Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (92 page)

Clerk (repeating): “Mohammad Barakeh.”

Barakeh: “Abstain.”

At that moment, the tension suddenly gave way to stifled shouts of relief and rejoicing on the left—the Left now incongruously but incontrovertibly led by Arik Sharon—and muttered acknowledgments on the right that any hope of an alliance of opposites to topple Sharon had just died. One after another, the Arab members now took their places and replied “Abstain” to the clerk’s query. If the Arabs abstained, Sharon was home and dry, regardless of what Netanyahu and his allies did. Sheepishly, the discomfited putschists filed in, too, and, in swallowed undertones, whispered their replies.

Sharon, surrounded by ecstatic members, stood and slowly made his way out. At the exit he stopped and surveyed his young aides, bright-eyed and exultant. “Learn a lesson,” he said. “Never, never give
way to pressure. You can change your mind. You can be persuaded. But never fold before threats.” Back in his Knesset suite he immediately summoned
Uzi Landau and Michael Ratzon, the Likud minister and deputy minister who had voted against the disengagement, and handed them their letters of dismissal. Identical letters had been prepared for Netanyahu and his friends. “I’m not rejoicing,” he told select journalists over the phone as he rode home to the ranch. “This wasn’t a happy decision. It was an important decision, but a sad one.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, compounding his discomfiture in the chamber, held a hasty press conference in the corridor outside where he categorically undertook to resign from the government within two weeks unless Sharon agreed to hold a referendum. This was also carried live on television, and he was shown perspiring freely. The contrast between the sweaty, harassed-looking Bibi and the cool and in-control Arik etched itself on the minds of the viewers.

D
espite his huge victory that night, Sharon’s government was still threatened and his disengagement policy still uncertain of final political success. To stay in power, he needed to pass the budget. But to stay in power, he clearly needed a more stable coalition—in other words, a coalition with Labor back inside it. The two goals seemed incompatible: Labor was opposed to the budget, and the Likud was opposed to Labor. The architect of the budget, moreover, Bibi Netanyahu, was now openly threatening to quit over the disengagement. If he did, would that not bring the Likud rebels to oppose the budget? Sharon could end up without Labor
and
without a budget. First, though, another moment of gratification: on October 27, the day after the Knesset drama, the government submitted its disengagement compensation bill to the house, and a week later it passed its first reading by a majority of 64 to 44 with 9 abstentions.

“Even those of you who oppose the disengagement shouldn’t oppose this bill,” Sharon reasoned at cabinet. “It’s designed to make things easier for the settlers who will lose their homes and businesses.” It provided up to $750,000 compensation for farming families for their homes and farms. Some MKs complained that these sums were overly generous by any realistic standards. But there was little appetite in the house, among supporters or opponents of the disengagement alike, to fight the Gaza settlers head-on over money, and the rates of compensation were not pared down.

The government did not detail the anticipated expenditure in the legislation. But the explanatory notes prepared for the MKs suggested
an overall outlay of 2.5–3 billion shekels excluding the costs of the military-police operation—a very large sum, but not debilitating. Pro-disengagement advocates asserted that the sum would soon be made up by a surge in exports as Israel’s general international situation picked up as a result of the disengagement.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, was wrestling with his own rash ultimatum. His co-conspirators had quickly detached themselves from the failed putsch. Netanyahu knew that if he walked out, he would walk alone. It was
Yasser Arafat’s dramatically deteriorating health that provided him with the pretext he needed to climb down. The Palestinian leader, still cooped up in the
muqata,
had been growing weaker since mid-October. At first, he seemed to be suffering from a stomach condition. Later, doctors diagnosed a disease of the blood. Now he lay dying in a hospital outside Paris. With Arafat gone, there might be radical changes in the region, Netanyahu explained to the prime minister on November 9, hours before his two-week deadline expired. He had therefore decided to remain in the cabinet.

