Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (83 page)

The Shin Bet chiefs’ presentation was an analysis of rare honesty and arresting cogency from people who knew what they were talking about. It laid out, unvarnished, the rock-bottom fundamentals of Israel’s condition. Yet it did not massively succeed in the one immediate and practical call that the four men made. They asked people to sign on to Ayalon’s “People’s Choice,” a grassroots peace initiative that he was promoting together with the Palestinian intellectual and political leader Sari Nusseibeh. This called for two states for the two nations, based on the 1967 borders and with each having its capital in Jerusalem. A quarter of a million Israelis eventually signed on, not enough to force the government’s hand.

But any relief in government circles was short-lived. A separate but similar initiative promoted jointly by Yossi Beilin, the architect of Oslo and now the leader of the left-wing
Meretz Party, and
Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former PA minister, won support and plaudits from all around the world. Their
“Geneva Accord,” signed under Swiss government auspices on December 1, also envisaged a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with one-to-one swaps of territory to enable Israel to annex the larger blocs of settlements adjacent to the border. Sharon fumed. “They are trying to do what only a government can do—negotiate and sign agreements,” he told reporters. “They’re causing only confusion and damage.”

Basically, the document filled out the agreements almost reached at
Taba in the dying days of Ehud Barak’s government. Those in turn had been based on the
Clinton Parameters, and indeed
Bill Clinton sent warm greetings to the nongovernment Israeli and Palestinian delegations and guests gathered in Geneva for the signing. Another former American president, Jimmy Carter, attended the signing ceremony himself. And—much more troubling from Sharon’s standpoint—the current American secretary of state,
Colin Powell, received his “old
friend” Yossi Beilin at the State Department a few days after the signing.

There was more trouble for Sharon. In December, an emergency session of the UN General Assembly resolved to refer Israel’s separation fence to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. This action followed the cabinet’s approval, on October 1, of plans for the still-unbuilt sections of the fence that entailed deep incursions into the West Bank in order to encompass Jewish settlements. Tens of thousands of Palestinians would be encompassed, too, under these plans. Many of them would be cut off from their own fields and have to pass through IDF-manned gates as they went about their daily lives.

This was already the case, on a much smaller scale, with the first section of the fence, between Salem and
Kassem, which had been completed during the summer and had already proved its effectiveness as a barrier to terrorists. Abu Mazen complained of the fence’s nibbling of West Bank lands, and of the much more extensive incursions now being planned, when he visited the White House in July.

In ostensible deference to American objections, the October 1 cabinet decision left gaps in the proposed incursive sections of the fence, as though to indicate that they were not final. But Washington refused to buy so transparent a ploy. “The gaps in and of themselves do not satisfy me,” Powell told
The Washington Post
. “The question is what becomes of the gaps in due course.”

Sharon faced a two-pronged legal fight over the fence, one at home and the other in The Hague. Regular demonstrations at points along the fence by Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign peace activists began to attract international media attention. A UN Security Council resolution condemning the cabinet’s October 1 decision was vetoed by the United States, but the General Assembly could not be blocked in this way. The assembly asked the International Court of Justice “whether Israel is legally obligated as an occupying Power to dismantle the barrier.” The answer seemed predictable, and while it would not have binding force, it was nevertheless another looming cloud on Sharon’s darkening horizon.

S
haron’s response was a bombshell: he announced Israel’s unilateral disengagement from all of the Gaza Strip and from a part of the northern West Bank. All the
settlements in these areas would be dismantled. All the soldiers stationed there would be withdrawn.

Everyone spoke of it as a bombshell, and yet, strangely, everyone claimed to have seen it coming. And they were right: it was clearly
discernible in Sharon’s public statements over a period of months. He did not seek to hide it and then suddenly spring it on the public. On the contrary, he deliberately “floated balloons” with the words “unilateral” and “disengagement” emblazoned on them, to gauge, presumably, how people would react. And yet, however much they had, or should have, anticipated or feared or hoped for the unilateral disengagement, depending on their views, when Sharon finally announced it, everyone was stunned. Peaceniks were stunned and ecstatic. Settlers were stunned and distraught. Most important for Sharon, the broad mainstream was stunned and supportive. The polls never wavered on that, from the day the disengagement was announced till the day it was carried out, eighteen months later.

One early balloon was flown by Ehud Olmert, plainly with Sharon’s compliance. In the second week of November, the deputy prime minister called in a
Haaretz
journalist to explain what he “personally” felt about the way things were going. “Very soon,” he confided, “the government is going to have to address the
demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement—and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement—we need to implement a unilateral alternative.”
¹⁵

On November 23, Sharon was questioned at cabinet and replied cryptically that he was indeed thinking about unilateral steps and when he’d decided he would ask for the cabinet’s approval.

What Sharon didn’t tell the cabinet was that on an official visit to
Italy two days earlier, he and Weissglas had taken time out to meet discreetly with
Elliott Abrams, the top Middle East man on the
U.S. National Security Council, and to fill him in on Sharon’s thinking (in advance of the cabinet’s approval).
^e

Olmert, meanwhile, signaled the new thinking to the Israeli public in still starker terms. “The present situation will lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish state,” he told
Yedioth Ahronoth
on December 5.

