Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (81 page)

There was a rebellious mood at the
Jerusalem convention center where the Likud central committee convened three days later. Demonstrators milled around outside, howling abuse at Sharon and the ministers who supported him. They were especially hostile toward Omri Sharon, surrounding his car and shouting in unison, “Look where you’ve led your father.” In the hall, hundreds of settler-delegates and their sympathizers set up a raucous cacophony with tin whistles. When Sharon entered, the noise became deafening. When Netanyahu rose to speak, it turned into a friendly chant of “Bibi, Bibi.” Netanyahu said a
Palestinian state would be “a faculty for
Hamas and
al-Qaeda.” He was implacably opposed to it. He was careful, though, not to speak directly against Sharon. Others were less reticent. “How can the prime minister want to give away our ancient patrimony to others?”
Uzi Landau, a lifelong hard-liner, hurled at Sharon. “This is a sad day for the Likud and a terrible day for the country. Terror has triumphed.”

Sharon, in his speech, avoided the buzzword “occupation.” It probably would have triggered a riot; as it was, there was scuffling in the gallery between his supporters and his opponents. Rather, in cautious, measured sentences, he proceeded on what would become, as his second term unfolded, a gradual, steady process of disengagement from the collective discipline of his own party. He recalled
Menachem Begin, who spoke in the Knesset of that “extra little bit of responsibility” that rests on a prime minister. “I bear the responsibility,” Sharon declared. “The responsibility lies on my shoulders.” He had promised the party at its last convention a great victory in the general election, and he had delivered it. But he had also promised the nation “to bring peace and security and I intend to fulfill that, too. For true peace, I said, I am prepared to make painful concessions. Very painful concessions … The people delivered its verdict, and I intend to keep my promise.”

He did not even look up at the hecklers, let alone respond to them. He did not raise his voice at them, or ask for quiet, or wait for quiet. He ignored them totally and delivered his prepared text as though they were listening in silent and respectful attention. He pitched his speech not at the rowdy audience in the hall but at the nation as a whole, watching him live on prime-time news.

•   •   •

T
he national leader who transcended and faintly despised mere party politics made a point of despising, too, the insistent attempts to impute “hidden agendas” to his dramatic change of policy. But his narrative, still unfolding, of a leader courageous enough to break with his own past, was already being challenged by an alternative narrative, much less heroic. “The prime minister was no longer a free agent,” the then chairman of the National Security Council and former
Mossad director,
Efraim Halevy, asserted years later. “He was not in charge. He was acting under duress … Weissglas had a hold over him. I don’t know where it came from. From somewhere outside government.”

This remarkable indictment could be dismissed as the resentful recrimination of the country’s top intelligence official who was later unceremoniously ousted from the inner sanctum of policy making by Sharon and Weissglas—were it not for the fact that Halevy’s indictment closely tallies with the indictment of
another
top defense official, the then army chief of staff, Lieutenant General
Moshe Ya’alon. “I suspected a sinister, symbiotic relationship between Sharon and Weissglas,” Ya’alon recalled, “based on other, concealed interests.”

Ya’alon also fought with Weissglas and was also eventually dumped by Sharon. Sharon’s aides, from Weissglas down, dismiss both Halevy’s and Ya’alon’s strictures as the fulminations of the disaffected. They embellish this verdict with anecdotes and reminiscences designed to make the two men appear stupid and petty. This in turn raises troubling questions as to how stupid and petty men could have risen to head the Mossad and the IDF. Ya’alon went on to join the Likud (after Sharon left it) and serves, at this writing, as a deputy prime minister.

For Halevy, the warning lights flashed following his brief trip with Weissglas to Washington in March 2003 and their unexpected audience in the Oval Office, where Bush extolled the benefits of the soon-to-be-published road map. “I knew that the road map was anathema for Sharon,” Halevy recalled.

