Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (8 page)

“We do not lust for battle,” the defense minister continued, “and we regret all loss of life, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. But it is as well that all should know that we are strong and that our blood is not to be spilled with impunity … Your glorious, all-volunteer battalion, comprising native-born Israelis and immigrants, members of oriental communities and of western communities, young men from all the lands of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America—your battalion is the living
embodiment of the unity of the Jewish people.” Ben-Gurion signed, “With love and admiration.”

From the immediate political perspective the Gaza operation was profitless: Israel was condemned by the UN Security Council. From a historical perspective, the operation stands out as a catalyst of escalation in the tension between the two armies, in the arms race between the two governments, and, ultimately, in the process by which the Arab-Israeli conflict grew into a vicarious battle between the superpowers.
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Egypt fueled the tension by ratcheting up its support for the Palestinian infiltrators. The
fedayun
groups operating out of the Gaza Strip became effectively an agency of the Egyptian military, armed and paid by army intelligence. They raided deep into Israel, occasioning ever larger reprisal attacks, usually by the paratroopers, against Egyptian military units. In one four-day period in August 1955,
fedayun
units ranged through southern and central Israel killing 11 civilians, injuring 9, and causing extensive damage to property. The paratroopers, in their first mechanized attack, captured and destroyed an Egyptian police station at
Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, killing 72 Egyptians and wounding 58 for the loss of 1 dead and 11 wounded on their own side.
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A month later, after repeated Syrian shelling of Israeli fishermen, the paratroopers swept up the northeastern (Syrian) shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), overrunning Syrian gun posts and killing more than 50 Syrian soldiers, wounding at least that number, and taking dozens more prisoner. Sharon’s men suffered 6 dead and 10 wounded. The operation was “too successful,” Ben-Gurion (now back in the dual role of prime minister and defense minister) complained when Dayan, with Sharon in tow, came to
Tel Aviv to explain what had happened.

The border escalation was doubly disturbing because by this time Israel was facing the threat of a hugely more powerful Egypt, backed by the Soviets’ military arsenal. The stunning shock was delivered by
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic new leader of the country, in a speech in September 1955. Egypt, he announced, had signed a major arms deal with
Czechoslovakia and would soon be receiving the first deliveries of state-of-the-art Soviet weaponry. The Americans knew something of this imminent Egyptian turnabout. Through intelligence
contacts they tried to head off Cairo’s shift into the Soviet sphere, but without success. For Israel, it was a bolt from the blue. The three Western powers, the United States, Britain, and France, had agreed in a 1950 concordat to severely restrict their arms sales to all Middle Eastern countries. Would they now ease those restrictions in the face of the challenge from Moscow?

In August 1956, an ambush laid by the paratroopers on the Gaza border against infiltrators again developed into a full-pitched battle with Egyptian forces. A dozen Egyptians were killed, among them a medical team. Israel’s consternation was all the greater because by this time secret negotiations were under way with France on possible military collusion against Egypt. The last thing Ben-Gurion and Dayan needed at that point was a border skirmish triggering an unplanned and premature conflagration. “Dayan’s anger at the paratroop commander became more open and more pronounced,” wrote an Israeli military historian. “[Sharon] was conducting ‘his own independent policy,’ in Dayan’s words.”
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The tension between Dayan and Sharon flared again in October, around a reprisal action against a Jordanian police station at
Kalkilya, on the West Bank, which turned into a battle between the two armies and left 18 Israeli dead and 68 injured. These were far higher casualty figures than the public and the prime minister were prepared to stomach for any reprisal operation that was less than all-out war. The fact that almost a hundred Jordanian soldiers, militiamen, and police were killed in the Kalkilya raid did not mitigate the losses. The fact that it came just a fortnight after another costly reprisal action, at Hussan, near Bethlehem, where ten paratroopers died, made it even harder to take.

A week later, on October 17, Dayan called in the officers who took part in the Kalkilya operation for a debriefing. He explained the constraints under which the government operated: the need to avoid civilian casualties and to avoid triggering intervention by British air force units stationed in
Cyprus. He urged the officers to speak out freely, but when Sharon and others criticized his policy and his behavior, he lashed back. He accused Sharon of indifference to Israeli casualties. Sharon needlessly risked soldiers’ lives, he charged, in order to kill greater numbers of Arab soldiers and score “fuller” victories. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the battlefield tactics at Kalkilya, everyone realized that the reprisals strategy had become counterproductive, escalating the tit-for-tat violence to unacceptable levels. “I think,” Dayan confided, “that there will be a pause in operations while we carefully reconsider our policy.”
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Alone in that room, Dayan knew that a large-scale war between Israel
and Egypt, and also between France and Egypt, was likely to break out within weeks. He knew that Britain, too, might take part alongside France. Together with Shimon Peres, the director general of the Defense Ministry, and a handful of aides, Dayan was deeply involved in secret negotiations with the French over this fateful scenario. In five days, with dark glasses shielding his telltale eye patch, he would accompany Ben-Gurion—the Old Man’s disguise was a trilby hat pulled down over his famous, flowing demi-tonsure—and Peres on a French air force plane via North Africa to a top-level summit conference at Sèvres, near Paris, where the details of this military collusion finally would be worked out. Guy Mollet, France’s Socialist prime minister, Christian Pineau, the foreign minister, and
Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, the minister of defense, promised Ben-Gurion to protect Israel’s skies from Egyptian bombers while the IDF struck at Egyptian forces in Sinai. In a separate understanding negotiated by Peres, the French leaders agreed to provide Israel with the technical assistance and the uranium required to create its own
nuclear weapons program.
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For France and Britain, the Sèvres Protocol was a last-ditch attempt to dislodge Nasser and prevent a total Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal. Britain had reluctantly agreed in 1954 to withdraw its forces from the
Canal Zone over a two-year period, thereby ending the seventy-seven-year British military presence protecting the waterway.
^j
The agreement provided that Britain could keep up some of its
bases in the Canal Zone, under civilian maintenance, for use by its troops in wartime. In July 1956, a month after the last British military units left, Nasser announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, largely owned by the British government and French shareholders. He said the company’s future revenues would go toward the cost of the
Aswan High Dam project in Upper Egypt, which the United States and Britain had recently pulled out of. (The dam was subsequently built with Soviet aid.) While the canal no longer served as an imperial lifeline from the mother country to British India, it was still a vital and lucrative route for international trade and especially for the constantly expanding traffic in oil tankers. Britain was both damaged and humiliated by Nasser’s action. France, in addition, bitterly resented Egypt’s support for the FLN rebels in
Algeria.

