Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (51 page)

In his newspaper column that weekend, headlined “Democracy and the Jewish State,” he took issue with

Sharon was not just lashing out wildly. While Rabin’s “true assessment” of the Arab parties was certainly different from his, it was not all that different. Rabin would never have said the things Sharon had said and written, calculated as they were to deepen interethnic divisions and fan the flames of hatred. Such statements were beyond the realm of decent political expression in Israel at that time, and some in Sharon’s own
Likud Party squirmed uncomfortably to hear them. But Rabin had agreed to unpalatable concessions to the ultra-Orthodox
Shas, in order to have “
a Jewish majority
” for the peace moves he intended to make. “Jewish majority” was not a phrase coined by Sharon or the Far Right. It was coined—or at any rate uninhibitedly used in everyday political life—by the Labor prime minister and his closest allies.
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Rabin wanted a majority of Jewish Israelis to support his policy.
Indeed, he wanted an Orthodox Jewish component in that majority. The Arab parties were good for blocking, not for governing.

Another key theme that suffused Sharon’s rhetoric and writing in the period following the 1992 election was “Jordan is Palestine.” He was nothing if not consistent. And he had never given up on this thesis, however exotic or quixotic it seemed to others. The fact that Israel had been negotiating since Madrid with pro-PLO
West Bank Palestinians (under the gossamer guise of a “Jordanian-Palestinian delegation”) made “Jordan is Palestine” more anachronistic than ever. Not to Sharon. “We should negotiate with the Palestinian state, Jordan, whose ruler, as far as we’re concerned, can be King Hussein or someone else—that’s for them to decide.”
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With Begin now dead, Sharon allowed himself a freedom of expression that he had never been bold enough to adopt while the old man lived. Begin’s autonomy had been nothing but a “fig leaf,” he wrote, “to enable Egypt and us to sign our peace treaty. The Egyptians needed this document in order to demonstrate their ‘concern’ for the Palestinian cause. We for our part had the deepest interest in signing the peace treaty with Egypt and precious little interest in any change of the status quo in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.”

This, of course, had been the unwavering conviction of the peace
camp in Israel since back in the late 1970s, when it became clear that Begin intended to fudge and drag his feet about his Camp David commitments on Palestinian autonomy while building—through the assiduous agency of Ariel Sharon—as many settlements on the West Bank and Gaza as he could.

Sharon’s point, of course, was that with Rabin’s election at the head of a government genuinely committed to peace, the fudging and foot-dragging might stop, and Israel might actually agree to a genuine autonomy regime that would set the Palestinians on the road to eventual independence. “Autonomy in the days of Rabin and the Left is not the same thing at all as autonomy under Mr. Begin and the Likud,” he warned.

This being the case, he wrote, the only way to rescue Israel now from the specter of eventual Palestinian independence, and the armed irredentism that would inevitably go with it, was to limit the autonomy to carefully circumscribed enclaves. These would center on the main Palestinian towns and their immediate hinterlands. The enclaves would be isolated from each other by large, contiguous tracts of countryside that would remain under full Israeli military control. The settlements, with their separate
roads linking them, would crisscross this whole area, ensuring that the autonomous Palestinian enclaves remained isolated. Sharon attached a map, which
Yedioth
spread over a whole page, displaying the enclaves, seven of them on the West Bank and four more in the Gaza Strip.

All together, they accounted for barely 30 percent of the territories. This proportion was to grow in subsequent presentations of the plan. But for Sharon’s detractors, both Israeli and Palestinian, then and thereafter, the proposal became known, and deprecated, as “Sharon’s Bantustans.” The allusion to
South African apartheid was used advisedly, and it stuck. It was meant to accentuate the effects of the separated enclaves on the Palestinians’ freedom of residency and of movement.
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In later elaborations of his plan, Sharon suggested an elaborate network of roads,
bridges, and tunnels to link the Palestinian enclaves.

“Eitan, we both raised our voices. We shouted at each other.”
Eitan Haber, Yitzhak Rabin’s longtime bureau chief, recalled his boss emerging from long, one-on-one meetings with Arik Sharon in the aftermath
of the
Oslo Accords. “He would be red-faced with anger after Sharon left, visibly agitated.” Why, then, did the prime minister inflict on himself these tongue-lashings from a bitter political foe? “He always had a soft spot for Sharon. Don’t forget, they went back decades together. ‘Ate from the same mess tin,’ as old soldiers say.”

Sharon agreed. “Our relations are built on a completely different background [from politics]; they come from another world. In that world, too, there were clashes between us. But we marched together, in lockstep, over decades, on tough missions and in life-and-death situations. My assessment now is that on key national issues Rabin has completely reversed his positions. I consider this reversal dangerous. But that doesn’t affect our relationship.”
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The turnabout in Israel’s di
plomatic direction, in the fall of 1993, was indeed breathtakingly sharp. For years and years, the focus of its policy and public advocacy had been directed at how to spurn the Palestine Liberation Organization and all it stood for. And now Rabin of all people was extending a hand of peace to the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, the man a generation of Israelis had been taught to hate and fear as a cunning and vicious terrorist.

True, on the left, and even among moderate Likudniks, beneath the public facade of rejection—the law of the land had until recently made it a criminal offense to meet with a PLO official
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—many talked privately of the inevitability of an Israel-PLO deal. This was the case before King Hussein turned his back on the West Bank in 1988, and all the more so thereafter.

