Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (61 page)

The idea of sharing Jerusalem, including the Old City, between Israel and the Palestinians has since become so commonplace, at least among pro-peace advocates, that it is instructive to rehearse here the U.S. ambassador to Israel
Martin Indyk’s words to Bregman in
Elusive Peace
: “The idea that half of the Old City would be under Arafat’s sovereignty was completely unthinkable to any American at Camp David, and any Israeli, other than Ehud Barak himself.” Bregman adds: “This was a generous, even stunning offer … that had never before been proposed by an Israeli prime minister.”

Even those superlatives are inadequate to express the change that Barak wrought in more than thirty years of Israeli dogma. “United Jerusalem,” in the distended city limits that Israel unilaterally imposed
after 1967, was an axiomatic and virtually consensual tenet of Israeli policy. It was rehearsed by politicians of the Right and of the Left—apart from the Far Left—in almost every speech, like a catechism. “The united city, never to be divided again.” Audiences would applaud automatically. Suddenly all this was challenged, opened to rational reexamination.

But when Clinton took the offer to Arafat, the Palestinian leader demurred. Custodianship was not sovereignty, he pointed out. He did not have the right to cede sovereignty over the Haram. He insisted, too, on exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the Palestinian suburbs adjacent to the Old City (the inner neighborhoods). He remained impervious to the combined pressures and blandishments of the president, the secretary of state, and the national security adviser. He managed to infuriate Clinton still more by insisting that the ruins of the ancient Jewish temple were not in Jerusalem at all but in Nablus, blithely nullifying thereby important parts of the Old and the New Testaments.

Clinton returned to Camp David on July 23 and plunged back into the discussions with renewed energy. But Jerusalem remained the crucial deal breaker. That is how the president himself assessed the summit on the morning of July 25, after trying one last time, and failing, to move Arafat on this issue. Shlomo Ben-Ami agreed. The considerable progress made on borders and security “was only hypothetical,” he wrote later, “because in the Palestinians’ working assumption it was conditional on Israel’s accepting the fundamentalist Palestinian positions on two key issues:
Jerusalem and the refugees.”

Writing as a historian as well as a politician and negotiator, Ben-Ami saw in the religious zealotry prevalent in the Muslim world on the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees the factor that furnished the deeper reason, or pretext, behind Arafat’s position. He noted that both the imam of al-Aqsa and the mufti of Jerusalem, the second an Arafat appointee, spoke out during Camp David forbidding on religious grounds any concession on sovereignty.
¹⁶

Tragically, this analysis can be applied to Ben-Ami and Barak. They, too, were influenced by the
religious fundamentalism on the Israeli side regarding the Temple Mount. They, too, were swayed by this fundamentalism to advance a position at Camp David that made a pragmatic compromise on Jerusalem effectively unattainable. In a cynical and ultimately hopeless effort to win support from zealot circles in Israel, Barak and Ben-Ami proposed that a synagogue for Jewish prayer be built on a tiny area of the Temple Mount. This drew outraged rejection from Arafat and his top aides.
¹⁷

Back in 1967,
Moshe Dayan vested administration of the Mount/Haram
in the Muslim
waqf,
or religious authority, and banned
Jewish prayer there. Jews, like anyone else, were free to visit this sacred site. But only Muslims were allowed to pray there. Happily, as Dayan knew, this edict coincided with the provisions of the Orthodox Jewish law, the halacha, which forbade observant Jews to set foot on the Mount until the Temple was restored in God’s good time.
Orthodox Jews had meticulously observed this prohibition for centuries. After 1967, the chief rabbinate of Israel solemnly reaffirmed it.

For many years, pressure to pray on the Temple Mount came from a marginal group of ultranationalist but not especially Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, the
Temple Mount Faithful. They would make periodic set-piece attempts to enter the precincts with prayer shawls and would be carted off by the police. The Muslim authorities, though forever warning of nefarious Jewish plots to take over the Mount and destroy the
mosques, were well aware of the Israeli government’s strictly enforced ban on Jewish prayer there.

The Muslim warnings, however, turned out not to be wholly without foundation when a Jewish underground was discovered by the
Shin Bet security service among Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the
Golan Heights in the mid-1980s. Among its plans was one to plant explosives beneath the mosques. Although the underground group was excoriated by the settler leadership, in the wake of this episode the blanket religious ban on ascending the Temple Mount began to fray. One prominent plotter, released from jail after five years, began agitating in favor of sacrificing the Paschal Lamb on the Mount. Settler rabbis searched for ways of ritually purifying people so as to enable them to tread on the Mount without defying the age-old Orthodox halachic ban. Others ruled that the ban did not apply to certain parts of the precincts, and they began exhorting religious Jews to visit those areas of the holy site.

Barak and Ben-Ami’s synagogue proposal fed into this dangerous trend within the settler-based community. It also contributed to the breakdown of Camp David, providing Arafat with proof for his suspicions that Israel was ultimately bent on taking over the holy site. In the wake of the failed summit, political attacks on the government were suffused with religious jingoism centering on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Even though the synagogue idea faded from the negotiations after Camp David, it remained a part of the backdrop to Ariel Sharon’s ill-advised visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, which preceded—some say triggered; some say caused—the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada.

Sharon’s action, too, was designed to feed the jingoism, which he
had been busily fomenting throughout the summer. His perverse provocation must be seen in this broader context of political and religious ferment.

“Mr. Speaker, no prime minister has the right to make concessions over Jerusalem,” Sharon proclaimed in the Knesset on July 24, while Camp David was still in progress.

