Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (69 page)

Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was under heavy pressure from the Saudis to toughen its stance against Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. Crown Prince Abdullah sent the president a stern letter, calling in question the entire American-Saudi relationship.
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In his response, Bush committed himself, for the first time, to a “viable independent Palestinian state.” In the State Department, too, work was under way on a major Middle East policy speech by Secretary of State
Colin Powell, later in the fall, that would signal a more energetic and more evenhanded American approach to Middle East peacemaking.

For Sharon, says the then
U.S. ambassador,
Dan Kurtzer, this Saudi-U.S. exchange exacerbated his constant anticipation and fear of vigorous U.S. diplomatic intervention in the conflict. This was the ambassador’s explanation of the Israeli leader’s bizarre, provocative—but somehow ultimately canny—behavior in the period following
9/11.

Like every head of government, Sharon put in a condolence call to the president on watching the fall of the Twin Towers. He was called back about twenty-four hours later. He offered his sympathies and solidarity. Bush thanked him and said that now more than ever the United States understood what Israel is up against in its fight against terror. “Then,” Kurtzer recalled, “Bush says, listen, you can do me a favor. I know you’ve authorized
Shimon Peres to go meet Arafat. Well, this would be a good time to do it. Sharon says no, I’m not ready to do this now. He gets off the phone, and now you have a split screen: In the Oval Office, they’re pissed, because Sharon is the first person in the world to say no to the president after 9/11, on something that they don’t think is very cosmic. Sharon is pissed because the truck seems to be coming down the highway at him faster than ever.”

The next day, Sharon held a conference call with members of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “His anxieties and the anxieties of some of the people on that call fed off each other,” Kurtzer recalled.

In the weeks between 9/11 and the Munich speech, both Bush and Sharon made public statements voicing their support for the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state. Sharon, aware that this was the thrust of Bush’s letter to Crown Prince Abdullah, made his statement on September 23 to a gathering of teachers at
Latrun, the site of his 1948 brush with death in the bloody, failed battle against the Jordanians. “Israel wants to give the Palestinians what no one else gave them—a state. Not the Turks, the British, the Egyptians, or the Jordanians gave them this possibility.”

In hindsight, this speech was the harbinger of the transformation to come. “His end goal was clearly partition,” says
Avi Gil. “That’s why he accepted publicly the principle of a Palestinian state.” But the speech made little impact at the time. No one in Jerusalem or in Washington took Sharon’s declaration too seriously because it was assumed that the borders he was contemplating would be rejected by the Palestinians as inadequate and the security conditions he proposed to demand of them would be unacceptable. No one was thinking at that time in terms of unilateral action. On the far right, nevertheless, the speech deepened suspicions. When Bush spoke, a week later, some of Sharon’s hard-line critics blamed his Latrun speech for the president’s public espousal of Palestinian national aspirations.

Bush’s “vision” of an independent Palestine living at peace alongside Israel was articulated at a press conference in the Oval Office on October 2. “The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision, so long as the right of Israel to exist is respected,” the president said. That was doubtless true, at least since the United States began a dialogue with the PLO in the late 1980s. But it had never been spelled out before so explicitly. The administration was at pains to stress that the new policy pronouncement had been in the works before 9/11. The pundits all presumed, nevertheless, that the decision to go public now was linked to Washington’s efforts to garner
Muslim world support for the imminent military assault on Afghanistan.

Then, on October 5, Sharon lashed out at Bush with a pathos and ferocity that left the world aghast. “I appeal to the Western democracies,” Sharon proclaimed in prepared remarks to journalists in Tel Aviv, “and first and foremost the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the terrible mistake of 1938. Then, the enlightened democracies of Europe decided to sacrifice
Czechoslovakia in return for a temporary, comfortable solution. Do not try to appease the
Arabs at our expense. We will not be able to accept that. Israel is not Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight against terror.” He went on to review the failed cease-fire efforts and ended: “We can rely only on ourselves. And from today onward, we will rely only on ourselves.”
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l

Washington was livid and demanded an immediate retraction. Within a day, Sharon’s office sensibly issued a statement explaining that his words had been misinterpreted. Sharon himself bawled out Ambassador Kurtzer on the phone. “It’s
your
fault.
You
stirred things up in Washington.
Your
reporting of the speech shaped their thinking.” When he finished, Kurtzer replied coldly: “Mr. Prime Minister,
you
created this crisis. I didn’t even hear your speech, let alone report it.”

In the Munich speech, Sharon’s near-compulsive apprehensiveness over American diplomatic involvement in the conflict seemed to sweep aside all other considerations. His own aides were aghast. “He wrote the speech alone,” one staffer recalled, “in his own hand, and sent it by fax from the ranch. As soon as I read it, I started sweating. I rushed over to Shani, but he said that Sharon was insisting. I phoned him and got shouted at: ‘That’s what I’m going to say, and that’s all there is to it!’ ”

