Ariel Sharon probably had a much nicer childhood than he admitted to. In family photographs from the 1930s he looks happy enough. A plump, clear-eyed little boy, neatly, almost fussily turned out, staring boldly at the camera, comfortable with his parents, his sister, his various uncles and aunts.
The backdrop is usually poor looking. The walls of the family homestead, both inside and out, expose bare boards and rough-hewn doors. The farmyard is unkempt, but it is clearly a busy and active place.
In later years, as a politician and eventually as leader of the rightist Likud Party, Sharon often spoke of the tensions between his parents and the other farming families in their moshav, or cooperative village, of Kfar Malal, nine miles northeast of Tel Aviv. He never tired of telling how he, at age five, fell off a donkey and cut his chin and how his mother carried him bleeding through the fields to a private doctor in the township of Kfar Saba, nearly two miles away, rather than have him treated at the clinic in Kfar Malal. The clinic was run by Kupat Holim, part of the Histadrut trade union organization. Samuil and Vera Scheinerman, Sharon’s parents, refused to belong to Kupat Holim.
Some of the village old-timers, though, pooh-poohed his account. It was hyped, they hinted: the auto-hagiography of a rightist arriviste who grew up, in fact, a Labor boy in a thoroughly Labor village. Vera, too, the lonely heroine of her son’s reminiscences, failed to confirm the ideological motives to which Arik ascribed her and Samuil’s running feuds with the village committee. “Revisionists?a We weren’t Revisionists,” she told an interviewer at the age of eighty-five, still running the farm at Kfar Malal. “Who even knew what that meant around here? It was simply that anyone who tried to demand a bit of order was immediately dubbed a Revisionist.”1
But Arik’s depiction of his parents as loners, tough and obstinate individualists in a society that preferred conformism, was basically right. Samuil and Vera were among the earliest settlers at Kfar Malal. New immigrants from Russia, they joined in 1922. First they lived in a tent. Then Samuil built the rickety cabin that, with additions, was to house the family till the mid-1940s, when they could finally afford a house of bricks and mortar. Yehudit, always called Dita, was born in 1926, and Ariel, called Arik, arrived two years later. There were quarrels over land. Kfar Malal was required to donate some of its fields to nearby settlements founded later. On one occasion—this, too, made famous by Arik’s incessant, proud narration of it—Vera resolved on the unilateral disengagement of the Scheinermans’ little vineyard from the annexationist designs of neighboring Ramot Hashavim. Husband away, children asleep, she crept out at midnight with rifle in one hand and wire cutters in the other and dismantled the new demarcation. The village suspected Bedouin marauders, but she put them right—and threatened to do it again unless the fence was restored to the far side of her vineyard.
As an individualist and as a trained agronomist with novel ideas, Samuil Scheinerman tried to introduce crops new to Palestine on his little farm. He planted peanuts and sweet potatoes. They were family staples for years. “So what? Arik doesn’t look small or stunted on them,” Vera observed years later.2 But neither of these niche foods swept the market, and making a living remained a problem. Vera swallowed her pride and wrote to her brother, Joseph, who had settled in Istanbul, asking if he could find work for Samuil.
For two years Samuil worked in Turkey. He came back full of plans for growing cotton, but no one in the Jewish Agency Settlement Department wanted to listen. In time, he planted avocados, another exotic novelty in those days, mangoes, and clementine oranges. Slowly his finances improved, but Dita and Arik’s high-school fees were still a heavy drag on the family budget.
High school for village kids was by no means the norm, and Vera and Samuil’s insistence on it exacerbated the charges of snobbishness and hauteur constantly muttered by their neighbors. Most of the other Kfar Malal children made do with eight years at the local elementary school, graduating at fourteen to become full-time farmhands. Arik did his share of farmwork before dawn. Then, in a blue shirt with red lacing and khaki shorts,3 the de rigueur dress code for kibbutz and moshav youngsters, he bused in to Tel Aviv.
The Geula High School, a private institution catering mainly to the sons and daughters of the Yishuv’sb bourgeois gentlefolk, stood by the seashore. Arik strode the half hour from the bus terminal, saving his fare money for a falafel and soda after classes. By late afternoon he was back home again, working in the fields until nightfall. Then—homework.
In later life, Sharon praised his parents for inculcating in him both the stomach and the stamina for sustained, hard work. “As a child,” he wrote in Warrior, the autobiography he published, in English, in the 1980s, “I listened to my father talk about the nobility of physical labor. By the time I was old enough to have my own thoughts on the subject, the work itself was in my bones … By the age of eight or nine I was doing the heavier work on my own. In the spring I would take the horse and wagon out to the vineyard and hitch up the plow.”
In Tel Aviv, after school, Sharon would sometimes spend his afternoons with his paternal grandmother, Miriam, Mordechai’s widow. She regaled him in Russian with “stories of her life in Petrograd, where she had studied to be a midwife; in Brest Litovsk, where she had practiced her profession; and in Baku, where the family had fled during the war.” Russian forebears and a good smattering of the language were to stand the politician Sharon in good stead decades later, when more than a million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union poured into Israel. So was the snippet of Scheinerman family lore, of uncertain provenance, that the midwife Miriam had actually brought the Likud leader and prime minister Menachem Begin into the world. Begin was certainly born in Brest Litovsk, and his father and Mordechai were certainly friends and fellow activists in the local Zionist cell.
The adult Sharon always praised his parents, too, for dinning into him a love of culture. “Be a ben kfar, a man of the soil,” the agronomist Samuil urged his son. “But be a ben tarbut, a man of culture, too.”4 Samuil was an enthusiastic amateur musician, and despite his prickly personality he found a few like-minded souls to make music with. He painted too. Vera read constantly. She made sure her children imbibed the Russian classics. From the tight domestic budget they bought little Arik a quarter-size violin and the lessons to go with it. They took him to musical soirees in neighboring Ramot Hashavim, at the home of Dr. Steinitz, an accomplished pianist and lecturer on music.c
While his young farmer’s fingers showed little aptitude for the fiddle, Arik took away with him a lifelong devotion to classical music from his incongruous childhood conservatory at Kfar Malal and Ramat Hashavim. Political rivals who suffered the sharp side of his tongue during the day knew they would find him all smiles and good cheer at night, in his regular seat at the Tel Aviv concert hall, for a performance of the Israel Philharmonic.d
At school, a classmate recalled, Arik was a good student and generally liked by the teachers. But where he really shone was in the martial arts class. Here he served as the instructor’s aide, helping to teach the boys and girls how to wield a cudgel to maximal effect. His budding military prowess was in evidence, too, on a class outing in tenth grade when the teacher lost his way and Arik led the hot and worried city kids back to safety.
Samuil kept quarreling and bickering with other families till the end. He died young, in 1956. At the burial in the village cemetery Arik himself eulogized his father. Standing at attention in his red paratrooper boots and red paratrooper beret, Colonel Ariel Sharon, a national hero by then, though already a controversial one, pulled out a folded paper from his tunic pocket and read appropriately uncontroversial words of love and longing for the dogged, hard-bitten idealist.
There was one item on Kfar Malal’s agenda that provoked no discord at all between the regimented village families and the cantankerous Scheinermans: defense against the Palestinian Arabs who lived all around. Vera never forgot the sense of near terror one night during the countrywide violent riots of 1929, when rumors reached the village that thousands of Arabs were massing in Kalkilya, a nearby town, to overrun Kfar Malal. With the other mothers she cowered with Dita and baby Arik in a concrete cowshed while the men made ready to fight for their lives. The attack never came. For his bar mitzvah, Samuil gave Arik a richly decorated Caucasian dagger he had brought with him from Baku. It was a symbolic gift but one whose import both giver and receiver recognized.
Guarding and patrolling the village at night was always part of the farmers’ lives. After his bar mitzvah, Arik was on the roster. At fourteen, like other likely lads, he took his oath of allegiance to the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish state in the making. The rite duly took place at dead of night, replete with Bible and revolver and flickering candle. The Haganah was supposedly secret, but everyone knew it existed, and most people encouraged the boys and young men to volunteer. Training at Kfar Malal took place on Saturdays and one weekday evening.
No sooner had Arik taken up arms as an eager young teenager than he found himself involved in the first of the historical disputes that were to dog his military career and later darken his political life. For Arik, they were historical in two senses: they became key episodes in the history of Zionism; and his own specific role in them was debated, often bitterly, for long years and even decades after the episodes themselves had become history.
The saison, or hunting season, was the cynical sobriquet attached to the period from December 1944 to April 1945 during which the Haganah actively pursued members of the Etzel,e the rival underground army of the Revisionists, and the Lehi,f an even more radical underground group. Some of these “dissidents” apprehended by the Haganah were handed over to the British, who deported them to detention camps in East Africa. Others were held in secret kibbutz lockups or merely roughed up and released.
Most of the serious pursuing, apprehending, and roughing up was done by the Palmach, the Haganah’s two-thousand-strong full-time guerrilla force. But the part-time soldiers sometimes played a role, too. Did young Arik Scheinerman, a dab hand with a cudgel, swing his stick and his fists in the saison of 1945? That was hardly something the future leader of the Likud would want to be remembered for. The evidence is sketchy. Sharon himself denied any such thing. “I hated [the saison],” he wrote in Warrior. “Even arresting and punishing the militants seemed reasonable enough. But turning them over to the British? How could Jews turn over other Jews? It seemed criminal, a shameful thing to be associated with.”
Two years later, with the Palestine issue before the newly formed United Nations, the Zionist leadership again clamped down on the Revisionist underground. This time, Arik Scheinerman seems to have joined in with gusto. By now he was an unofficial NCO in the unofficial army of the state-to-be. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1945, he had been picked to take part in a Haganah platoon commander’s course in the remote southern kibbutz of Ruhama. Here again he distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat training and field craft, though he graduated, to his chagrin, only a probationary corporal, not a full corporal.
He wanted to enlist in the Palmach. His parents wanted him to register for studies in agricultural science. Instead, he did neither but enrolled in the Jewish Settlement Police. This was a legitimate branch of the Mandatory security forces, designated to protect the Jewish settlements and patrol the roads between them. But it was also a convenient cover under which military-minded youngsters like Arik could continue their own weapons training, and train other Jewish youth, without harassment from the authorities.
