Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (82 page)

Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced the obvious: the
hudna
was finished. “Israel has a right to defend herself,” the White House spokesman commented coldly. Secretary of State Powell and John Wolf desperately urged Abu Mazen and his lieutenants to crack down on the Islamist militants and avert a new round of terror and reprisals. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,”
Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza commander, assured the U.S. envoy. “I’ll start tonight, I’ve got my men ready.” But Arafat would not let him use his men against the militants. Arafat refused to endorse the agreement with Israel transferring security control in four more West Bank cities. Days later, inevitably, Abu Mazen resigned. In a parting speech before a tense and stormy
Palestinian parliament in Ramallah on September 6, with angry demonstrators battling his security men outside, the moderate, well-meaning leader laid the main
burden of blame for his failure on Arafat, for refusing to forgo his powers and enable the new prime minister to govern.

Abu Mazen had made a start, however modest, on the huge job of uprooting the corruption and maladministration that had entrenched themselves in Arafat’s PA. Several particularly degenerate police officers were removed. Traffic cops returned to city streets. Jails were fixed up; courts resumed functioning with a semblance of due process. No less important, his minister of finance,
Salam Fayyad, a former official of the
World Bank and later of the
International Monetary Fund, began to forge a rational and effective system of budgeting and administration, with civil servants and security men paid into their bank accounts rather than by cash handouts from their bosses. In many ways, as it turned out later, the short-lived Abu Mazen–Salam Fayyad partnership in 2003 was a forerunner of their much longer and much more effective cooperation—the one as president of the PA, the other as prime minister—later in the decade.

In later interviews, Abu Mazen tended to soften his verdict on Arafat and to attach more of the blame for the collapse of the
hudna
and of his prime ministerial experiment to Sharon and the Americans (not, however, to himself). Many Israelis in the peace camp agreed with his criticism of Sharon’s behavior during these potentially transformational—but wasted—months. In June, Sharon knew Abu Mazen was negotiating earnestly with Hamas to achieve a
hudna
. Yet he referred to him as “a chick that’s not yet grown feathers.” Until he grew feathers, Sharon continued insultingly, Israel would take care of terrorism itself. His aides made sure the slighting remark, made at cabinet, was immediately leaked.

In another comment about Abu Mazen around this time, no less inane but more telling, Sharon observed that “Abu Mazen, too, is still an Arab.” This provides an unguarded glimpse into the deep reservoir of his distaste and distrust for the neighboring nation. That never changed, even though his policy on an eventual accommodation with the Palestinians changed so radically. It helps to explain—though not to excuse—his shortsighted approach to Abu Mazen’s prime ministership in 2003 and his inexplicable, almost perverse failure to coordinate the Gaza withdrawal with President Abu Mazen—Arafat was dead by then—in 2005. Unilateralism, as we shall see, was presented by Sharon and his aides as a policy of last resort in the absence of a credible negotiating partner. In fact, though, in a very profound way, for Sharon it was a policy of first resort, even of first choice.

Sharon’s single most frustrating refusal from Abu Mazen’s point of view was to release a significant number of prisoners as part of the
hudna
package. Israel held thousands of Palestinians in its jails. To the Palestinians many of them were political prisoners or freedom fighters. To the Israelis they were members of illegal organizations or outright terrorists. Sharon laid down as his basic guideline that “terrorists with blood on their hands” would not be freed. That still left plenty of scope for a generous gesture that, more than anything else, would have shored up Abu Mazen’s standing on his own side. In the event, Israel released only four hundred men, most of whom were serving relatively short sentences that were anyway nearing completion.

The ostensible removal of settlement-outposts, many of which were back in business the morning after their forcible “dismantlement” by the army, was another protracted and gratuitous insult to Abu Mazen of which the Palestinians became quickly and acutely aware. A list of outposts purportedly evacuated turned out to comprise lone shacks, uninhabited, which the settlers themselves offered to take down in “deals” with the Defense Ministry. Sharon’s lofty rhetoric about the rule of law and his solemn promises to the Americans were honored in the breach.
¹¹

With the
hudna
dead, the tit for tat of terror and reprisal resumed. On September 6, an IAF warplane dropped a half-ton bomb on a building in
Gaza City. Israeli intelligence had hard information that
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and all the top Hamas leadership would be meeting inside. There were long discussions over the appropriate ordnance; no one wanted a repeat of the Shehadeh disaster.
^d
The bomb destroyed the third floor, where the meeting was understood to be taking place. In fact it was held on the ground floor, perhaps because of the difficulty of getting Sheikh Yassin’s wheelchair upstairs. Yassin and the fourteen others escaped almost unscathed.