Nevertheless, when the turnabout came, it took everyone by surprise. Peres and Rabin succeeded in keeping the months of talks in Norway secret.
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The initial agreement, signed on the White House lawn and sealed with that famous handshake—Rabin reluctant, Arafat eager, Clinton fairly forcing them to clinch—was called “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements.” The aim was to put in place an “elected Council for the Palestinian people
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.”
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The five years were to begin “upon the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho area.” The two sides would negotiate an “
Interim Agreement” providing for a “transfer of powers and responsibilities from the Israeli military government … to the Council.” “Permanent status” negotiations were to begin “no later than” the third year and were to cover “issues, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors.”

The declaration was accompanied by an exchange of letters between Rabin and Arafat. The PLO recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” committed itself to resolve “all outstanding issues through negotiations,” renounced “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence,” and affirmed “that those articles of the
Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist … are now inoperative and no longer valid.” Rabin wrote simply, in response, that “Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.”

Sharon never ceased excoriating Oslo as a historic mistake of monstrous proportions. For him, Arafat was and would always remain a base murderer, an unreformed terrorist, an inveterate liar, implacably committed to Israel’s destruction. Nevertheless, the gradual transfer, under the Oslo Agreement, of parcels of territory to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority offered, in Sharon’s mind, an opportunity to advance his own ideas on the shape of Palestinian-Israeli peace. Thus, while protesting vehemently in speech and in print against the initial “Gaza-and-Jericho First” phase of the Oslo process, Sharon was also boasting, “In Gaza, Rabin is basically implementing my plan. What he’s done is pretty close to what I’ve been proposing.”

Sharon meant that Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the establishment of Arafat’s rule there had left all of the Jewish
settlements in the Strip intact and undisturbed. They sat on nearly 20 percent of the land.
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They would continue to be protected by the army. The newly formed Palestinian Authority was to exercise its self-rule, for the time being, over the remainder of the Strip. Sharon wanted that “time being” to go on indefinitely. And more important, he wanted the same sort of arrangement to pertain in the West Bank.

He wanted to input his ideas with Rabin regardless of their formal
status on opposite sides of the political divide. Rabin, never too busy for Sharon, would hear him out, time after time, just the two of them, in meetings from which even the prime minister’s closest aides were excluded. For Rabin,
Eitan Haber explained, “it was a way of reexamining his own positions, by submitting them to the rigorous criticism of someone with mirror-image views, but with experience and detailed knowledge that he really respected … Sharon would say, ‘Why are you giving them this hill? It’s higher than the next hill. Give them that.’ He knew the map like the back of his hand.”
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The agreement on Gaza and Jericho was signed on schedule, on May 4, 1994, in
Cairo. On July 1, Arafat arrived in triumph in Gaza. His long exile seemed over. A new era of peace seemed to have dawned. Later that month Israel and Jordan signed a joint declaration in Washington proclaiming their intention to conclude a full peace treaty. The Israel-Jordan peace treaty itself was signed in October at a colorful ceremony on the Arava border, with President Clinton affixing his signature as witness.

But the negotiations with the
Palestinians over the Interim Agreement dragged on for a further sixteen months. The atmosphere was poisoned by an unprovoked massacre of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi
Mosque
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in Hebron in February 1994, perpetrated by an American-born settler-doctor, Baruch Goldstein, from nearby Kiryat Arba, and by a series of Palestinian terror attacks, including
suicide bombings, perpetrated mainly by Hamas, a fundamentalist organization that opposed any accommodation with Israel. Buses were blown up in
Afula (April 1994),
Hadera (April 1994), and Tel Aviv (October 1994). In January 1995 a double suicide bombing took the lives of twenty-two off-duty Israeli soldiers waiting at a bus stop at Beit Lid, near Netanya. More bombings followed in
Kfar Darom (April 1995) and Jerusalem (August 1995).

The Rabin government blamed Arafat and his various security forces, which were supposed to have taken full control over Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip, for failing to rein in Hamas. The parties of the Right blamed the Rabin government. They pointed out that under Oslo hundreds
of Hamas militants whom Rabin had deported to Lebanon in 1992 had been allowed back home to Gaza. These men, the Right alleged, had learned the ghoulish trade of suicide bombing from the Lebanese
Hezbollah.

The Interim Agreement, or Oslo II, as it was called, was finally signed, in Washington, in September 1995. Israeli forces would withdraw from the six major cities on the West Bank, and these would become “Area A,” under full Palestinian civil and security control. A special regime would be negotiated for the city of
Hebron, with the enclaves of Jewish settlement there remaining under IDF protection. Other densely populated areas of the West Bank would become “Area B,” where the Palestinians would have civil and police control but Israel would retain “overall security authority to safeguard its citizens [that is, the settlers] and to combat
terrorism.” The third and largest, but least populated, area would be “Area C,” where Israel retained civil and security control.

The natural assumption throughout the region and around the world was that the Oslo process would culminate in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat, in his every public utterance, insisted that this would be so and that the capital of his state would be Jerusalem. Rabin, it is worth noting, never committed himself publicly to this outcome. The five-year transitional period was explained by Rabin government officials as a testing and confidence-building period during which the two sides would learn to live together. These officials explained that in Rabin’s view the Israeli public needed to be conditioned gradually to the idea of a Palestinian state. The trauma of the turnabout on recognizing and negotiating with the PLO was about as much as the public could take at one time. A second trauma, of swallowing eventual Palestinian independence, would have to be administered gradually.