It also allowed him plenty of spare time to work on the family farm. “One day,” he writes, “as we were working together in the orange groves…[Samuil] said, ‘Arik, I want to tell you, anything you decide to do with your life is all right with me. But you have to promise me one thing. Never, never take part in turning Jews over to non-Jews. You must promise me that you will never do that.’ ”5
In fact, though, the second saison, in 1947, did not entail collaboration with the British forces. These, still vigorously enforcing their blockade of Palestine’s shores against Jewish refugee-immigrants from post-Holocaust Europe, were by this time seen as outright enemies by David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, and the mainstream Zionist leadership. The Haganah made do with beatings and incarceration of Etzel activists. In the area around Kfar Malal, known Etzel recruiters were warned away, and when the warnings went unheeded, one of them had his arms thrust in an irrigation pipe and deliberately broken. Another was locked in a refrigeration plant for twenty-four hours. Arik, attached now to the Haganah’s fledgling intelligence branch, is said to have gathered the information that led to these brutal assaults. In another incident, Arik tracked five Etzel men carrying tommy guns and engineered their ambush by a Haganah unit. But they opened fire and escaped, leaving a Haganah man shot through the buttocks.
Periodically over the years, people would come forward with vivid recollections of these activities that the adult Arik would have preferred to forget. “He was very, very active in everything we did against the Etzel,” said Dedi Zalmanson, one of Arik’s Haganah comrades, in 1983.6 “He chased after me with a pickax handle,” said Yosef Menkes, an old-time Etzelnik, in 1990.7 “He smashed up my coffee shop,” said Ben-Ami Zamir, another ex-Etzel man, in 1995.8 Arik, he recalled, arrived by truck at the head of a Haganah posse. “He asked me for a soda, pointing to a crate on the floor. As I bent over to fetch it, he whacked me over the head with the wooden club he was carrying. I was covered in blood. Unluckily for him, my brother, who was in the Palmach, happened to be around, and he fought back. My sister, who’d been boiling up water for coffee, poured it all over them.” Arik, prime minister by this time, issued a categorical denial. “I never took part in the first saison nor in the second saison, and I never hit a Jew with a pickax handle.”9
In Warrior, Sharon wrote that he was attracted to the militants, jealous of “their actions and their heroism. But I was also in the Haganah, and I believe that people did not have the right to go off and do whatever they wanted, no matter how courageous they might be.”10 It was a delicate balancing act by a general whose own subsequent military career was stained by acts of excessive and wanton retribution and who now, as a politician, aspired to lead the party that still adulated the Etzel. Sharon often claimed that his military career was in fact stymied—he was held back for years and was never appointed chief of staff—because he wasn’t “one of us,” in other words, a reliably anti-Revisionist Laborite. “What do you mean ‘not one of them’?” one lifelong Revisionist, Mordechai Zippori, snorted contemptuously. “ ‘Not one of them’?! He took part in the saison and beat up Etzel men.”11
Life was not all cudgels and plowshares. Arik was in love. “She was not exactly my first love,” he wrote years later. “But what I felt now seemed completely different from anything I had felt before.” Margalit Zimmerman, whom everyone called Gali, was just sixteen, a student at the boarding school for immigrant children next door to his parents’ farm. He had furtively watched her weeding and was smitten. Happily, his Haganah duties required him to impart military rudiments to the boys in Gali’s class, and through them he communicated his first request for a date. “I cut a hole in the wire fence that surrounded the yard so she could sneak through … In the evenings we would go out and sit next to the old village well in the middle of the groves, holding hands and talking in the dark.”12
On November 29, 1947, endorsing the recommendations of a special commission of inquiry, the United Nations General Assembly voted by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem was to remain under international control. Throughout the country, Jews took to the streets dancing, singing, and weeping with joy. Ben-Gurion watched the celebrations with a heavy heart. “I knew that we faced war,” he wrote in his diary, “and that in it we would lose the finest of our youth.”
The youth were now called up in their thousands for full-time service as the Haganah steadily morphed into a regular army, ready to be proclaimed as such as soon as the British flag was hauled down and the Jewish state declared, the following May. The intervening months quickly deteriorated into countrywide civil war. The Palestinian political leadership flatly rejected partition. Palestinian fighters, backed by Arab volunteers from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, attacked Jewish settlements and transportation. The Haganah, spread too thin to defend the entire Yishuv, attacked city suburbs and villages seen as strongholds of the Palestinian forces. The British for their part, having announced their departure date, effectively washed their hands of their security responsibilities. Their troops protected only their own evacuation routes. Ben-Gurion sent emissaries abroad on a desperate quest for arms; he anticipated with dire certainty that the Arab states would pitch their regular armies into the battle once the Jewish state came into being.
Arik was mobilized on December 12. He did his initial fighting in the general area of Kfar Malal, in the center of the country. “Operating around the old coastal highway, we raided Arab bases and set ambushes … Typically we would leave our camp in the middle of the night, picking our way through the orchards…[W]e would be at our ambush site before first light, waiting for the early-morning traffic between the Arab villages and bases … As one action followed the next, I became aware that the others in our platoon had developed confidence in my ability to lead them into these actions.”
The guerrilla war was “vicious, cruel and littered with atrocities.”13 On the last day of 1947, armed Arabs killed 39 Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refineries. The Haganah hit back, killing 60 Arabs in the village of Balad el-Sheikh. In February, two terrorist bombs in Jerusalem killed a dozen Arabs and 60 Jews. In March another 17 Jews died and many more were injured in a truck bombing at the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem. On April 9, 110 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Etzel in an attack on the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem. Four days later, in a revenge attack, 77 Jewish medical staff died in an ambush on a convoy traveling to a beleaguered Jewish hospital on Mount Scopus, in east Jerusalem.
Arik was part of the Alexandroni Brigade, a loose collection of local Haganah units gradually taking shape into a regular military formation. After a large-scale night attack on Iraqi irregulars in the village of Bir Addas, he was formally appointed a platoon commander. “A good many of the soldiers I was now leading were from Kfar Malal, boys I had studied with and played with, but whose families had been at odds with mine for ages. But now our relationships had become something else entirely.”14
Some of these boyhood friends were lost during the months of guerrilla warfare that preceded the “real” war against the invading Arab armies after the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. At the time, there seemed little difference between before and after.
What set that day [May 14] apart was the short pass I had. I would be seeing Gali for the first time in almost two months. That night I was scheduled to lead a raid on the bridge to Kalkilya…[T]here was just enough time to get home, give Gali a kiss, and say goodbye. As I walked toward the children’s school where she still lived, I heard a radio … Ben-Gurion’s voice … announcing the establishment of the State of Israel. “In the Land of Israel the Jewish People came into being. In this land their character was shaped.” These were beautiful words, sonorous words. But they did not excite me … It seemed to me that we already had our independence for the past six months. We had been neck-deep in it and fighting for it since November. The coming night at the bridge to Kalkilya would be no different from all the other nights.
The Haganah, hard-pressed in the early months after the Partition Resolution, scored some successes in the weeks before independence. In April, Haganah forces broke the Arab blockade on the road up through the hills from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Convoys of supply trucks brought food, fuel, and ammunition to the city. Mixed cities designated part of the proposed Jewish state were overrun: Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 22–23, Safed on May 13–14. Many of their Arab inhabitants fled. Jaffa and Acre, which were both to have been within the proposed Arab state, were also taken. So was much of the western Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, fell to the Arab Legion and local Palestinian fighters. Hundreds of settlers and soldiers were killed or taken into captivity in Jordan.
The fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance. The city had been designated a corpus separatum in the UN resolution, but once it became clear that the fate of Palestine would be decided by war and not diplomacy, Jerusalem became the most sought-after prize—both for Ben-Gurion and for the Transjordanian leader, the emir Abdullah.g The two wily neighbors had hoped not to fight. Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir to negotiate with the emir, with a view to Transjordan peaceably annexing part of Palestine to his kingdom. But the talks failed. Jordan’s small but well-trained Arab Legion acquitted itself by far the best of all the invading Arab armies.
It was against units of the Legion, well dug in around a British-built fortress at Latrun, commanding the road to Jerusalem, that young Arik Scheinerman now found himself deployed. This was to be not another derring-do night raid against ill-trained irregulars but a pitched battle against disciplined soldiers, equipped with artillery and heavy machine guns. The Israeli side, moreover, was dishearteningly ill-prepared.
On May 26, 2005, at a memorial event for the dead of his regiment, the Thirty-Second Regiment of the Alexandroni Brigade, Prime Minister Sharon reflected on that fateful night, fifty-seven years before:
An olive grove near ancient Hulda. My platoon and I lie sprawled in the afternoon heat under the shade of the trees. Thoughts before the battle. We blend into the scrubby soil, as though we were an integral part of it. Feelings of rootedness, of homeland, of belonging, of ownership.
Suddenly a line of trucks pulls up nearby. New recruits, foreign looking, pale, in sleeveless pullovers, gray trousers, striped shirts. A mélange of languages. Names like Herschel and Jazek are bandied about, Yanem, Jonzi, Peter. They so don’t blend with the olive trees, the rocks, the yellow earth. They came to us from the death camps of Europe…
They stripped off, white-skinned bodies, tried to find uniforms that fit, struggled with buckles and belts helped by young commanders they have only just met. All are quiet. Acquiescent. Not one of them shouts, Give us a chance at least to breathe a little air after the terrible years we have been through. As though they know this is another battle, the last battle, for Jewish survival.
The new recruits didn’t yet know, Sharon continued, of the draft dodgers in the Yishuv who failed to enlist or of “moneyed aristocracy who sent their sons abroad lest they be harmed in the war. No one sang of these new recruits, the ‘overseas draftees,’ as they were called … Numbers on their arms. The lone remnants of their families, of their entire communities, cinders salvaged from the flames … No one told stories around the bonfire about their exploits. They had no one waiting for them at home, with whom to share their experiences. They had no homes. Men from another world, young like us but a thousand years older.”
It was a subtly political speech, but for his peroration Sharon cast aside subtlety:
My comrades and my commanders are assembled here. With you I started on my life’s path. From you I learned. After the war, I thought I’d go back home to work and to study. But our need to stand firm in the battle lines did not end then, and it still has not ended. Looking back, I feel as though I’ve been at the front for sixty years. Now I have decided on a great effort designed to bring about different days, days of peace and quiet. It is a difficult and painful effort, and I am on the front line in a hard battle, perhaps the hardest I have ever fought. But I will persevere because I know it is both right and vital for our nation. And for that, too, I need your comradeship.
He carried the memory of that day with him all his life. It taught him tactical truths that he was later to employ in much larger engagements. It taught him lessons of leadership, basics of battlefield morale.
Arguably, it taught him, too, some basic truths about Israel’s place in Palestine and in the wider region. He needed a whole lifetime, though, to learn them. But in the end—before the end—they sank in.
