Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (72 page)

The upshot was a convenient trade-off: the Americans engineered the quiet demise of the UN inquiry; Israel lifted the sieges in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Some creative diplomacy by Britain gave Sharon a sufficiently face-saving solution to his demand that the wanted men besieged in the
muqata
and in the
Church of the Nativity not be released.
Tony Blair had tried to persuade Sharon back in November that Arafat could never agree to hand over
Ahmed Saadat,
Fuad Shubaki, and the others but that he might agree to British monitors assisting in their Palestinian imprisonment. “Is that offer still on the table?” Sharon’s aide
Danny Ayalon now asked the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, Sherard Cowper-Coles, in an out-of-the-blue telephone call.
⁴²
A week later, Andrew Coyle, a former governor of the famously austere Brixton Prison, waited outside Sharon’s office door at midnight while Cowper-Coles and
Dan Kurtzer, his American counterpart, argued within over the conditions under which Saadat, Shubaki, and the four others would be held in a PA jail in
Jericho, with Coyle supervising. “He wants to see you,” Cowper-Coles came out and told the tough ex-warden. “Tell him exactly what it’s like in Brixton for an IRA prisoner.” It was not going to be quite like that for the Palestinians. But Sharon was apparently satisfied by Coyle’s no-nonsense mien and agreed.
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The siege in Bethlehem ended a week later, after complicated negotiations involving
Muhammad Rashid for the PA, the Tel Aviv
CIA
station officer for the Americans, and a former British MI6 agent,
Alastair Crooke, representing the EU. Thirteen Palestinians with Israeli “blood on their hands” were deported to
Cyprus aboard a British RAF plane; twenty-six more were exiled from the West Bank to the
Gaza Strip; and the remaining eighty-four Palestinians in the church (a hundred-odd had been allowed to leave earlier) were released to their homes.

Defensive Shield was over. Some 260 Palestinians had been killed,
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thousands injured, and close to two thousand arrested. Most of the Palestinian dead were armed men, but there were many innocent deaths and injuries and widespread damage to property. The Israelis had lost 34 soldiers, 23 of them in
Jenin. Another 60 Israelis had been killed in terror attacks during the period of the operation. One of the bloodiest, on May 7, was a suicide bombing in a gaming club in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv. Fifteen people died, and 55 were injured in that attack; Hamas claimed responsibility.

Still, the surge of terror deaths seemed to be receding. April’s figure was lower than March’s, and May’s would hopefully end lower than April’s. Clearly, Defensive Shield had not “solved” the problem. But it had salved the pernicious spread of helplessness and despair within Israeli society. It might not have been a military masterstroke. Perhaps no such stroke is possible in a regular army’s struggle against armed militants. But by seizing the initiative, it restored Israelis’ confidence in their state and their army and, by extension, in their prime minister.

This restored confidence, which showed dramatically in the polls, stemmed both from the massive deployment of military power and from a notable moderation in its use. This was Sharon’s only war as prime minister, as it turned out, and he ran it very differently from his past military campaigns. With tens of thousands of soldiers under arms and on the move, the death and devastation in the Palestinian territories could have been of an entirely different dimension. Given the firepower he had mobilized, he unleashed relatively little of it. For all his banging on the table and barking at his generals, he kept Defensive Shield within the confines of his new, prime ministerial weltanschauung: restraint is strength.
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Arafat marked his release from five months of siege with a stately
progress by helicopter and car through the battered towns of the West Bank on May 13. He met with bereaved families, embraced orphans, spoke words of encouragement to injured people. But the public at large was largely absent from the streets. The
rais
’s return was far from triumphal. Commentators put this down to the unpopularity of the deal he had struck in Bethlehem, especially the deportation of some of the men trapped in the church. One place where enthusiastic crowds did gather was the Jenin camp. But Arafat, apparently fearing local Islamic radicals, declined to leave his car. His convoy swept past the battered camp. In the months that followed, Arafat did not leave the
muqata
much. He did not go abroad, or even visit Gaza, apparently for fear that Israel would not let him return.

Arafat owed his freedom above all to Crown Prince Abdullah. He was effectively the Saudi ruler; King Fahd, his half brother, was elderly and not really functioning by this time. Abdullah had flown to Crawford, Texas, on April 25 and virtually threatened Bush with a major rupture in relations if Arafat continued to be besieged by the Israelis.

Abdullah had recently proposed peace and normalization between Israel and all the
Arab countries in return for the creation of a
Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. The key issue of
Palestinian refugees was “to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” “Agreed” meant Israel could not be forced. It signified Arab recognition that most of the refugees and their descendants would not return to Israel. Commentators presumed the plan was floated to curry favorable sentiment in the West following
9/11, in which most of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Nevertheless, this was the first time the Saudis had expressly held out the prospect of Israel’s full acceptance into the Arab region. In normal circumstances, Prince Abdullah’s plan would have had a powerful impact on Israeli public opinion. In fact, it was barely noticed. It was submitted to and approved by the
Arab Summit in Beirut on the very day of the
suicide bombing at the hotel in
Netanya. Instead of a wave of hope and encouragement, Palestine was swept by a new wave of violence. Sharon gave the plan a cautious and perfunctory welcome.

For the Palestinian president, Defensive Shield had been a heavy, though not a mortal, blow. Ironically, the IDF’s attacks on the PA security forces and its ransacking of government buildings vindicated Arafat’s claim that he was powerless to impose his authority on Hamas and the other militant groups. The Israelis, however, were past caring, having effectively given up on any security cooperation with the
rais
and his multiheaded security apparatus.

