Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (87 page)

By early 2004, the police had come to believe there had in fact been a
third
transfer to the Sharon brothers, also apparently of $1.5 million—making $4.5 million in all—and this last sum seemed to have remained with the family after they had paid off their bank loan and paid back Cyril Kern. The police suggested that Sharon’s old Israeli-American friend
Arie Genger, who, it turned out, had lent money to Kern in the past, was involved. So, they believed, was
Martin Schlaff, the reclusive Austrian-Jewish businessman and part owner of the casino at Jericho together with the Palestinian Authority, and, as it now turned out, together with BAWAG, too. Were Genger, and perhaps Schlaff, involved in the
original
donations, through the U.S. front companies, for the 1999 election campaign? If so, the whole saga was an elaborate loop. Genger was questioned and asserted his right to remain silent.
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With Vienna inhospitable and Genger inscrutable, the police could only try to force the equally uncooperative Gilad to furnish the information they lacked. In June 2003, at police request, a Tel Aviv magistrate had ordered Gilad to produce all the documents in his possession connected with the investigation. He refused. This was an attempt, he argued, to unseat his father undemocratically. In August, another magistrate ruled that he couldn’t refuse. He was asserting his right to stay silent on the grounds that he might incriminate someone else (his father). But the law, wrote Magistrate
Daniella Shirizli, recognized only the grounds of not incriminating oneself. He must produce the documents forthwith.

Gilad obtained from another magistrate a stay of execution pending his appeal from the first magistrate to a higher court. But the second magistrate ruled that he must deposit the documents in a court safe for the time being. Gilad appealed
this
ruling before yet another court. If he agreed to deposit the documents, he argued, he would be admitting he had them in his possession. But he had made no such admission, insisting on his right to silence. This second appeal was accepted in the Tel Aviv District Court on August 13, 2003. Now the state appealed,
and in December 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that Gilad must hand over all the documents to a magistrate, who would decide which of them could be read by the police and which would remain protected by Gilad’s right to silence.

Gilad grudgingly turned over some documents, but the prosecutors claimed they were ones that the police had anyway, whereas the ones the police wanted, Gilad had failed to provide. Among these latter were documents and bank statements relating to a company called Charnington Ltd., which Gilad and Cyril Kern had apparently set up in 2002 as a vehicle for doing business together (or, as the police suspected, for transferring illicit moneys).

In February 2004, the Tel Aviv District Court ordered Gilad to instruct BAWAG to send him all the relevant statements regarding the money transfers and regarding Charnington Ltd. and to hand them over to the police. Yet again, he appealed to the Supreme Court. There, finally, on March 29, 2004, five justices held against him and ruled that he must hand over documents and tapes connected to both the Cyril Kern affair and the
Greek island affair. His lawyer announced that he would have to contact “various third parties such as the Austrian bank” and ask them for the documents. “But no one says they’re going to give them to us.”

The police, meanwhile, raided the offices of a lawyer and an accountant in Tel Aviv thought to have set up Charnington Ltd. for Gilad and Kern and impounded documents and computers. In April 2004, the prosecutors were back in Magistrate
Daniella Shirizli’s court, arguing that lawyer-client privilege should not apply to at least some of this material. For the first time, they referred explicitly to
Martin Schlaff, who, they said, was believed to have paid money into Charnington ostensibly for “consultancy work” undertaken by Gilad and Kern. The material they wanted could throw light, they said, on the intimate relationship between Schlaff and the Sharons.

On May 6, 2004, Gilad informed the court that he had no written record regarding consultancy services he had performed in return for $3 million that had been deposited in his account in Austria. The contract had been verbal, he explained. “Three million dollars are deposited in your account,” asked the prosecutor, “and you don’t remember seeing any document relating to the source of this fee?” Gilad: “There is no such document because all the agreements were made orally, but …” “
Don’t say ‘but,’ 
” Gilad’s lawyer, David Libai, cut in. “Nothing in writing?” the prosecutor persisted. “After all, it is $3 million.” “Well, maybe it was mentioned in a fax. I don’t remember.”