He nearly died there that day, of thirst, of blood loss from a bullet that struck him in the thigh and exited through his stomach. His son Omri attested that whenever his father passed that place, for the next fifty years and more, he was assailed by an overwhelming thirst.15 His own platoon, much better kitted out than the newcomers, had nevertheless somehow not been provided with water canteens. The platoon was supposed to lead the attack on the hilltop Jordanian emplacements and the fortress and monastery below. Arik planned to cross the Jerusalem highway and come upon the defenders under cover of darkness. The rest of the force would follow.
But logistical delays—a critical unit of mortars failed to arrive; the buses ferrying the troops to the battlefield lost their way16—meant that the attack didn’t get going till nearly dawn. The rising sun caught the platoon in open country, still on the wrong side of the road, and drew down on them a relentless hail of mortar bombs and machine-gun bullets from the hilltop. Casualties quickly mounted; the radio set was hit. The soldiers tried to flatten themselves into a shallow gully, waiting with gradually flagging confidence for reinforcements.
The Jordanians and the Palestinian irregulars, meanwhile, sensing that Arik was effectively abandoned, advanced on foot toward the beleaguered Israeli platoon.
[They] came again and again … moving in, shouting “Etbach al Yahud,” “Kill the Jews,” firing. Each time we drove them back, choking as the stench of cordite mixed with the smoke billowing over us from the fires in the wheat field … Between the fighting, the sun, and the hot wind coming across the plain, we were dying of thirst.
Around noon, the Jordanians on the hill intensified their fire, the usual forerunner of another assault. Raising myself to see what was happening, I felt something thud into my belly, knocking me back. I heard my mouth say “ima”—mother, and the instant it was out I glanced around to see if anybody had heard. Already blood was seeping through my shirt and from my shorts, where another wound in my thigh had appeared as if by magic. I lay down, still lucid, but feeling my strength ebbing away.
By this time, almost half of the thirty-six-man platoon were dead and most of the others wounded. The Israeli field guns suddenly fell silent, and Arik, looking around gingerly, saw Arab soldiers on a hill to the rear where another Israeli unit had previously been deployed.
Now and then they stooped down over black shapes that were just barely distinguishable … Instantly I realized what the scene meant. Our people there were gone—dead or withdrawn. The black shapes on the hillside were their casualties; the Arabs stooping over them were looting and mutilating the bodies. Then I understood the silence. We were alone on the field. The other units had been ordered back. That was what the artillery fire had been for, to cover the retreat … They had not known that we were still here, and still alive … I gave the order and pointed out the direction—straight back through the smoke and over the terraces.
[T]he Arabs on the hillside were moving slowly, going from body to body, oblivious that we were down here … Simcha Pinchasi, a wonderful boy from Kfar Saba, had been hit badly in both legs and could not move. With a look and a quick nod he indicated that he would cover the withdrawal…“But Arik,” he said, “before you go, give me a grenade.” I gave it to him, knowing there was no hope whatsoever, not for him and most likely not for the rest of us either. There was no one whom I could ask to carry him, just as there was no one who could carry me.17
Arik crawled painfully on all fours toward the terraces that rose up out of the burning field. He knew he lacked the strength to climb along them. A young soldier from his platoon half dragged him along. “He was a new boy, just sixteen years old. He had joined us only two days earlier, and somehow I could not remember his name. I stared at him in horror. The bottom of his jaw had been shot up, leaving a mass of gore … He was unable to talk. I was too tired.”
“He kept saying, ‘Get away. Save yourself; run for it,’ ” the young savior recalled years later. “But I insisted. I wouldn’t obey him.”18 “Together we crawled over one rocky terrace, then another,” Sharon continued his account. Eventually, they were picked up by a jeep, driven, coincidentally, by Rifka and Shmuel Bogin, a brother and sister from Kfar Malal. “Then the name of the boy who saved my life came to me. It was Yaakov Bogin, a cousin of theirs. A moment later … I passed out.”
Half conscious on the long and much-interrupted ride to the hospital, he thought he overheard people remark that he had been hit “right in the genitals…[At Ekron] some of the village women came in carrying cans of milk and filling glasses for us. I was so thirsty; but looking down at my abdomen, they wouldn’t give me any. I couldn’t keep my eyes open … But when I was awake I couldn’t keep my mind off my wound.”19 At a field hospital in Rehovot, “my stretcher was placed on the ground, and a charming volunteer nurse asked me to urinate. I couldn’t. She asked for a catheter to be brought, and I said, ‘Wait, I’ll try again.’ This time I succeeded. She kissed me on the mouth, and then I realized that my wound was not where I had feared.”20
Lying in the hospital in Tel Aviv for several weeks, he reviewed the battle in his mind over and over. Fifteen of his soldiers had been killed and eleven others wounded. He had known most of them well; they were from Kfar Malal and the surrounding settlements. He knew many of their families, whose lives would never be the same again. Some of the parents came to visit him in the hospital. He didn’t know what to say to them. He felt he could not claim with conviction that their loved ones’ deaths had been unavoidable.
He never, then or later, questioned the strategic decision by Ben-Gurion to hurl regiment after regiment, some barely trained to shoot a rifle, against the Latrun defenses, in three successive and failed assaults. In the event, the army found an alternative route up to Jerusalem, dubbed the Burma road, which it was able to roughly pave and use to send in supplies to the city. Military historians argued subsequently over whether the dogged and costly harassment of the Arab Legion forces at Latrun served at least to reduce their numbers and their effectiveness in the fight for Jerusalem itself (which ended with both sides exhausted and the city divided by concrete walls, barbed wire, and pillboxes for the next nineteen years). Arik’s criticisms were on the tactical level, and they were bitter and devastating. He faulted the more senior commanders for failing to plan the operation in greater detail, failing to ensure that it was launched on time, and above all failing to command the forces in person and from the front—so that they could change plans and improvise as the battle ebbed and flowed. “There wasn’t a single senior officer on the ground, and that was what was lacking at the critical moment,” Sharon told his longtime friend and amanuensis, Uri Dan, years later.21
Arik was troubled, too, by the almost blithe stoicism with which both officers and other ranks in the fledgling Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seemed resigned to leaving the injured as well as the dead on the battlefield. He found himself wondering what the proper code of conduct ought to be, especially given that he had seen with his own eyes acts of cold-blooded barbarism perpetrated on abandoned soldiers, both living and dead.
“The decision to withdraw and to leave wounded men in the field was mine, and I had to live with it,” said Brigadier General (res.) Asher Levy, Arik’s company commander at Latrun. “If I hadn’t taken that decision, they’d have all been killed. As it was, some were killed, and some were taken into captivity by the Jordanians. Of course the battle was a deep trauma both for Arik and for me. The realization that you’ve left your comrades wounded or dead on the battlefield, justifiedly or not, is a most terrible experience.”
Sharon was later to claim that as a result of his experience at Latrun he instituted in the forces he commanded—and this later percolated throughout the army—a strict, almost hallowed code that forbade leaving anyone, alive or dead, on the field of battle. In fact, Asher Levy explained, that principle was rehearsed, and was supposed to apply, in the pre-state Haganah and in the IDF from its very first day. The question was how determinedly the principle was put into practice.22
Despite the repeated defeats at Latrun, the IDF held its ground elsewhere until a truce brokered by the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte went into effect on June 11. It was to last for just one month, but Ben-Gurion made good use of every moment of it, dramatically bolstering the firepower of his army with weapons that his emissaries had purchased around the world and that were now flowing freely into the country. The size of Israel’s armed forces also increased significantly as the inflow of immigrants swelled the available pool of manpower. In early June, 40,000 men (and women: about 10 percent of those mobilized were women) were under arms; by mid-July, the figure had risen to 63,500. By the end of the year, it stood at more than 100,000. The invading Arab states—Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia—were vastly larger than Israel, but they failed to bring to bear their manpower potential on the Palestine front.
Ben-Gurion used the brief respite, too, to organize and consolidate the IDF. He insisted that the Etzel, and the Palmach, too, merge into the general army and not retain a separate command structure or separate units. The standoff with the Etzel climaxed with the arrival of an arms ship, the Altalena, which Ben-Gurion ordered shelled rather than allow its cargo to be distributed in large part to Etzel units, as the Etzel leader, Menachem Begin, was demanding. Historians give credit to Begin for avoiding a civil war in the midst of the War of Independence by ordering his men not to fight back.
On July 9 the fighting resumed. The IDF quickly conquered the Arab towns of Ramle and Lydda in the center of the country. They were both to have been included in the Arab state under the Partition Resolution of the previous year. Their fifty thousand inhabitants fled east, actively impelled to do so by the victorious Israeli forces. Arik had recovered sufficiently to rejoin his battalion by this time, and he took part in operations in the Lydda area. In his memoirs he wrote of a Transjordanian counterattack, “overrunning a unit, then massacring the wounded. Twenty-eight bodies had been found, many with their ears missing, some with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. For days we scoured the area looking for missing pieces, and scattered around the hills we found them: fingers, ears, penises caked into the dusty earth … I caught myself thinking about having been left behind on the field.”23
After ten days of intense fighting a second truce was called. Arik spent this one, too, in the hospital. Driving his jeep with his company commander alongside him, “somehow I managed to roll it over on us, breaking some ribs and injuring my spine in the process.”24 In mid-October, the fighting resumed for a third and last time. Israel strove mightily to drive the Egyptians out of the Negev, the south of the country, and the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the Lebanese out of the Galilee, the north. It was largely but not entirely successful. The main Negev town of Beersheba was taken on October 21, and IDF units swept across the northern border into Lebanon later that month. But an Egyptian brigade of some four thousand men was dug in around the area of Faluja in the northern Negev and refused to give ground.
Arik, on his feet again and now serving as reconnaissance officer of his battalion, tasted bloody defeat once again. “This Taha Bey [the Egyptian brigadier] was a true hero. Without any real hope of breaking out or being rescued, his brigade was … repelling every attack … Finally a major effort was planned for the night of December 27. Our battalion would keep the village of Faluja busy while a second battalion would carry out the main assault on Iraq Manshiyeh [a British-built fortress held by the Egyptians]. It was a disaster. By the time we were able to disengage we had lost ninety-eight men out of a total of six hundred.”
The war ended with armistice agreements, signed during the first half of 1949, with Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria (Iraq refused to sign). Israel had expanded from the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it under the UN Partition Resolution to 78 percent. Most Palestinian inhabitants of this expanded Jewish state had gone or been expelled. Of the remaining land, the West Bank was annexed by Trans-jordan (henceforth known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), and the Gaza Strip was taken over by Egypt.
Despite the very steep price in blood—5,682 dead, almost 1 percent of the population—the IDF had emerged victorious.
With demobilization, the IDF lost not only its wartime bulk but also many of its best young officers. The Palmach, which had been the Haganah’s only professional fighting force before the state, did not take kindly to being disbanded and merged without trace into the regular army at Ben-Gurion’s insistence. Many of its men preferred to return to their kibbutzim rather than pursue military careers.