In many of the towns and
refugee camps, street power now passed to the militants, with armed gangs of
al-Aqsa Brigades and others roaming around uninhibited, brandishing their weapons, and meting out summary and brutal justice to alleged collaborators with Israel.
Ramallah and
Jericho were the last redoubts of PA military control. Much of the PA’s civil administration managed to continue functioning, though—schools, hospitals, municipal services. But without effective policing, law enforcement and tax collection faltered. Daily life deteriorated. Freedom of movement, which had been hampered by Israeli roadblocks since the start of the intifada, was now even more severely constrained.
Roads between villages, even between neighborhoods in the same town, were severed by mounds of earth or concrete cubes piled up by army bulldozers. The effect on the economy was direct and disastrous. Tens of thousands of working people joined the lists of the unemployed. Many of them turned to the
Hamas-affiliated welfare agencies for material help.

B
y forcibly reopening the whole of the West Bank to IDF and
Shin Bet control, Defensive Shield contributed in time to the suppression of the intifada, and in particular to the detection and prevention of
suicide bombings. Nevertheless, Defensive Shield gave Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, pause for thought about the limits of military power deployed against a nation in revolt. Despite the show of force, despite the killing and capturing of militants, among them senior figures in the various armed organizations, despite the deployment of the army and the Shin Bet throughout the West Bank, terror attacks continued. More and more influential Israelis now joined the growing clamor among the public for a “security fence,” a barrier between the West Bank and Israel that would physically block the suicide bombers on their way to murder and death. Barak had ordered staff work on the fence toward the end of his term, but when Sharon swept him from office, the idea seemed to have been swept out with him.

Sharon’s popularity surged after Defensive Shield, but so did support for the fence. In a
Maariv
poll published in June 2002, 69 percent of those questioned favored building a fence, and only 25 percent opposed it. “Perhaps this is the secret of the fence’s broad popularity,” wrote the analyst
Chemi Shalev. “It’s both a physical barrier and a symbolic, emotional bulwark, an opaque screen behind which people feel they can push the Palestinians and all the grief they bring with them and, as far as most people are concerned, the settlers too.”

Sharon could no longer ignore the public demand. On June 23, the
cabinet formally approved plans for the first stage of the separation fence. It would stretch for seventy miles, from Salem on the northwestern tip of the West Bank south to
Kassem, opposite
Netanya. It would hug the old green line on parts of its route but would periodically belly into the West Bank to encompass major Israeli settlements. Some of this bellying would take in Palestinian villages, too. Two other small stretches of fence were also approved, north and south of
Jerusalem, both of them on West Bank land. The Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new department that would supervise construction of this first stage and prepare for the subsequent stages that would eventually seal off the entire West Bank.

For Sharon, the decision to build the fence was his first substantive break with the settlers and with the pristine dogma of “
Greater Israel.” This was not mere talk of a hypothetical Palestinian state arising from a hypothetical negotiation at some vague time in the future; it was the tangible and immediate consequence of unilateral action that the government was taking. It would mean that farther-flung settlements that Sharon himself had deliberately located in the Palestinian heartland would find themselves on the wrong side of a fence. Sharon and the ministers could contend all they wished that the fence was solely a security barrier with no political significance. No one believed that, least of all the settlers who would be crossing through it each day on their way to and from work in Israel.

The long struggle on which Sharon now embarked—against the Palestinians, against the Americans, against world opinion, and against Israel’s own high court—over the precise route of the separation fence was itself the most convincing proof that he understood full well that the fence would become the baseline for a future border. Arguably, Sharon’s decision to build the fence was no less momentous or historically significant than his later decision to disengage from Gaza and dismantle the settlements there and in the northern West Bank. The two decisions, in fact, need to be seen as an integral progression along a path of unilateralism that Sharon was steadily adopting as his overarching strategy toward the conflict.
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Unilateralism could exist and flourish, however, only to the extent that the international community, and especially of course the Americans, forbore to insist on bilateralism—that is, on a credible peace negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. As his good luck would have it, the very next day after the fence decision by the cabinet in Jerusalem, Sharon and the world received public and formal
confirmation from Washington that as far as George W. Bush was concerned, negotiation with Yasser Arafat was no longer a viable option.

“Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership,” the president declared in a long-expected, meticulously drafted statement on the Middle East. With Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice at his side in the Rose Garden of the White House, Bush called “on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing
democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.” Bush’s message was starkly clear: as long as Arafat stood at the head of the Palestinian people, the United States would not be promoting or supporting their claim to statehood.

Bush reiterated his “vision of two states living side by side in peace and security.” But he immediately added—and this was critical in Sharon’s eyes—“There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror.” The order of business, then, was to be: first fight terror, and only then make progress toward peace. “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing,
terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.” Even the short-range American demands, that Israel pull back its troops to the pre-intifada line and cease settlement building, were preceded by “As we make progress toward security …” The president added that the PA was tainted by “official corruption. A Palestinian state will require a vibrant economy, where honest enterprise is encouraged by honest government.

“When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors,” Bush continued, “the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.” As for the eventual full realization of his two-state vision, “The final borders, the capital and other aspects of this state’s sovereignty will be negotiated between the parties as part of a final settlement.”

“Dismantle their infrastructure,” whatever that meant, was a recognizably Israeli phrase. And small wonder: Sharon and his top aides had been intimately involved in the American drafting process, offering language and arguing about the wording almost till the moment of delivery. The Israeli input began during Defensive Shield, when
Efraim Halevy, the outgoing head of the
Mossad, brainstormed with his senior staffers with a view to offering Sharon a forward-looking exit
strategy once the fighting was done. The Mossad men came up with a plan called “An Alternative Leadership for the Palestinian People.”