Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (66 page)

And last in the group, Sharon himself, fixing the camera with a relaxed, composed, but distinctly non-exultant look. In the following days, reporters began to comment on how restrained and almost solemn Sharon appeared after his election triumph. He had reached the apex of his political life, but he hardly seemed to be rejoicing, at any rate not outwardly. With time, this behavior would become the hallmark of his increasingly popular leadership: coolness, restraint, an aura of mature unflappability and gravitas.

Behind the front line in Rubinger’s composition is a group of laughing, chattering, plainly euphoric Likud Party activists. Sharon, turned away, seems to be almost pointedly ignoring them. That, too, would prove prophetically significant as his prime ministership unfolded. Omri Sharon, who had run the campaign and would run his father’s relations with the party faithful, is seen in another frame, bending down to embrace the new prime minister.

Omri’s partner in the campaign,
Uri Shani, who would now become the all-powerful director of the
Prime Minister’s Bureau, was typically invisible but undoubtedly present behind the scenes. One celebrant discreetly not in the room was
Muhammad Rashid, Yasser Arafat’s financial adviser. He had spent much of the earlier evening with Omri at the offices of the Sharon family lawyer
Dov Weissglas, watching television coverage of the voting. Why the three were together, why they continued to meet and talk over the next few weeks, and why Rashid seemed to welcome the election outcome that the Arab world, and indeed much of the wider world, mourned and feared—these questions fueled rumor and speculation as the new team prepared to take over.

Rashid was the Palestinian Authority’s representative on the board of the hugely lucrative
Oasis Casino in Jericho, which had drawn thousands of Israeli gamblers each evening in its heyday but now stood silent and empty because of the intifada. Weissglas represented the PA’s partner in the enterprise,
Martin Schlaff, an Austrian Jewish businessman and friend of the Sharons’. Once the television exit polls were in, Rashid phoned Arafat. “I told you, he’s won big-time,” he said, and immediately set about trying to broker a meeting between the two old enemies. Sharon did not say no. He insisted, though, that a meeting would have to be conditional on a major move by the Palestinians to suppress the rampant violence of the intifada.
²

Only Omri and a very few others in Sharon’s coterie were privy to these early diplomatic feelers. For much of the outside world, and certainly for the defeated and dispirited Israeli peace camp, Sharon’s triumph exacerbated a nightmare that had begun on the Temple Mount and was now threatening to engulf all of Palestine in bloody conflict. There seemed no prospect or hope of any meaningful diplomacy.
The Guardian
put it baldly:

Israeli doves were devastated. People uninhibitedly gave voice to their moral and political despair and, in many cases, their physical fear for their own and their children’s futures. Some spoke openly of looking to leave the country and build their lives elsewhere. Remembering him as the builder of the settlements, the instigator of the
Lebanon War, and, most recently, the provoker of the Palestinian uprising, they expected only the worst from Sharon as prime minister. The speed and starkness with which Barak’s policies and promises had all collapsed were driven home now by the huge margin of his defeat. Sharon swept home with a 62–38 majority.
^b
Every middle-of-the-roader, every floating voter, seemed to have turned his or her back on the Labor Party leader, on the Oslo process, and effectively on peace with the Palestinians.

For
Marit Danon, the dread and desperation posed an immediately practical problem. “I was in panic,” she recalls. “Both because of my political views and because I was frightened of what would happen. I’d been reading up about him. One night I had to get Barak to sign some documents, and I let it out. ‘Prime Minister, I won’t work with that man … I don’t sleep nights … I can’t stay here … My conscience won’t allow me to.’ ”

Danon had worked as the private secretary of Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir as well as of the politically more palatable Rabin, Peres, and Barak. “Barak slammed his fist down on the desk. I think this was the first time he raised his voice at me. ‘You’re not leaving this place! He’s not the man you think he is … Listen to me. This is a man who reads, who loves music and art. He’s not what he looks like from the outside.’ Back home, I thought to myself that I’d had a good working relationship with Barak and he wasn’t going to dupe me deliberately. I’d give it a chance.”
^3
c