Arik was appointed commander of the reconnaissance company of the Golani Brigade. “The end of the war had left many frontier areas disputed or unclear, and skirmishes with the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Lebanese were a regular fact of life. It was a time for establishing borders and training new recruits in patrolling, intelligence gathering, and night fighting. The job was just down my alley.” His commanding officer, Colonel Avraham Yoffe, promoted him to captain in 1950 and recommended him for a battalion commander’s course.
It was run by Yitzhak Rabin, a former top Palmach commander who had distinguished himself in the war and had decided to swallow the forcible disbandment of the Palmach and make his career in the IDF. On completing the course, Arik was appointed intelligence officer of Central Command, an unexpectedly steep step up on the ladder of promotion and an opportunity to make his mark on the top brass. His first contact with Moshe Dayan, then commanding officer (CO) of Southern Command, came in a large-scale training exercise. Arik was intrigued to find that the already-famous general scored his successes by not playing by the rules. Dayan launched his attack on Central Command before the war game had officially begun, gaining a strategic advantage but eventually running out of fuel. Arik led a counterattack that salvaged some at least of Central’s honor. Later he was carpeted on the grounds that intelligence officers do not lead field operations—and resolved there and then to quit the intelligence corps.
His activities during this year were repeatedly stymied by bouts of malaria, for which the antidote was increasingly large doses of quinine. In the end the army doctors recommended a complete break and change of climate as a way of ridding his system of the bug, and he set out to see the world. But first, “My father and I went to a clothing store in Tel Aviv, where I bought my first sport jacket and a pair of what were then known in Israel as ‘half shoes,’ to distinguish them from the high-top boots that everyone always wore on the farm. When I arrived at Orly airport in Paris, my uncle took one look at my outfit and blanched.”25 Duly kitted out by his uncle Joseph’s bespoke tailor, Arik spent a fortnight taking in the culture and living the high life in Paris. Then it was on to London, where he had three friends from the war: Yitzhak Modai and Dov Sion, both young Israeli officers, and Cyril Kern, an English Jew who had volunteered for the IDF in 1948 and was now back in the U.K. making money in the rag trade.
From London, Arik flew to New York, where his host was his aunt Sana. She helped him get a driver’s license, explaining to the examiner that he was an Israeli army officer and hence his rudimentary English. She flew down to Florida, and he took her car on a leisurely swing through Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, joining her in Palm Beach for New Year’s 1952. “By the time I returned to Israel I felt like a man of the world. More important, the malaria seemed to have disappeared.”
Back in uniform, he found himself assigned to Northern Command, where once again his path crossed that of Dayan and once again Arik signaled to the famous general that they were two of a kind: single-minded, devious, and resourceful. Two Israeli soldiers had crossed the border with Jordan and been captured. Dayan, now CO Northern Command, asked his intelligence officer whether he thought it might be possible to pick up a couple of Jordanian soldiers to help expedite the Israelis’ repatriation. Arik, careful to sound equally blasé, merely offered a noncommittal “I’ll look into it.” But as soon as Dayan left his room, he phoned one of his officers, Shlomo Hefer, and arranged for the two of them to drive to a remote spot on the border.
They pretended they were looking for a lost cow and got into a shouted conversation with a Jordanian sergeant and three soldiers, inviting them across to drink coffee under a tree. Arik, in reasonable Arabic, asked the sergeant to send one of his men back to ask about the cow. He sent two. No sooner were they out of sight than Arik and Hefer drew their weapons and bundled the remaining two into their vehicle. The next morning, Dayan found a note on his desk: two Jordanians were in the cells below his office, waiting to be interviewed. Dayan, in a cover note to the chief of staff attached to Arik’s report of the capture, wrote, “In my opinion, this operation, which was carried out with sense and with daring, is worthy of special mention.”26
“It was the beginning of a complicated lifelong relationship between us,” Sharon wrote later, “that was to be marked by deep feelings of respect, but by suspicion too … He positively relished the idea that someone would do this kind of thing … Typically he would convey his intentions in an ambiguous way, leaving plenty of room for initiative and interpretation … If the result was success, fine. But if it was a failure, well then, the responsibility was not his but yours.”27
Dayan’s tenure at Northern Command lasted only half a year; he was promoted to deputy chief of staff and moved to the High Command in Tel Aviv. Arik was all the more susceptible to a sustained barrage of nagging from his parents, especially his mother, to continue his education. The army, reluctant to lose a promising officer, suggested a leave of absence for the purposes of study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period he would be commander of a reserve battalion in the Jerusalem Brigade. Perfecting the picture from Arik’s viewpoint, Gali was moving to Jerusalem too. Having completed her studies as a psychiatric nurse, she was to work in a small psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of the capital. The couple married without much ado at the office of a military chaplain whom Arik knew. They found a basement apartment for rent, and Arik began diligently taking classes in Middle Eastern history. “It was a wonderful time,” he writes.28
But it didn’t last. The situation on the borders was steadily worsening. Ever since the war ended (and indeed, even before), Palestinian refugees had been infiltrating back across the unmarked frontiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some sought to return to their former homes: if one member of a family could establish residency, there was a chance for the others to come back under a family reunification scheme. Others simply tried to harvest the crops, the fruits, or the olives growing on their former lands. Often the land was now worked by Jews: the government deliberately located new settlements close to the armistice lines in order to stake the state’s claim to every inch of the territory that remained in its hands after the war. New immigrants were channeled to these border settlements and encouraged to farm the land. Government instructors gave rudimentary guidance to those who had never been farmers before.
The infiltration soon gave rise to violent and sometimes fatal confrontations. Some refugee-infiltrators did not confine themselves to their own former farms or villages but scoured the wider area for produce, tools, irrigation pipes, livestock, anything worth taking. Some settlements formed vigilante groups to protect their property, since the border was wide open and the army was plainly unable to patrol its entire winding length.
The government for its part ordered the army to maintain a ruthless shoot-to-kill policy along the armistice lines.29 The purpose was twofold: to keep the refugee-infiltrators out for fear of a mass return that could quickly undermine the new state’s conveniently manageable 80/20 Jewish/Arab demographic; and to reaffirm, each day anew, the inviolability of the armistice lines, even in the absence of full peace treaties. Subsequent orders issued by the IDF High Command forbade shooting at women and children. Male infiltrators, too, were not to be shot at without due warning, unless they opened fire first. In practice, even after these limitations were imposed, shoot to kill continued to be the order of the day in some IDF units. In others, nonviolent infiltrators were rounded up and sent back or handed over to the UN observers.
The harsh deterrent policy against the refugee-infiltrators was the focus of political argument then and thereafter. Also still in dispute is whether the Israeli policy caused or at least catalyzed the next spiral of escalation. Increasingly, the Palestinian infiltrators came in armed bands, out to kill and maim indiscriminately. Israel’s response was to launch reprisal raids across the borders, against the villages or refugee camps from which the marauders were believed to have set out.
It was the dissonance that developed between that vaunted policy and its execution on the ground that sucked Arik back into the army and catapulted him to military prominence and national fame. Time and again, reprisal actions over the borders ended in frustrating failure. The postwar army seemed to have lost its fighting edge. IDF units were driven off with ease by poorly armed Jordanian militiamen. Often, the raiding party failed to make contact altogether, losing its way in the dark.
Arik had an opportunity to show how it should be done in July 1953. Mishael Shaham, commander of the Jerusalem Brigade, won approval from the High Command to go after a particularly lethal Palestinian marauder who lived in the village of Nebi Samuel, overlooking Jerusalem from the north. But Shaham could not get a regular IDF infantry unit to take on the assignment. So he called in Arik, one of his reserve battalion commanders, and asked him to undertake the mission with whatever men he could pull together. By nightfall, seven crack fighters were strapping on their webbing and checking their tommy guns. They were a motley collection: not men from his battalion at all, but comrades from war days and a couple of present-day soldiers discreetly wooed out of their units. The fact that Shaham, a regular army colonel, countenanced this semi-guerrilla setup reflected his desperation at the almost daily toll of Israeli lives and property that the infiltrators were exacting in the area under his command.
In the event, the reprisal raid was a flop. The man was not at home, and anyway the dynamite charge that Arik’s men laid failed to blow off the door of his house. It did, however, rouse other villagers who began firing vigorously at the raiders, who in turn chucked a few grenades and beat a retreat. Yet when they returned to base at dawn and told their story, Shaham was well pleased. At least they had reached the target and engaged it. That was a lot more than most such operations achieved.
Shaham wrote to Ben-Gurion, prime minister and minister of defense, urging that the army set up a special force to conduct reprisal raids. Asked to recommend a commanding officer, he said he had the very man. Arik, sorely tempted, shrank back at the thought of Gali’s likely reaction, let alone Vera’s. He had an important test in history the next day, he muttered to Shaham. “Why study history when you can make history?” the colonel replied.30 A fortnight later Arik was called before the chief of staff, Mordechai Makleff, and formally offered the task of creating and commanding the proposed special force.
“I’m dying of hunger. Where’s that porcupine we hunted yesterday?”
“Coming right up! He’s on the grill with onions as big as a bull’s balls.”
This gastronomical exchange between Major Arik, big-bellied, silver-haired, but baby-faced commander of Unit 101, and his deputy, Shlomo Baum, is one of the salient memories of one young officer, Moshe Yenuka, who had come for an interview at the elite unit’s base in the Jerusalem hills. The commander, Yenuka recalled, wore sandals on his bare feet and a large pistol strapped to his belt.
Arik cherry-picked his men from all over the army, often to the chagrin of rival commanders. While he encouraged an atmosphere of informality between officers and men that harked back to the egalitarian traditions of the Palmach, he was demanding and unforgiving in the strenuous training programs that he put in place in Unit 101. And while discipline was lax on base, it was harsh and inflexible on operations. Unit 101’s esprit de corps rested on a new, much higher benchmark of what constituted “mission accomplished.” The officers exhorted the men, and the men exhorted each other, to persevere despite casualties, to drive home their attacks, and always to bring their dead and wounded back with them, never leaving them to the enemy’s mercies.
Arik began pressing Shaham and the High Command for assignments. Among the first was a mission to drive a clan of Bedouin encamped in the Negev back across the border into Sinai. Jeep-borne soldiers of Unit 101 stormed through the encampment firing their weapons at will. A few of the Bedouin were wounded; the rest fled in panic. The Israelis burned their tents and confiscated abandoned weapons. They chased the fleeing Bedouin to the border, where, in a demilitarized zone between Israeli and Egyptian territory, Unit 101’s jeeps ran into a larger Egyptian force. “Get out, or we’ll do to you what we did to you in ’48,” Arik barked at the Egyptian troops. “We’re leaving now. If you shoot, we will immediately turn back and attack you.”
