Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (60 page)

Barak hoped the Israeli public would have learned from the reports out of Shepherdstown that he was driving a tough bargain. But for at least 150,000 demonstrators, gathered on a chilly night in Rabin Square in downtown Tel Aviv just after Shepherdstown ended, that was not the lesson learned. Their placards and their chorused chants made it clear they still felt Barak was about to sell out. Two of Barak’s ministers, Natan Sharansky of Yisrael B’Aliya and Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, sat on the dais, alongside opposition politicians and Golan mayors. They had both abstained in the
Knesset on December 13. But that was a passive demonstration of displeasure. This was an open act of defiance.

The Palestinian track was also demanding attention. The deadline for implementing the next further redeployment was fast approaching. At a meeting early in January, Arafat asked Barak to include three villages close to
Jerusalem among the territories that were to become Area A—that is, wholly Palestinian controlled—in the imminent FRD. The villages were effectively suburbs of the holy city. One of them, Abu Dis, was the site of the Palestinian parliament building, still under construction. Barak didn’t say no, which for Arafat was as good as saying yes. In the Knesset, Sharon accused Barak of “lying and cheating, not to the enemy, God forbid, but to our own loyal citizens.”
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On March 26, Clinton, encouraged by Barak, met with Assad in Geneva. He assured the Syrian leader that Israel now accepted the June 4 line, but Barak wanted to be sure “that Israel retained sovereignty over the water of the Sea of Galilee and the
Jordan River and therefore the borderline should not touch either one.” Assad, wan and sickly looking, replied: “Then they don’t want peace … The lake has always been our lake; it was never theirs … There were no Jews to the east of the lake.”
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Clinton later recalled Assad saying, “Look, you and I are friends, but there’s not gonna be a deal if I don’t get to run my feet in the lake.” There was no further reason to sit and talk, and after barely an hour the meeting ended.

Sharon followed some of this from his temporary home alongside the fire-ravaged ranch house. Lily was in bed now most of the time, venturing out almost only to go to the hospital for treatment. “A man gets used to living in a beautiful house for twenty-five years, with her touch all over it,” he told Amira Lam in
Yedioth Ahronoth
on March 10. “Every plant and vase, the pictures on the piano, the embroidered towels in the bathroom, the table napkins lovingly folded. I would come
home, and the music that we both loved was always playing. I would sit in my armchair, and Lily would pour me a drink, and when I still used to smoke, sometimes she might light me a cigar, and we would sit and talk. We don’t have that now, and I really miss those moments.”

The interview made poignant yet somehow uncomfortable reading. Poignant, because Lily was lying upstairs as he spoke with the reporter, sinking to her death. Uncomfortable, because he was so frank and almost maudlin, but also because he seemed to be parading, not to say exploiting, his personal sadness on the magazine cover of the country’s largest-circulation newspaper. On the other hand, he was leader of the opposition at a crucial time for the country; he legitimately needed to show that he was functioning despite his burden of worry and grief. “I know there is all kinds of talk in the party, that this is affecting my work,” he said.

On March 24, the temporary home became a house of mourning. The entire political community, regardless of affiliation or ideology, turned out for Lily’s funeral on a hilltop near the ranch or for a consolation visit during the seven-day shiva period of mourning. They all knew her personally, because she had always been at her husband’s side. Even during her illness, she had made the effort to be there for
him. Shimon Peres spoke for many of them when he said, “Lily was a wonderful woman who fought her illness with uncommon courage and with the same devotion and determination with which she stood by her husband’s side through every one of his battles.”

“You fought till the last moment, with fortitude, with serenity, with dignity,” Sharon said in his eulogy at her graveside. “You left our world loving and enveloped in the love of all your family and friends. They will love you forever.” She was just sixty-three.

During the shiva mourning period Sharon made it clear, as he had in the interview, that Lily’s absence would not end his political career. But there was more than that. Though cut off by his bereavement, Sharon discerned that the Geneva denouement might mean that Barak was weakening faster than anyone had expected. To a group of party activists who came to comfort him, Sharon said: “Carry on, carry on—and in the end you will breach the wall.”

“I really liked that,”
Ofir Akunis recalled. “I remember it to the present day. Sharon had been party leader for the best part of a year, but this was the first time I felt he was seriously exhorting us to action. The ‘wall’ was
Ehud Barak, and the message was, if we keep attacking, we can defeat him. Sure enough, politics seemed to come back to life in the following months as Barak’s popularity continued to drop.”
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Another Likud member, who had feared that Lily’s death would leave Sharon suddenly old and lonely, found himself wondering at the speed and feistiness of his resurgence. “There were more important things to do than to mourn Lily … so he did them,” this man recalled, drily. “Arik dearly loved Lily. He would stroke her hand and gaze into her eyes. But did he love her for herself or out of his overwhelming love of himself? I remember later someone suggested that Arik was so egocentric that apart from his sons he couldn’t actually love another person. He loved to have her with him, because she loved him and spoiled him. When she was no longer around, she was no longer around.”
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W
ithin days of the Geneva letdown, Barak gave orders—no tactic this, but a momentous, if impetuous, decision—to have the army out of Lebanon long ahead of his original July deadline. Since there was to be no agreement with Syria, the withdrawal would be unilateral. He sent a stern warning to Damascus not to interfere as the Israeli troops pulled out.

