Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
QUESTION:
How was the disengagement going to help Sharon get out of his criminal investigations?
YA
’
ALON:
He thought, and he turned out to be right, that if he undertook an initiative like the disengagement, he would be
etrogized
!
j
The media would wrap him and
etrogize
him. They wouldn’t play up so prominently the allegations of
corruption that were swirling around him. It’s a question of headlines, of editorials. The nation reads of a new initiative full of hope for the future, and it sees the media supporting and promoting it. Drugging the public, if you like. Sharon read the map aright. Politically, his move was brilliant.
QUESTION:
But how does that save him from the judicial process?
YA
’
ALON:
Judges and law enforcement officials are people, members of the public, part of the country. They’re influenced. Every judicial system, in its court verdicts, in its decisions whether to indict or not, reflects the norms of the society in which it operates. Does this influence a particular attorney general or a particular state prosecutor? I would hope not. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure if people aren’t influenced subconsciously. I’m not sure if they don’t think to themselves: “If I indict the prime minister now, when he’s in the middle of a major withdrawal initiative,
Haaretz
will slaughter me!” [Laughs.]
23
Don’t underestimate the power of the press.
a
See p. 421; for the full text of the road map, see the Appendix.
b
Weissglas says:
Sharon’s brilliant gambit—and I say this with the utmost lack of modesty—is that we agreed [to the road map] knowing that the result would be different. The road map is purely “performance based.” Theoretically, if the Palestinians had fully implemented the first stage, we could have been in “permanent status” negotiations with Arafat before the end of 2003. And the monitoring was not in our hands. We took a huge risk. But we took it so cleverly, God forgive me for praising myself. We insisted that the monitoring must be U.S.-led. Sharon said, “In matters of security, a U.S. general will not lie.” We insisted on a soldier, not a politician who might bullshit and say that what the Palestinians had done on security was satisfactory … And sure enough—it was unsatisfactory. In fact they did nothing. Don’t forget, the road map incorporated into its first phase both the Tenet plan and the Zinni plan, detailed and comprehensive work papers on how the PA was to suppress terrorism, disarm the militias, and so forth.
c
Schlaff’s company owned the Jericho casino; see p. 365.
d
See p. 419.
e
There is some uncertainty as to what precisely Sharon and Weissglas said, what precisely Abrams understood, and what he reported back to Washington (Kurtzer interview, Herzliya, July 28, 2008). Abrams himself, in a later interview, seems to have been more impressed by the food than the conversation:
It was at dinner … we were at Sharon’s hotel, the Hilton. And then they bring food. Jeez. And it’s big slabs of meat and they absolutely do not look kosher! And Dov [Weissglas] goes ahead and cuts out a big slice, and I’m thinking it’s very pink … it might be ham, and I said to Sharon, “OK, what kind of meat do you think that is?” And Sharon said, “It is better not to ask.” (Bregman,
Elusive Peace
, 280–81)
f
A bout of flu at the beginning of December enabled Sharon to deliver another heavy hint through the mouth of Ehud Olmert, whom he asked to stand in for him at the annual graveside memorial ceremony for Ben-Gurion. “Let us assume that we can conquer the whole of Eretz Yisrael by force of arms,” Sharon (through Olmert) quoted the founding father. “I’m sure we can. But what then? We will create a single state. But the state will want to be democratic. There will be general elections—and we will be in the minority … When the choice before us was the whole of Eretz Yisrael but no Jewish state, or a Jewish state but not the whole of Eretz Yisrael, we chose a Jewish state.” To drive the point home, Sharon (Olmert) added: “In the near future, the leaders of Israel will need to gather all their inner strength, all their Zionist faith, in order to determine our destiny with the same remarkable fusion of vision and realism [as Ben-Gurion’s]…that requires painful compromise for peace.”
g
See Appendix.
h
In truth, nor did Kurtzer want to do it. His colleagues at State regarded the Weissglas-Rice side letter as little short of a disaster because it gave official U.S. sanction to settlement activity within the “construction line,” wherever that was, of each individual settlement within the blocs. “We would rather have had settlement activity without the sanction than with the sanction,” Kurtzer admitted. But that was the U.S. policy as formulated by Rice and her staff in Weissglas’s letter, and it prevailed. Weissglas’s verdict on Kurtzer: “A nice chap, but a bit strange, and he wasn’t really in the loop about the big moves. Ambassadors are a bit passé.”
