Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (63 page)

That did not mean, though, Ben-Ami wrote, that Israel was blameless. He listed the settlements, the settler-only roads, the blockades and sieges, the Netanyahu government’s rejectionism, “and the ambivalence of the Barak government, too, especially in regard to the settlements,” as valid accumulated cause for the Palestinians’ burning resentment.
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He did not list his own performance as the minister in charge of the police.

“N
o countries and no media subscribe to the Israeli version of events,” France’s president,
Jacques Chirac, said, railing at Barak on October 4 at the Élysée Palace in
Paris. “The whole world shares the same feeling … Sharon provoked these incidents and he did so with the consent of your government.”
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Chirac certainly spoke for much of the world. “It is hard to believe,” wrote the British newspaper
The Independent,
“that Mr. Sharon, perhaps the Israeli politician most detested by the Palestinians, did not expect trouble—trouble that, as he is an opponent of further concessions by Israel, can only serve his aims.” At the UN Security Council, Israel was lambasted by delegate after delegate for Sharon’s provocation and for the army’s subsequent use of disproportionate force against the Palestinians’ protests. The Friday fatalities on the Mount were largely elided between Sharon’s visit on Thursday and the splurge
of violence across the West Bank that began on Saturday. Sharon was the villain, with Barak and Ben-Ami in supporting roles. Arafat’s part, if he had one, was seen as that of victim.

But some world opinion, even in the first few days, was more nuanced.
The New York Times,
for instance, though asserting that Sharon’s “provocative and irresponsible visit” had been the “precipitating incident,” warned on October 3 that “now the fighting has taken on a life of its own.”

Israeli public opinion, too, reflected the complexity of what was happening. “Pride and provocation—no matter what. Those were the hallmarks of the visit,”
Haaretz
editorialized on October 2.
Yoel Marcus, the paper’s leading columnist, asserted that Sharon had “caused the conflagration that has led thus far to dozens dead and hundreds injured.”
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But the Palestinians were blamed, too. “The territories are burning, and Arafat is doing nothing to extinguish the flames,” wrote
Maariv
’s Oded Granot. “Sharon’s visit … provided the Palestinian Authority with the excuse it needed to ignite the battlefield.”

Sharon’s action was quickly subsumed into the broader crisis. The broader crisis, moreover, rendered his action, even in the minds of his critics, retrospectively less pigheaded and pernicious than it initially appeared. Even moderate Israelis began to think that the Palestinians had shown by their subsequent behavior that perhaps Sharon had a point. “These events prove that we must not cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians,” wrote
Ron Ben-Yishai, the veteran defense analyst of
Yedioth Ahronoth
and the reporter who first confronted Sharon on the telephone with the horrors of Sabra and Shatila (and subsequently testified against him before the Kahan Commission).
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Sharon had acted unwisely this time, too, Ben-Yishai wrote. But the violence on the Mount and beyond had been instigated by the PA’s own security forces. “The man whose security chiefs deliberately ignite a firestorm on the holiest site to Islam and to Judaism is plainly not fit to have the sovereignty over that site vested in him.”
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By the month’s end,
Haaretz
’s
Ze’ev Schiff added his authoritative endorsement to official Israel’s accusation that the intifada had been preplanned. Ironically, Schiff wrote, Israel owed Arafat a debt. “He has brought us back to recognize our strategic reality: Israel is still a nation at war, and it needs to behave like one when it weighs its options and considers the limits of its concessions.
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Another violent shock for Israelis came on October 12. Two reservists driving in a civilian car mistakenly entered
Ramallah. They were set upon by a mob, dragged to a
police station, and beaten to death. One of their assailants leaned out of a window and held up his hands, dripping with blood, for the mob to see and cheer. Another phoned one of the men’s wives on his cell phone and announced, “I’ve just killed your husband.”

The country was swept by a paroxysm of anger and impotence. These feelings were not relieved when Barak ordered air force
helicopters that night to bomb and strafe the Ramallah police station and other PA offices in the West Bank and Gaza but to give sufficient advance warning so that in practice the attacks were on empty buildings. In a less flamboyant but more effective response, Barak gave orders to the security services that every Palestinian militant involved in this bestial outrage be brought to justice or killed.

