Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (53 page)

As after the shock of Oslo, so too, mutatis mutandis, Sharon was quick off the mark in assimilating and countering the political trauma of
Rabin’s assassination. Potentially, this heinous act was devastating for the standing and respectability of the “national camp,” especially of the religious Right, which was the crucible of the assassin Yigal Amir’s murderous mind-set. In the first week or two after the assassination,
kippa
wearers were verbally and sometimes even physically abused. There was little patience for the claim that Amir was a “wild weed,” an unintended excrescence of the settlers’ zealotry. The broader Right was indicted with him. It had furnished, after all, the political hinterland for the settlers and their fanatical rabbis with their pernicious dogmas of hatred.

And indeed, those dogmas and the religious Zionism that spawned them had become, in effect, the only real ideology of the whole Right. The old-style, secular Revisionism of Begin and Shamir had been swallowed up by the rampant messianism of Gush Emunim and its settler cohorts. They set the tone for the whole of the “national camp,” and that camp, therefore, could not wash its hands of the responsibility for Rabin’s blood. Time and again, the balcony scene was replayed in the
media and in people’s minds.

Netanyahu was spurned and humiliated by
Leah Rabin at the funeral. Sharon could have exploited the party leader’s discomfiture to his advantage. He did not do so. Instead, reassured by the acceptance of his own condolences, he pushed back for the Right, rallying the disconcerted troops and throwing his support behind the embarrassed and endangered Bibi. “The struggle for Eretz Yisrael must go on,” Sharon urged the Likud leadership the day after the funeral. “Any weakness on our part will spell disaster.” The media were inciting against the entire Right, he warned.

Netanyahu, in a statesmanlike act, announced that his party would not stand in the way of the formation of another Labor-led government, under
Shimon Peres. “Governments in Israel are changed by the ballot, not the bullet,” he told the Likud executive on November 19. When elections came, the Likud would win. Meanwhile, they would stand firm against the baseless allegations being leveled against them. He dwelled on the revelation that the
Shin Bet had had a mole among Yigal Amir’s small circle of ultraradical friends who appeared to have functioned more as an agent provocateur than as a covert source of information. He demanded a full inquiry.
Democracy was in danger.

Speaker after speaker echoed this sentiment. Sharon said the story was typical of the way the Left had conducted itself for decades. An unwonted spirit of unity pervaded the party. Netanyahu was hugged and warmly applauded. In
New York a fortnight later, prompted
apparently by this same spirit, Sharon protested vehemently over a memorial event for Rabin organized by American Jewish leaders at Madison Square Garden, to which the Likud leader had pointedly not been invited.

Before the year’s end Sharon announced that he was following this line to its logical conclusion and shelving his own pretensions to the party leadership. This statement was particularly welcome and timely for Netanyahu, because new rumblings had begun in the party after the assassination about possibly replacing him with
Dan Meridor. Internal polling showed Netanyahu’s popularity plummeting. The fear was that he had been irreparably tainted on that balcony. But Sharon’s contempt for Netanyahu (most of the time) was surpassed by his loathing for Meridor, Begin’s cabinet secretary and Sharon’s enemy from the days of the Lebanon War. He called on the Likud to unite behind Netanyahu and urged the other parties of the Right to do so, too.

In January 1996, Israeli agents killed Yihye Ayash, Hamas’s most notorious bomb maker in Gaza, by setting off an explosive device planted in his cell phone. Ayash, “the Engineer,” was held personally responsible for some of the worst terror outrages that had hit Israel during the previous year. Peres was to regret giving the go-ahead to eliminate him. A series of revenge bombings by Hamas took a terrible toll of Israeli civilians in the months leading up to the election in June.

Hamas struck back first on February 25. Twenty-six people died on a No. 18 bus
in Jerusalem and 44 more were injured. On the same day, a woman soldier was killed and 34 other passengers injured on a bus in
Ashkelon. Both explosions were
suicide bombs. The next day, a woman was killed and 23 others injured when a terrorist in a car deliberately plowed into a queue at a bus stop in Jerusalem. A week later, again on Sunday morning, again a suicide bombing on a No. 18 bus in Jerusalem, 18 died, and 7 were seriously hurt. The next day, March 4, the festival of Purim, 14 died in a suicide bombing near Dizengoff Center in the heart of Tel Aviv, and 157 were injured.