It worked and gave the guys a lot to laugh about when they got back to base. But some in the unit were uncomfortable with the action against the Bedouin. Meir Har-Zion, a Unit 101 man whom Moshe Dayan was later to praise as the finest soldier Israel ever had, recorded years later in his memoirs a “sense of imperfection” that pervaded him at the time. “Is this the enemy? Is it all justified?”31 Arik tried to persuade them that Israel needed to assert its sovereignty and shore up its borders and this was the only way to do it. Dayan himself, in his memoirs, writes that these Bedouin, members of the Azazme tribe, “served Egyptian intelligence by passing on information and by planting mines and carrying out acts of violence inside Israel.”32
Shortly after, Unit 101 was ordered into action against the al-Burej refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, and again a dispute arose over the likely fates of innocent civilians. Shmuel Falah, one of the soldiers, refused to take part in the attack. Arik allowed him to switch to a second platoon whose task was to blow up the home of an Egyptian military commander. In the debriefing, defending the deaths of women and children, Arik railed that the women were “prostitutes serving the armed infiltrators who kill our innocent civilians.” The chief of staff, Mordechai Makleff, phoned Shaham to demand an explanation of how fifteen civilians had died in the operation. Shaham called in Arik. Arik explained that a guard had given the alarm; the Unit 101 men found themselves in a tight spot; they had had to shoot their way out of the refugee camp.
Perhaps it was his cavalier attitude to Arab lives that had persuaded the Jerusalem Brigade commander, Shaham, to recommend Arik for Unit 101 in the first place. Shaham himself once recounted how he had been assigned two new battalion commanders, Arik and Shlomo Lahat, nicknamed Chich, who was also studying at the Hebrew University.h “Chich arrived, took command of a battalion, and the first thing he asked was, ‘Where do we train?’ Arik came and received a battalion too, and his first question was, ‘Where can we fight Arabs, where can we kill Arabs around here?’ That was the difference between him and others.”33
But Major Arik Scheinerman, aged twenty-five, did not make the policy. He merely executed it more effectively than it had been executed before Unit 101 came into being. His military leadership, first at Unit 101 and afterward as commander of the paratroopers, meant that the reprisal operations achieved greater success than in the past. It also meant that the conflict with the surrounding states escalated; the operations achieved too great success, as Ben-Gurion himself later observed.
Like Shaham, though, like Moshe Dayan and other top officers, Arik wholeheartedly identified with the reprisals policy. Indeed, time and again at Unit 101’s camp at Sataf, in the Jerusalem hills, the unit commander’s voice was to be heard blasting and cursing the powers that be for not being even tougher in the border warfare and specifically for not approving more cross-border operations for Unit 101.
On October 12, 1953, Palestinian infiltrators gruesomely murdered a mother and her two children in the Israeli village of Yahud, east of Tel Aviv. General Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, promised to hunt down the killers. He invited Israel to send tracker dogs over the border to help in the search, but they lost the scent. Glubb condemned the murders at Yahud.
Nevertheless, Mordechai Makleff, the chief of staff, and his deputy, Moshe Dayan, met the next morning with the acting defense minister, Pinhas Lavon, and with Ben-Gurion, who was vacationing and thus formally not involved in the decision making. They decided on a reprisal operation against Kibbiya, a nearby Palestinian village on the West Bank. Fifty of Kibbiya’s 280 homes were to be blown up. Arik was called to Central Command headquarters at Ramle. Unit 101 was to give diversionary support to the paratroop battalion that would conduct the large-scale operation. The paratroop commander was hesitant, explaining that his men were neither trained nor prepared for the action. Arik stepped in immediately. Unit 101 was trained and prepared, he said. He could take command of the whole force and lead the operation the following night.
Arik himself led the combined force of a hundred paratroopers and twenty-five men from Unit 101. Returning at dawn, he reported that a dozen Jordanian National Guardsmen and two legionnaires had been killed in exchanges of fire early in the operation.
“In a few more minutes we were in the village proper,” Sharon recorded in his memoirs.
As we walked through the streets an eerie silence hung over the place, broken only by the strains of Arab music coming from a radio that had been left playing in an empty café. A report came in from one of the roadblocks that hundreds of villagers were streaming by them … At midnight we began to demolish the village’s big stone buildings … Soldiers were sent to look through each house to make sure no one was inside; then the charges were placed and set off.34
But there were people inside. Sharon writes that he went home to Jerusalem to sleep and learned only later in the day, from Jordanian radio, that “sixty-nine people had been killed, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. I couldn’t believe my ears.”
Israel claimed the victims must have been cowering unnoticed in cellars or basements and were killed by mistake in the explosions. The Arab Legion claimed many of the bodies had bullet wounds.35 Ben-Gurion made matters worse by going on the radio several days later to claim that the attack on Kibbiya had been carried out not by the IDF but by a vigilante group of local Jewish villagers enraged by the incessant raids on the border settlements and finally by the triple murder in Yahud. This was not the first time that Israel had denied the IDF’s role in reprisals and resorted to the vigilante canard.36 It fooled no one, especially since some thirteen hundred pounds of explosives had been expertly laid to blow up forty-six buildings in Kibbiya—hardly the work of an enraged posse. Great Britain, Jordan’s patron, voiced “distress and horror” at the outrage. Washington said that “those responsible should be brought to account.” Israel was condemned and excoriated around the world.
Behind the self-righteous facade there was both shock and worry in Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion asked to see the officer in charge of the Kibbiya operation. “It was an exciting moment for me,” Sharon recorded later, in unwonted understatement. He was fairly bursting with pride. The “Old Man” quizzed him about the operation and about the men of Unit 101. Perhaps he suspected they were ex-Etzel fighters, prone to massacring and to disobedience. Arik told him they were mostly moshav and kibbutz youth. “They were the finest boys we had, I said, and there was no chance they would ever act except under orders. Then Ben-Gurion said, ‘It doesn’t make any real difference what will be said about Kibbiya around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’ ”37
Sharon may have been embellishing, but his grasp of the prime minister’s remarks was accurate. Alongside the concern over international fallout from Kibbiya there was a grim gratification in Ben-Gurion’s circle that at last the army could be relied on to deliver a bloody but unmistakable message to the other side. “There were tragic consequences that were nobody’s fault,” Dayan wrote. “But from a purely military perspective, this was a first-class operation … The lesson for the whole army was that the government’s instructions were no longer mere wishful thinking but rather minimal expectations. Instead of army units returning from operations and explaining why they had failed to carry out the assignment, the paratroopers were explaining why they had done more than expected.”
Still, the worldwide castigation was a sober reminder of Israel’s vulnerability. “The lesson,” Dayan wrote, “was that we must direct our reprisals against military targets. What was ‘permitted’ to the Arabs, and indeed to other nations, was forbidden for Jews and Israelis and would not be forgiven them. Not only foreigners but citizens of Israel themselves and Jews overseas expect from us a ‘purity of arms’ far more exacting than that demanded of any other army.”38
The reprisals policy was drastically revised. No longer were Arab civilians and Arab villages and refugee camps to be considered legitimate targets. The IDF’s border war now shifted to focus on the armies of the states flanking Israel. Their regular armies, especially the Egyptian troops in the Gaza Strip, were actively supporting, arming, and encouraging the bands of armed Palestinian infiltrators, known as fedayun. The states, therefore, were responsible. Repeated military discomfiture could bring them, it was held or hoped, to rein in the marauders.
The exploits of Unit 101, although not public knowledge at the time, were the stuff of word-of-mouth legend throughout the army. So were its off-duty feats, which of course contributed to its dazzling panache in the eyes of less privileged soldiers. Unit 101’s camaraderie was elitist, brash, and brutal. One Friday evening in December 1953, a 101 man driving one of the unit’s jeeps was stopped by military police in Tiberias. He failed to address them with due deference, and they took him to their base, where three of them knocked him about a bit. He reported to his own base. Within hours, a posse of comrades had been rounded up, made its way to Tiberias, stormed the MP base, located the three assailants, and set about them with clubs. All three required hospitalization.
An inquiry was duly launched; Shaham was carpeted; Shaham called in Arik. Arik penned a fulsome apology to the IDF chief of operations, expressing “the most profound regret in my own name and in the name of every one of my men, for the grave incident that took place … I am confident such an incident will never recur. I do hope this incident will not cast a shadow on the excellent relations between my unit and the Military Police.”39 Back at Sataf, the posse members were sent home on a two-week furlough; when they returned, Arik informed them that they had been confined to base for a fortnight.
Five months after Kibbiya, Unit 101 ceased to exist as an independent military formation. It was merged with the paratroop battalion. Presumably, both lessons of Kibbiya were at play here: on the one hand, Dayan (who was appointed chief of staff in December 1953) wanted a larger fighting force imbued with the spirit of Arik’s commandos; on the other hand, he wanted that spirit embraced, contained, and rendered more disciplined and less antiestablishment—less prone, in other words, to embarrass Israel by intemperate action.
The merger was seen as a hostile takeover by the men themselves, and there were murmurs of defiance. Some of the best fighters in the unit had joined it in order to escape the spit and polish of the regular army. There would be no more beating up of MPs when they were part of a proper battalion. Arik invited Dayan to Sataf to woo and win them over. “You have established new standards of combat, new benchmarks for completing missions,” Dayan said, stroking their individual and collective egos. “Now it’s time to instill those standards into the entire army.”
There was not much enthusiasm for the merger on either side. Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Harari, the commander of the paratroopers, a former British army officer, fully expected to command the enlarged battalion. Dayan disabused him. The paratroopers themselves looked askance at the scruffy crew who sidled reluctantly into their spick-and-span base at Beit Lid, north of Tel Aviv.
The handover ceremony said it all. Harari, ramrod straight, starched, and buckled, precision marched to his spot on the parade ground, facing the flagpole. He read out a terse parting speech and ordered officers who had asked to leave with him to fall out and line up beside him. Many did.
Arik quickly distributed the few dozen Unit 101 men among the different companies of the four-hundred-strong battalion. And he sent all the companies off on prolonged training exercises in different parts of the country, so as to dissipate any lingering umbrage. “Within weeks,” a young officer wrote decades later, “it became clear that 101 had not merged into 890 the paratroop battalion but rather 890 had merged into 101.”
