Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (67 page)

The visit laid the foundation for a remarkable—because so unexpected and seemingly incongruous—empathy between
George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon (though it is unsurprising that Bush 43 shrugged off warnings and pejorative depictions of Sharon from members of the Bush 41 administration). For all new Israeli prime ministers, their first visit to Washington is almost an extension of their election victory celebration. For Sharon—and especially given the name and provenance of his host—it was the very acme of his long-yearned-for rehabilitation.

The Israeli press punditry pointed out that the U.S. administration had yet to define detailed policy goals in the region beyond the broad aim of crushing or at least containing
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hence, according to the pundits, Sharon had been allowed to drone on about the dangers of
terrorism worldwide (he mentioned bin Laden), about
Arafat’s inadequacies, and about Israel’s security needs, without Bush pushing him harder on the nitty-gritty issues of the occupation and the intifada.
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But for all of Bush’s broad sympathy with his Israeli guest, the private meeting was not all declamatory. Sharon surprised the president, in the deepest confidence, with a remarkably far-reaching catalog of the areas he would be prepared to cede, and the settlements he would be prepared to dismantle, in the context of an end-of-belligerency agreement with the Palestinians. This would be less than full peace but a substantial interim step on the road to eventual peace (which, in Sharon’s view, could take fifty years to reach). Bush for his part made Sharon promise that despite his loathing for Arafat, and despite the president’s own barely veiled contempt for him, Israel would not physically harm the Palestinian leader.

The violence at home, meanwhile, was steadily escalating. In March 2001, Palestinian
suicide bombers attacked civilian targets inside the green line. There had been a spate of such attacks inside Israel during the mid-1990s, but in the “al-Aqsa Intifada” thus far suicide attacks had been confined to the occupied territories, targeting soldiers and settlers. (There had been
car bombings and other forms of terror attacks inside Israel.) Israeli
Military Intelligence saw the change as a calculated strategic decision and attributed it directly to Arafat. He had given the Islamic organizations the “green light,” Sharon was told.

Shaul Mofaz, then IDF chief of staff and subsequently Sharon’s minister of defense, recalled a clandestine report that reached him on February 11 of a meeting between Arafat, his security chiefs, and key Hamas leaders at which the
rais
asked, “Why do the Jews not have more deaths?” And he added: “You know what to do.” “That was the day,” said Mofaz, “when he unleashed the wave of suicide assaults inside Israel that grew more and more devastating until it climaxed in the Passover seder attack in the hotel in
Netanya a year later.”
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When Arafat asked his question, the Palestinians had sustained more than three hundred dead in the intifada and Israel around sixty. Not all intelligence experts concurred as to the hierarchical nature of the intifada and the measure of blame and responsibility that should be attributed to Arafat. When the
suicide bombings multiplied, some argued that individual motivation, especially revenge over the killing or wounding of a close relative, needed to be factored in alongside ideological and organizational aspects to fully analyze and understand the spectacular growth of this ghoulish form of terror.
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Sharon roundly blamed Arafat for everything on the Palestinian side of the intifada, including the suicide bombings. His preoccupation during these early months was over the growing mood of helplessness among the public as the bombings took their arbitrary toll of Israeli civilian lives. But above all, he was concerned about the army’s ability to fight back and win. “In my day, we didn’t know how to do these things,” he observed caustically when treated to a state-of-the-art computer presentation by senior IDF officers early in his term. “But I’ll tell you what we did know how to do. We knew how to fight.”
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He seriously feared that despite the almost immeasurable disparity of military power, the army was incapable of defeating the Palestinian armed uprising. “He felt the army, for all its might, was helpless,” Uri Shani recalled. “Something had gone seriously wrong. The main problems, as Sharon saw it, were unsuitable commanders and inadequate training. The elite units were brilliant, but the regular forces deployed in the West Bank and Gaza—he wasn’t sure they had the capacity to defeat the intifada. For years, Lebanon had been seen as a fighting front, whereas the Palestinian territories were a policing assignment.”
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The prime minister’s concerns were not just tactical. “He felt the IDF, in addition to its operational weaknesses, lacked a basic understanding of the ripple effect of losing … of the need to demonstrate effective military strength if you were going to show flexibility on the diplomatic front.”

In June 2001, after a ghastly Friday night suicide bombing at the
Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv seafront that left 21 teenagers dead and 132 injured, Sharon ordered the army to prepare to enter the
casbas,
the Palestinian inner cities, in pursuit of terror cells. Chief of Staff Mofaz noted that the soldiers’ lives would be in danger because there weren’t enough ceramic bulletproof vests to go around. Sharon retorted that the emergency stores were full of these vests, so much so that Israel had been supplying them to neighboring Jordan.
Mofaz replied that these stores were intended for war. “Kaplan
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and I exchanged glances,” Shani remembered. “We knew what was coming. ‘This
is
war, in case you haven’t understood till now,’ Sharon thundered. ‘We are at war!’ ”

Sharon did not see the hardy and usually aggressive Mofaz as his problem, but rather the echelon of field commanders below the chief of staff. His solution was to take to the field himself. “There were dozens of visits to units in the West Bank,” said
Arnon Perlman, Sharon’s close aide and spokesman. “He focused on the colonels and the lieutenant colonels, the men who commanded the brigades and battalions. He would spend hours with them, going over ideas, poring over maps. He would come away feeling the army was not prepared, conceptually, for winning this war. That he needed to shake it up himself.”
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Sometimes he would invite groups of field officers to his office in
Jerusalem. He would regale them with accounts of the exploits of
Unit 101 in the 1950s and of his anti-terror operations in Gaza in the 1970s. His message never varied: surprise the enemy; throw him off balance; come at him from an unexpected angle; attack, always attack.