“Israel will pay a high price for this crime,” the quadriplegic cleric warned. Three days later two
suicide bombers took fifteen lives:
in Tel Aviv, a bomber exploded alongside a group of off-duty soldiers waiting for rides;
in Jerusalem, a father and daughter were among the dead in a wrecked café. The next day, Israel struck from the air again in Gaza, rocketing the home of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar. His son and a bodyguard were killed and two dozen others injured; Zahar himself escaped. On October 5, a woman suicide bomber from
Jenin killed twenty-one customers in a restaurant in Haifa. Fifty more were injured.

Sharon suspended all dealings with the PA government. After Abu Mazen’s departure, Arafat installed the much more pliant Abu Ala
(Ahmed Qureia) in the post of “prime minister with executive powers,” but it was clear to all that real power continued to reside with the
rais
. Sharon refused to meet with Arafat. He pushed through cabinet a resolution “to remove this obstacle [that is, Arafat] in the manner and time of our choosing.” But the Americans had not removed their objection to Arafat’s physical elimination. The
rais
remained in the
muqata
. The
road map was turning into a dead letter.

On October 15, the
United States suffered its own casualties from Gazan terror. A massive roadside bomb ripped through an armored van, killing three security men. They were escorting an American cultural attaché whose assignment was to interview applicants for Fulbright scholarships. The State Department promptly banned all further travel by its personnel to Gaza.

While there had clearly been a disappointing setback on the Palestinian side, Washington was losing patience with both sides. Moreover, as the initial, sweeping success of the Iraq invasion turned to ashes, accusations proliferated that somehow Israel or its sympathizers in America had dragged the administration into the war. Yasser Arafat was one of the earliest to charge that Israel actively “incited” in favor of war against Iraq.
¹²

It was a charge echoed at the time both on the right and on the left of American politics.
Bill Keller of
The New York Times
ridiculed it. “A less conspiracy-minded observer,” he wrote, “might point out that the long-standing Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the fact that our interests coincide with Israel’s does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president’s brain … What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is—to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire—good for the
Jews.”
¹³
But as the postwar occupation of Iraq went from bad to worse, the innuendo began to hurt. The strategic fallout, moreover, looked less good for the Jews in Israeli eyes. The
Mossad feared that terror operatives now streaming to Iraq from all over the Middle East would, in time, filter into Jordan and Lebanon and join the Palestinian intifada against Israel.

The gathering gloom on the diplomatic front was exacerbated by another turn for the worse in Israel’s economic woes. Netanyahu’s tough medicine earlier in the year was not working yet; another dose was needed. Many families were hurting badly. People who had managed in the past to keep their heads above water, just, now found themselves slipping into real poverty as vital welfare subsidies for children, for old people, for
single mothers, for the unemployed, were all slashed. A single mother from the small
Negev town of Mitzpe
Ramon, Vikki Knafo, caught the national mood when she struck out, in the blazing heat of July, on a long, lonely march to the capital to protest her inability to provide for her three young children. By the time she arrived, she had become an icon. Some six hundred other single mothers joined her in a tent encampment outside the Finance Ministry. Netanyahu refused to meet her. But his advisers were seriously worried over the image of heartlessness that her protest was tarring him with. Inevitably, it rubbed off on Sharon, too. His poll figures and those of the government began to slide.

“W
hen sorrows come,” as Sharon the ardent theatergoer must have heard more than once from King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” While the wiliness of Arafat, the weakness of Abu Mazen, and the troubles of the economy were all known or predictable challenges, he now ran into a flurry of awkward and unexpected episodes that sapped his public standing. That pattern was not starkly clear at the time as events moved along in their ragged way. It has been reconstructed subsequently, perhaps too obsessively, by commentators seeking the key to Sharon’s cataclysmic move at year’s end that suddenly changed everything.