The 101 commandos-now-890-paratroopers ceased their excesses against the military police and, much more important, against Palestinian civilians. But with the new pattern of attacking military targets, and attacking on a much larger scale than previously, the risks inherent in the reprisal operations became even greater, certainly in the eyes of the foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, and the doves in government. Escalation was inevitable, given that the clashes were now between armies. The numbers of soldiers killed, wounded, and captured—Egyptian soldiers, Jordanian soldiers, and also Syrian soldiers—were embarrassingly high for their respective governments. Yet the fedayun infiltrations persisted. The atmosphere in the region steadily, dangerously deteriorated.
Again, it was Sharon’s military prowess, tactical skills, and leadership gifts that contributed significantly to the success of the military operations conducted within the revised reprisals policy. Again, though, he did not make the policy. However enthusiastic an executor he was of it, he was only that—the executor, not the architect. He did not conceive it, nor was he ultimately responsible for it. Retrospective discussions of this period that blame Sharon for triggering the chain of events that led to the 1956 Sinai War give him too much credit (or discredit). Granted, his own incessant pushiness, his expansive, extroverted personality, his unbridled, loudmouthed criticism of the moderates, all contributed to his ostensible importance in the scheme of things (and all enhanced the strictures of his critics). Granted, too, he was much coddled by Ben-Gurion. And he for his part took every available advantage of his access to the premier and defense minister. But he was never in the inner coterie, not one of the bright young men like Dayan and Shimon Peres and Teddy Kollek whom the Old Man nurtured and whose company he patently preferred to that of his own old party comrades. They were policy makers, inasmuch as they were present at the conception and formulation of policy. Sharon never was.
It was Ben-Gurion who required Arik, as he did other officers and diplomats, to Hebraize his diasporic-sounding name. The Sharon is the name of the geographic district around Kfar Malal, and it vaguely emulates the sound of Scheinerman. Vera and Samuil (who had long used his Hebrew first name, Shmuel) readily concurred, although they themselves kept the old family name.
There is no record of what Gali thought. There are hints, however, of broader dissatisfaction on the part of Arik’s young bride over the dramatic change of course their life had taken. When he went back into the army and started coming home late, or not at all, from raids or training exercises, Gali’s frayed nerves showed through. “She used to give him a hard time,” an army comrade, Gideon Altschuler, recalled more than fifty years later. “My wife and I lived near them in Jerusalem, and we were good friends. The two of them didn’t always live harmoniously. She didn’t understand that when your man comes back from an operation across the border, that’s not the time to pick a quarrel with him.”40 When Arik took over the paratroop battalion, the young and still-childless marriage was strained even more. “He hardly ever came home,” according to one account, “and when he did, it was only for a few hours—during which time he subjected her to long-winded army stories. She asked him many times to be around more often, but Sharon was engrossed in his military life.”41
One of the revamped paratroop battalion’s earliest operations, in March 1954, followed the murder of eleven bus passengers on a winding road in the Negev called Ma’aleh Akrabim, or Scorpions Hill. The assailants were fedayun from across the Jordan border. The target chosen for reprisal was the West Bank village of Nahalin, where the paratroopers were to blow up houses again. The new policy of attacking only military targets had not yet fully gelled. Arik handed out flashlights to the troops with which they were to scour the homes before demolishing them. In the event, Arab Legion units tried to block their access, and a pitched battle developed between the two forces. The end result was seven legionnaires killed in the operation and three civilians, including the mukhtar, or headman, of Nahalin.
Three months later, following the murder of a farmer near Kfar Saba, the target was an Arab Legion camp at Azoun, on the West Bank. The dovish Sharett was now prime minister, Ben-Gurion having retired, at least temporarily, and gone to live on a remote Negev kibbutz, Sde Boker. Sharett approved the army’s reprisal plan. Arik handpicked seven of his men to carry out this mission. The commander was Aharon Davidi, Arik’s deputy. Leading the squad through nine miles of West Bank territory on the dark, moonless night was Meir Har-Zion, commander of the battalion’s reconnaissance company and a man with uncanny navigational skills. Two of the others were also ex–Unit 101 men, Yitzhak Gibli and Yoram Nahari. Sharon sat with the seven as they pored over aerial photographs and maps and saw them off at the border at nightfall. They were kitted out in civilian clothes and armed with non-army-issue tommy guns. Even though the IDF was now beginning to direct its reprisals at the neighboring armies, it apparently still sought to cling to the ostensible deniability of the “vigilante” fiction.
At the camp, they split into two groups. Each stormed a large tent, spraying automatic fire and hurling grenades. As they withdrew, Gibli was hit in the leg. They lifted him and kept running, but he was hit again, this time in the neck. They bandaged him quickly. The surviving legionnaires were firing wildly in all directions. Soon they would come after them. Gibli begged to be left. “Just give me a grenade,” he told Davidi. “When they reach me, I’ll blow myself up with them.” Davidi consulted with Har-Zion. It was against their battle ethic to leave a wounded man in the field. But they decided there was no choice; if they stayed, they would all suffer the wounded man’s fate (which they fully assumed would be death or suicide). But Gibli was not killed and instead was taken prisoner. On his cell wall, he recalled four decades later, he scratched the first letters of Arik’s and Davidi’s names, “to remind myself who I am and where I come from.”42
Arik for his part, surprised and delighted to learn that Gibli was alive, now embarked on a determined effort to get him back in the way he knew best: kidnapping Jordanian soldiers wherever he could pounce on them. In one instance, he had a jeep painted in white with UN markings and dressed up two of his men as Palestinian peasants and Har-Zion as an Israeli policeman. They were to drive to the border to “return” the two straying peasants. When a Jordanian patrol came to “receive” them, they would grab the officer and head back with him to Israel. The officer in question saw through the fresh paint or the peasant dress and backed away in time. On another occasion, Arik sent two women soldiers across the border to entice legionnaires, also without success.
He was like a man possessed, endlessly repeating the mantras that the paratroopers don’t leave a man in the field (which they had) and that the IDF does everything possible to bring its men home. He was a lieutenant colonel by now, having been promoted after being wounded leading an attack in July 1954 on a fortified Egyptian army position near Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. “I was hit in the thigh,” he recounted in a nostalgic lecture, as prime minister, forty-nine years later.
The same searing physical pain. But whereas at Latrun I was a young platoon commander abandoned on the field of battle after a bitter fight and a crushing defeat, this time, despite the pain, I had a feeling of confidence. I’d been wounded again, but in a battle that we’d won. And I was among comrades in a unit suffused with self-confidence and fighting spirit. Above all, I myself was confident in the certain knowledge that I would never be abandoned on the field. That knowledge, that our comradeship would sustain every test, was what gave us all the determination and the strength to carry out every mission assigned to us throughout that period and in the wars that followed.43
Sharon’s mantras reflected the spirit he inculcated in the paratroopers, and these did in time pervade the whole army as ideals to be aspired to.
Under Arik, a commander’s decision to leave a wounded man would be justified only in the direst straits, as Gibli’s case proved. For Arik, what also changed was the lengths to which he believed the IDF should go to get its POWs back. His unremitting attempts to seize Jordanians led to serious strains with Dayan and his head of operations, Colonel Meir Amit. Dayan wrote in his diary:
I called in Arik on August 25 and told him he had no approval to cross the border and grab a hostage to exchange for Gibli … To resolve this business of unapproved operations [I said], there was one single condition: that we worked in cooperation. If he wasn’t satisfied with the approval given for a particular operation, he could always come and present alternatives. I would not be angry or surprised if a particular operation with a particular purpose changed under the circumstances and produced different results. But I would not tolerate the defined purpose of an operation being altered before the operation had begun. Arik said he understood, agreed and promised.44
The “business of unapproved operations” was never really resolved between the two men. This conversation was a harbinger of many conversations to come over the next two years and further in the future, when Sharon was to lead much larger formations under Dayan’s overall command.
In his memoirs, Dayan wrote of Ben-Gurion’s “special affection” for three IDF officers: Haim Laskov,i Assaf Simchoni, and Sharon. The founding father saw in all three of them “the antithesis of the galuti, or diasporic Jew. The New Jew was a fighter, bold, self-confident, expert in the art of war, in weaponry, in field craft, in the region, and in the Arabs. Ben-Gurion could not bear casuistry and beating around the bush. He didn’t like the Talmud; his heart rebelled against two thousand years of exile. He yearned for the Israelites of the Bible, living on their land, farming and fighting, independent and proud and building their national culture. Haim, Assaf, and Arik were like those ancient Israelites in his eyes.”45 Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar writes that the Old Man told him he admired two soldiers above all for their bravery and resourcefulness: Dayan and Sharon.
Sharon himself failed to understand that his easy and frequent access to Ben-Gurion rankled with other, more senior officers. “With the room full of generals and staff officers, he would call me to be next to him … It was a situation that cried out for tact on my part, but at the age of twenty-six I didn’t recognize the need.”46
Regardless of the tension between Sharon and himself, Dayan was consistent and unequivocal in recognizing the reprisal operations as a key factor in strengthening the IDF. “Dayan saw the reprisals as a means of educating and training the army,” writes his then aide-de-camp, Mordechai Bar-On. “The long series of combat failures during the years before his appointment as chief of staff, and especially during 1953, worried him deeply, and he saw his main task as chief of staff to restore the IDF to fighting efficacy … The reprisal actions were the chief instrument.”47
Dayan insisted that the army’s regular infantry brigades improve their combat effectiveness and that more units develop the commando skills which the paratroopers expended so much effort acquiring. With time, Dayan records in his memoirs, other units began to take part in the reprisal operations. “The paratroopers ceased to be solely an army formation and became a concept and a symbol—the symbol of courageous combat.”
The paratroop battalion “has set high standards of combat,” Dayan told the General Staff in February 1956. “It has proved that we can achieve those high standards, and has thereby had an influence throughout the army. It has demonstrated what the level of commitment of the individual fighter can be and ought to be in battle. If one man had succeeded in moving the entire army forward in this regard, it is Arik.”48
But there were moments of weakness, too, even of cowardice. And there were serious lapses of ethical standards, despite the lessons ostensibly learned from the Kibbiya operation. In February 1955, Meir Har-Zion and three other paratroopers crossed the border and killed five Bedouin in cold-blooded revenge for the murder of Har-Zion’s sister. The sister, Shoshana, and a friend had gone hiking on the Jordanian side of the border, heading for the Dead Sea. They never returned. Har-Zion formally quit the army, enlisted three paratrooper friends, and went after the killers. They picked up six Bedouin, murdered five, and left the sixth alive to tell the tale. Har-Zion maintained that these were the killers, but there was no clear proof of that.49 “The entire episode was a throwback to tribal days,” Sharon writes in Warrior.
