Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (52 page)

Interestingly, the original Israeli architect of Oslo, Yossi Beilin, was among the first to understand that the process he had devised harbored within it the danger of its own demise. He realized that by deferring the “permanent status issues” to later, Israel and the Palestinians were essentially proposing to leap over a chasm in two steps, a surefire formula for plummeting to destruction. During 1994–1995, Beilin entered into a series of intensive discussions with the key peacemaker on the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and together they drafted the outline of a permanent status agreement. It provided for the establishment of an “independent State of Palestine.” Two national capitals, Yerushalayim and al-Quds, would exist within one undivided city of Jerusalem. The border issue was to be resolved by land swaps. Beilin and Abbas completed their text in late October 1995. Beilin, though close to Peres, decided to submit it to Rabin. But Rabin was assassinated on November 4.
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T
hroughout this period, political discourse in Israel was debased on occasion by outright incitement and was sullied more frequently by borderline rhetoric that gave rise to heated debate as to the legal limits of inflammatory language in a
democracy. Sharon walked the borderline—uninhibited by his private friendship with the prime minister. Ostensibly, he condemned the incitement against Rabin and Peres, but he himself engaged in it. Moreover, he seemed to justify or at least condone it by holding himself up as the victim of similar incitement. “The ministers complaining today,” he asserted, “are the very same people who stood at demonstrations under signs saying, ‘Begin—Murderer,’ ‘Sharon—Murderer,’ in the middle of a war, after Christian Arabs killed Muslim Arabs in Sabra and Shatila.”
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Instead of the chants of “Rabin—traitor,” he said, he himself would prefer “silent demonstrations, protests that cry out in their stillness.” To this end, in August 1995, he joined a small group of rightist Knesset members and political activists who pitched two tents in the park opposite the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem and declared a hunger strike against Oslo. For eight days, he subsequently claimed—though he hardly looked the worse for it—he subsisted solely on mineral water, which a solicitous Lily brought with her on her exhortative visits.

The trouble was that apart from Lily and other relatives and friends of the fasters, their sacrifice of body mass somehow failed to attract the masses, and the days passed in relative solitude. Sharon tried to take command, arranging cell phones, radios, and televisions for the fasters. “We must all stay on message,” he urged. The message was “Wipe out terror” and “Think again about Oslo.” It was to be delivered by “a shout of silence.” Sharon hoped the protest would reach out to a broad public, well beyond the settlers and their national-religious hinterland. But the couple hundred well-wishers who turned up to demonstrate their solidarity each day were mainly young men in crocheted
kippot
and girls in long denim skirts—hard-core settler gear—and a smattering of black-clad Jerusalem
haredim
.

But any pretension to dignified, silent protest was giving way by this time to a culture of rabid, violent incitement. It all came spewing out at a huge demonstration organized by the parties of the Right at Zion Square in downtown Jerusalem on October 5, 1995, to protest the signing of the Oslo II accord the week before. Amid a crowd estimated at more than 100,000, Rabin was not merely called a traitor. His photograph was held up on placards dressed in the uniform of an
SS officer. The leaders, haranguing the crowd from a balcony, did not react. Later, after Rabin’s murder, some of them claimed they had not seen the offensive signs.

Sharon, the last speaker, accused the government of “double collaboration—once with a terrorist organization led by a war criminal, and once against Jews. Never in history has a country freely ceded a part of its historic homeland. They are doing it in their own names, not in ours.”
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Some of the demonstrators then marched toward the
Knesset, attacking official government
cars as they went. Rabin’s car, without Rabin in it, was vandalized, its lights smashed, and its bodywork dented and scratched. The Knesset Guard, a highly trained force usually de
ployed for ceremonial purposes, took up positions on the perimeter fence to protect the seat of Israel’s
democracy. The
police, on the streets outside, were pelted with stones and burning torches. They waded into the crowd and arrested dozens.
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The buzzword “collaboration,” with all its emotive undertow, was no slip of the tongue on Sharon’s part. He had compared Rabin and Peres to Marshal Pétain in an interview in
Penthouse
several months earlier. Now he dug up the French national hero turned collaborator again in an interview with the
haredi
magazine
Hashavua
. “Their [Rabin and Peres’s] action is even graver than what Pétain did,” he said. “It’s hard to speak of treason in connection with Jews, but the essence of their action is no different [from treason]. They sit with Arafat and plot with him how to deceive the citizens of Israel. And I am choosing my words carefully.”

He chose similarly scurrilous words in an interview at this time with another
haredi
magazine,
Kfar Chabad
. “Rabin and Peres are a couple of collaborators,” he said, “who in any normal country would be put on trial.” Now, though, he moved from Nazi collaboration to Stalinist provocation. The reports appearing in the media about purported rightist threats to assassinate the prime minister and other ministers were deliberate provocations, he asserted. They were like the alleged threats against Stalin published in Russia in the 1930s. Stalin used them to destroy his enemies.

Compounding his inflammatory references to terrible chapters from history, Sharon added an ancient and uniquely indigenous component. The government was becoming a
mosser,
^f
he wrote in June 1995 in an article addressed specifically to the settlers. The government,
in its withdrawal policy, proposed in effect “to hand over the settlers to gangs of armed Palestinians … They’ve handed over Jews to non-Jews before,” he continued, alluding to the pre-state
saison
. “Being a
mosser
and a snitch is part of the spiritual ethos of the Israeli Left. Don’t forget for a single moment that the members of
Peace Now and its various metastases are closer in their souls to the PLO murderers than they are to you.”