i
Ya’alon dismisses the involvement of Brigadier General
Eival Gilady—a representative, after all, of the defense establishment—in the early, secret stages of the initiative as “improper … This is a case of improper behavior by an improper officer … That’s why he had to quit the army and was not promoted to commander of the planning branch as he wished … In army planning procedures people come up with all sorts of scenarios. To make out that one such scenario was the basis of the disengagement plan, and hence arrogate the disengagement to oneself, was not exactly accurate.”
j
Etrogization
was a word invented later by the prominent political commentator Amnon Abramovitz to depict what he said was the media’s mollycoddling of Sharon during this period. An
etrog
is a species of citrus used in Jewish ritual on the Festival of Tabernacles, or Sukkot. It has a delicate little crownlike growth at its tip. If that breaks off, the fruit is no longer kosher for the ritual. The
etrog
is traditionally wrapped in layers of wadding to protect it. By analogy, Sharon, though embroiled in criminal inquiries, was wrapped in protective wadding by the Israeli media, which strongly supported his disengagement plan.
T
he alternative narrative seemed to have the timing on its side. Sharon unveiled his disengagement plan precisely the day after a new attorney general took office. No more would the witty, rumpled, stern, but ultimately soft
Elyakim Rubinstein hold the key to the prime minister’s legal and hence political future. In his seven years as attorney general, the religiously pious and reputedly rightist Rubinstein had ordered police investigations against all three prime ministers whose governments he advised.
a
But he stopped short of indicting any of them.
The new man, Menachem “Menny” Mazuz, had risen to the position of deputy attorney general over years of quiet toil inside the Ministry of Justice. His political sympathies were unknown. As a member of the secular intelligentsia, he most likely favored peace over “
Greater Israel.” If so, he might hesitate before bringing down a prime minister actively engaged in withdrawing Israeli forces and settlements from sizable swaths of the occupied territories. That, at any rate, was the buzz that quickly began to circulate on the right.
On Mazuz’s desk soon after he settled into his new office was a recommendation from his most senior subordinate, State Attorney
Edna Arbel, to indict Sharon for receiving bribes. Her recommendation, moreover, was public knowledge; she or someone else had made sure to leak it. Furthermore, Arbel was angling to become a justice of the Supreme Court. If she succeeded, Mazuz knew, he would meet her again, probably frequently, during his term as attorney general. But the configuration between them would be different then: he would be pleading before her. He would need to be brave, some would say
foolhardy, to overrule her now. All this was uncomfortably clear to Sharon, his sons, and the rest of his friends and advisers on the “ranch forum.”
To appreciate quite how bad Sharon’s situation and his survival prospects were at this crucial moment in his prime ministership, we need to wade back into the two affairs that were threatening to end his career in obloquy. The “
Greek island affair,” the subject of Arbel’s recommendation to indict him, had been looming steadily larger since Sharon had fobbed it off a year before in his famously blacked-out television broadcast. He had boasted to viewers of his son Gilad’s business prowess and high earning potential. Gilad hadn’t even been questioned by the police, he had added smugly.
Since then, both Gilad and he himself had undergone lengthy police questioning. Gilad, on July 31, 2003, and again on September 3, stolidly exercised his right to remain silent. He also refused to hand over documents and tape-recordings that the police wanted. They couldn’t obtain a search warrant to look for them, Gilad’s lawyers argued, because Gilad lived in the home of a serving
Knesset member, Ariel Sharon, which was protected by his parliamentary immunity.
Sharon père had received the police interrogators at his official residence in Jerusalem on October 30, 2003, and sat with them for six straight hours. He spoke a great deal and even joked with the detectives, a police source disclosed later. But at the end of the day, the source complained, the prime minister didn’t provide clear answers to the questions he was asked.
