Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (56 page)

He was working hard, mainly on himself, to create the same impression in the eyes of the political community back home. “In the past, he was often to be heard voicing uncomplimentary comments on the prime minister’s performance,” wrote
Yossi Verter,
Haaretz
’s political reporter, with his customary understatement. “Not anymore.”
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But Sharon could still not resist an occasional swipe even in his new role as Bibi’s loyal and devoted elder minister. “A few days ago,” he told delegates at the Likud Party conference in November, “the prime minister said to me, ‘There’ll be a tough fight at conference. I’ll need your help.’ And I replied, ‘That’s a bit difficult, because I don’t know whether to help your right hand or your left hand.’ ” The audience roared with laughter. The ministers on the dais smirked and guffawed. The reporters on the side chortled. Only Netanyahu seemed nonplussed and grinned awkwardly. The phrase became an instant perennial, still trotted out whenever Netanyahu’s famous indecisiveness is up for discussion.
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“B
ibi confided to me his view,” wrote
Dennis Ross, the American peace envoy, “that a leader can never afford to give up ‘his tribe’—those who are fiercely loyal to him, who identify with him because of shared roots, long-standing ties, and emotional connections. Bibi never figured out how to reconcile his ambition to be a historic peacemaker with the reality of his political tribe, which did not believe peace with the Palestinians was possible, and were certainly not prepared to pay the price that a test of peace might entail.”
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Some would say that was too charitable a reading of the tribe and of the leader who strung along the Americans for years and ultimately chose the shortsighted pretensions of this tribe over the nation’s crucial long-term interests. Sharon, at any rate, became his prime minister’s close ally during 1997–1999, both in stringing along Ross and his bosses in Washington and in trying to have it both ways with the Likud’s political base back home.

The Americans understood that Netanyahu’s preference was to cede nothing and play for time. They hoped, nevertheless, that they could engage the other side of his conflicted political persona, the side that craves success. After the Meshal affair, the Clinton administration was intent on seeing Netanyahu pursue the implementation of Oslo II, the
Interim Agreement, which Rabin had concluded and Netanyahu had ratified but which remained a dead letter in regard to its provision for three
further redeployments (FRDs) by Israel on the West Bank. The second of these FRDs was due to have been carried out in September 1997, but the first remained unimplemented.

Coincidentally, and conveniently for Sharon, the timing coincided with David Levy’s resignation from the Foreign Ministry. Levy had been moving steadily leftward on both domestic and foreign policy and increasingly chafing at Netanyahu. Now he chose to quit over an evolving state budget that he found far too tough on low-paid working people. Netanyahu made no immediate move to replace him at the Foreign Ministry, but Sharon quickly became the leading candidate, at least in his own eyes. He stepped up his public praise of Netanyahu.

There now followed a long period of months during which Sharon performed the most elaborate minuet, dancing between the ostensibly—but only ostensibly—irreconcilable positions of loudly opposing a double-FRD from 13 percent of the West Bank and quietly intimating that he could in fact live with it,
if
he became the foreign minister who negotiated it. Thirteen percent became the line behind which the Americans decided to dig in, after being pushed steadily back by Netanyahu from the original 20 to teens and then to low teens. It was fairly arbitrary, but they had lined up the Palestinians beside them, and they did not intend to budge.

The crunch came in the fall of 1998, when the Americans issued invitations to the two sides to attend a summit conference in order, at last, to wrap up the FRDs. The hard Right in Netanyahu’s coalition threatened open rebellion. The government was in imminent danger of collapse. Netanyahu finally played his ace: Sharon would be foreign minister. He would be responsible henceforth for the peace process with the Palestinians. And, as a fast-working analgesic for the hard-liners’ angst, Sharon would join the Israeli delegation to the conference. Sharon for his part was still publicly proclaiming his opposition to 13 percent. The implication was that he would carry the fight to the summit. “Tie us up, hand and foot!” he demanded of the cabinet.

On October 14, 1998, the day before the summit was to begin at the
Wye River Plantation conference center in Maryland, Sharon’s
appointment was formally approved by the cabinet. He flew off after the prime minister to the United States, first to visit King Hussein at the
Mayo Clinic, then on to Wye, where he arrived near midnight on the fourth day of the conference. President Clinton asked to meet with him alone, and they sat until nearly two o’clock in the morning. It was the first time they had met, and plainly the American side hoped that Sharon, now that he had achieved his ambition to get back into the center of policy making, would prove an asset in the negotiations.