B
arak had rejected the PA’s demand for a UN inquiry into the Temple Mount episode. In effect, he was protecting Sharon’s action, and his own failure to prevent it, from what he presumed would be a sweeping international condemnation. The most he would agree to was a carefully selected inquiry commission headed by an American, and eventually, after much negotiating, this was appointed. Its chairman was
George Mitchell, the former Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate who had won kudos around the world for his role in brokering the peace in Northern Ireland.
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The creation of the
Mitchell Commission provided the backdrop
conducive for yet another attempt to create a Barak-Sharon unity government. Barak tried to persuade his party ministers, meeting on October 22, that Sharon was much more moderate than he appeared. If he joined a unity government, that wouldn’t spell the end of the peace process. The Sharon of today was not the Sharon of old, Barak asserted. The ministers were unconvinced. So were Sharon’s comrades. Of the nineteen Likud members, fourteen spoke against a unity government at a faction meeting the next day. This was quickly
leaked, and it reinforced the opposition on the Labor side. Sharon wasn’t even master of his own house, the Labor doves jeered.

A week later, at a Knesset session marking the anniversary of Rabin’s murder, Sharon spoke of his “yearning for a leadership figure projecting stability and reliability, radiating a deep understanding of events, an ability to analyze and to draw conclusions, and above all to take responsibility.”
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But he still didn’t mean himself. Even at this late date, he was still admonishing the younger man and urging him, in effect, to take him into his government as his deputy.

But Barak, and indeed Sharon, were no longer calling the shots. The Knesset was about to dissolve itself. It could by law do so if 61 of its 120 members raised their hands in favor. Shinui, a small, anti-Orthodox party that broadly supported Barak’s peace policy, joined now with the parties of the Right to ensure that absolute majority. Dissolution meant new elections; Netanyahu looked a shoo-in.

But now Barak suddenly announced that he was resigning as prime minister. Since the dissolution of the Knesset had not yet been approved on three readings, Barak’s resignation overrode it. Instead of general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, there would be an election for the prime minister alone. It would be held in exactly sixty days from the date
of Barak’s resignation. That would be February 6, 2001. By law, only sitting MKs would be eligible to run. Netanyahu was not a sitting MK.

Sharon insisted he was as surprised as everyone else. No, there had not been any collusion between him and Barak to keep Bibi out, he retorted angrily to the many Likudniks who claimed that there had.

Netanyahu’s supporters drafted an amendment to the existing legislation to enable a non-MK to run for prime minister. Sharon immediately announced that he would support it. Netanyahu, confident that it would pass, called a press conference in
Jerusalem where he formally announced his candidacy for leader of the Likud and for prime minister. Two days later, on December 12, the Likud central committee endorsed the party’s support for the “Netanyahu Law” and voted to hold the party’s leadership primary a week later, on December
19. Sharon, in a speech laced with sarcasm but also with a bitter, between-the-lines recognition that this might well be his swan song, pointedly ignored the probability that Netanyahu would displace him. He would run against Barak, Sharon told the rowdy hall, and he would beat him. “After the elections, there’ll be a country to govern,” he kept repeating. The delegates got the point and roared their displeasure.

Netanyahu made a hero’s entrance into the crowded hall, hugging and kissing ecstatic delegates as he progressed slowly to the podium. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you,” he began his speech. Their adulation was almost palpable. He spoke like a candidate confident of triumph. But there was a vaguely discordant note, which the rapturous delegates did not pick up. There ought to be general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, Netanyahu remarked. “The present Knesset is fractured, divided, splintered.”

On December 18, the day before the Likud primary, the Knesset voted. By a majority of 65 to 45, it passed the “Netanyahu Law” enabling a non-MK to run for prime minister. The bill was rushed through all three readings and the committee stage in one afternoon. The proceedings stopped briefly while members crowded around television screens to watch Netanyahu, at an impromptu press conference, inveigh against the law bearing his name and insist that he would not run even if it were passed. They ignored his fulminations, all presuming he himself would ignore them, too.

