Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (55 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Other government departments were outraged at Sharon’s largesse. The Treasury made it clear that there was no money for a desalination scheme that Sharon had also promised. It would have to be raised abroad—a difficult proposition. Until it was, though, the additional twenty-five million cubic meters per year would keep flowing.
The flowering of his friendship with Ariel Sharon came late in life for King Hussein. It produced a poignantly memorable tableau. The king, pallid and bald from anticancer drugs, received Sharon and Lily in October 1998 in his suite at the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. It was the eve of an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation convened by President Clinton at Wye Plantation, outside Washington. “Stay strong,” Sharon urged the king. “We need your courage, your experience as the most veteran statesman in the Middle East, and your help in promoting and achieving a stable peace in the region.” For sensitive Israeli ears, the subtext was clear: it takes one to know one. For by then Sharon himself was basking in the role of statesman—he was now foreign minister—and man of peace.
a
The new election law had been passed on March 18, 1992, the last day of the previous
Knesset. It was to go into effect in 1996. Under its provisions, voters would cast two ballots, one for prime minister and the other for the party of their choice. The intention was to strengthen the big parties, whose leaders were naturally the prime ministerial candidates, at the expense of the smaller parties. Advocates of the reform assumed that most voters would vote the same ticket for prime minister and for party. But it backfired badly. Many people apparently felt that having cast one vote for a prime minister who was the leader of a big party, they could allow themselves to cast their other vote for a small party. The result, in 1996, was a shrinkage of Likud and Labor, the two big parties, and a surge among the smaller parties, like
Shas, a Sephardic-
Orthodox party, and
Yisrael B’Aliya, a Russian immigrant party. The Likud had voted against the measure, but Benjamin Netanyahu broke ranks and sided with its proponents—a wise choice, since the new system brought him to power.
b
Sharon’s depiction in this article of the dangers of withdrawing from the
Gaza Strip was eerily identical to the arguments used against him by the settlers and the Right when he ordered the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. (They would say it was eerily prescient.) “The too-hasty among us proclaim, ‘Gaza first,’ ” he wrote.
There are some of them in our own camp. [Sharon was referring to
Moshe Arens and
Ronni Milo, two senior Likud figures who urged Shamir before the 1992 election to get out of Gaza.] “Get out of Gaza,” they say. “Who needs Gaza?” Well, not to mention the inherent perversity of volunteering to cede a part of the national homeland, which no normal nation would do, I would like to ask them to explain how they think it will be possible to live without a Jewish cordon sanitaire between the Gaza Strip, with its 700,000 hostile Palestinians, and
Sinai, an incessant source of weaponry and terror. Without the bloc of Jewish settlement [
Gush Katif, in the southern Gaza Strip], who is going to block that traffic? They say: “We’ll put up a fence, we’ll mine the border, we’ll dig canals, we’ll set up barriers and roadblocks. The main thing is to get out.” Well, first of all, it is just not possible to seal off a territory hermetically. In the past, bands of terrorists have infiltrated from Gaza and reached as far as the suburbs of Tel Aviv. But to attack southern Israel, they wouldn’t have to leave Gaza at all. A
Katyusha
rocket deployed on Falastin Square in central Gaza will easily hit Mohammed V Square (remember the sad national farce of that name?) in central
Ashkelon. It will hit Kiryat Gat,
Sderot, Netivot, and dozens of
kibbutzim and
moshavim. What will we do? How will we respond?
c
In January 1990, Prime Minister Shamir learned that
Ezer Weizman, then his minister of science and technology (and later the president of Israel), had met in Geneva with the PLO representative to the UN agencies there, Nabil Ramlawi. Shamir wanted to fire him on the spot but acceded to Rabin’s plea that he merely evict him from the inner cabinet. Sharon, then at the height of his “constraint” campaign against Shamir, said in a speech to party loyalists that the fact that Weizman had not been properly punished was “just as serious” as his offense itself.
d
They were begun by two academics on the Israeli side, working under the loose aegis of Yossi Beilin, who served as Peres’s deputy at the Foreign Ministry.
Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia), a senior PLO official, headed the Palestinian delegation.
e
Known to the Jews as the Cave of Machpela. Both faiths believe their forefather Abraham lies buried there.
f
Mosser:
one who hands over Jews.
g
See pp. 148–49.
h
Unlike the Begin government after Sabra and Shatila, the Rabin government needed no pressure to set up a commission of inquiry into the
massacre at the mosque. The president of the Supreme Court,
Meir Shamgar, headed it, and another two justices (one Jewish and one Arab), a former army chief of staff and an academic, sat alongside him. Within a week, they began to hear evidence.
Sharon wasted no time either. For him, massacre plus commission spelled an opportunity to ratchet up his own unending battle against the verdict of the Kahan Commission ten years earlier. “I am writing to you,” he wrote in a bitter and cynical open letter to Justice
Aharon Barak in March, who was widely thought to have been the moving spirit behind the Kahan Commission’s determinations and recommendations, “in order to save Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin and the chief of staff and his generals from the danger of ‘indirect responsibility’ for the massacre in the Cave of Machpela. They face that danger as a result of the ‘principle of indirect responsibility’ which you laid down when you served as a distinguished member of the commission of inquiry into the murder of Muslims by Christians at Sabra and Shatila.”
The Shamgar report found much disorder and sloppiness within the IDF and the
police and a “totally unsatisfactory” level of coordination between the two. It found laxity and remissness in the way the law was enforced against the settlers. But it apportioned no responsibility for the massacre, direct or indirect. “We do not believe that anyone can be blamed for not having foreseen the fact that a Jew would plan and carry out a massacre of Muslims in the Tomb of the Patriarchs.” Sharon celebrated this as “a ringing slap in the face to the false standards which guided the Kahan/Barak Commission … The responsible report of Justices Shamgar, Zouabi, Goldberg, and their colleagues is the first nail in the coffin of the Kahan/Barak Report.”
i
Dalia Rabin recalled:
While I was deputy minister, cabinet secretary
Gideon Sa’ar ordered the removal of photographs of the Oslo process from the walls of the prime minister’s office. I wrote a very long and very strong personal letter to Arik. I wrote that you can’t change history like that. If you take these pictures off the wall of the prime minister’s office, in a way you’re giving legitimacy to the assassination. He didn’t reply. Not a word. When I resigned, he invited me in for a private chat. He tried to persuade me not to quit the Knesset. We discussed politics and many things, and then, at the end, as I stood to leave, he said, out of the blue: “And as regards the pictures—you were right.” But he still didn’t put them back up.
j
Temporarily. Netanyahu asked him to head the Mossad in place of Yatom. He agreed and served as director until 2002.
I
believe there will be peace. There has to be peace, in my view. We have to make every effort to bring peace about. I have always been depicted as an enemy of peace. But I have never been an enemy of peace, because I witnessed the horrors of war. I believe in peace, and I believe that the day will come when peace will prevail. Thank you.”
1
Sharon’s transformation during this period from man of war to man of peace was neither complete nor consistent. He did not become a born-again peacenik, now or later. His detractors, still legion, mocked the intimations of change as a cynical stunt. It was designed, they said, by his admen friends to make him more eligible for promotion, to get him into the kitchen cabinet at last. The talk at the top, in the region and in Washington, was of progress to peace. To get there, therefore, Sharon had to talk the talk. That didn’t mean he would walk the walk.
Still, talk, however disingenuous, is not just talk. Talk is the stuff of politics. Talk makes the political man. In June 1997, Sharon invited Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen),
Yasser Arafat’s deputy in the
Palestinian Authority, for a long private talk at Sycamore Ranch. It was
leaked two weeks later, probably by Sharon himself. “This meeting,” wrote
Shimon Shiffer, a veteran political commentator, “is one of the most important developments that has happened in the process of reconciliation between the two nations.” In an article headlined “Sharon Has Crossed the Lines,” Shiffer wrote that Sharon now recognized the realities that had given rise to the
Oslo Accords and that in effect he, too, now recognized the PLO as the authentic representative of the Palestinian people.