The road map, he explained, undercut the essence of Sharon’s long-held policy that Israel must strive for a stable
interim agreement with the Palestinians because a permanent agreement was unachievable given the wide differences in the two sides’ positions on basic issues. The road map proposed to reconcile those differences within two years and produce precisely the permanent peace that Sharon considered unattainable. Thus, for instance, the road map envisaged shared sovereignty in Jerusalem—it prescribes “a negotiated resolution on the status of Jerusalem that takes into account the
political
and
religious concerns of both sides”—which for Sharon, Halevy maintained, was totally unacceptable.

Halevy therefore expected a spirited struggle by Israel to try to change the tenor of the road map. “Weissglas reported that the U.S. would ‘accept’ Israel’s reservations. I’m not sure the Americans even bothered to file them in their archives,” Halevy said. “Sharon signed off on the partition of Jerusalem. Why did he change his mind? Why did he accept a document that he himself had said for months was one of the greatest threats to Israel?

“I was reminded in some way of what I had read of President Wilson and [his close aide] Colonel House, who became the de facto president. Sharon was no longer seeing people who had been close to him. He was surrounded. He was closeted. He couldn’t reach out to talk to people if he wanted to. Weissglas had a hold over him.”
⁴

For Ya’alon, “Things started happening that seemed murky and dishonest.” With Abu Mazen installed
as prime minister, Israel resolved to hand back security control over several West Bank towns to the Palestinian Authority. One such town was
Jericho, and Weissglas met with the Palestinian chief negotiator,
Saeb Erekat, to organize the transfer. The Defense Ministry’s intention, says Ya’alon, was to remove the
roadblocks around Jericho and enable Palestinians to enter and leave freely. But Weissglas told Erekat the town would be reopened to Israelis, too, Ya’alon asserted.

He recalled:

In the event, Jericho remained closed to Israelis, and the casino stayed shut. That incontrovertible fact is cited by Sharon’s supporters to refute the allegations implied by Ya’alon. By the same token, says
Avigdor Yitzhaki, the director general of the
Prime Minister’s Office (2001–2004), a casino ship belonging to Schlaff—and the subject of much anti-Sharon rumormongering—remained empty and abandoned in the
Red Sea resort of
Eilat throughout Sharon’s term because the owners could not get a government license to operate it. “Hardly proof of Schlaff’s reputed omnipotence in Sharon’s Israel,” Yitzhaki notes sourly.

Neither Halevy nor Ya’alon was speaking out publicly at this time, and their alternative narrative, focusing on Weissglas, remained, for the moment, relatively muted. The related theory that Sharon was moving leftward in order to curry favor with the
media, and thereby somehow ease the pressure of the criminal investigations against him and his sons, was in the air already, but with nowhere near the resonance it was to receive later, when the settlers embraced it as their battle cry. Amir Oren, a columnist on
Haaretz
and longtime critic of Sharon, suggested in an article in June 2003 that Sharon “has his back to the wall. Two parties will be asking him tough questions: Bush about the future, and the police about the past.”
⁶

S
haron’s “leftward” turn over the road map was all the more remarkable given the spike in Palestinian suicide-terror attacks during this period. The intifada, though no longer at the level of sustained intensity that preceded Defensive Shield, nevertheless still spread indiscriminate carnage and pain throughout the country. Yet Sharon had cruised to victory in the election in February. His approval rating dropped from May to June, but it still stood at a solid 47 percent and remained at that figure in July.
⁷

Part of the reason for the Israeli public’s relative optimism despite the continuing terror was a sense, or at least a hope, that things might finally be changing on the other side. Abu Mazen’s public opposition to the intifada’s resort to lethal violence was a matter of public record and could not but impress Israelis, whatever the depth of their skepticism regarding his true powers and Arafat’s true relinquishment of powers.