On July 4, Judge Shirizli ruled that Gilad had fulfilled his duty under
the court order to hand over the documents in his possession regarding the Cyril Kern affair. The yearlong battle in the courts seemed to have ended, at least for the moment. Gilad had emerged unscathed, or at any rate unprosecuted.

But in the court of public opinion, in the salons and the streets of Israel, and most especially among the settlers and their political hinterland, the suspicions against the Sharons became the shrillest battle cry against the prime minister’s disengagement policy. Settler activists who for years, indeed for decades, had celebrated Arik Sharon as their hero and their leader, regularly dismissing all his various brushes with the law as the lies and slanders of the Left, now embraced the latest slew of allegations against him with holy zeal.

Zvi Hendel of the National Union, the only Knesset member who actually lived in a settlement in the Gaza Strip, captured this upsurge of righteous indignation with a sound bite that became an instant slogan: “The depth of the disengagement is as the depth of the investigation.”
^e
Sharon, he explained, was “a base and corrupt man.” Sharon had only dreamed up the disengagement when it seemed that the family would be prosecuted over the
Greek island affair. Hendel laid it on with all the rancor of a jilted lover. “For years he [Sharon] called us the salt of the earth, and now he spits in our faces and kicks us in the head with a great muddy boot.”
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So prevalent did this alleged nexus between the “affairs” and the disengagement become, especially on the political right, that when the attorney general announced his decision in June 2004 to close the Greek island file, the joke around the Knesset was that Sharon responded: “If I’d have known that, I’d never have started with this disengagement.”

The campaign to impugn Sharon’s motives was to continue unabated long after Sharon himself had physically collapsed and his government had come to a peremptory end. In the settler community and its hinterland, his corruption and its purportedly causal effect on his policy making became axiomatic, almost articles of religious faith.

The settler leaders’ dissemination of the “depth … depth” theory was all the more cynical and manipulative because it was they themselves, years earlier, who had been the first to sense—and to
warn—that Sharon was showing signs of softening on the Palestinian question. Yet that was long before the “affairs” crashed down on him. Moreover, the one man among their leadership who had developed a genuine intimacy with Sharon over the years, Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever, flatly rejected the “depth … depth” theory. In a documentary film made after the disengagement in which he was interviewed extensively, Zambish pointedly refused to support or give any credence to this allegation. Sharon, he insisted, had acted in what he believed—wrongly in the view of the settlers, but sincerely—was Israel’s national interest.
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By contrast, Sharon found himself suddenly basking in the warm approbation of
media at home and abroad—the same media that over the years had expended millions of words criticizing and excoriating him. Soon enough, this unwonted media praise was itself adduced by Sharon’s opponents on the right to reinforce the “depth … depth” theory. The disengagement, they claimed, was a sophisticated ploy designed to play to the largely dovish press gallery in order to soften coverage of and commentary on the “affairs.” The
etrogization
argument advanced by the former chief of staff
Moshe Ya’alon became a central part of the public debate surrounding the disengagement.

Sharon himself, for all his ostensibly contemptuous indifference to the alternative narrative and its various purveyors, did put on record one blunt rebuttal of it as he set out on this last act of his life’s drama. “There is no connection,” he told political reporters on February 4, “between the disengagement from Gaza and the police investigations. I am doing the disengagement not because of the investigations, but in spite of them.”
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The
political fight to stop the disengagement began within days of the interview with
Yoel Marcus.
Yisrael Katz, once Sharon’s street-smart political fixer, subsequently a Bibi man, and now the minister of agriculture but trying his best to befriend both rivals, proposed a referendum among the membership of the Likud Party. His reasoning was subtle—subtly insidious, some of Sharon’s advisers feared—and could not easily be dismissed. “We have some 300,000 party members across the country,” Katz argued. (In fact there were just under 200,000.) “A Likud prime minister must be able to show that his policy has the support of the majority of his own voters.”
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Sharon, assured by his pollsters of the broad national support his
new policy was attracting, would ideally have preferred a nationwide plebiscite. He knew that the narrower the voter base, the more susceptible it would be to a pavement-pounding, door-knocking campaign by young settlers and their urban sympathizers. He feared their efficacy and their contagious zeal. But there was no provision for an ad hoc nationwide plebiscite under existing law, and Attorney General Mazuz ruled that one could not therefore be held using the existing election machinery. Special legislation would have to be drafted and passed in the Knesset—a veritable invitation for endless filibusters and other foot-dragging contrivances. The Likud, on the other hand, as an independent political party, could organize a referendum among its members without any need for legislation.