For all his nostalgic, blustering exhortations to the officer corps, Sharon as prime minister was a very different, much more cautious commander than the brutal major of the 1950s, the ruthless general of the 1970s, or the intemperate defense minister of the 1980s. “He consciously allowed himself to be restrained, by me, by others,” Minister of Defense Binyamin Ben-Eliezer recalled years later. Sharon ranted and bellowed in fury after particularly heinous terror attacks, demanding instant and massive retribution. “Kill the dog” was his mildest demand, often screamed into the telephone, usually in reference to Arafat. But by the time the first meetings took place with the defense minister and senior IDF officers, the prime minister’s wrath was subsiding and cooler councils prevailed.

Moshe Kaplinsky, who was appointed military secretary to the prime minister in July 2001, said he “quickly discovered that Sharon as prime minister was very different from his image … much more
realistic and controlled. He understood that not everything was military force. Yes, I thought restraining him would be part of my job, to the extent that a military secretary can restrain a prime minister. But in intimate consultations I saw how he thought about the ramifications of every move. I saw this was a complex man; not the simplistic advocate of brute force that one had been led to believe.”
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International diplomacy had moved into high gear with the publication of the
Mitchell Report on April 30. As we saw, the commission declined to lay the blame on Sharon for triggering the intifada with his visit to the Temple Mount. Nor did it give succor to the Israeli contention that Arafat had preplanned the uprising. But it also spoke movingly about the need to stop the violence and offered a blueprint for a way forward. This included

The PA announced on May 15 that it accepted the report and supported its immediate implementation. Sharon for his part said Israel accepted the report, too—with two reservations and one condition: it rejected the settlement freeze; it objected to the criticism of the IDF; and it demanded seven days completely free from violence before implementation could begin.

The Mitchell proposals became the basis of American and international diplomacy, with efforts focused on getting the parties to translate their ostensible acceptance into tangible action. Sharon stuck to his seven-day demand, which, given the chaotic situation in the territories, he could confidently assume would not be met. This conveniently enabled him to ignore the initial requirement from Israel in the Mitchell Report: the settlement freeze. In late May 2001, though, in response to mounting international pressure, he proclaimed a unilateral
cease-fire, “save for life-threatening instances.” The IDF stopped initiating operations in the territories and tightened its open-fire regulations. The Americans were to procure parallel steps from Arafat, but the most he would agree to was a resumption of meetings between officers for security coordination. This initial, tentative upturn was blown to smithereens at the
Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv promenade that Friday night in June.

On the following Sunday evening, Sharon visited the injured youngsters and their families at the Ichilov Hospital
in Tel Aviv. He was not a frequent visitor at hospitals or at gravesides or at the scenes of terror attacks. His aides explained that the security phalanxes around him made such visits burdensome. Not all commentators were convinced. Some recalled pointedly that
as defense minister, too, during the Lebanon War, he generally steered clear of hospitals and funeral parlors.

He was visibly moved by the self-discipline of some of the injured Russian immigrant kids, biting back their pain, summoning up a determined smile when the prime minister swept in trailed by a bevy of cameras. “Restraint, too, is a component of strength,” he proclaimed at an impromptu press conference at the hospital. “We are waging a very hard battle indeed. The behavior of the injured boys and girls is truly admirable, as is the behavior of their families, dignified behavior by people who have only recently come to this country.”
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There was nothing impromptu in Sharon’s choice of words. The phrase “restraint is strength” instantly became an aphorism, as its author,
Reuven Adler, knew it would. It came to articulate what was seen as the quintessence of the new Sharon: prudent, calm, long-suffering, conscious of the complexities of Israel’s predicament. Sharon enhanced the effectiveness of the phrase by appearing to apply it both to himself and to the young patients smiling through their pain. “When will it all end?” Larissa and Victoria, both encased in plaster, asked him as he walked slowly between the beds in the orthopedic ward. “It’s gone on for a hundred years,” he replied. “Only peace will end such attacks,” one of the girls ventured. “I am trying all I can to bring that about,” the prime minister quietly answered her.

“ ‘Restraint is strength’ worked,”
Uri Shani said, looking back, both as a slogan and as a policy, though it was not popular with the Israeli public at the time. Israel did not strike back then. But when it did lash out nine months later, invading the Palestinian cities in
Operation Defensive Shield, it enjoyed the broad support of the (post-9/11) Bush administration. “The fact that we restrained ourselves brought us political strength. The image of schoolchildren blown up at a beachfront club touched the world.”
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The upshot was that within months of his coming to power, the visceral fear of Sharon in Israel and around the world largely dissipated. The many Israelis who were convinced, and terrified, that his advent would inevitably mean a drastic escalation in Israel’s response to the intifada, with the concomitant dangers of igniting a regional war, recognized that that wasn’t happening.

Abroad, too, leaders and commentators who had excoriated Israel under Barak for its disproportionate and indiscriminate use of military force against the Palestinians, and had warned direly that Sharon’s election would bring a bloodbath, began to concede that they were wrong. The overall level and intensity of Israel’s military activity remained essentially unchanged for the first year of Sharon’s premiership. Targeted assassinations of Palestinians increased. But the overall rate of Palestinian fatalities never returned to the peaks of October and November 2000, while the number of Israeli victims rose toward the end of 2001 and soared in March 2002.

For many mainstream Israelis, the initial fear morphed into an uneasy distrust. This distrust was never fully to fade. Sharon’s intentions, and even more so his motives, would always be impugned by his detractors and suspected, or at any rate questioned, by the broader public. But the distrust was to be increasingly tempered by two other attitudes that gradually embedded themselves in people’s minds: reliance and, however grudging, admiration. Sharon as national father figure was an image that many people contemptuously eschewed in 2000. Five years later, almost incredulously, they were embracing it.