Sharon’s response to Arafat’s terminal illness was restrained, especially given his long loathing of the man. At first, the Israeli intelligence agencies, like the doctors the PA brought in from around the Arab world, failed to understand how grave the
rais
’s condition was.
^f
Sharon was reluctant to let him leave for treatment abroad. “Our people say he’s not so ill,” Sharon told Weissglas over the phone to Europe. He didn’t want Arafat traveling around the world and bad-mouthing the disengagement, he said.

Weissglas, on a train between Brussels and London, went to work quickly. Soon he phoned Sharon back with a firsthand report from one of Arafat’s closest advisers: Arafat was sinking. Sharon ordered the army to facilitate Arafat’s transfer, by Jordanian government
helicopter and then French government airplane, to a hospital in
France. After his death, the Palestinians demanded that Arafat be buried on the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. Sharon refused, fearing the grave would become a rallying site for Palestinian resistance in Jerusalem. But he overrode the
Shin Bet’s urgings that Arafat be laid to rest in Gaza,
¹⁷
and he agreed to a grave site in the grounds of the battered
muqata
in Ramallah.

“Recent events could be a historic turning point,” he said in a statement on Arafat’s death. “Israel is a peace-seeking nation … If after the Arafat era ends a new Palestinian leadership arises, a leadership
that carries out the Palestinians’ commitments under the
road map, then we shall have the opportunity to coordinate various steps with them and also to resume political negotiations.” But he made it clear that while this was his vague hope, his immediate and unwavering intention was to carry out the disengagement unilaterally.

But there would be no disengagement if there was no government, and there would be no government, come March 31, if there was no budget. The Likud rebels still stolidly refused to vote for the budget. Now, however, extremism of another kind gave Sharon his lucky break. In his dogged search for Knesset votes, Sharon had been flirting with the
haredim
of United Torah Judaism. He promised them 290 million shekels for their schools and yeshivas if they supported the budget bill. It was a fairly modest allurement, but for Shinui’s
Tommy Lapid it was a nefarious bribe that he and his party could not countenance. If Sharon went ahead, Lapid warned, Shinui would secede. It would continue backing the disengagement policy, though, from the opposition.

Sharon’s response was instant. If the Shinui ministers voted against the budget, he replied, he would sack them at once and open negotiations with Labor and the
haredim
to form a new government. His own party, he reasoned, would support him this time—because not to do so would be to trigger the premature end of the Likud-led government.

That is precisely what happened. On December 1, the government submitted the budget bill to the house. Shinui voted against it, and it was duly defeated. No sooner had the voting ended than Sharon summoned the five Shinui ministers and handed each of them a letter of dismissal. His coalition now comprised just the forty Likud MKs, and almost half of them were in profound political rebellion against him. He now called for an urgent session of the Likud convention. There, as he had done unsuccessfully three months earlier, Sharon asked for the delegates’ consent to coalition talks with Labor. To sweeten the pill, he made it clear that he hoped to co-opt the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, too. This time, he won a comfortable majority: 1,410 votes to 856, or 62 percent.

Still moving swiftly, Sharon sent his aides to negotiate with Labor. Every portfolio in the rejiggered cabinet was available, he announced expansively, “except the prime ministership; that’s not vacant.” Peres, in equally lofty tones, declared that his party was “not interested in portfolios, only in policies.” The reality, of course, was less lofty. Not every portfolio was available. In fact, not one of the top ones was. Sharon, for sound political reasons, did not propose to shunt aside either
Netanyahu at Finance or Mofaz at Defense. As for the Foreign Ministry, Silvan Shalom threatened that if Sharon dumped him to make way for Peres, “there’ll be no government at all.” He was strong enough in the party to make that come true, or at any rate to cause Sharon serious grief.