At the same time, he resolved to travel to Washington to present his plans to Clinton. He spoke of a three-way summit with Arafat in the
summer. He would bring a comprehensive peace plan, he promised the president.
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The clearest indication that Barak was serious was his appointment of two unimpeachable peaceniks as his envoys to a series of discreet Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that now got under way, first in the region and later in Sweden. The purpose of these talks, at least in Barak’s mind, was to prepare the ground for the make-or-break tripartite summit, along the lines of the Carter-Begin-Sadat summit at Camp David in 1978. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a professor of history whom Barak had incongruously appointed his minister of internal security, had long argued for sweeping Israeli concessions on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Alongside him, Barak appointed a former army officer and now a successful lawyer,
Gilead Sher, also a confirmed dove.

The interaction in the months ahead between
Barak and these two gifted but difficult men was to bring Israel to the brink of peace, much, much closer than any previous leaders had ever dared to go.

On May 8, Barak and Arafat met at Abu Mazen’s home in
Ramallah. Their negotiators then enplaned for Sweden, where, courtesy of the prime minister, Göran Persson, they held relaxed, secluded conversations at a remote government guest complex. Ben-Ami indicated that the three “settlement blocs” that Israel wanted to keep would require annexation of 8 percent of the West Bank.
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This was unacceptable to the Palestinians. But it was already a far cry from the double-digit annexation being bandied about in public. And the concept of
land swap, a political unmentionable in Israel until then, was firmly on the table at the Swedish guesthouse.

This hopeful beginning was soon disrupted when serious violence broke out in the Palestinian territories around May 15, Naqba Day in Palestinian parlance, the anniversary of the creation of Israel. Barak ordered the negotiators home.

In the north, the IDF’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon was gathering pace but increasingly looking like an undignified flight. Thousands of Lebanese civilians, marshaled by
Hezbollah, were marching southward, sweeping through the crumbling lines of the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s mainly Christian militia ally in the “security zone.” Barak gave orders to speed up the pullback. SLA men and their families desperately but fruitlessly clustered at the border fence demanding to be let through, too.

The constant toll of military deaths in the unending guerrilla war with Hezbollah would now, hopefully, end. A wave of visceral relief swept the country. The withdrawal, moreover, had been accomplished
without any further loss of Israeli lives. But the abandonment of the SLA gnawed at the national conscience. And Hezbollah trumpeted the Israeli retreat as a great victory for its Shiite fighters and a shining example to the Palestinians of what armed resistance could achieve.

Barak pointed to the unilateral withdrawal as a bold act of leadership and the honorable discharge of a solemn electoral commitment. Sharon tried to tap into the public’s ambivalence. “It’s a very good thing that we’ve gotten out of Lebanon,” he told the Knesset on June 5. “It was the right decision, though it should have been taken earlier. But while getting out was right, the way it was done was absolutely wrong.” The “erosion of the IDF’s deterrence” in the eyes of the Arab world would make Arafat even more intransigent. “He wants to achieve what the Hezbollah ostensibly achieved … to the last centimeter.” Unbeknownst to Sharon, that logic was shared by the Palestinian negotiators who were working with Ben-Ami and Sher on ideas for compromises. “What have you done to us with this crazy withdrawal from Lebanon?”
Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia) complained.
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Mohammed Dahlan, the head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Forces and a powerful political figure in the PA, said the Israeli withdrawal “gave our people the message that violence wins … the message from Barak was that he would move under pressure … that he would withdraw only if forced to.”
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Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon provided double closure for Sharon. By bringing back the army to the international border, Barak finally stanched the hemorrhaging of IDF blood that began in June 1982 and had never really stopped for eighteen years. Moreover, by briefly reopening the national debate over Lebanon, Barak showed that time, and perhaps Sharon’s own incessant battles with his critics, had had their effect. The burden of Lebanon no longer made Sharon unelectable.

B
uoyed by the public’s support for the Lebanon withdrawal, and with the
Syrian track in indefinite abeyance following the
death of Hafez Assad on June 10, Barak now swung all his energies behind his push for a tripartite summit. Arafat was reluctant, fearing that if the summit failed, Clinton would line up with Barak to blame him for it. Clinton promised him that whatever happened, he would not point fingers afterward, and he invited the two leaders to come to Camp David on Tuesday, July 11.

Like the abortive Geneva summit between Clinton and Assad, Camp David has been subjected to a good deal of twenty-twenty hindsight
analysis by participants and pundits. Clinton did go back on his word and blamed Arafat for the summit’s lack of success. Others faulted the U.S. president for allowing himself, as they saw it, to be cajoled by Barak into holding the summit in the first place. Clinton made no determined effort, moreover, once the summit got under way, to break down Barak’s high-handed decision not to deal with Arafat directly and to leave the negotiating to their subordinates. There was no substantive dialogue between the two leaders, even though Barak’s logic for pressing Clinton to host the summit had been that the endgame must be conducted by the principals themselves.

Barak decided early that there was no chance of a breakthrough until the eve of Clinton’s scheduled departure, on the eighth day of the summit, for a meeting of the G8 in Okinawa. That naturally became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the first week was spent treading water. On the night before Clinton left, Barak asked to meet with him alone and presented him with a proposal that both gobsmacked and delighted the Americans: the partitioning of the
Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over the
Muslim and
Christian Quarters, Israel over the Jewish and Armenian Quarters. The Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, would be handed by UN resolution to the joint custodianship of
Palestine and Morocco, the nation that chaired the Islamic Conference’s Jerusalem Committee. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over all the outer
Arab neighborhoods of the city, and there would be shared sovereignty in the inner neighborhoods. Barak whittled down his demands to control the
Jordan River border, now suggesting an IDF presence in a small area for a period of years. He spoke of some
land swap as compensation for Israel’s annexing up to 9 percent of the West Bank for its settlement blocs. There would be a “satisfactory solution” to the refugee question.