In the world’s chanceries the reactions to Sharon’s victory were similarly horrified or at best ambivalent. Statesmen mouthed the requisite diplomatic congratulations through clenched teeth. In Washington, Secretary of State
Colin Powell issued an “impassioned plea” for restraint. Leaders in the region should “recognize the absolute importance in controlling the passions, in controlling the emotions,” Powell said. This made predictably little impact in Syria, where officials described Sharon as a racist, a war criminal, and a terrorist and predicted his election probably meant war. In neighboring Lebanon, too, the newspaper
Almustaqbal,
owned by Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, ran the headline “Israel Has Voted to Reject Peace.” In Egypt, though, the state-owned Cairo Radio urged the Arab world to give Sharon a chance. Here, Begin’s return of the whole of Sinai had been a dramatic change of policy and ideology that gave hope, however slender, that Sharon, too, might change his thinking.

S
haron was eager to set about proving that the fears and trepidation about him were misplaced, the dredged-up detritus of times long gone. He was determined to build the closest possible relations with the United States. He had been effectively decreed persona non grata in Washington under the first Bush. A first friendly phone call from
George W. Bush was encouraging. The president recalled his heli-tour of Israel as Sharon’s guest back in December 1998. Neither of them had thought then they would meet next time as heads of their respective countries, Bush joked.
^d

Sharon had not waited for the election to make contact with Arafat. Toward the end of January, he dispatched Omri,
Dov Weissglas, and
Eytan Bentsur, his director general back at the Foreign Ministry, on a discreet mission to
Vienna, where they spent a long evening at
Martin Schlaff’s home together with
Muhammad Rashid.

They were not, however, discreet enough. A report of their trip was broadcast the same evening on Channel 1 (state-owned)
television. It said they had flown to see Schlaff. Weissglas was quoted as saying they would meet with “a Middle Eastern personality” who happened to be in Europe. The trip, he insisted, had nothing to do with Schlaff’s business affairs. This immediately triggered speculation, much of it pejorative, about the Sharon family’s rich friends, about kickbacks and
corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and about possible connections between the two.

Weissglas, flying back into the storm, denied the Jericho casino had even been mentioned at the talks in Vienna. But the Labor campaign hammered away at the attorney’s multitasked role as Schlaff’s business representative, Sharon’s libel lawyer, and now Sharon’s political emissary to … Schlaff and Rashid, the casino partners. “Sharon’s world blurs between business interests and policy considerations,” Labor accused.

But no one could produce any hard proof of bribery—then or later. Sharon himself claimed the meeting in Vienna had been Arafat’s idea and was intended for Rashid to learn firsthand about Sharon’s policies. It had nothing to do with the casino. “I don’t gamble with the fate of the country the way Barak does,” Sharon quipped. On the Palestinian side, Minister of Information
Yasser Abed Rabbo complained the
leak helped Sharon contend he was in dialogue with the Palestinians. “We want to prevent this criminal and murderer from attaining power,” he thundered. But he did not deny that the meeting had taken place.

Allegations of corruption dogged Sharon virtually throughout his term. It was almost taken for granted that Sharon’s family finances and his political funding were shot through with conflict of interest, at the very least. In tens of thousands of Israeli homes that weekend, people lectured each other knowingly about Sharon’s vast (for Israel) ranch, and where had he got the money for it? And what did he owe the rich men who helped him buy it? And all his other rich friends in America and Europe, and Israel? But this pervasive presumption of
impropriety seemed to have little or no effect on voters—not at the 2001 election, which took place ten days after the
Vienna story broke, and not in the 2003 election, which, as we shall see, was also preceded by seriously uncomfortable media disclosures.
^e