Sharon’s foremost concern at this relatively early stage of a conference that was to distend into a nine-day marathon was to impress upon the public back home the firmness of his determination not to shake hands with Arafat. No requirements of pomp or protocol attaching to his new office would weaken his resolve. This ultimately non-substantive issue consumed him, and the Israeli media, to an obsessive degree—given, after all, that Sharon had pressed so hard, and for so long, to get into the room where decisions were made and where Arafat sat and talked with Israel’s leaders.

Talking, as distinct from shaking hands, was kosher in the new foreign minister’s book. The very next evening he participated in a dinner that Clinton gave for the senior delegates and held forth expansively to the Palestinian leader on farming and animal husbandry. This, however, as the Israeli press breathlessly reported, was after he had demonstratively ignored Arafat’s gesture of greeting as he entered the room—“General Sharon,” Netanyahu announced to the assembled company by way of introduction—and dexterously contrived to shake the hands of Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Nabil Shaath while avoiding that of Arafat.

The Palestinians, in their briefings, grandly dismissed Sharon’s antics. The
rais
’s gesture, they said, far from obsequious, was intended to convey the thought that Sharon had tried to crush him in Beirut, yet here he was, sixteen years later, the American president’s honored guest—and Sharon’s negotiating partner.
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Beneath the posturing, though, Arafat was hurt, and he harped on it long after in conversation with his intimates.
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Arafat’s own behavior had been the opposite of churlish. Sharon had asked Arafat, through a reliably discreet middleman, not to overly decry or condemn his appointment as foreign minister and not to boycott him. And sure enough, the Palestinians’ public reaction to Sharon’s appointment was the least strident of all the
Arab states. Arafat himself made do with an anodyne observation that this was an internal Israeli matter. In private conversations with the Americans, the Palestinians pointed to the potentially favorable
effect of Sharon’s appointment, if indeed he and Netanyahu intended to push through the FRDs. “The time for moderate leaders will come later,” the Palestinians told their American interlocutors.
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“The
Wye River Memorandum,” as it was called, provided for a 13 percent first-and-second FRD. All of it was to be from Area C to Areas A and B, as the Palestinians and the Americans had insisted. “Everyone was euphoric,”
Dennis Ross wrote, recalling the predawn moment when the draft was finally approved. But it didn’t last. “The President and Bibi were sitting alone; no smiles, only stern looks. They were barely talking, and Bibi looked positively stricken.” The hiccup that seriously threatened to choke the euphoria was
Jonathan Jay Pollard, the
U.S. Navy analyst turned Israeli spy who had now served thirteen years of his life sentence. Earlier in the year, Netanyahu had formally recognized—he was the first prime minister to do so—that Pollard had spied for Israel. Now he wanted the president to pardon the spy as part of the Wye package, which included Israel’s release of 750 Palestinian prisoners. Clinton’s
CIA chief urged him to resist.

In the event, Netanyahu caved. Sharon was around throughout this frantic eleventh-hour drama. Some reports later said he thought Netanyahu should hold out for Pollard even at the expense of the accord.
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But the bottom line is that over Pollard, as over the accord itself with its 13 percent FRD, Sharon at the end of the day acquiesced and gave the prime minister his political support.

Yet even in this long-desired position in the prime minister’s intimate proximity, Sharon still managed to keep dancing his two-directional minuet. He was foreign minister, he had been a key negotiator at Wye, he advocated and defended the accord, yet now he urged the settlers to move swiftly and unilaterally to seize lands adjacent to their settlements as a way of warding off the dangers of Wye. In point of fact, only three disused outposts were to be dismantled under Wye. Yet Sharon told a group of settlement leaders on November 15 that they should push out the boundaries of their settlements without asking or waiting for official approval.