By March 2004, the right wing of the Likud Knesset faction was in open revolt and threatening to withhold their votes from government legislation in the house. The coalition partners further to the right, the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu and the National Religious Party, were already bucking the coalition whip almost daily. A policy statement by the prime minister on March 15 was approved by an embarrassing majority of one: 46 votes to 45. Labor and Meretz were still voting as opposition parties. Shimon Peres, the Labor leader, encouraged Sharon to move ahead with his
disengagement plan and expand it to the West Bank. He made it clear to Sharon that when it came to the test, Labor would side with him.
Yossi Sarid, the head of Meretz, said he didn’t believe it would ever actually come to the test. “There’s no plan and there never was. There won’t be any disengagement in the foreseeable future.” But Sarid, too, despite his skepticism, promised (hypothetical) support. “If any practical step is actually submitted to the Knesset, if we see a single settlement moving, we’ll vote in favor.”
⁸

At a session of the Likud Party convention in Tel Aviv on March 30, Sharon, facing
Edna Arbel’s recommended indictment, was given a rousing ovation. But when he spoke of his disengagement plan, the clapping turned to boos. Clearly he had no majority for it in this forum. He announced, to general approbation, that he would accept Yisrael Katz’s proposal for a party-wide referendum in the interests of preserving party unity. The result, he declared, “will obligate every representative of the party, starting with me.”

The Yesha (Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) Council, the settlement umbrella body generously funded by the state, swung into action. The Likud voters registry was “divided up” among the settlers of the Gaza Strip. Every settler family, beefed up by youngsters from the West Bank settlements, “adopted” a cluster of five eligible voters. They would phone them, e-mail them, visit their homes,
befriend their families, inundate them with material about the idyllic, pastoral life in the Gaza communities that Sharon proposed cruelly to eradicate.

Sharon’s strategy of persuasion was three-pronged. First, he argued, the disengagement plan itself was sad but eminently sensible in the long run because there was
no
prospect in
any
conceivable peace arrangement of Israelis remaining in Gaza. “What have we got to look for there?” became the slangy, unofficial slogan of the disengagement. (The official slogan, proposed by
Reuven Adler, was “The disengagement—good for Israel.”) It was a favorite phrase of Shaul Mofaz, the popular, intifada-fighting chief of staff who now stood alongside Sharon as his defense minister and, significantly, as his outspoken backer in the disengagement venture.

Second, both Sharon and Mofaz made it brutally clear that the army would not be scurrying out of Gaza in disarray, as it had—in their view, at any rate—out of south Lebanon in May 2000.
Hamas, unlike
Hezbollah in Lebanon, would not be able to claim it had driven Israel out. On March 22, the air force took aim again at Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic Hamas leader. This time, using
rockets, it did not err. The sheikh in his wheelchair and nine others, among them his bodyguards, were killed in a street outside a mosque just after dawn prayers. At the Likud convention on March 30, the first wave of cheering for Sharon broke out when the chairman,
Yisrael Katz, thanked him “for the decision to eliminate Sheikh Yassin.”

Less than a month later the rocket-firing
helicopters struck again, assassinating Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, as he drove through
Gaza City. The United States said it was “deeply troubled” by the sheikh’s killing, but its ambassador at the UN,
John Negroponte, vetoed a Security Council resolution that sought to condemn Israel for the action but was “silent,” as the U.S. envoy explained, “about terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas.” Between March and May, in addition to the high-profile assassinations, the army mounted penetration raids and sharpshooter ambushes deep inside the Gaza
refugee camps, taking a heavy toll of armed militants.
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