1
He stuck to his guns: he had nothing to do with Gilad’s business affairs; he was not the owner of
Sycamore Ranch (his sons were); there was no connection between Gilad’s contract with the building contractor Appel and Appel’s help to him during the 1999 Likud primary. Nor was his own involvement in hosting the Greek delegation in any way connected, or criminal.
In December, there was some (relatively) good news for the Sharons. The Tel Aviv prosecutor’s office recommended indicting Appel for giving bribes to various officials, including Sharon, but recommended closing the file on Sharon for accepting bribes—on grounds of lack of sufficient evidence. In Israeli law it is possible, though highly unusual, to indict a bribe giver while exculpating the bribe taker because he did not have the requisite criminal intent. He did not know, in other words, that he was being bribed.
But the relief at Sycamore Ranch was short-lived. Edna Arbel, it soon became clear, was not adopting the recommendation from Tel Aviv; she believed Sharon should be indicted, too. On January 21, 2004, during the “interregnum” between the retirement of Attorney
General Rubinstein and the appointment of Attorney General Mazuz, Arbel, as acting attorney general, quickly filed the indictment against Appel for bribing Sharon. This was widely seen as an attempt to present Mazuz with a fait accompli. He would have to indict Sharon, too, or else resort to that seldom-used distinction between bribe giver and bribe taker. He would have to contend, in effect, that the Sharons were too naive to understand what Appel was about. “Senior officials are to be held to a stricter standard,” Arbel asserted in a speech. “In offenses involving governmental corruption we are obliged to indict, unequivocally obliged.”
Reluctantly, Sharon and his aides began discussing a retreat to a new line of defense: the law providing that a prime minister, unlike other ministers, is not required to resign if indicted, only if convicted. This would be a hard line to defend in the battlefield of public opinion. But they made ready to try.
Under the strict letter of the law, they had a good case. Whereas the Supreme Court had laid down a strong judge-made line of precedent, starting back in 1993, that a government minister, if indicted, must resign or must be removed by the prime minister, statute law provided explicitly that a prime minister need step down only if he was convicted of a serious crime and his conviction was upheld on appeal. In Sharon’s case, the general expectation was that even if he were indicted, the trial and appeal would take many months or even years. No rush to resign, then, the prime minister’s advisers contended.
Would public opinion go along with that? Much would depend on lawyers’ arguments. The statute protecting the prime minister from summary removal was originally passed as part of the reform of the electoral system in the 1990s. Under that reform, the status of the prime minister became constitutionally different from that of other ministers. He was a semi-president. He was elected personally and directly by the public, in a separate ballot.
Since then, though, the electoral system had been changed back, mainly, as we saw,
b
at Sharon’s own dogged insistence. The prime minister was now, once again, in constitutional terms just a name on his party’s list of
Knesset candidates, no different from the others, all elected in one single ballot.
But—and here was the rub—while many other provisions in the law had been changed back or abrogated by the Knesset, this one, about his removal from office for committing a crime, had been kept intact. An oversight, argued Sharon’s adversaries. Now that the electoral system
had been changed back, the law reverted to the Supreme Court precedent. Not so, argued Knesset Speaker Rivlin, who was a member of the law committee in 2001. “We wanted to shore up the special standing of the prime minister even after the election system returned to the one-ballot vote.”
Edna Arbel was very clearly of the hard-liners’ mind. “The moment a criminal indictment is filed against a public figure, he is duty-bound to suspend himself from office,” she declared. She did not refer explicitly to the case of a prime minister, or specifically to Prime Minister Sharon. But behind the scenes she was working furiously to connect the dots.
By March 28, aided by a team of six handpicked government attorneys, Edna Arbel had completed her last major opus as state attorney and submitted it to Mazuz:
The State of Israel v. Ariel Sharon
. It was a complete draft indictment, accusing the prime minister and his son Gilad of taking bribes from David Appel, both in the form of political support from Appel in Sharon’s 1999 primary campaign and in the form of cash paid by Appel into the account of Sycamore Ranch as Gilad’s ostensible salary. In return, according to the draft indictment, Sharon had helped Appel with his plans to build a vast new residential suburb near the town of
Lod and with his even vaster (but unsuccessful) plans to build the holiday paradise on the Greek island.