Peres grandly waived his claim to the Foreign Ministry. Instead, he proposed, he would just have the title of vice prime minister, with no ministry of his own. Sharon received a list of the areas that his would-be vice prime minister wanted to run. It included relations with the
Arab world; relations with the donor states to the Palestinian Authority; responsibility for peace negotiations with the PA; responsibility for all the diplomacy surrounding the disengagement both with the PA and with the wider world; responsibility for the secret intelligence agencies; and responsibility for the national security council. It would have left both Sharon and Shalom largely unemployed. But Sharon made light of it. Peres wasn’t going to back out now, he reckoned, because of strife over turf. But Shalom was less philosophical. He insisted that Sharon defend him from the Labor leader’s intended depredations. He demanded a paper from the prime minister enshrining his areas of responsibility as foreign minister.

“You don’t know how to work!”
Yisrael Maimon, the cabinet secretary, remembers Sharon bawling at him and Weissglas. “You just have no idea of how to work! Get a piece of paper and start writing. Write to Silvan as follows, yes. Write to him, eh, that he is responsible, eh, for relations with Togo. And, eh, with Equatorial Guinea, yes. And with all of the Scandinavian countries. Fill up three whole pages, yes, with areas that he’s responsible for. Every country. Look on the map. Then he’ll have lots of responsibilities. When are you two going to learn how to work?!”
¹⁸

No less hilarious—and the whole country shared this one—was the fact, turned up by government lawyers, that the law did not allow for two vice prime ministers.
Ehud Olmert had the title already, and he wasn’t about to give it up for Peres. Say something happened to Sharon, God forbid. The prime ministership would fall into the Labor leader’s hands for ninety days, until new elections were held. That could be disastrous for the Likud. The law would have to be amended. That would take weeks. Peres was adamant: the seven other Labor ministers would not be sworn in until he, too, could be sworn in
as vice prime minister (II).

It took till the second week of January. But the delay was a blessing because it enabled Sharon to bring
United Torah Judaism (UTJ)
in, too, despite desperate efforts by the settlers and the Likud rebels to persuade the
haredi
party to stay out. UTJ had only five seats, paltry compared with Labor’s nineteen. But it was important beyond its number. The
haredi
party’s accession to the coalition meant, in effect, a political schism within Orthodoxy.
Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the ninety-four-year-old spiritual leader of a key faction in UTJ, explained that Sharon had enough votes to ensure the disengagement anyway. He didn’t depend on UTJ’s five. He had Labor and Shinui and Meretz and the
Arab parties lined up behind the policy, apart from the majority of his own Likud Party.

But that was naive, and there was nothing naive about the aged rabbi. He knew that UTJ’s entry eased the way in for Labor, thereby salvaging the budget and giving the government a new lease on life. The national-religious rabbis’ cry, moreover, that the disengagement was heresy would ring hollow now that the black-garbed, bearded MKs of the ultra-Orthodox UTJ were part of the disengagement government.

The
haredim
were still deeply resentful of the economic reforms that had drastically cut back child allowances and plunged thousands of their families into penury. They had not forgiven Sharon for keeping them out of his government in 2003 so that Netanyahu could go ahead and make those cuts. These people, moreover, many too poor to own
cars, had been savagely hit by the bus bombings
in Jerusalem during the years of the intifada. Many ordinary
haredim
sympathized with the Gaza settlers. Left to their own devices, many might have taken to the streets on the settlers’ behalf.

But
haredim
are never left to their own devices.
Haredi
politics is tightly run by the rabbis, and the rabbis, in the main, still cleave to the old ideological-theological ambivalence toward the Zionist state. This means two general rules for rabbinical decision makers: that
haredi
parties should not be the ones to determine Israel’s defense and foreign policy, but that if they nevertheless find themselves in that role, they should support a moderate, unaggressive policy that does not “stir hatred among the nations.” Hence Rabbi Eliashiv’s somewhat disingenuous claim that the UTJ would not have the casting votes on the disengagement. Hence, too, his decision, wittingly taken, which in effect enabled the disengagement to happen. The settlers sent delegations of their own rabbis to importune the
haredi
sage. But he had made up his mind. “The waiting period is over,”
Yossi Verter wrote on January 7, when Rabbi Eliashiv’s decision was announced. “Nothing now stands in the way of Sharon carrying out his disengagement plan. Nothing but the madness of the extremists.”
¹⁹