Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (95 page)

Yet to an important extent the dispiriting aftermath of the Gaza disengagement was Sharon’s fault as much as his successor’s. Sharon left the job half done not only because he was struck down before he could complete it but also because he failed to build strong and lasting foundations that would have made the unilateral disengagement from Gaza the indestructible basis of a two-state solution to the conflict. Sharon’s high-handedness toward the Palestinians sowed the flaws in the disengagement that eroded its historic significance for both peoples.

Even though his basic strategic decision was that Israel must act unilaterally, there was room—and need—for close coordination on a tactical level with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon’s disdain for “the Arabs” meant that he did not sufficiently apply himself to this aspect of the disengagement. There was enough coordination, mainly in the form of dire threats, to ensure that not a shot was fired by any Palestinian militant group in Gaza throughout the period of the actual disengagement. But Israel could have done much more to help ensure that the PA security forces took firm control of the Gaza Strip in the wake of the IDF’s departure. In the event, Hamas and its allies were able to strengthen their deployment, in defiance of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas and
Islamic Jihad militants seemed able to resume firing their Qassam rockets and mortar shells over the border almost at will.

Sharon’s high-handedness and insensitivity toward the PA caused or at least contributed to Israel’s failure to implement an elaborate agreement on access, trade, and communications with Gaza in the immediate follow-up to the disengagement.
Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, spent long hours in Israel in mid-November 2005 personally negotiating the clauses. She called the deal “a major step forward” that would allow the Palestinians to “live ordinary lives” and would establish a new “pattern of cooperation” between the two sides. “For the first time since 1967, Palestinians will gain control over entry and exit from their territory,” she said.
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The agreement provided for the implementation, after years of delay, of the “safe passage” between Gaza and the West Bank that Israel had undertaken to establish under the
Oslo Accords. A detailed schedule of bus routes and timetables was worked out under Rice’s urging. But it soon fell into disuse as Israel reacted to repeated rocket fire and terror
attacks by shutting down or constricting access to Gaza. There was logic in this position, but it bred bitter disillusionment on the other side and played into the hands of the Palestinian opposition, Hamas.

Was it Sharon’s shortsighted disdain for the Palestinian Authority that engendered his relative passivity, too, in the face of Hamas’s determination to run in
Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2006? He did protest to the Americans. He demanded that Hamas be required to lay down its weapons and amend its charter calling for the elimination of the Jewish state as the preconditions for its eligibility. The Americans’ “passion for
democracy is so fervent,” he complained, “some of them believe that the simple fact of holding elections is enough to found a democracy.”
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Had he thrown the full weight of his post-disengagement prestige behind his argument with Washington, the outcome might have been different. As it was, Hamas emerged victorious from the election in January. A year later, after attempts at
Fatah-Hamas unity rule, violent clashes broke out in Gaza between the two Palestinian movements. PA-Fatah forces were roundly defeated, and Hamas set up its own Islamic regime in the Strip. Israel in response imposed a partial siege on the Strip, preventing exports and drastically limiting imports in the vain hope of toppling the Hamas government.

Sharon’s ineffective response in the face of the resumed rocket fire from Gaza continues to trouble and mystify his close aides and political supporters to the present day. “I am not prepared for this to continue!” he fumed at cabinet on September 24, slamming his fist down on the table. The cabinet had been convened on a Saturday night after a flurry of Qassam rockets rained down on the township of
Sderot, close to
Sycamore Ranch. “For three years I’ve been asking you to deploy half a battery and start shooting,” he admonished the military commanders.

But the attorney general ruled—as Sharon knew he would—that artillery fire into a built-up area would be illegal under the laws of war. “Do something tonight to put a stop to it!” Sharon demanded of the defense minister. “Er … I think it’s going to take longer than that,”
Shaul Mofaz replied quietly. Someone suggested a ground incursion. “We didn’t leave Gaza in order to go back in,” Sharon growled.
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He knew the rocket (and mortar) fire was threatening to discredit the disengagement in the Israeli public mind—the arena of its most telling and most significant success. But he had no simple solution. He could only rail and make vague threats. A friend and former adviser recalls talking to him on the car telephone one evening as he drove
home to the ranch. “Have you reached
Ashkelon?” the friend asked. “Do you see the lights of Gaza?” “Yes, I do,” Sharon replied. “Why do you? Why are the lights still on in Gaza when rockets are falling on
Sderot?! It was you who invented the idea of hitting their infrastructure. And it worked in the past!” “It’s going to happen,” Sharon replied. “You’ll see, it is going to happen.”
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But nothing happened as long as Sharon was in office. The sporadic rocket fire and limited IDF responses continued for years, until eventually the Olmert government launched a massive and controversial armored incursion into the Gaza Strip,
Operation Cast Lead, in December 2008.
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Persistent spinning by the settlers and by Netanyahu largely persuaded the Israeli public over the years that the disengagement had brought on the rocket fire. The fact that rockets had been fired before the disengagement, both at the Jewish
settlements inside the Gaza Strip and at towns and villages in sovereign Israel, was blurred. The fact that much higher casualties, civilian and military, were sustained before the disengagement than after was glossed over. It was undeniably true, though, that larger and more deadly rockets were smuggled into Gaza—and fired from Gaza into Israel—in the years after the disengagement. Steadily, their range increased, from Ashkelon to Ashdod to
Beersheba and, by 2012, to the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

The fall of Gaza into
Hamas’s hands seriously undermined the disengagement in the Israeli public’s mind. “We can’t make the same mistake in
Judea and Samaria” became Netanyahu’s watchword. It was catchy and seemed cogent. But it was founded on the tragic rupture of Sharon’s new strategy of unilateralism before it could be consummated.

