Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (14 page)

Sharon pulled through emotionally, thanks in large part to Lily. “The hardest times were at night,” he writes, “when sleep was impossible and the scene played and replayed itself in my head. Awake during the nights, Lily and I cried together. During the day there was work, then at home if we did not talk about it we could hold the pain inside. But once we would start to talk, it was impossible to put a barrier to the tears. Neither of us could find any comfort or relief from the terrible grief.”

Lily nevertheless often complained over the years to their friend—who had been Gali’s friend and now, with the two tragic deaths in the family, grew ever closer to Lily—that Arik refused to talk about Gur, that he kept his bereavement bottled up. In the trunk of his car he carried a rake, a hoe, and a watering can. When he passed the graveyard, he would take them out, tend the double grave site, and shed a silent tear.
³¹
He organized an annual horse race in memory of his boy, who loved to ride; but he never spoke, even there, about Gur.
³²

Once, many years later, he let a rare shaft of light into this dark place in his soul. It was during an interview
as prime minister on
Israel TV Channel 2 in 2003. Looking at family snapshots, the interviewer, Rafi Reshef, gingerly referred to Gur. “He looks like a lovely boy,” he ventured.

“Yes, he really was a lovely boy,” the prime minister replied.

Arik Sharon’s efforts to colonize the captured territories, which were to preoccupy him for much of the remainder of his public life, began before the Six-Day War had even ended. “As soon as I heard that
Samaria and
Judea were liberated,” he wrote in
Warrior,
“I had cabled instructions to the commander of the infantry school to move from the base in
Netanya to a captured
Jordanian army camp near Shechem. That was the first one I moved.”

“Shechem,” which Sharon deliberately used in his English text, is the biblical Hebrew name for the large West Bank town known in Arabic and English as Nablus. The religious and nationalistic yearnings to annex the West Bank were reinforced from the outset of this decades-long and still unresolved political struggle by the less biblical, more rational contention that the territories were crucial for Israel’s defense. Given the enmity of the surrounding Arab states, it was argued, Israel was indefensible in its pre–Six-Day War borders. At one point, opposite Netanya on the Mediterranean coast, the country was less than ten miles wide.

Settlements, usually
kibbutzim and
moshavim, had been Zionism’s way of staking out its claim to the land from its earliest days. After independence in 1948, the leadership continued to see settlements along the borders—inhabited first by soldier-farmers, then by immigrant-farmers—as the surest way to secure and solidify the 1948 armistice lines.

This settlement tradition, espoused mainly by the Labor Zionists who had dominated Jewish life and politics in
Palestine both before and after independence, was now almost naturally espoused by all those who sought, for religious, nationalist, or security reasons—for many of them, it was an amalgam of all three—to perpetuate Israel’s control over the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and strategic parts of Sinai).

Right from the start, though, such settlement ran into Arab and
international opposition. The Arabs saw it, correctly, as a strategy ultimately designed to expand the borders of Israel at their expense. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 requiring Israel’s “withdrawal … from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and at the same time acknowledging “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Israel argued that the resolution did not specify withdrawal from “all the territories” or even from “the territories”—just from “territories,” meaning there was scope for adjustments. These needed to be negotiated between the parties, Israel maintained; that was the meaning of “secure and recognized boundaries.”

Much of Israeli policy in the years and decades that followed the Six-Day War has been focused—though this was not often articulated—on how to avoid, allay, or weather international disapproval of Israeli settlement in the post-1967 territories while at the same time allowing the settlements to multiply and grow. “Allowing” covers a multitude of nuanced attitudes adopted over the years by various Israeli governments, of various ideological persuasions, to the diplomatic and legal problems posed by settlements and, in more recent years, to the domestic political power wielded by the growing settler constituency.

Sharon was brilliantly quick in grasping the dilemmas inherent in the Israeli yearning to settle the newly acquired territories—and in devising the first solution to get around them: army training camps. As the head of training, he was perfectly placed to implement his solution, which turned out to be no less than historic in affecting the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict for decades ahead. “Within a few months I was able to transfer quite a few [of the military training schools]: the infantry school, the engineering school, the military police school, part of the artillery school, the main basic training school for new recruits, the paratrooper recruit school, and others.”

These military schools usually took over strategically positioned and now abandoned
Arab Legion camps. But—and this was the long-term point—they naturally grew in size, and some became in time the nuclei of large civilian settlements in the populated Palestinian heartlands. At first, these civilian settlements were ostensibly mere adjuncts of the army bases, inhabited by people who provided various necessary services to the base. Gradually, though, they filled out, with families, with other settlers more loosely connected to the neighboring base, and finally with settlers not connected at all to the base, which by this time had itself become the adjunct of a swiftly expanding settlement.

If it had been up to Prime Minister Eshkol, there might well have
been a deal with Jordan. King Hussein kept up discreet contacts with Israel despite the “Khartoum Noes.”
^e
But Dayan, the defense minister, was loath to cede the West Bank, theorizing instead about a “functional” sharing of sovereignty. Another key figure in the government, Deputy Prime Minister
Yigal Allon, compiled a plan for the return of most of the West Bank to Jordan but with Israel keeping the
Jordan valley, the area around
Jerusalem, and a strip running along the narrow sections of the pre-1967 line.