Tribal or not, Sharon provided Har-Zion with a tracked vehicle, a driver to take him right up to the border (“the best I had”—Yitzhak Gibli, now back from Jordanian captivity), and weapons with which to conduct his vendetta. And what’s more, Dayan knew in real time that he had done so. “Dayan called to ask what had happened…‘I tried to persuade him [Har-Zion],’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen. So I gave him some help.’ ‘Can we still stop him?’ Dayan asked. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘It’s too late for that.’ ”50 When the four returned, they were feasted and feted by the paratroopers.
Prime Minister Sharett demanded that the four men stand trial “or else we will lose the right to demand that neighboring states try and punish murderers [of Jews].” Ben-Gurion, who had now returned from his desert retreat and was serving as minister of defense, agreed. Har-Zion and his friends were arrested. Sharon hired an able young lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, to plead their case. But Tamir was a vocal and eloquent member of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party and a thorn in the government’s flesh. Ben-Gurion was furious, more over the political deviation in hiring Tamir, apparently, than over the killings that Sharon had abetted. Ben-Gurion gave Sharon a stark choice: sever your ties with Tamir at once, without telling him why, or leave the army at once. Sharon chose the former, explaining to Tamir only years later why he had been forced to do so.51
In a fawning and disingenuous letter to Dayan—disingenuous, it would seem, on both their parts—Sharon vigorously denied any taint of disloyalty. “There is no unit in the army more admiring of and loyal to the chief of staff than the paratroop battalion.” He admitted to “mistakes” in the Har-Zion affair but insisted that he “genuinely and sincerely believed at the time I was doing the right thing … I never intended, Heaven forbid, to embarrass the IDF in any show trial, and I certainly had no political intent regarding the lawyer.”52
Ben-Gurion, in his diary, faulted Sharett for publishing the names of Har-Zion’s three accomplices and justified Har-Zion’s refusal to cooperate with the police investigators. The upshot was an internal IDF investigation. There was no trial and no punishment. Har-Zion was back in uniform within months. “The final outcome of the affair,” writes the historian Benny Morris, “reflected Ben-Gurion’s position in general. He never really wanted to prosecute four of his most favorite soldiers, especially since a trial might have thrown light on other ethically dubious actions of Unit 101 and the paratroopers.”53
A much more ominous drama was meanwhile building up between Israel and Egypt. On February 17, 1955, an Israeli farmer was murdered near Rehovot. Clearly the killers had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip. Sharon submitted a plan to attack in reprisal a small Egyptian army unit encamped south of Gaza City. Ben-Gurion and Dayan together persuaded Sharett to agree. The order to the paratroopers, they explained, would strictly forbid them to kill enemy soldiers “except if that proves vital for the fulfillment of the mission,” which was defined as blowing up buildings in the camp and in the nearby railway station.
To ward off suspicious snooping by UN observers, the paratroopers left their forward camp at the kibbutz of Kfar Azza together with girl soldiers, all singing and laughing as if they were off on a hike. As they approached the border, they split off into separate attacking forces. One headed for the Egyptian army camp, another for the station; a third set up an ambush on the main road from the south, to intercept reinforcements.
Bad navigating led to mistakes, and the first and second forces found themselves in a vicious firefight with Egyptian soldiers. Eight paratroopers died, and a dozen more were injured. The Egyptians lost fourteen men. A number of buildings were destroyed, and the attacking units withdrew under fire, carrying their dead and wounded with them. The third force, meanwhile, wiped out a column of Egyptian reinforcements, killing twenty-two men without loss. Waiting on the border, Dayan listened to Sharon’s grim report impassively. “The living are alive and the dead are dead,” he said, wheeled around, and left the scene.
Ben-Gurion published a paean of praise for the paratroopers. “The cabinet has unanimously asked me to convey to the paratroop battalion our feelings of appreciation and admiration for the spirit of Jewish heroism demonstrated in this battle … I am sure that these feelings are shared by the entire country. The paratroop battalion, which enjoys the love of the whole nation, has proven once again for all the world to see the triumph of Jewish heroism and has added a glowing page to the annals of the Israel Defense Forces.
“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.54
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.55
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.”56
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.”57
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.58
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:
• to maul the Egyptian army and smash as much of its newly supplied Soviet weaponry as possible;
• to break the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, at the tip of the Red Sea, and open up the southern port of Eilat to commercial shipping; and
• to end the Egyptian-run fedayun infiltration from the Gaza Strip. If that were stopped, it was held, Jordan would rein in its own fedayun, too.59
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.60 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.61
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.62
At dawn on the thirty-first, however, an order came through from the High Command in Tel Aviv forbidding further movement westward. Egyptian jets swooped down to strafe the paratroopers, vulnerable targets in their shallow foxholes. The Egyptian planes were chased off by a squadron of Israeli fighters, and three of them were downed. But the Israeli pilots radioed to the paratroopers, Sharon writes, “that an Egyptian armored brigade was moving toward us” from the direction of Bir Gafgafa, a large military base to the northeast. Again Sharon proposed moving his force into the Mitle. His reasoning this time was that his twelve hundred lightly armed men—only three of the brand-new AMXs had made the journey to the end; the others had broken down, and there were no spare parts to fix them—would be sitting ducks for the oncoming Egyptian armor, spread-eagled as they were on the flat ground east of the pass. They needed to take up defensive positions on the slopes of the Mitle from where they could pick off the Egyptian tanks with bazookas and recoilless rifles as they made their way through the narrow defile. Again, though, the order came back from Tel Aviv: stay put. Southern Command sent its chief of operations, Rehavam Ze’evi, by Piper plane to survey the scene and to make sure the order was obeyed.
Sharon persuaded Ze’evi to approve sending a reconnaissance patrol into the pass, to confirm that it was free from Egyptian forces. “ ‘You can go as deep as possible,’ ” Sharon recalled Ze’evi saying, “ ‘just don’t get involved in a battle …’ Immediately I put together a unit to go into the pass. My idea was that this unit would move the twenty miles to the western end and hold the position there, preventing Egyptian forces from attacking from that direction. Then the rest of the brigade could move inside, deploying to defend themselves against the armored forces … For this job I put the three tanks together with two companies of infantry in half-tracks.”
Ze’evi remembered things rather differently. “I told [Sharon] that a reconnaissance patrol was approved but nothing more than that,” Ze’evi testified to Laskov. “We’re sitting and talking, and I see that a whole column of vehicles is lining up, half-tracks, jeeps, AMX tanks. I say to Arik, ‘What’s all this?’ He says, ‘Those sons of bitches, when I tell them to prepare a reconnaissance patrol, everyone starts pumping it up out of all proportion. But don’t worry, it’s just a patrol.’ I said to Arik, ‘I’m warning you, this patrol is to bring back nothing but information.’ ”63
Sharon put one of his battalion commanders, Mordechai Gur, in command of this ill-defined force with its ill-defined mission. He gave him, he writes, “strict orders not to get involved in any fights … But within a mile of the entrance the first half-track was slammed by a volley of fire from hidden positions high on the defile walls. The driver was killed instantly and the half-track swerved sideways and stopped. The second half-track moved up and was also hit and stopped.”64
Gur’s force had driven into a well-laid trap. Egyptian troops, holed up in caves and dugouts high above the pass, virtually invisible from the air, rained down mortar and machine-gun cross fire on the Israeli vehicles. The paratroopers, those who were not hit in the first fusillade, tried to clamber out, to find what cover they could, and to return largely ineffective fire at their tormentors. Gur resolved to stand and fight rather than try to back away. He managed to send a runner back to Sharon to describe the inferno in which he found himself. He begged urgently for help.
Sharon sent in two units of reinforcements, under Eitan and Davidi, to join the battle. “It was a precarious situation. We were exposed on the flatland at the end of the pass. Many wounded were already being brought out of the battle. I felt I had to take immediate steps to create a defensive perimeter facing the approaching Egyptian armor and to have the wounded evacuated.” He began redeploying the rest of the brigade on the slopes at the entrance to the pass and at the same time arguing with the air force, who were reluctant to land their DC-3s in the soft desert sand. In the end, they took the chance and began ferrying the casualties out of the battle zone.
Gur and his dwindling force were pinned down and fought desperately until sunset, when Yitzhak Hofi, the deputy brigade commander who had joined the original patrol and made it westward with two tanks and several half-tracks, charged back through the pass and provided fire cover, under which, with the help of the reinforcements, the paratroopers finally withdrew. After nightfall, Sharon sent two small units to creep along the sides of the pass and ferret out the Egyptian positions. “They attacked one Egyptian cave and firing hole after another in hand-to-hand fighting. For two hours the sounds of battle reverberated through the pass before finally giving way around eight o’clock to an ominous silence.”65
The next morning, Sharon recalls, his troops were poised to give battle to the column of Egyptian tanks. But the only sound from the desert was the drone of two Israeli Piper Cubs, searching in vain for the Egyptian armor. With the Anglo-French intervention now (belatedly) imminent, the Egyptians had preferred to turn northwest and withdraw across the canal.
More than 250 Egyptians died in the caves overlooking the Mitle. But the paratroopers’ losses—38 killedk and 120 wounded—were a grievous blow to the brigade. They would represent some 20 percent of all the IDF’s losses in the hundred-hour Sinai War, which ended, for Israel at any rate, as a huge and resounding success. Three IDF columns, mainly comprising reservists, struck into Sinai in the wake of the paratroopers’ jump. One headed south from Eilat, took Sharm el-Sheikh at the southern tip of Sinai, and spiked the guns that had blockaded the Straits of Tiran. The paratroopers had been designated to attack Sharm el-Sheikh, too. But by the time they regrouped after the battle of the Mitle and dashed down the western Sinai coast, it was too late. Another armored column attacked the heavily fortified Egyptian complex at Abu Agheila in northeastern Sinai. This was the heaviest fighting of the campaign, but eventually the Israeli force overran the defenders and pushed on toward Ismailia on the Suez Canal. The third, northernmost column skirted the Gaza Strip, taking Rafah at its southern end and then splitting. Half the force doubled back through the Strip, attacking the Egyptian units stationed there. The other half raced on along the Mediterranean coast, taking el-Arish and surging on toward Kantara, on the canal.
The final cost to Israel was 172 dead, 700 wounded, and 4 prisoners of war. Egypt suffered thousands of dead, great numbers of wounded, and 5,581 prisoners of war.
The British and French experience was far less favorable than Israel’s: their combined land, sea, and air forces, operating—albeit not without copious snafus and delays—out of Cyprus and Malta and from half a dozen aircraft carriers, crushed Egyptian resistance. But Nasser had ordered all the cargo ships in the canal to be sunk, and so, while British troops were back in control of the waterway, Britain and France could not reopen it for maritime traffic. And Nasser, though his army was trounced, claimed a great victory. Far from being overthrown, he seemed more popular than ever.