The prime ministership was his for the taking, but he declined to take it. True to his word, and dumbfounding backers and critics alike, Netanyahu confirmed that he was standing down. “I will not stand as a candidate in elections that … offer the winner the title of prime minister but deny him the tools to effectively lead the country,” he declared.
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B
arak still had one potential trump card in his hand: the peace process. Right up to the last minute, Sharon continued to believe—and to fear—that
Barak and Arafat would reach a deal. The territorial issue had now narrowed to around 5 percent of the
West Bank, with swaps, and both leaders gave Clinton to understand they were “in the ballpark.”
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Dennis Ross quotes the veteran Saudi Arabian diplomat Prince Bandar, responding to a briefing on the state of the negotiations on December 19: “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy; it will be a crime.”

On December 23, in a last-ditch effort, Clinton presented U.S. bridging proposals to negotiators from the two sides. On territory, he suggested “a solution that provides between 94 and 96 percent of West Bank territory to the
Palestinian state with a
land swap of 1 to 3 percent.” On Jerusalem, the “
Clinton Parameters” followed “the general principle that what is Arab in the city should be Palestinian and what is Jewish should be Israeli; this should apply to the Old City as well.” On the Temple Mount, the president proposed “Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram and Israeli sovereignty over … the Western Wall and the space sacred to Judaism of which it is part. There would be a firm commitment by both not to excavate beneath the Haram or behind the Western Wall.” On refugees “our guiding principle has to be that the Palestinian state will be the focal point for the Palestinians who choose to return to the area, without ruling out that Israel will accept some of these refugees.”

The Israeli negotiators Ben-Ami and Sher, diligently transcribing the president’s words, found the time to exchange furtive glances and scrawled notes in Hebrew. “We can live with this,” they both wrote. Ben-Ami noted worriedly, though, that their Palestinian negotiating partners were looking glum.
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The Barak cabinet voted on December 27 to accept the Clinton Parameters. There were reservations, but they were “within the parameters, not outside them,” in Ross’s words. Arafat, on the other hand, “was never good at facing moments of truth,” Ross writes caustically. He came to Washington but rejected the president’s proposal.

Like Clinton and Ross,
Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, lays the main blame on Arafat for the failed peace process. He calls him “the artful dodger.” Indyk writes: “President Clinton formally offered Arafat Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif as one of the parameters for the final agreement. If that is what he had been holding out for at Camp David, why did he turn down Clinton’s
offer? The answer, to my mind, is straightforward: rather than breaking through into a new world, he clung to what he knew best—the ways of the old Arab order.” It needed courage, Indyk adds, for Arafat to tell the Palestinian refugees “that they would not be going back to the homes of their forefathers, few of which existed anymore, even though they had known that in their hearts for a long time … Arafat was too scared to tell them the truth.”
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Even with Clinton gone, Barak sent Ben-Ami and Sher, boosted by the dovish ministers Yossi Beilin,
Yossi Sarid, and Amnon Lipton-Shahak, for a week of negotiations at
Taba beginning January 21. Ben-Ami in his book writes of Israeli intelligence assessments in January that Arafat was suddenly and belatedly waking up to the prospect of Barak losing to Sharon on February 6 and the new Bush administration turning its back on the Middle East peace process. Hence his urgent instruction to Abu Ala to get an agreement at Taba. Sadly, the Israeli foreign minister adds, the new instructions were not accompanied by serious new flexibility.

I
n the months before this final denouement, Barak had been working fitfully on an alternative policy option: unilateral separation. Separation, that is, between Israel and the Palestinians, or, more accurately, separation by Israel from the Palestinians. If there was “no partner” on the Palestinian side for the foreseeable future, given Arafat’s obduracy and the mounting violence, then Israel must act alone in its national interest by separating itself from the Palestinians along the lines of the agreement that the Palestinian leader was rejecting now but that his successors, it was to be hoped, would be prepared to negotiate at some time in the future.