At first, the American administration was uncomfortable with whatever it was that Sharon was cooking up. On December 15, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Silvan Shalom met with National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice in Washington and came away seriously rattled. “I woke up Sharon in the middle of the night,” Shalom recalled, “and I told him, ‘She says that if you come out with your unilateral plan, it will cause a rift between the U.S. and Israel.’ Because they saw it as a cop-out from the road map. ‘She demands that you say that it’s part of the road map, that it will be carried out in close coordination with the U.S., and that settlers from Gaza will not end up in the West Bank.’ ”

Sharon decided to put those points into the speech he was planning to give three days later.

He spoke on Thursday, December 18, the last evening of the annual
Herzliya Conference. The conference organizers were told to schedule him precisely in time for the prime-time TV news. Sharon himself spent the whole previous evening and day alone in his “tower” study at the ranch, looking out on his land and writing. He knew that after this speech, nothing would be the same for him anymore.

Two paragraphs in, he made it clear which way he was headed:

The Herzliya speech did not lay to rest all the speculation about what the prime minister intended to do and when he intended to do it. True, he was now publicly, dramatically committing to a unilateral withdrawal, if, as was virtually taken for granted, the Palestinians did not take the security measures that would satisfy him. But withdrawal from where? From Gaza only? From all of Gaza? From some of the West Bank, too? If so, how much? All in one go, or in stages?

Sharon himself said, “I know you would like to hear names [of settlements to be dismantled], but we should leave something for later.” Was he being coy? Was he reluctant to end the guessing game to which he was subjecting the whole country, and plainly enjoying? Or was he not yet clear in his own mind about how he wanted his new policy of unilateralism to play out in practice?

The speech itself indicated an ambition larger than withdrawal from Gaza. In his very first mention of the new key word, “disengagement,” Sharon spoke of it as “disengagement from the Palestinians.” Not merely from the Palestinians of Gaza (from whom, in fact, most Israelis were disengaged, given that a virtually impermeable security fence surrounded the Gaza Strip and that Gazans were no longer allowed to work in Israel), but from “the Palestinians.” He continued: “The Disengagement Plan will include the redeployment of IDF forces along new security lines and a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population. We will draw provisional security lines, and the IDF will be deployed along them. Security will be provided by IDF deployment, the security fence, and other physical obstacles. The Disengagement Plan will reduce friction between us and the Palestinians.”

Without question, then, he was thinking of withdrawal in the West Bank, too, and not merely from the four isolated settlements at the
northern end of the West Bank, which were the only ones eventually included in the disengagement plan.

Sharon added: “The relocation of settlements will be made, first and foremost, in order to draw the most efficient security line possible … This security line will not constitute the permanent border of the State of Israel. However, as long as implementation of the road map is not resumed, the IDF will be deployed along that line.” But of course the Gaza Strip border
was
undisputedly the “permanent border of the State of Israel,” so he must have had in mind some line in the West Bank. He began the next paragraph with “Israel will greatly accelerate the construction of the security fence. Today we can already see it taking shape.” Plainly, he was planning or at least considering a very ambitious disengagement that would bring Israel back to the line of the security fence that he was in the process of erecting in the West Bank. The route of the fence approved by the cabinet in October encompassed some 16 percent of the West Bank.
¹⁷
This was destined to shrink substantially. But so were the dimensions of the disengagement.

T
he idea of withdrawing to the fence was in fact one of four proposals originally considered within Sharon’s close circle and discussed with the Americans.
¹⁸
It was the most ambitious. In the event, Sharon decided on the least ambitious of the proposals under review: withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and from just three (later four)
settlements in the northern West Bank. Still, it was a momentous decision, an entirely new departure. He announced it on February 2, through the veteran
Haaretz
columnist
Yoel Marcus.

Sharon had invited Marcus to his residence in Jerusalem for a long, leisurely breakfast. He had scheduled a session with the Likud Knesset faction in the afternoon and may have intended to publicize his dramatic announcement there first, with Marcus following up with their interview in the newspaper the next morning. That was how things used to work before the age of the Internet. Marcus, too, may have been planning his next day’s article as he drove back to Tel Aviv at midday. He briefed the
Haaretz
editor, Hanoch Marmari, on what he had heard and was sent posthaste to write a story for the paper’s Web site. An hour later the country was in uproar.

“Of course there’ll be uproar in the country,” Sharon had predicted in the interview. “It won’t be easy. I’ll have trouble in the Likud … If there’s no choice, I’ll change the composition of the government. I take the protests inside the Likud seriously, but I mustn’t let them change
what I think is the right thing to do in the national interest. People have got to understand that there’s a difference between pristine ideology and practical reality. [My plan] will sustain Israel into the future with the maximum possible security.”

The wave of outraged reaction flooded from the divided Likud faction across the rightist and religious spectrum. The Judea, Samaria, and Gaza Settlement Council warned ominously that if Sharon presented his plan in Washington the following week, “he will lose his moral right to remain in power.” The transport minister,
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu faction, said the plan was “a road accident involving the entire nation.” Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party, another coalition partner now likely to leave, said Sharon was “undergoing a mutation into a leftist; his moral duty is to resign.”