Here, though he may not have precisely intended it—what he did intend was reckless and pernicious enough—Sharon came close to fanning the burning core of fanatical religious incitement that was later held directly responsible for Rabin’s murder. The term
mosser
had its origins in the religious law, or halacha, of the Jewish Diaspora, where it meant to hand over Jews to the Gentile authorities. That could spell cruel death, and so medieval rabbis ruled that, where possible, the
mosser
himself should be executed. Settler-rabbis on the West Bank seriously weighed during the summer and fall of 1995 whether the ancient law of
mosser
applied to Yitzhak Rabin. If it did, the halachic implication was that he must be put to death. It is unclear to this day to what extent, if at all, the young religious assassin
Yigal Amir was influenced by these religious deliberations. There is no doubt that many in the settler community and its political hinterland knew of the deliberations.

Sharon assiduously cultivated the settler community during his wilderness years. He could no longer direct
bulldozers and budgets at their behest. But he was eager to establish himself, though in the opposition, as their leading champion in the public arena and as their dependable bulwark of consolation and encouragement as they absorbed the body blows of Oslo with increasing trepidation.

He took credit, as we have seen, for Rabin’s retaining all of the
settlements in Gaza intact and handing over only the balance of the Strip to Yasser Arafat in the Gaza and Jericho First phase of the Oslo process. There were mutterings on the left over this decision. Some felt it betrayed weakness or, worse, fear of the settlers. Rabin spoke of them disparagingly in private and sometimes in public. But the fact was that since his first government’s climbdown at
Sebastia
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he had avoided another head-on clash with them. Under his long stewardship at Defense during the 1980s, some restriction was imposed on the creation of new settlements, but the existing ones grew and flourished.

The pressure on Rabin to confront the settlers came to a head after
Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi
Mosque in Hebron in February 1994. The Hebron settlers could not
in all fairness directly be blamed for Goldstein’s wholly unpredicted crime. The man was a doctor by profession and had until the day of the murder discharged his Hippocratic oath toward
Palestinian patients in exemplary manner. But these Hebron settlers, or some of them at any rate, were vicious, provocative, and insidious in their relentless efforts to make life miserable for their Muslim neighbors. Even their little
children were mobilized in this battle of dispossession: they would be sent to spread thumbtacks on the carpets of the mosque (which doubles as a synagogue), when the Muslims prayed barefoot. Rabin was urged, indeed implored, immediately following the massacre to seize the moment of national outrage and shame and physically, forcibly, remove the couple hundred Jewish Israelis who had made their homes in the heart of the fundamentalist Muslim city. He considered the proposal but rejected it.

Faced with this possible threat to the Hebron settlers, Sharon weighed in with gusto. In a television interview he called on “all the citizens of Israel” to come to Hebron and offer passive resistance to any attempt at evacuation. He vowed that he himself would be there, at the head of the resisters.
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The talk of evacuating
settlements in the Palestinian territories, even though hypothetical at that point, and the separate start of negotiations on the
Syrian track, inevitably rekindled the memory of the only settlements that Israel had actually evacuated—
Yamit and the Rafah Salient. Sharon took the opportunity of a pro–Golan settlements rally in July 1995 to publicly recant over that episode. He wanted to apologize, he told the crowd, for his shameful membership in a government that had agreed to hand back the Sinai settlements to Egypt. He was sorry to have done it, and it must not in any way serve as a precedent.

A month later, he urged the settlers to “seize the hilltops” in the face of the Oslo process. In an interview, with the author and a colleague on
Haaretz,
Sharon described a spate of minor landgrabs by settlers on the West Bank as a “mere warm-up exercise” in preparation for “the real struggle.” He explained:

But he did not really know them. In his continuous swirl of cynicism and extremism he turned a blind eye to the ominous inner dynamic at work among Orthodox settler ideologues. He did not comprehend
where their religious and political hatred for Rabin was leading the most violently fanatical among the settlers. He did not “know these people.” Yet he, more than anyone, had the duty and the responsibility to know.

For every Israeli, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was an indelible trauma. People compare the moment they heard of it to the shock of the siren that sounded the onset of the
Yom Kippur War. For Sharon, Rabin’s death was a personal bereavement, too. He saw himself as a protégé and a friend of the slain leader. For Rabin, too, their relationship was an intimate web of professional patronage and personal friendship that transcended their political rivalry. In the months before the murder, his daughter
Dalia Rabin recalled, “Arik said the most terrible things. He incited no less than Bibi. We have all the speeches collected here [at the Rabin Center for Israel Studies in
Tel Aviv]. And then, in the evening, he would phone up or come around to my father, and they would talk. Where to draw the lines and how to redeploy the troops. My father would never mention the
speeches of the daytime. Never. Arik told me himself: ‘We talked topography.’ ”

Dalia, a lawyer, had a brief career in
Labor Party politics and served as deputy minister of defense (2001–2002) in Sharon’s first administration. “Arik had a really warm spot for me. I was invited to every meeting of the ‘kitchenette,’ every late-night consultation at the prime minister’s residence. He never apologized publicly for the things he said against my father. But privately, to me, he did concede that ‘there were things said that shouldn’t have been said.’ ”
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