Barak himself led Labor in intensive negotiations with Likud for a fortnight after the election, then suddenly announced that he was taking a break from politics after all, as he had originally announced on election night, and would not serve as defense minister or as any other minister. The Labor top echelon, with undisguised reluctance, gathered in late February to elect Shimon Peres interim leader in place of Barak, pending a party-wide leadership primary later in the year. Peres wasted no time in agreeing to Sharon’s terms for the unity government. Labor made a last, feeble effort to get the Treasury instead of Defense. But Sharon was adamant: the purse strings stayed in the hands of the Likud. He earmarked
Silvan Shalom, a hungrily ambitious Likud figure, for that post—and only then telephoned Netanyahu, who was in
New York, ostensibly to ask him to join the government. “What position?” Netanyahu asked. “Come home and we’ll talk about it.” Netanyahu got the message. “There’s no need to talk,” he said. “I wish you every success.” Peres took the Foreign Ministry; his Labor colleague Binyamin Ben-Eliezer got Defense.

Sharon’s treatment of David Levy was breathtakingly shabby. Levy had led his three-man faction out of Barak’s coalition, hastening its collapse. “I’m sorry, David,” Sharon told him, blithely ignoring the enormous debt he owed the man from Beit She’an for single-handedly preventing Netanyahu from leaving him out of his government in 1996, “I don’t have a department for you.” He suggested that Levy become a minister without portfolio, which the onetime deputy prime minister, foreign minister, housing minister, and absorption minister
indignantly spurned. “I’m not going to sit there just to warm a chair,” he told reporters outside Sharon’s office.

A month for cobbling together a coalition is considered, in Israel, almost lightning speed. On March 7, Sharon stood proudly on the Knesset podium to read out his list of twenty-six ministers. “I could have formed a more compact and more homogeneous government,” he said, meaning a rightist-religious alliance. “That would have been easier to run the country with. But I fear the price we would have had to pay to keep it going would have been too high.” That same day, he demonstrated the advantage of leading a broad-based government and not being held in thrall to a bevy of little parties. The Knesset, led by the two biggest parties, Labor and Likud, voted to abolish the
direct election system for prime minister and restore the old method whereby the voter cast one ballot only—for the party of his choice. This was an impressive show of consistency: Sharon had always opposed the direct election reform that was enacted nine years earlier, and he continued to oppose it, even though it had brought him to power so convincingly.

The peroration of his inauguration speech was taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which prompted Tamar Gozansky, a much-liked Hadash (communist) MK, to call out: “He freed the
United States from slavery. It’s time you freed us from the occupation.” Sharon ignored that and concluded, to a hushed house: “It is Lily’s birthday today. Lily was at my side and supported me through all the hard times and the happy times, and in all my struggles. At this moment I and my family miss Lily very much. Thank you all.”

B
y the time of the inauguration, Sharon’s aides, working quietly, had negotiated a draft cease-fire accord with Arafat’s men. Sharon himself, despite his vaunted distaste, had spoken twice on the telephone with the
rais,
in English and without interpreters. He said he would send a trusted emissary to meet with him and his people in
Ramallah. He had sent the most trusted of all: Omri.

This could only be interpreted as a positive gesture toward Arafat. Omri went together with Yossi Ginossar, a former Shin Bet man now in business with
Palestinian partners who had served both Rabin and Barak as a discreet messenger to the PA. They had two meetings with Arafat, who was attended by Rashid and other aides. Subsequently, Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and the chief Oslo negotiator, Abu Ala, now Speaker of the Palestinian parliament, visited Sharon at the ranch. Sharon proposed a temporary Palestinian
state on 42 percent of the land—effectively Areas A and B. This was rejected, unsurprisingly. But on February 28, the draft cease-fire was concluded to end the current violence and resume formal peace negotiations. It would have ended the intifada right at the outset of Sharon’s term.
^f

The draft was never signed. A senior Palestinian official hinted privately to the Israelis that Arafat had backed away at the last minute. Rashid, the chief go-between, disappeared for several weeks, and when he finally surfaced, he, too, confirmed that “the
rais
rejected my plan.”
⁴

Sharon, meanwhile, was preparing for his first visit to Washington. The president invited him to come on March 20, barely a fortnight after he took office. That looked like a friendly sign, but it also seemed to indicate that the administration wanted early confirmation of its own assurances to other governments of Sharon’s newfound moderation and perspicacity.