The
Allon Plan, as it became known, was always rejected by the king. But it became the effective blueprint for civilian settlement in the territories during the ten years of Labor rule that followed the war. Settlement was encouraged along the torrid and inhospitable Jordan valley, around Jerusalem, and at sites close to the former borderline. This was apart from large housing projects for Jews in
East—that is, formerly Jordanian—Jerusalem. Israel formally annexed the eastern part of the city and sizable swaths of land around it immediately after the war, declaring the much-enlarged municipality its eternal and indivisible capital.

The “national camp,” still a minority but growing, never acquiesced in the Labor governments’ limitations on Jewish settlement. Partisan settlement efforts were sporadically attempted in areas beyond the Allon Plan, and, as we shall see, some took root during Yitzhak Rabin’s first government (1974–1977). Sharon’s training bases with their seeds of civilian adjuncts grew to become a means for the government and the army to circumvent their own Allon Plan restrictions.

T
hough severely mauled and deeply humiliated, Egypt was not giving up the long-term struggle against Israel. The occupation of Sinai and the paralysis of the
Suez Canal—once again, as in 1956, Egypt deliberately sank ships in the waterway—made that struggle now all the more pressing. On June 22, 1967, barely two weeks after the defeat, Nasser told the Soviet president, “Because the Israelis are now in Sinai, we are building up our defences on the west bank of the Canal. If the Israelis refuse to leave peacefully, sooner or later we’ll have to fight them to get them out.”
³³

Even before the war was over, Nasser’s Soviet patrons began pouring in new arms to replenish Egypt’s stockpiles. New and better planes and tanks arrived in the following months, accompanied by more than a thousand Soviet advisers to help assimilate them. In September, the
Arab League, meeting in Khartoum, vowed “No recognition, No negotiation, No peace” with Israel.

As if to demonstrate how vigorous and unbowed they still were, the Egyptians torpedoed and sank an Israeli destroyer off Port Said on October 21, 1967. Israel retaliated by shelling oil refineries and petrochemical plants at
Suez. After this exchange, a tense quiet settled on the front for the following year. But President Nasser and his generals made it clear that once their army was fully refurbished, they intended to resume active hostilities and engage Israel in a sustained “
war of attrition” on the canal front.

The first installment came unannounced on September 8, 1968. “The Egyptians launched a massive artillery attack on the sector from
Kantara northward,” writes Major General Avraham “Bren” Adan in his Yom Kippur War memoir,
On the Banks of the Suez
. “Our troops entered their defensive bunkers, but these had been prepared very amateurishly. Many were easily penetrated by the Egyptian artillery shells. So we suffered ten killed and eighteen wounded in one day, a heavy price by Israeli standards. This artillery barrage came as a surprise and jolted the IDF Headquarters … On October 26 there was another massive Egyptian artillery barrage, this time across the entire front line and over a period of nine hours. Fifteen of our men were killed and thirty-four wounded.”
³⁴

Chief of Staff Bar-Lev now ordered General Adan, “at the head of an inter-service team, to bring to the
General Staff a proposal for the creation of a
defensive system in Sinai.”
³⁵
Chaim Herzog, a leading military historian and a future president of the state, treads ever so carefully as he recounts the beginnings of the “
Bar-Lev Line,” the defensive system in Sinai that was the focus of huge controversy four years later, at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War.

The question was a classic one: Was the IDF to defend Sinai from the water’s edge, which would mean building much stronger fortifications along the canal, or was it to rely on mobile defensive forces deployed farther back, beyond effective artillery range? Adan’s team was to consult with the CO of Southern Command,
Shaike Gavish. But, Herzog hints, Gavish’s mind was already made up. “Gavish came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to hold positions on the waterfront, particularly at all points which were probable crossing areas for the Egyptians. Furthermore, since the Israeli concept invariably called for mounting a counter-offensive into the enemy’s territory, it was important for [the Israelis] to sit in force along the Canal itself and not be in a position which would require fighting before they reached it.”

Adan’s final recommendation, which was adopted, was “a combination
of the two systems of defense”: position defense and mobile defense. He insists in his book that the strongpoints along the canal “were never planned to prevent a canal crossing or serve as a defensive line. They were only a warning line. The defensive role would fall to the armored forces in reserve.”

Sharon presents a very different story. In his account, Adan’s series of fortifications, or
ma’ozim,
fortresses, as they were called in Hebrew, were designed both to serve as forward observation posts
and
“to help stop the Egyptians on the water line, before they could establish any significant presence in the Sinai.” He and Tal, alone among the generals, Sharon writes, consistently and unequivocally opposed this concept and argued in favor of a mobile defense.
^f

The crescendo came in April 1969. “During one of our regular Monday General Headquarters meetings … a particularly acrimonious exchange erupted…[F]or Bar-Lev it was apparently the last straw. That same evening he called a second meeting,” Sharon recalls.