the peace camp was the nation’s unrivaled specialist in all matters of defense and security. “Jewish lives are at stake,” Sharon asserted in June 1988. “If the minister of defense is not capable of acting to defend them, he should be replaced.”
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After elections in November 1988, which the Likud won by a whisker, Sharon demanded to be made minister of defense in the new government. He urged that it be a narrow-based rightist-religious coalition and not another alliance with Labor. But Shamir preferred to renew the national unity partnership with Labor, partly to keep Sharon out of Defense. Back at Industry and Commerce, Sharon stepped up his sniping at Rabin, harping now on his penchant—which everyone knew and no one talked about—for drinking large quantities of whiskey. Thus, at one cabinet meeting:

Sharon’s own proposals for defeating the intifada, which he never tired of repeating, included tightening controls on money transfers from the Arab world, barring men from violent Palestinian villages from working in Israel, and outlawing political and charitable organizations suspected of ties to the PLO. But above all he advocated deportation—peremptory deportation, and not just of the offenders themselves.

“That is the biggest single sin of this government,” he told an audience of government spokesmen in March 1988:

Sharon’s “bringing order” to Gaza in 1970, it will be recalled, included a more brutal aspect that led, after much controversy, to the Strip being taken out of his hands. He constantly urged the same kinds of aggressive initiatives, using elite commando units, now, too. Armed militants must be hunted, smoked out, ambushed, captured, or killed. The army needed to take the fight to them. Again, the message was simple: I did it then; I can do it now; let me do it.

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R
abin became an easier target for Sharon to attack as the intifada dragged on because his defenders were themselves growing increasingly uneasy with his performance. Rabin talked of weeks, but the intifada went on for months that eventually became years. His initial self-confidence—he was in America when the intifada broke out and refused to cut short his visit and hurry home—began to grate. Much worse, the criticism surrounding his “break their bones” line, whatever its true context, mushroomed into a huge and anguished controversy over the morality of the army’s actions—and the patent immorality of some of its excesses.

Rabin, despite his years in diplomacy and in politics, always remained something of the gruff and honest soldier. He explained to his Labor Knesset faction that “nobody dies” from the kind of “aggressive action” the army was taking to disperse demonstrations and restore normal life. He was aware, he said, that “any confrontation between soldiers and civilians looks bad on camera.” But he preferred such footage to scenes of shooting, of Molotov cocktails and burning tires.

Both kinds of scenes proliferated. Random incidents of IDF cruelty were caught on camera, bringing down on Israel, especially in Europe, a new outpouring of deprecation reminiscent of the
Lebanon War. The most ghoulish episodes occurred in the early months. The army’s instinctive reaction to the unanticipated uprising was that it must be quelled fast. Orders were unclear and confused as they filtered down from Rabin to the units in the field. In one case in February 1988 in a Gaza Strip
refugee camp, five soldiers from the Givati infantry brigade beat and kicked a forty-three-year-old man to death. They jumped on him, smashing his ribs and banging his head on the ground—all this in front of his twelve-year-old son. In the same month in Nablus, soldiers beat and kicked several young Palestinians whom they had arrested during rioting. One soldier pounded at one of the prisoners with a rock, deliberately trying to break his shoulder, then went at another, trying to break his arm. The whole sequence was filmed by a CBS crew and broadcast around the world. Again in February 1988, also near Nablus, a group of soldiers used a
bulldozer to bury four young Palestinians up to their necks in wet earth, as “punishment” after a riot.

In the media, and among soldiers and their families, there was both widespread repression and enormous ambivalence. People preferred or pretended to be ignorant of what was going on. They were also ashamed, but angry too—at themselves, at their sons or brothers in
uniform, but also at the Palestinians who were confronting the army with challenges it had not been trained or equipped to confront. Why it was not trained or equipped, why after twenty years of occupation, with no land-for-peace deal in sight, did it not occur to anyone in government that a popular Palestinian uprising was inevitable, or at least likely—that question goes to the heart of Israeli attitudes to the Palestinians and to the conflict. It was never directly addressed, let alone answered, even after the intifada had subsided.

Sharon was careful not to be seen as siding too uncritically with soldiers and officers who had committed brutal offenses. At the same time, it was important to him to sympathize publicly with the fighting men and to score points off Rabin. “Soldiers Need Backing,” Sharon headlined an article in
Yedioth Ahronoth
in March 1988. The episodes cited above were mostly still unpublished then. But rumors abounded, and Sharon himself knew broadly what had been happening on the “front lines” of the intifada. “There is nothing that weakens the military more than the fighting soldiers’ sense that the top echelons are not giving them the backing they need,” he wrote. “There is nothing more destructive to an army’s operations and to its motivation than the soldiers’ feeling that … they are scapegoats for the incompetence of higher echelons.”

When courts-martial finally began to be held, the sentences handed down for acts of savagery usually entailed no more than a few months behind bars. The military judges wrote ringing condemnations of the brutal acts recounted before them and warned in their judgments that pillars of the national ethos were in danger of erosion. But they made a point of stressing, too, how hard and frustrating these young soldiers’ conditions of service had suddenly become, cursed, insulted, and stoned as they were, day in and day out, by Palestinians of both sexes and all ages. The courts often agreed to plea bargains in which charges of aggravated assault were reduced to mere conduct unbecoming, with the punishments similarly mitigated.

In June 1988 a soldier was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and another two years on probation for fatally shooting a Palestinian in Saja’iya, Gaza, at point-blank range. “I told him to stand still and put his hands up, but he refused and cursed me and my mother. I walked up to him and stuck my rifle into his belly. He looked at me. My whole body shook, and I pulled the trigger.” The military judges had harsh words for the army’s induction system, which had not weeded out this recruit, who was clearly unfit to serve. The case highlighted nevertheless the unconscionable fact that the IDF was pitting soldiers trained to shoot and kill against rioters who were in
the main unarmed (though there were many armed attacks, too, and instances of shooters mingled in with stone throwers and unarmed demonstrators). Israeli propaganda harped on the killing propensities of stones, which could indeed be lethal if large enough or if fired with sufficient force from slingshots. The soldiers were not permitted, in theory at least, to fire live ammunition at stone throwers unless they felt themselves in serious danger.

In order to reduce fatalities, soldiers were issued rubber-coated bullets. These are fired in volleys from regular rifles and, unless used from very close range, are intended to hurt but not to penetrate. But there were mishaps. In June 1988, a nine-month-old baby lost an eye to a rubber-coated bullet. She was lying in her mother’s arms inside their home in Jabaliya, Gaza, when the bullet came through the window and hit her. In August 1988, the IDF began issuing plastic-coated bullets. These are fired singly and at a much greater velocity than the rubber ones. Within six months, the plastic bullets had accounted for forty-seven Palestinian fatalities.

By early 1991, 154 officers and men had been court-martialed. Hundreds more had faced disciplinary action within their units. During the same period 75,000 Palestinians had been arrested and 45,000 of them charged before military courts. Sharon joined more than fifty coalition ministers and Knesset members who supported a private member’s bill providing pardons for all IDF soldiers (but not officers) who had carried out illegal orders during the first three months of the intifada. The bill’s sponsors argued that the soldiers, suddenly transformed into untrained policemen, had no mens rea when they stepped beyond the bounds of legality. The bill was opposed by Minister of Defense Arens and by Minister of Justice
Dan Meridor and never became law. In practice, generals were commuting any severe sentences and making sure no soldier stayed in jail for too long.