Suddenly there was only one issue in the election campaign. And Peres was no longer the certain victor. Sharon nevertheless called for the creation of an “emergency government of national unity,” even if this meant postponing the election for a year. He, as the leading expert on security, in his own eyes at least, presumed he would be minister of defense. His colleagues in the Likud saw this as a transparent attempt to bypass Bibi and get back to where he wanted to be. Peres, in any event, turned Sharon down.

•   •   •

F
or Peres, things seemed to go from bad to worse. This second premiership of his, born in tragedy, had not gone well from the start. He seemed depressed and sluggish compared with his usual frenetic self. Friends and aides urged him to hold snap elections in the wake of the assassination. By all indications, he would have won a landslide had he done so. But he was obsessed with the need to be his own man rather than merely inherit the mantle of his slain rival. He wanted to notch up successes of his own before going to the polls. He took over the Defense Ministry together with the prime ministership, as Rabin had, and as had Ben-Gurion, his mentor.

The Conference of Peacemakers held at the Egyptian resort of
Sharm el-Sheikh on March 13 was a bald effort by leading figures in the international community to help Peres ward off the growing challenge from the Right. President Clinton and President Mubarak of Egypt hosted twenty-nine world leaders, among them
Russia’s
Boris Yeltsin. They stood for photographs alongside Peres and Arafat, and all pledged their best efforts to fight against terror. But Israeli voters were unimpressed, and the gap between Peres and Netanyahu kept steadily narrowing as Election Day, May 29, drew near.

Peres seemed jinxed. In April, responding to an escalation of rocket fire across the Lebanese border, he launched
Operation Grapes of Wrath, a massive bombing and shelling campaign by the IDF designed to drive the villagers of south Lebanon to flee north toward
Beirut. The mass flight, it was thought, would bring irresistible pressure to bear on the Lebanese government to send its army south and rein in the
Hezbollah guerrillas who were firing the
rockets. This strategy was deemed sophisticated by some Israeli policy makers, but others found it both cynical and far-fetched. Sharon was an enthusiast. The army should take the opportunity to extend Israel’s “security zone” up to the Litani River, he proposed expansively during a tour of the border region on April 17. The next day, Operation Grapes of Wrath was peremptorily terminated, amid much international outrage and domestic embarrassment, when an errant shell fell on a UN shelter in the village of Qana, killing more than a hundred civilians.

During April, two more
suicide bombs, one in
Hadera, north of Tel Aviv, the other near a settlement in the Gaza Strip, took a further heavy toll of Israeli civilian lives. Peres’s hopes of progress on the Israel-Syria track were also fading. Two rounds of talks between Israeli and Syrian officials at the
Wye River Plantation conference center
outside Washington in December and January were businesslike but did not produce a breakthrough. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s figures were steadily creeping up.

The final push came in the form of a hugely visible, hugely energetic nationwide campaign launched by the
New York–based
Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement three days before the elections. Every crossroads, every public space in Israel, was plastered with the slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews.” Thousands of black-hatted
Hasidim and
kippa
-clad settlers fanned out across the land to spread this pithy, pointed message. Its corollary, of course, was that good Jews should vote Netanyahu, who, moreover, would be not so good for the
Arabs—in other words, would not cede any of the Holy Land to them.

If indeed, as many pundits believed, this last-minute effort by fervent groups of Orthodox believers swung the election to Bibi, then Sharon had every right to take the credit for it. It was he who, two weeks earlier, initiated a secret meeting at the dead of night with a leading rabbi of the Israeli branch of Chabad, Yitzhak Aharonov. They met in a girls’ school at Kfar Chabad, a village wholly peopled by Chabad Hasidim not far from Tel Aviv. Sharon spoke of the danger hovering over Eretz Yisrael if Peres remained in office. Bibi, he said, would guard the land. Aharonov, well versed in political affairs, wanted to hear the pledge from Bibi himself. Sharon telephoned, and soon Bibi arrived and launched into a passionate speech of his own about the land and his loyalty to it.

Chabad Hasidim were his special forces in the election battle. But Sharon paid diligent heed to the other
haredi
communities, too, visiting their rabbis, touring their neighborhoods, and reminding them all of his prodigious home-building efforts for their communities, as minister of housing, on both sides of the green line. This was the first election to be held under the reformed voting system. Voters would cast two ballots, one for prime minister and one for the party of their choice. With the two candidates for prime minister running neck and neck, the disciplined phalanxes of
haredi
voters would be crucial.