For Israel, the war with Egypt was designed to achieve three goals:

Sharon’s paratroopers were to play a key role in the opening phase of the clandestinely coordinated hostilities. The Sèvres Protocol provided that Israeli forces were to launch “a large-scale attack on the Egyptian forces on the evening of October 29, with the aim of reaching the Canal Zone the following day.” The only way that could realistically happen was by a parachute drop. “On being apprised of these events,” the protocol continued, “the British and French Governments during the day of 30 October 1956 [will] respectively and simultaneously make two appeals to the Egyptian Government and the Israeli Government” to withdraw their forces ten miles from the canal. Egypt, in addition, would be required to “accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by the Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement.”

Egypt, of course, was not expected to agree to any of this, in which case “the Anglo-French forces will launch military operations against the Egyptian forces in the early hours of the morning of 31 October.” Israel, meanwhile, released from its own requirement to heed
to Anglo-French demands, would “send forces to occupy the western shore of the
Gulf of Aqaba and the group of islands Tirane and Sanafir to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba.” Another paragraph provided that “the arrangements of the present protocol must remain strictly secret.”

How secret did Ben-Gurion keep it, and for how long? Specifically, how much did Sharon know and understand of the larger picture before and during the fighting? The question is important in understanding Sharon’s conduct, which resulted, according to his critics, in the needless deaths of nearly forty paratroopers and the injury of more than a hundred.

Sharon himself claimed he knew everything before everyone. “As we licked our wounds after
Kalkilya,” he wrote, “Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres left for
Paris to try to conclude negotiations with the French and British that would bring all three countries into a concerted action against Egypt. When they returned on October 25, I went to see Ben-Gurion. He told me briefly that a deal had been struck by which Israel, France, and Great Britain would each gain their objectives … Events that would shake our world were now only days away. As I stood there absorbing it, I could almost feel the wings of history brushing the air.”

This is not quite as bizarre as it sounds: a young lieutenant colonel dropping in on the prime minister and defense minister to hear secret plans to which senior generals were not yet privy.
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Sharon did frequently call on the Old Man. Indeed, on November 4, as the Sinai War was winding down, Sharon was at Ben-Gurion’s home reporting in person on the operation he had led, and his wife, Margalit, also came in and was greeted warmly by the prime minister.
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On the afternoon of October 29, Sharon’s lead battalion under Rafael Eitan, 395 men in all, took off as planned in a fleet of DC-3s and flew toward the Mitle Pass, 150 miles from the Israel-Sinai border. The original intention had been to drop on the western end of the pass, a bare dozen miles from the canal. But intelligence reports pointed to an Egyptian deployment in that area, and so the drop was moved to the eastern end of the pass. The change of plan proved fateful.

Sharon himself led the rest of the paratroop brigade, reinforced by an armored company of thirteen French
AMX light tanks, on a dash across the desert to link up with Eitan’s force. Three Egyptian fortified positions stood in their way. On the evening of the twenty-ninth they took
Kuntilla, some twelve miles inside Egyptian territory, “moving the attacking units around to the rear,” Sharon writes, “so they could come in out of the setting sun.”

At dawn on the thirtieth, “we were in position in front of Themed, a Bedouin oasis that had been heavily fortified with minefields and perimeter fences and was held by two companies of Egyptian infantry.” This time he attacked head-on, with the sun behind him. Tanks, half-tracks, and jeeps all surged forward. “Huge whirls of dust clouded the desert from the charging vehicles, illuminated from behind by the bright morning glare. Emerging from the cloud, at the last moment, we formed a single line and smashed into the middle of the Egyptian defenses. Themed, too, fell quickly.”

The last obstacle was the little township of
Nakhl, with an adjoining military camp, forty miles farther west. Sharon’s forces took them by late afternoon in another swift frontal assault. “I had left a company behind to secure Themed, and now I left a battalion at Nakhl … In the back of my mind was the thought that the British and French might not act, and if they didn’t I would have to have a protected line of withdrawal out of the desert.” The rest of the brigade swept across the remaining seventy miles without opposition, and by ten that evening the first units entered Eitan’s encampment.

Eitan, Sharon writes, had been strafed during the day by Egyptian warplanes and shelled by a motorized infantry unit advancing through the Mitle from the west. But Israeli planes had bombed and destroyed this force, and the pilots had reported “that the pass was now free of any discernible Egyptian presence.” Sharon determined to press on through the pass to the western end. In his testimony after the war to General
Haim Laskov, who was appointed by Dayan to investigate the fighting at the Mitle, Sharon said he had met with the CO of Southern Command, General
Assaf Simchoni, at 3:00 a.m. on October 29, and the two of them had agreed that the paratroopers, once they had linked up, would push on through the Mitle Pass to the original drop site at the western end. They would then station one battalion at each end of the pass.
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