The first unpredicted blow came in September 2003, from an unexpected source. A group of twenty-seven pilots in the air force reserves signed a letter declaring, “We, veteran pilots and pilots still on active service … object to carrying out illegal and immoral attacks … in the territories.” They sent it to the commander of the air force, General
Dan Halutz, with a copy to
Yedioth Ahronoth,
where it appeared as the cover story of the paper’s popular magazine,
Seven Days,
on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “We, for whom the IDF and specifically the IAF are inseparable parts of our lives, refuse to continue hitting innocent civilians. Such actions … are the direct result of long
occupation which corrupts all of Israeli society. The continuing occupation mortally damages Israel’s security and its moral strength.” The pilots claimed there was a great deal of “gray refusal” in the air force. Many reserve pilots, they told reporters, and even some still in full-time uniform, found quiet ways to opt out of bombing or rocketing missions in the territories. They ended their letter with a declaration: “We will continue to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and in the Israel Air Force on any mission for the defense of the State of Israel.”

This inspired another embarrassing and worrisome protest from within the nation’s elite. Three months later, thirteen reservists from
the semisecret Sayeret Matkal commando announced that they, too, would “no longer participate in the regime of oppression in the territories.” In a letter addressed directly to Sharon (with a copy to the media), they wrote of their “deep anxiety for the future of the State of Israel as a democratic, Zionist, and
Jewish state and for its moral and ethical character.” They declared that they were no longer “prepared to serve as a defensive shield” for the policy of expanding the settlements. “We will not take part in depriving millions of people of their human rights. We will not corrupt our own humanity in the service of an army of occupation. We can no longer remain silent.” They signed off with their unit’s motto, “Who Dares Succeeds,” which had thrilled generations of the best Israeli youth striving to win a place in this most exclusive unit, its exploits shrouded in martial mystique.

The Sayeret protest was made public on December 22. But it had been in the making for weeks. And meanwhile, if the reserve pilots and commandos could be dismissed or at least pigeonholed as a bunch of leftists, nothing of that applied to another high-profile group who inveighed against the corroding evil of the occupation and the shortsightedness of the Sharon government. They were four former chiefs of the Shin Bet security service:
Avraham Shalom (1980–1986), Ya’akov Peri (1988–1995),
Carmi Gillon (1995–1996), and
Ami Ayalon (1996–2000). They didn’t all especially like each other, as Gillon explained to the
Yedioth Ahronoth
journalists Sima Kadmon and Alex Fishman on November 14. But they had decided to come together to do this unique joint interview, run across the cover and five inside pages of
Yedioth
’s weekend political supplement, because they truly believed the country was endangering its future.
¹⁴

“If we don’t give up the goal of ‘
Greater Israel,’ ” said Shalom, “and if we don’t stop treating the other side in the disgraceful way we do, and if we don’t start understanding that he, too, has feelings and that he, too, is suffering—then we’re on the way to the abyss.” What was “disgraceful”? the two reporters asked. The roadblocks? “Everything. Everything is disgraceful,” Shalom replied. “We humiliate the Palestinian all the time, individually and collectively.” This from the head of a service that had famously honed humiliation into a supereffective technique of interrogation and intimidation. But there was more. All four ex-chiefs criticized the fundamental paradigm of Sharon’s policy: first crush terror, then move to negotiation. It was a mistake, said Gillon. “No, you’re wrong,” said Shalom. “It’s an excuse.”

All four agreed that there would have to be a showdown with the settlers. But they maintained that the great majority of settlers, if treated empathetically, if praised for their pioneering spirit and offered
reasonable compensation, would leave quietly. “Arik Sharon’s the one who can do it,” said Peri. “The man who built the settlements is the man who can dismantle them. He keeps talking about painful concessions. This is the painful concession he must make: taking down the settlements.” Ayalon added: “The obsession of today’s policy making about whether we have a partner on the other side is a huge mistake. In the present terrible situation, with people being killed in restaurants and buses, the only way forward is unilaterally. If Israel, tomorrow morning, got up and got out of the Gaza Strip, and seriously started taking down illegal settlements [on the West Bank], I believe, based on many years of intimate knowledge, that the Palestinians would come to the negotiating table.”