The sole significant test in Israeli eyes, as Abu Mazen well knew, was whether the incidence of violence declined. In his low-key, businesslike way he immediately arranged to meet with Hamas leaders in Gaza and
tried to draw them into a general cease-fire. At the beginning of July 2003, against the odds and despite unanimously downbeat punditry, Abu Mazen got all the Palestinian factions to agree to a
hudna,
or temporary truce. Israel was to respond by stopping its “
targeted assassinations” and also by releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. In addition, in accordance with its obligations under the first phase of the road map, Israel began dismantling illegal settlement-outposts in the heart of the West Bank.
Television crews duly recorded IDF soldiers exchanging shoves and punches with “hilltop youths,” as the young settlement activists were dubbed.

Sharon himself had told a part-incredulous, part-hostile group of settler leaders on June 17 that he intended to fulfill Israel’s part of the road map “without winks and nods and without sleights of hand.” These, of course, had been the stock-in-trade of his intimate collusion with these same leaders for the past twenty-six years. He intended to remove fifteen of the illegal outposts at once and more later, Sharon said. The settlers felt he was moving toward the dismantlement of established settlements, too. “For all these years you were our compass,”
Pinhas Wallerstein, a veteran and prominent settler leader, wailed. “And now you’re abandoning us.” “I love the hills of Samaria no less than you,” Sharon replied. “Sometimes it’s hard to decide which hill is more beautiful. But a new reality has come into being … We have made commitments, and I am determined to honor them. We must try this new path; perhaps it will lead us to security.”

The settlers for their part said they would fight him, albeit without violence. Among those present was Ze’ev Hever, whom everyone called Zambish, a Gush Emunim activist who had been close to Sharon for decades and whom, unlike some of the others, Sharon genuinely liked. Unlike those who found it hard to believe that the wink-and-nod days were over, Hever understood that something fundamental had changed in their old champion. Sharon had “lost control” of the road-map process, Hever told his comrades. The prime minister’s sole focus of concern now was Washington, and as Washington’s appetite grew, so Sharon would feed it more and more settlements—first outposts, then established communities. His conclusion, Hever said, was that they must fight him all the way, from the first tiny outpost. No deals, no compromises.
⁸

With the
hudna
in place, Abu Mazen was invited to the White House. He met with Sharon in Jerusalem ahead of his U.S. trip. Their talk was businesslike and without rancor. Their aides kept up frequent contact. For the first time in nearly three years, a breath of optimism
wafted through Palestine and Israel. The United States sent a full-time peace envoy to the region, the veteran diplomat John Wolf, charged with monitoring progress in implementation of the
road map.

Prodded by the Americans, Sharon gave orders to transfer to the PA responsibility for security in the city of
Bethlehem and in the Gaza Strip, apart from the Gaza settlement enclaves and the main north-south highway that runs through the Strip. IDF troops moved out of these areas. July was the least violent month since the intifada began: three deaths on the Israeli side, seven on the Palestinian.
⁹
Talks began on transferring security in four other West Bank cities. “Tensions were reduced,” the U.S. envoy Wolf recorded. “Quality of life in Gaza and metropolitan Israel went up sharply. The
Gaza agreement enabled Palestinians to move freely [in the Strip], people could go to the beach … Stores which had hardly been open at all were staying open until ten or eleven at night … So this was a moment of opportunity. It got people’s hopes up.”
¹⁰

It was a pitifully brief moment. For Israelis, all the hopes collapsed with a terrible
suicide bus bombing
in Jerusalem on August 19. The Hamas bomber, a married man and university graduate, was disguised as an
Orthodox Jew. He boarded a No. 2 bus on the edge of the old
haredi
district of Mea Shearim and detonated his explosive belt, obliterating himself and taking the lives of sixteen adults and seven children. Hamas in
Hebron took the credit for this atrocity. It was intended, it said, to avenge the deaths of two Hebron activists, one
Islamic Jihad and the other Hamas, at the hands of IDF troops. Two days later, Israeli
helicopters struck in Gaza again. This time, there was no collateral killing. The target was Ismail Abu Shanab, a senior leader
of Hamas. He and his two bodyguards died in their car under a hail of rockets.