Why didn’t Sharon encompass more of the West Bank in his first (and as it turned out, sadly, his only) disengagement? Why did he plump for the least ambitious of the alternative proposals presented to him? Weissglas, making the best case for his client, says the chief consideration was security. The Gaza Strip was effectively sealed off from Israel by a fence. The fence around the West Bank was still unfinished.

Unilateral disengagement from Gaza, therefore, was much more easily done. The army’s role in Gaza, moreover, was almost entirely a garrison role: guarding the settlements and protecting their access routes. Unlike in the West Bank, the troops did not enter the Palestinian
cities and refugee camps in the Gaza Strip to make arrests and generally enforce the occupation. The withdrawal, therefore, Weissglas argued, did not significantly weaken Israel’s security control of the Palestinians, because the army was not engaged in direct control over the Palestinians of Gaza in the years before the disengagement.

A good, lawyerlike case. But not good enough. Not good enough to explain why the rockets and mortar bombs from Gaza were allowed to resume. But also, and more important, not good enough to explain Sharon’s initial decision to go for a minimalist disengagement. Like Rabin at Oslo, Sharon proposed to leap the chasm between Palestinian occupation and Palestinian statehood in two bounds. Granted, he could not have evacuated all the outlying settlements, those beyond the “settlement blocs,” in one sweep. But he could have enunciated a clear and unequivocal plan to do so in stages. That would have dispelled doubts about his own intentions and instilled hope in place of skepticism among the Palestinians and the wider Arab world.

Still, the Gaza disengagement, for all its flaws and limitations, was a monumental change of direction for Israel. After decades of settling in the occupied territories and thus denying the Palestinians the prospect of independence, Israel began physically divesting itself of these territories and thus making space for the Palestinians to have their state, too. Despite subsequent disappointments and disillusionment on both sides, despite well-grounded criticism of how the disengagement was done, one precedent-setting fact stands out as indisputable: settlements
can
be dismantled and settlers removed. It is politically possible for an Israeli government to do it. Indeed, it is not even that difficult to do—provided there is the will, the strength, and the leadership to do it.

Sharon spent long years building the settlements and abetting the
settlers in their drive to impose the Jewish state on its Palestinian neighbors. Then, very late, he understood what this hubristic policy endangered: the very survival of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Despite the frustrating and heartbreaking regression in peace prospects in the years since the Gaza disengagement, the impact of his last, audacious act may yet prove irreversible. And if it does,
Zionism will have been saved.

H
ow many
children do you have?” Sharon asked his cabinet secretary,
Yisrael Maimon, and his director general,
Ilan Cohen. “Two,” Maimon answered quietly. Sharon knew the answer, but he was in a jolly, joshing mood. “Only two?! Go home! You heard what the professor said. Why are you wasting your time in meetings?”

The meeting just ended, on the afternoon of December 18, 2005, had been with Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a prominent Jerusalem sociologist who came with a team from a think tank to discuss Jewish demography. The scholar demonstrated with graphs and charts how dramatically Israel would benefit if ordinary (that is, not
haredi
) families had three or four children instead of an average of just over two. Sharon followed his arguments closely.

DellaPergola was delighted. Earlier in the year he had made an initial presentation to the prime minister and his staff, and Sharon, though friendly and welcoming, seemed to snooze through most of it. Now the prime minister gave the professor a hearty handshake and told his aide Lior Shilat, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “We must meet with these people again.”

The last visitor of the day was Shimon Peres, the vice prime minister, back from a trip to Europe. Later, Peres said he thought Sharon looked a little pale. When Peres left, Marit Danon came into the room with papers for the prime minister to sign. “We were talking. I asked him to decide about some event he was invited to, and suddenly I felt his speech was strange. I knew what it was; my late father had had a stroke.” She summoned Shilat to stay with Sharon while she went into the next room to phone Gilad and Sharon’s doctor,
Boleslav Goldman. “Bolek said, straight to hospital. But by the time I went back to his room, a matter of a minute or two, he was over it and behaving like at the end of any normal day. He said his polite good evenings to the
girls in the front office and headed out to the ranch. They didn’t notice anything.”
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But as soon as the convoy of cars started driving, Sharon felt dizzy again. Gilad, over the phone, instructed them to drive to
Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv, Dr. Goldman’s hospital. But Goldman, also by phone, countermanded that. “He sounds confused,” Goldman said. “Take him at once to the nearest hospital.” The convoy turned around and sped toward the
Hadassah Medical Center, on the western outskirts of Jerusalem.

When he was admitted, Sharon was still groggy. He couldn’t count his fingers or read his watch.
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But he quickly improved. The CT and MRI examinations showed a brief and minor stroke, a transient ischemic attack in medical language. He seemed to have survived unscathed. Still, for an overweight seventy-seven-year-old, with the burden of a country on his shoulders, a stroke, even a minor one, was no joke.