They needed no further encouragement. In the months that followed, spurred on by Sharon, by their determination to thwart Wye, and finally by their sense that the rightist government was about to fall, the settlers grabbed “hilltop after hilltop … Within a few weeks, new settlements were established, one after another, unhindered. Netanyahu was fighting for his political life and needed the settlers’ votes. The settlers scorned the IDF Civil Administration officials who tried to enforce the law. ‘You will not be able to stop us; we have help from on high,’ they said. In at least four cases, Netanyahu ordered that
Civil Administration inspectors who came to evacuate the settlements be stopped.”
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Sharon hosted Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) at the Foreign Ministry in
Jerusalem for what was billed as a first preview of the
permanent status negotiations. Sharon brimmed with bonhomie, his aide
Tomer Orni recalled. The Palestinians, he said, must “jump ahead” economically. It was completely untenable—and made peacemaking veritably impossible—that the Palestinian
GDP per capita was a mere fraction of Israel’s. He suggested that the two of them, together, visit the model Israeli high-tech industrial park at Tefen in the
Galilee, near Abbas’s birthplace at
Safed. Sharon himself was looking into a vast desalination project in the sea near Gaza. Why didn’t he and Abbas go together to the United States to seek funding? They must meet frequently to promote these ideas, to create economic interdependency between Israel and the PA and thus deepen both sides’ stake in peace.
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The brilliantly gifted literary critic Yoram Bronowski, who wrote subtle and cruel
television reviews for
Haaretz,
seized on Sharon’s facial tic, long a favorite prop of Israeli comics and cartoonists, to illustrate the inconsistency of his positions at this time. In a television interview soon after Wye, Bronowski noted, the whole comportment of the foreign minister seemed to broadcast the “inner conflict in which he finds himself. Thus, the ‘best’ agreement is also a ‘dangerous’ agreement. He didn’t ‘applaud Arafat,’ he merely ‘stood up and clapped, like everyone else.’ As he said these things, his nose seemed to move, like in children’s stories, in the opposite direction from his mouth. For a moment, it seemed to be growing longer, or at l
east to be denying its owner’s words … Is it possible that his lips will vote in favor, while his nose, or his ears, vote against?”
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In the event, the
Knesset vote went smoothly, and the first phase of the Wye Agreement was duly implemented on Friday, November 20, 1998, in the area around
Jenin. Territory comprising 2 percent of the West Bank was transferred from Area C status to Area B, and a further 7.2 percent from Area B to Area A.

The next phase of the withdrawal was scheduled for December 14. It did not happen. As November ended, Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank and especially in East Jerusalem in favor of
prisoner release grew daily more violent. On December 2, Netanyahu and his inner cabinet—by now seriously beleaguered by rightist political allies turned critics—resolved that further withdrawal would be conditional on Arafat calling off the prisoner campaign, taking effective action against incitement, and committing not to issue a unilateral declaration of independence. The Palestinians balked. None of this was in
Wye, they said. It was all pretexts dredged up by Israel to avoid withdrawing and to provoke a crisis just as Clinton was due to visit Gaza and make a historic appearance before the
Palestinian parliament. Ministers still loyal to Netanyahu, meanwhile, feeling their cabinet seats increasingly wobbly beneath them, began muttering about why Clinton needed to come in the first place. His visit would only deepen the fissures within the coalition. Sharon was hastily dispatched to Washington to try, somehow, to hold things together.

The irony of the former persona non grata now reappearing in the U.S. capital on a mending mission was not lost on either side. In an unscheduled meeting with Clinton himself, Sharon turned on all his charm and effusive good manners to while away the time on anything and everything—other than the scheduled next withdrawal. He had brought with him a tasteful gift for the president, which he spent precious minutes elaborately bestowing. “If Clinton asked himself afterward what happened,” a senior Israeli diplomat recalled, “he would have answered that Sharon set out to avoid the issue—but he’d have had to admit that he did it elegantly!”
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By the time Clinton arrived in Gaza on December 13, 1998, at the head of a large delegation, both the Israeli coalition and the Wye Accords were in parlous condition. Netanyahu and Sharon tried to confine their bickering with the Americans to whether the Palestinian parliament needed to vote for the abrogation of the PLO Charter or whether an acclamation would suffice. But in the end they had to admit to Clinton that they would need “a brief respite” before proceeding with the next withdrawal, even if the session in Gaza passed off satisfactorily. There were many other issues, they claimed, on which the Palestinians were not living up to their Wye commitments. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright argued back; the president barely shrugged. Plainly, he had given up the ghost as far as this Israeli government was concerned.