The reaction from the two superpowers, the United States and the U.S.S.R., was wholly and vociferously negative. President Eisenhower, who had been reelected on November 6, threatened to induce a run on sterling unless Britain withdrew forthwith. Israel for its part was the target of some ominous nuclear saber rattling from the Soviet leader, Marshal Bulganin, and more civilized but no less stern admonishments from Eisenhower. Ben-Gurion, who had waxed lyrical over his expansive “Third Kingdom of Israel” with its biblically named outposts in the far south, quickly folded and agreed to pull out. The UN Security Council set up a peacekeeping force that it deployed along the Israel-Sinai border and at Sharm el-Sheikh. In March 1957, the blue berets moved into the Gaza Strip, too, and the last IDF units pulled back across the armistice lines.
The war left Sharon’s standing and prestige in the army seriously weakened and his military career compromised. “Why are we, the best fighters, not in the fighting?” he had remonstrated with Southern Command by radio on October 31, in the course of his pleading to be allowed to move into the Mitle Pass. “When are we going to stop this guarding and start some fighting?” To the historian Motti Golani, this radio message shows that Sharon did not understand “the bigger picture” even when he was right in the thick of it.66 There was no need to advance into the Mitle and risk a bloody battle now that the intended effect of the parachute drop was in train. The Anglo-French ultimatum had been delivered on the morning of the thirtieth, twelve hours after the Israeli parachute drop, as planned. It had been duly rejected by Egypt, and the two European powers launched their military operations that morning, the thirty-first, with bombing runs over the Canal Zone. There was no purpose, therefore, in Sharon’s troops advancing west.
Mordechai Gur, who led the “patrol” into the pass, was scathing in his criticism of Sharon:
He didn’t direct the battle. No one directed it … Sharon was physically exhausted on the way down to the Mitle, after all the planning and conferring that preceded it. When Arik’s there—he’s there. Now he simply wasn’t there. He slept the whole time or dealt with other things. When we saw he wasn’t functioning, Davidi took the decisions instead of him. That’s how we overran Kuntilla, Themed, and Nakhl. [At the Mitle] he wasn’t functioning for hours on end. He was panicked, presumably because he’d acted against orders and because the casualty figures scared him. He collapsed under the stress … The brigade commander was totally out of it.67
That public indictment came thirty years after the Sinai War, when Sharon and Gur were rival politicians. But Gur leveled the same accusations against Sharon inside the army as soon as the fighting was over. And there was worse. “I never saw his back when we were charging the enemy,” Gur said at a tense and bitter meeting of the paratroop officers that Sharon himself convened in March 1957. “Not at Gaza. Not at Khan Yunis. Nor at Hussan. Nor Kinneret. Nor Kalkilya. And most of all, not at the Mitle. Where was he from 1:30 in the afternoon till 8:30 at night? He wasn’t there. He didn’t take part in the fighting. He wasn’t even on the radio.”
By then, many of the officers were in open revolt against their commander. They wanted him out. He had urged them to speak freely; they accused him, in effect, of cowardice. He tried to defend his behavior at the Mitle. He needed to organize the rest of the brigade, he said, for the armored Egyptian assault that he expected imminently. He needed to organize a makeshift landing strip in the desert for urgent medevac flights. He had directed the battle from the entrance to the pass, feeding in reinforcements, planning how to outflank the Egyptians dug into the hillsides.
Was Sharon, Ben-Gurion’s paragon of the courageous new Jew, in fact a coward? Some of his critics inside the paratroop brigade cast this ultimate aspersion openly. “He was not a brave man,” said Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, then a platoon commander who was wounded at the Mitle. “He was fearful for his own personal safety.”68
Others confirmed that he did not often lead his men into battle but acknowledged that, at his rank, this was not necessarily the criterion by which to judge his bravery. Yitzhak Hofi, his deputy at the Mitle, said Sharon’s behavior was entirely acceptable by the yardstick of any other fighting unit, where senior officers controlled the battle from behind the front line. “But by the standards of the paratroopers, which he himself had inculcated, there was something strange in his conduct.”69 Even Gur, his most stringent critic, conceded in a 1986 interview that Sharon did lead in several of the reprisal operations. “But at a certain point he began to think that he was too important [to lead from the front]. In the Gaza operation, for instance, he went along with us and then, suddenly, he moved aside.” Gur praised Sharon’s unequaled ability to “read the battlefield.” “That’s why I was so furious with him at the Mitle, for simply not being there. If he’d have been in contact with us, everything would have ended differently.”70
In the welter of recriminations after the Mitle, another charge surfaced. This one stuck to Sharon for the rest of his life: he was an inveterate liar. This, too, wasn’t new. Ben-Gurion himself had gently suggested to his young hero a number of times that he needed to rein in his penchant for not quite telling the truth. “He never called him outright a liar,” said Yitzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s longtime bureau chief and most discreet and intimate aide who was later to become president of the state (1978–1983). “On one occasion when I was present, he spoke to him almost in a fatherly way. ‘Arik, you know people say about you that you aren’t always accurate …’ He was being euphemistic. He knew from his military aide, Nehemia Argov, that that was the word inside the army. Arik: ‘No, no. I do try to be accurate.’ BG: ‘Well, it’s not good not to be accurate. One must be accurate.’ Arik: ‘Okay, okay.’ ”71
Dayan’s criticism of Sharon’s mendacity was withering. “[M]y complaint against the paratroop command was not so much over the battle itself as over their subterfuge in terming the operation a ‘patrol’ in order to satisfy the General Staff. This made me sad, and I regretted that I had not succeeded in molding such relations of mutual trust that if they had wished to defy my orders, they would have done so directly and openly.”72
Shimon Peres watched these swirling emotions from his own position of close proximity to the prime minister and to the military leadership, and with an abiding affection for Sharon. Half a century later, he looked back on those events and on Sharon’s subsequent, turbulent career and offered a trenchant observation of his own. “For Arik, the report on the battle was part of the battle. You’ve got to fight not just the enemy; you’ve got to fight your superiors, too. They’re men of little faith.”73
Shmuel Scheinerman’s death from cancer on December 31, 1956, added to the gloom that seemed to envelop Sharon at this time. “I felt I had not known him. In my childhood everyone had been too busy. Then came the War of Independence, then Unit 101 and the paratroopers. Since the age of seventeen I had hardly been at home. Perhaps it is normal for children not to fully appreciate their parents until later in life. For me, unfortunately, the first intimations of that truth came with the blow of my father’s passing.” Just recently, moreover, he and Gali had bought a home—from General Laskov, as it happened—in the Tel Aviv suburb of Zahala, brushing aside the sick Shmuel’s imprecations that they build a house and settle on his land at Kfar Malal. In the hospital, close to the end, Sharon recalled, “[Shmuel] said softly, ‘It’s a pity I’m going to die. You still need my help in so many ways.’ ”
Arik had been able, at least, to gladden the dying man’s heart with the news that he had a grandson. On December 27, Gali gave birth. The couple was overwhelmed with joy: “Both of us had wanted many children. But two years earlier we had been told we would be unable to conceive. The news had put a cloud over our lives.”74 The circumcision ceremony, on the eighth day in Jewish law, was bittersweet. Shmuel was dead; the newborn was named after him: Gur Shmuel.
a The Revisionist Zionist movement, founded in 1925 by Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, became the main opposition to the Labor-led World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Jewish state in the making. The Revisionists evolved over the years into the Likud.
b Yishuv: the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.
c Like many of the people in Ramot Hashavim, the Steinitzes—both he and she were medical doctors—had fled Hitler’s Germany and were now reinventing themselves as farmers in the Jewish homeland. Their Bechstein grand made the bucolic life a little more palatable for them. “Now your grandfather,” Prime Minister Sharon used to needle the young Likud hard-liner Yuval Steinitz nearly seventy years later, “there was a sensible man.” Yuval, a left-wing professor of philosophy turned right-wing politician, was chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Sharon alternated irony and charm in an unremitting effort to winkle him away from the camp of his archenemy, Benjamin Netanyahu, into the dovish camp that supported his disengagement from Gaza. In charming mode, he would recall at Steinitz’s committee how, as a youngster driving his oxen into the fields, he would stop and listen to the music wafting from the open windows of Grandfather Steinitz’s house.
d This stopped, for security reasons, when he became prime minister.
e An acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization, commanded by Menachem Begin.
f Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for Israel’s Freedom, known by the British as the Stern Gang. One of its leaders was another future prime minister—Yitzhak Shamir.
g Shimon Peres, then a junior aide to Ben-Gurion, makes the point in Ben-Gurion: “[Priority] Number one for Ben-Gurion was Jerusalem. That was his argument with Yigael Yadin [the deputy chief of staff], who wanted to fight in Ashkelon because the Egyptians had reached Ashkelon. And Ben-Gurion said no; Jerusalem first. It was the same on the Jordanian front: John Glubb [the Transjordanian commander] said we’ll cross from Beisan to Haifa and bisect the Jewish state, and Emir Abdullah said no; first Jerusalem. Interesting, that parallel.”
h Lahat went on to become a major general in the army and, later, mayor of Tel Aviv.
i Chief of staff from 1958 to 1961.
j Israel tried to head off this Anglo-Egyptian agreement by ordering a network of Egyptian-Jewish agents to carry out provocative attacks against American cultural centers and other institutions in Egypt. The idea, breathtaking in its naïveté and irresponsibility, was that such attacks would poison Egypt’s relations with the West and prompt Britain to keep its troops on the canal. The amateurish attacks all failed hopelessly; two of the Jews were executed; an Israeli agent committed suicide in prison; six other Egyptian-Jewish members of the group received long prison terms. What was poisoned as a result, terminally in the view of many historians, was the cohesive solidarity within the ruling Mapai Party. Ben-Gurion, who was on his Negev kibbutz and out of power during “the unfortunate mishap,” as it was called for years in the censored Israeli press, insisted on a judicial process to determine if his stand-in as defense minister, Pinhas Lavon, had ordered the operation. Lavon put the blame on the head of Military Intelligence, Binyamin Gibli (no relation to Yitzhak). Luckily for Chief of Staff Dayan, he was out of the country when the order was given. Ben-Gurion’s veteran Mapai colleagues, led by his close lieutenant and eventual successor, Levi Eshkol, wanted to make do with a ministerial committee that had delivered an inconclusive verdict on who gave the order. After years of simmering conflict, Ben-Gurion eventually resigned from office and seceded from Mapai in 1963, taking Dayan and Peres with him. The labor movement as a whole was seriously weakened by this infighting. In time, this decline helped pave the way for the Likud’s accession to power in 1977, after three decades of Labor rule.
k Two more died in separate incidents.