A week later, with Barak now back, the controversy raging, and the coalition floundering, Sharon lambasted the prime minister. “Eighteen times in your election broadcasts you promised not to divide Jerusalem. You promised it would remain united forever. You have broken every promise you made. You say you speak in the name of your supporters. But they no longer support you, Mr. Barak. They’ve changed their minds, like you changed your promises.”
^19
f

Barak had already lost
Shas, the National Religious Party, and
Yisrael B’Aliya. The three coalition partners bolted on the eve of Camp David. David Levy, who had switched sides and become Barak’s foreign minister, now announced his resignation, too. The government no longer commanded a Knesset majority. That made the regular business of governing difficult. But Barak could still rely, just about, on the
“blocking bloc” of Jewish and Arab MKs that precluded an alternative, Likud-led government.

On August 15, Sharon attacked the synagogue scheme: “Barak has agreed to cleave in two the heart of the Jewish people: the Old City of Jerusalem … He is ready to concede on the Temple Mount. He is trying to soften the blow by demanding that Arafat recognize the Jews’ right to pray. This very proposal, that Arafat recognize our right to pray at the holy of holies of the Jewish people, is in itself debasing and only goes to show to what depths our side has sunk.”
²⁰

The holiness of Jerusalem, he continued, was “many times more meaningful for the Jewish people than it is for the
Christians and Muslims.” The Jewish people “were the only pioneers in the annals of the Land and of Jerusalem who transformed the rocky and … barren scrubland into green and arable terraces. They did this by hard work and sweat; no other people were creative in the same way. The Jewish people were the first who built a glorious temple in Jerusalem, which was the font of holiness for the entire nation and the entire land.”

Sharon was a thoroughly secular Jew. But this confused exposition on “holy” and “holiness” reflected more than the modern, secular Jew’s grappling with the significance of a unique, religion-based national identity in today’s world. It was also a politician’s shameless milking of these emotive terms for whatever populist advantage he could get from them. But, as we have seen, politicians on both sides of the Israeli divide were engaged in this dubious pursuit.

At the UN Millennium Summit in
New York in September, Clinton and Arafat discussed vesting sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram in the
Organization of Islamic States. Barak was encouraged, although for his part he spent much of his time in New York persuading world leaders that the outcome of Camp David proved that Arafat was not a serious partner for peace. Negotiators for the three sides continued batting ideas about. Clinton’s presidency was running out, but he still hadn’t given up hope of pulling off a peace deal in the closing weeks of his term.

Back home, in an unwonted gesture of conviviality, Barak invited Arafat and his top aides to dinner at his home in
Kochav Yair. He sent an army
helicopter to bring them over. Nava, his wife,
²¹
radiated good cheer and plied her guests with good food. Barak and Arafat strolled arm in arm through the French doors and sat alone in the garden, without note takers. They seemed to get along fine. Their aides wondered why they hadn’t tried this simple technique of talking to each other at Camp David. Clinton, apprised ahead of time, phoned in to exhort
them. They confirmed to the president that their negotiators would be leaving for Washington that same night for further intensive talks.

There was an elephant in the room, but no one seemed to notice it. According to
Gilead Sher, “Nobody mentioned the imminent visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of the opposition, to the Temple Mount.”
²²
The dinner took place on September 25. Sharon’s visit was scheduled for September 28.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, the minister of public security, was effectively doubling as foreign minister (the only job he really wanted: he was formally appointed foreign minister on November 2, 2000, and held both portfolios until the end of the Barak administration). He was to fly out to Washington later that night at the head of the Israeli negotiating team.

In the garden, the visit did come up. “Why didn’t Sharon visit the Haram when he was defense minister or foreign minister?” Arafat complained to his host. “That’s our
democracy,” Barak replied. “I can’t prevent the leader of the opposition from visiting the site.”
²³

In any event, any disturbing thoughts about the impending visit did not cloud the upbeat atmosphere at the dinner or at the talks that opened in Washington a day later. These talks were intended as a final refinement of the parties’ positions, and a final attempt at narrowing the gaps between them, before the United States presented its own package of proposals designed to bridge or resolve all the remaining points in dispute.

Ben-Ami took time out from the talks on September 27 to be briefed over the telephone by his commissioner of police, Yehuda Wilk, as to what was expected the next day on the Mount. “He told me that on the basis of intelligence assessments he recommended allowing the visit to go forward,” Ben-Ami recalled. “He said he had a contingency plan in place to get Sharon out fast if serious violence erupted.” The minister for internal security spoke by phone, too, with
Jibril Rajoub, the PA’s head of preventive security on the West Bank. “Rajoub told me that if Sharon did not enter the mosques themselves, he believed there would not be any rioting, and whatever demonstrations did take place would be kept under control.”
²⁴

In Israel, September 27 was a busy day, too. In the afternoon, the radio broadcast the propitious announcement that Benjamin Netanyahu had long been waiting for with great and mounting trepidation. He was
not going to be prosecuted for bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust. And his wife, Sara, was not going to be prosecuted for theft. This was good news indeed. His political career would not be hobbled for months or years, perhaps even forever. The couple’s conduct in relation to a longtime family retainer was, in the words of the attorney general, “dismal and worthy of the most stringent criticism.” But that was veritable music to the Netanyahus’ ears. For in the next paragraph of a lengthy report, Attorney General
Elyakim Rubinstein explained that however reprehensibly they had behaved, their actions and omissions did not meet the criteria for a criminal prosecution. He therefore ordered the files against them closed for lack of evidence.
^g

Netanyahu issued a string of suitably contrite statements. His loyalists could barely contain their exultation. He would come roaring back now, they confidently predicted, to sweep away the debris of Barak’s collapsing coalition and restore the Likud to its rightful place of power. They mocked recently renewed talk of a unity government as the Canute-like last-gasp efforts of the failed prime minister and the over-the-top Likud stand-in leader to turn back the irresistible tide of Bibi’s return in triumph.