Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (42 page)

In August 1985, Sharon decided to share his impressions of the cabinet room with a group of Irgun veterans. “You cannot imagine the hatred for the settlers in
Judea and
Samaria that comes through at cabinet meetings,” he told the rightist old-timers. The government, which was trying to stop settlers from taking over more houses in the center of
Hebron, was conducting a “white paper policy,” he declared. The reference was to Britain’s infamous
White Paper of 1939 drastically limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase in
Palestine, just on the eve of World War II. There could hardly be a more infuriating comparison for this audience, indeed for any Zionists. But Sharon had more. “Peres and his gang can jump as far as I’m concerned,” he asserted, using a Hebrew sexual vulgarism.

Labor ministers urged Peres to fire Sharon. Shamir warned that would trigger a full-blown cabinet crisis if he did. Sharon delivered a wishy-washy apology of sorts. Peres proclaimed that such unbridled attacks made it impossible to continue with the unity government. But he did continue—until three months later, when Sharon struck again, this time blasting Peres’s
peace efforts as underhanded and pusillanimous. The cabinet was being kept in the dark. He, Sharon, had demanded that Israel insist on the removal of the PLO offices from
Amman as a precondition for talks with Jordan, “but I was answered with cynicism.” It was “no accident” that Peres did not explicitly rule out the PLO as a negotiating partner. Peres’s weak-kneed policies were also endangering the peace with Egypt.

Peres drafted a formal letter of dismissal and leaked a facsimile of it to the press. Shamir again threatened to bring down the unity government, but this time Peres called his bluff. Now it was Sharon’s turn to sweat. “I find it appropriate to clarify,” he meekly announced, “that if things I said were interpreted as a personal insult against the prime minister, I hereby apologize to him.” But he insisted on his right to hold his views “on critical policy issues.” Not good enough, said Peres’s bureau. Sharon duly added, live on camera: “I support the government’s policy as outlined in its Basic Policy document. Of course, I regret the harsh expressions that I used.” Still not good enough. Peres informed a special cabinet meeting of his decision to dismiss Sharon. Behind the scenes, Peres drew up the text of an apology that he wanted Sharon to sign. One key sentence expressed Sharon’s “confidence” in
Peres. Sharon said it was “demeaning.” But his support in cabinet was growing noticeably ragged. Nobody wanted to lose their jobs, and risk elections, over Sharon’s lip. Sharon wrote another letter, almost groveling.

A year later, on the eve of the rotation, and with many in Labor openly urging Peres to seize on Sharon’s latest insult and bring down the government, Shamir was worried. The Likud must “deal with” Sharon’s words, the soon-to-be prime minister told his Likud cabinet colleagues. Sharon’s words this time were particularly vicious. On Saturday, September 6, Palestinian terrorists had killed twenty-two worshippers in an Istanbul synagogue. They shot them indiscriminately with automatic weapons and later tried to set their bodies on fire. That same night, Sharon issued a statement asserting that “this terrible pogrom is the Palestinians’ answer to Israel’s peace entreaties and Israel’s concessions. [Our] concessions to the
PLO … have been interpreted as weakness and have spurred Palestinian terror, backed by
Libya and Syria … The incessant pursuit of chimerical peace plans … has contributed to the undermining of Israel’s defensive shield.”

At cabinet the next morning Sharon had his slick letter of apology ready. “It would be absurd to attribute to me any intention.… [etc.]” But Peres was not having it. He wouldn’t negotiate, he said. Sharon had effectively blamed the murders in Istanbul on the government. He wanted a complete and categorical retraction, and nothing less would do.

The Likud ministers made it clear to Sharon that he was on his own this time. If Peres fired him, they would not resign. Perhaps Shamir and his aides hoped Sharon would dig in and they would be rid of him. But he quickly drew back and signed an apology cum capitulation penned by Peres’s people. “I hereby clarify that there is no connection between our constant and sincere striving for peace and the murder of Jews,” his statement averred.

Bizarre though it sounds, and despite this baiting of Peres,
Yossi Beilin says unhesitatingly that “Sharon was one of our guys.” There were ten men in the inner cabinet, the body that Peres and Sharon had created in their secret conclave to run an evenly divided country.

Each of the Labor men had his own long and complicated relationship with Sharon. “They all went back a long time,” says Beilin. He felt like one of the
hevra
(the good old boys). With most of them it was love-hate. With Bar-Lev it was pure hate, but they kept it in check, radiating coldness at each other but rarely baring their fangs. “It was clear to me that Peres and Rabin didn’t see in Sharon what I and my generation saw in him: the father of the settlements, the unprincipled cynic, the epitome of the ugly Israeli. That doesn’t mean they liked him or that they didn’t understand he was a dangerous man. But they saw him as he saw himself—as one of the
hevra
.”

B
y 1985, Sharon was developing his attitude of aggrieved and aggressive victimhood into a comprehensive narrative of the
Lebanon War and of his role in it. He published three lengthy essays in
Yedioth Ahronoth,
the largest-circulation newspaper by far, reexamining the Lebanon War and concluding that it had been a major triumph. But then came the stab in the back.
⁵

Between the outbreak of the war and the
massacre at the camps, “the Israeli Left, with Labor at its head,” cast aside consensus, preferring instead an opposing doctrine “that might best be called, in the language of our times, ‘nowism.’ ” This of course was Sharon’s slighting reference to
Peace Now, the dovish ginger group that had spearheaded protests against the war culminating in the huge demonstration in Tel Aviv after Sabra and Shatila. “ ‘Nowism’ means: peace—now, concessions—now, withdrawal—now … It is the product of non-Zionist Jewish leftism, a conflation of cosmopolitanism, communism, and self-hate … It totally rejects Jewish nationalism and fights against it while giving blind support to Arab nationalism and snivelingly kowtowing before the worst of its leaders.”