Under Sharon’s dogged wooing of their leaders, almost all of them voted for Netanyahu. Some rabbis had toyed with the idea of instructing their flocks to cast blank ballots for prime minister; after all, why should they take sides? Sharon talked them out of any such foolishness, persuading them that the return of the Likud to power would mean more state-built homes for their young couples and more state budgets for their yeshivas.

•   •   •

N
etanyahu won by a whisker. On election night, it looked as if he had lost. Peres went to bed thinking he would still be prime minister in the morning. The final figures were 1,501,023 votes for Netanyahu, 1,471,566 for Peres: a margin of 29,457 votes, or just under 1 percent of the valid votes cast. In the vote for the parties, Labor beat Likud by 34 seats to 32.

Netanyahu owed his victory, in no small part, to Sharon. But it quickly emerged that the new prime minister did not intend to repay his debt. As the coalition making went ahead and the names of the prospective ministers began to
leak out, Sharon’s was not among them. Demeaningly, Sharon found himself fighting for a job in the new government. Netanyahu planned to leave him out entirely or offer him a junior portfolio, knowing he would refuse it, which amounted to the same thing. Sharon insisted that he had been explicitly promised one of the top three posts: Defense, Finance, or Foreign Affairs. Netanyahu did not contradict him; he just ignored him. Years later, he explained that Sharon brought disharmony to the work of a cabinet. He did not fear him as a contender for the leadership, Netanyahu insisted. “In those days Arik was not considered a threat to leadership. He was a threat to government.”
¹⁹

Sharon did the rounds of the
haredi
“courts” again, ostensibly to thank the rabbis for their votes, in fact to solicit their help to get him into the new government. They tried their best. Their key supporters, wealthy businessmen in Israel and abroad, lobbied with Bibi for Sharon to be named finance minister.

At half past three on June 18, Netanyahu’s spokesman announced to waiting reporters that a seventeen-man cabinet was to be sworn in. That meant Sharon was still out. David Levy, the foreign minister designate, stormed into Netanyahu’s room. “I won’t be part of a government that Arik Sharon’s not part of. We’ve come a long way together. If he’s out, I’m out!”

“David, what are you doing to me?!” Netanyahu cried, sweating. “In ten minutes’ time I’ve got to present my government, and now you tell me you’re out.” “Sharon’s got to be in,” Levy replied stolidly. “You know I’m trying to fix it,” Netanyahu wailed. “Give me a few more days.”

Netanyahu, reluctantly, had been trying to fix it. He came up with a new creation, the Ministry of National Infrastructures, and began the thankless task of harvesting a basket of departments and functions from other ministries that he had already manned. The new incumbents were unsurprisingly grudging. A package pulled together
by Minister of Justice
Ya’akov Ne’eman, one of Netanyahu’s closest advisers, included the defense industries (transferred from the Defense Ministry); the Public Works Department (from the Housing Ministry); the powerful
Israel Lands Authority (from the Prime Minister’s Office); the Electricity Corporation (from the Energy Ministry); sewerage (from the Interior Ministry); the railways (from the Transport Ministry); water infrastructure (from the Ministry of Agriculture); and assorted other projects. But Sharon wanted more. He wanted the ports, the airports, oil and gas refining. Even his sympathizers in the Likud began to mutter about his appetite for budgets and power, which seemed to grow with the swallowing.

On July 3, David Levy struck again. At a meeting of the coalition executive, open to the press, he rose and turned to Netanyahu. “The manning of the government is not yet completed,” he boomed in his sonorous bass. Sharon sat stony-faced as Levy thundered on. “I want to say this to the prime minister: There is one dear colleague, a colleague who did his very best so that this coalition should come into being but who has yet to find his proper place at the cabinet table. This situation cannot continue.” Levy looked around slowly and continued: “So, if it is not resolved before the prime minister flies to Washington next week, I myself will bring relief to ministers who are not prepared to give up departments in their ministries on behalf of the Ministry of Infrastructures. I will vacate my own ministry and thus free up one cabinet seat. No doubt, there will be those who interpret my words as a gimmick. But I am not weak. I do not need to resort to gimmicks.”