But Sharon read Bush right. Their relationship soon pulled out of this trough and developed into a closeness rarely achieved between leaders of the two countries. “That the president liked Ariel Sharon wasn’t the point,” Aaron Miller explained. “When it came to fighting terror, seeking peace, and promoting democracy, Israel was on the right side of the line. Arafat and the others had chosen the wrong side.”
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Arafat moved with desperate speed not to be caught wrong-footed by 9/11. Initial outpourings of joy in the
West Bank and
East Jerusalem were quickly smothered, on his orders, by the PA’s security forces.
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He called in TV crews to film him giving blood in a
Ramallah hospital for those injured in the
al-Qaeda attacks. That same evening, a close aide met with three prominent Hamas figures in Gaza to deliver an unequivocal message from the
rais
. “From now on, you must do nothing that can damage the Authority. If Sharon succeeds in portraying us as terrorists, no one on earth will support us.” The
Fatah-linked Tanzim, too, was sternly warned to rein in its men. “We all heard,” the Gaza Tanzim boss, Sammy Abu Samadana, recalled later. “But everyone went back home and did as he pleased.”
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The
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) certainly did. On October 17, two of its activists trailed the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam “Gandhi” Ze’evi, to his hotel room
in Jerusalem and shot him dead. It was an act of revenge for the assassination by Israel of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP leader, ten weeks earlier, and it was a great coup. Ze’evi was not merely the highest-ranking Israeli to be assassinated by Palestinians; he was a symbol and spokesman of the most extreme anti-Palestinian sentiment in Israeli political life. When Sharon, in the run-up to the election, had sent a greeting card to Arafat for the Muslim festival of
Eid al-Fitr, Ze’evi commented that he, too, “would have sent Arafat an envelope, but not with a greeting card inside.”
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“The era of Arafat is over,” Sharon declared after Ze’evi’s death, laying the blame on the
rais
.
^m
The
Shin Bet caught two members of the assassination squad and tracked down the others, including the man who masterminded the plot,
Ahmed Saadat. They were holed up in Ramallah. Israel gave precise information to the
PA and the United States. Arafat ignored the demands that he arrest them.

Sharon’s relentless assault on Arafat’s credibility with Washington was hugely assisted by the saga of a small cargo ship called the
Karine A,
which Israeli intelligence had been shadowing for weeks toward the end of 2001. Flying a Tongan flag of convenience and commanded by a Palestinian naval officer, the ship had taken on fifty tons of arms and ordnance at the
Iranian island of Kish. The weapons were paid for, according to Israeli intelligence, by
Fuad Shubaki, head of finance in the PA and Arafat’s confidant.
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When the ship turned toward the
Suez Canal, intent on unloading its cargo off the Gaza coast, Israel decided to act. Chief of Staff Mofaz commanded the interception personally
on the night of January 3, 2002, from an air force Boeing 707 command-and-control plane high above the
Red Sea.

The first person Sharon told about the combined ops success was a man who he knew would appreciate its finer points: the former U.S. Marine Corps general
Tony Zinni. “I asked Sharon if I could break the news to Arafat,” the general writes in his memoirs. “I wanted to see the look on Arafat’s face when I told him about it.”
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Zinni had been appointed in November U.S. special envoy to the region. He confronted Arafat with the
Karine A
on the first day of his second trip. “ ‘That is not true,’ Arafat shot back. ‘This was not our ship. It’s an Israeli plot. This is an Israeli setup.’ ”
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Sharon sent Mofaz to Washington with detailed and unambiguous evidence of Arafat’s personal involvement in the illicit (under Oslo) arms purchase.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, saw the Israeli chief of staff as soon as he arrived. She took the evidence to the president that same evening.
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Arafat made matters worse for himself by writing a letter to President Bush strenuously denying any link to the ship. It was transparently untrue, and Bush took it as a personal insult to his intelligence. “The president wrote him off after that letter,” an American diplomat recalled.

By this time, the intifada violence had spiraled to new heights.

On November 27, a Palestinian disguised as an Israeli soldier sprayed bullets around the bus station in the northern town of
Afula, killing 3 and injuring 30. Two days later, a
suicide bomber on a bus killed 3 passengers at
Hadera. Two days after that a double suicide bombing in the center of Jerusalem left 11 dead and 180 injured. On December 2, the following day, 15 died in a suicide bombing on a bus in Haifa. Hamas claimed responsibility for both of these attacks. On the fifth, an
Islamic Jihad bomber apparently detonated his suicide belt prematurely on a street
in Jerusalem; several passersby were injured. On the ninth, again in Haifa, a suicide bomber exploded himself at a busy junction, injuring 30. On the twelfth, two suicide bombers injured Israelis traveling in two cars to a settlement inside the Gaza Strip. And on the same day, on the West Bank, 10 bus passengers were killed and 30 injured in an attack outside the settlement of Emanuel. Within hours of this last outrage, the Israeli Air Force had bombed Arafat’s headquarters in Gaza and destroyed his fleet of three helicopters.

Arafat, under intense American pressure, issued orders on December 16 for “a complete halt to all operations, especially suicidal operations.” He vowed to “punish all those who carry out and mastermind such operations.” A lull in the violence followed. Any hope of it lasting was dashed, though, by Sharon’s decision, in mid-January, to authorize
the assassination of a prominent and popular Tanzim militant,
Raed Karmi. That, at any rate, is how many critics of the prime minister interpreted the even bloodier escalation in the violence in the early months of 2002.

The twenty-seven-year-old Karmi, formerly a PA intelligence officer, had become the undisputed boss of
Tulkarm and the surrounding area. In the early months of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Karmi was answerable, at least nominally, to the senior
Fatah figure in Tulkarm, Dr. Thabet Thabet, a dentist by profession and a man with many friends in the Israeli peace camp. These friends continued to maintain later that Thabet had remained a moderate and had done his best to rein in the swashbuckling Karmi. But the
Shin Bet insisted that Thabet actively instigated attacks by Karmi and his men on settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. Ehud Barak accepted this extrajudicial indictment cum conviction, and Thabet was assassinated outside his home on December 31, 2000, by an army sharpshooter.

Thabet’s killing divided Israelis. But Karmi’s act of brutal revenge united them and marked him as a doomed man. Two young
Tel Avivans were espied in a Tulkarm restaurant on January 23, 2001. They had come, with an
Israeli-Arab friend, to buy provisions for their own restaurant on Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv’s trendy downtown drag, a million light-years from the intifada. Karmi and his thugs kidnapped them at gunpoint, drove them out of town, and shot the two Jews dead. They sent the Arab home to tell the tale.