The
Zionist Labor movement had always rejected “nowism,” Sharon continued. But now Labor had betrayed itself, its past glory, and its ideological heritage because that was the only way it could attack and malign those who were conducting the war, oust them from power, and get back into power itself.

In his second essay, Sharon turned to the accusation that he had led the country into a “war of choice” (Hebrew:
yesh breira
) in Lebanon,
whereas all of Israel’s previous wars had been wars of no choice (
ein breira
). This was sometimes put in terms of Lebanon having been a “political war” while all the others were wars of national defense. This spurious distinction, Sharon argued, was a deliberate perversion of Israel’s history, indeed of all history. Clausewitz himself had determined that war was in essence an extension of policy.

The Left had simply brainwashed public opinion into believing, or at least mouthing, an assertion that wasn’t true. The truth was that 1982 was a war of
yesh breira
—and so were the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. “The only war of
ein breira
was the war in the
Warsaw Ghetto, where the war aim was to prove that Jews can die fighting.” In all the subsequent wars fought by the State of Israel, there had been a choice, between fighting for political goals and forgoing those goals. That was the choice that confronted the leadership under Ben-Gurion before Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And, indeed, “the precursors then of today’s nowists” had advocated deferring the declaration or even making do with something less than statehood.

With the
yesh breira
canard set straight, by his lights, Sharon now took issue with the gravest charge against him—that he had misled the government and the nation. Another vicious calumny, he asserted in the third and last essay. “
Operation Peace for Galilee was the first and only war in which everyone knew, in advance, in full and in detail, what its declared aims were. Everyone understood what the military and political advantages were that we hoped to achieve. Anyone claiming to have been misled (unless he was a complete idiot or completely out of touch) is simply lying.”

But that, of course, begged—and fudged—the key question. Was the war aim what the government declared or what “everyone understood”? Sharon’s fine distinction seemed to be that Israel didn’t
want
to extend the war beyond the forty-kilometer line, but it
anticipated
that that was what would happen, and it made its preparations accordingly, using long pre-laid plans.

“With the removal of the terrorists from Beirut, Israel achieved a strategic success on the order of significance of the
Six-Day War … The defeat of the PLO produced most favorable consequences in
Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza and among hostile elements within the
Israeli-Arab community … Our real strategic and political situation—that based on sober assessments, not on the fads of hostile media—has vastly improved.”

But the success had starkly eroded, “and the tragedy is that we’ve done it to ourselves. Operation Peace for Galilee succeeded. But it has
been made to fail. The blame for this erosion, as for the drawn-out siege of Beirut, as for the demoralization within the army—all that blame rests on the shoulders and on the consciences of the leaders of the
Zionist Left.” After the brief period of political consensus at the start of the war,

•   •   •

T
wo years later, in the summer of 1987, Sharon decided to try once again to persuade the establishment and the intelligentsia, if not to see the war his way, then at least to concede that his narrative of it was legitimate. At a lecture marking the fifth anniversary of the war, at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Sharon spoke for three straight hours, reading from a prepared text and referring to large maps he had brought with him. The audience included top army brass, past and present, politicians, academics, and journalists.

His text purported to be, in large part, his own campaign diary, recording day by day the unfolding of the war and showing how military necessity—and not a nefarious plot—had turned a forty- to forty-five-kilometer, forty-eight-hour incursion into a long and costly war that was still not entirely over. His subtext was an attempt to show that Begin, far from the depressed and introspective hermit he had now become, was fully and vigorously in control throughout the war.

Sharon was focusing, rightly from his perspective, on what had become by then his critics’ central thesis: that he had duped not only the cabinet but Begin, too, into expanding and extending the war. Begin’s sad decline in the months after the war, the loss of his beloved wife, and his subsequent reclusive retirement and long, poignant silence, all conspired to dramatically improve his retrospective standing in the eyes of the largely dovish intelligentsia. Decades of opposition to all he stood for gave way to sympathy for his personal plight. He shared, it was felt—and indeed suffered—the pain and shame of an unnecessary war.

And as Begin’s stock rose, Sharon’s fell ever lower. He alone bore the sin of the accursed war, and of the accursed occupation of the Palestinians, too. Begin’s role as the inspiration and the architect of the Likud’s policies seemed to fade, whereas Sharon, who was still on the national stage, albeit not center stage, became “the father of the settlements,” as though Begin were merely their doddery old grandfather, and the sole villain of the Lebanon debacle, as though there had been no prime minister above him, urging him forward or reining him in.

Twelve times in his lecture Sharon referred to Begin’s decisive role before and during the war. In February 1982, he disclosed, Begin had hosted Bashir Gemayel in Jerusalem. “ ‘It [war] could happen any day,’ ” Sharon quoted the prime minister telling the Phalange leader. “ ‘We won’t be the ones who start.’ There would have to be a provocation ‘that will be clear to the whole world. We have to be sure that the U.S. will support us internationally. For your information, I met
yesterday with Mr. Shimon Peres, the leader of the opposition, and we reached a near consensus. If we go into Lebanon, we will have the backing of 105 out of the 120 members of the
Knesset. If this does happen, we will advance northward as far as possible.’ This is what Begin said.” Sharon paused to make his point. “And then Begin continued: ‘If your existence is in danger, we will fight … We will act to defend you. I have a consensus with Mr. Peres to this effect, and we have told Secretary of State Haig.’ ”