2
a
Cynical or significant, Sharon’s meeting with Arafat’s longtime lieutenant intrigued the Knesset, and most especially the doves, both Jewish and Arab. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter was Sharon’s extemporaneous closing flourish, at the end of a lengthy statement and subsequent exchanges with members. The deputy Speaker, Professor Naomi Chazan of Meretz, granted him extra time to make his replies. “We’re all riveted,” she said, without sarcasm. “Don’t worry,” Sharon said, with plenty of sarcasm on his part, “nothing’s happened to shake my views about our right to Eretz Yisrael. I’ve heard so many worried voices here in the debate. Let me assure all the worriers: they’ve got nothing to worry about!” But then he seamlessly switched into his new, conciliatory vein. “I just think we must find a solution that everyone can live with … I believe that Jews and
Arabs can live together in peace and must live together in peace. And I believe that day will come.”
He had met with Abu Mazen, he said, in order to lay out in a straightforward and unvarnished way “what Israel can and can’t do.”
He did not deny reports in the press that he had given Abu Mazen to understand that he accepted, or at least did not dismiss, the Palestinians’ principled demand for an independent state. Even if we set aside for a moment the impossibly narrow borders that Sharon envisaged for the Palestinians, his very countenancing of Palestinian statehood, however hypothetical, was still anathema at that time to much of the Israeli Right (and heresy to the religious Right). This was probably the first time (apart from his ideological swerves during the
Shlomzion episode, which he subsequently denied) that Sharon intimated publicly,
albeit by insinuation, his pragmatic thinking on this touchstone political issue.
In a way, acceptance of Palestinian independence was less of an ideological leap for Sharon than for the others in his camp and for many in the
Labor Party, too. After all, he had always favored Palestinian statehood—but centered on Jordan, not on Palestine. That was the essence of the “Jordan is Palestine” doctrine that he had espoused for so long, in defiance of the political orthodoxy. He therefore did not need to shake off the dogmatic Israeli denial of Palestinian national aspirations that constricted Israel’s policy thinking under both Labor and Likud. He had never donned that particular piece of political and intellectual corsetry.
But while the Palestinians stressed that Abu Mazen had visited Sharon’s home with Arafat’s blessing, Sharon insisted that his attitude to Arafat was unchanged and that he would continue to boycott him. “We know that in war civilians get killed, and we all regret that. But the purpose in war is not to kill civilians. Arafat ordered the killing of civilians—of children, women, old people. That is why I refuse to speak to him.”
He made a point, too, of telling the Knesset that Abu Mazen’s visit was fully coordinated with the prime minister, who was “very interested” in it taking place. That was a cruel rubbing of salt into the wounded ego of David Levy, who had vociferously protested being left out of the loop, even though, as foreign minister, he was supposed to be running the negotiations with the Palestinians. The dynamic of Levy’s discomfiture and eventual displacement by Sharon was already under way.
A month later, in August 1997, Sharon met with the U.S. peace envoy,
Dennis Ross, in
Jerusalem, at the specific request of the prime minister. The envoy briefed the minister on the state of ongoing interim negotiations, and Sharon talked about his ideas for the
permanent status negotiations. But more important than the substance of their talk was the fact that it took place at all. It was the first time for years that a high-ranking American official sat opposite Sharon, the bogeyman of the Bush-Baker era (and no special favorite of the Clintonites either). More than anything, it signaled that he was on his way back to the heart of the matters that mattered. In November, he was in the White House, sent by Netanyahu to expound to the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and other key officials on his ideas for eventually parceling the
West Bank between the two nations.
He knew full well, he told his American hosts, that his original “enclaves” scheme was no longer relevant, in the wake of the Oslo
Accords. He knew the Palestinians needed contiguity, and he believed that he could provide it, with tunnels, bridges, and overpasses. He knew above all, he said, that a Palestinian state was inevitable. He wanted, therefore, to reach “strategic understandings” with the United States on the size and nature of the security zones that Israel would need to keep, and also on key issues like water resources. An unnamed senior American official was quoted in the Israeli press as saying that Sharon had left an impression in Washington of “moderation and pragmatism.”
3
