I believe there will be peace. There has to be peace, in my view. We have to make every effort to bring peace about. I have always been depicted as an enemy of peace. But I have never been an enemy of peace, because I witnessed the horrors of war. I believe in peace, and I believe that the day will come when peace will prevail. Thank you.”1
Sharon’s transformation during this period from man of war to man of peace was neither complete nor consistent. He did not become a born-again peacenik, now or later. His detractors, still legion, mocked the intimations of change as a cynical stunt. It was designed, they said, by his admen friends to make him more eligible for promotion, to get him into the kitchen cabinet at last. The talk at the top, in the region and in Washington, was of progress to peace. To get there, therefore, Sharon had to talk the talk. That didn’t mean he would walk the walk.
Still, talk, however disingenuous, is not just talk. Talk is the stuff of politics. Talk makes the political man. In June 1997, Sharon invited Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat’s deputy in the Palestinian Authority, for a long private talk at Sycamore Ranch. It was leaked two weeks later, probably by Sharon himself. “This meeting,” wrote Shimon Shiffer, a veteran political commentator, “is one of the most important developments that has happened in the process of reconciliation between the two nations.” In an article headlined “Sharon Has Crossed the Lines,” Shiffer wrote that Sharon now recognized the realities that had given rise to the Oslo Accords and that in effect he, too, now recognized the PLO as the authentic representative of the Palestinian people.2a
Cynical or significant, Sharon’s meeting with Arafat’s longtime lieutenant intrigued the Knesset, and most especially the doves, both Jewish and Arab. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter was Sharon’s extemporaneous closing flourish, at the end of a lengthy statement and subsequent exchanges with members. The deputy Speaker, Professor Naomi Chazan of Meretz, granted him extra time to make his replies. “We’re all riveted,” she said, without sarcasm. “Don’t worry,” Sharon said, with plenty of sarcasm on his part, “nothing’s happened to shake my views about our right to Eretz Yisrael. I’ve heard so many worried voices here in the debate. Let me assure all the worriers: they’ve got nothing to worry about!” But then he seamlessly switched into his new, conciliatory vein. “I just think we must find a solution that everyone can live with … I believe that Jews and Arabs can live together in peace and must live together in peace. And I believe that day will come.”
He had met with Abu Mazen, he said, in order to lay out in a straightforward and unvarnished way “what Israel can and can’t do.”
He did not deny reports in the press that he had given Abu Mazen to understand that he accepted, or at least did not dismiss, the Palestinians’ principled demand for an independent state. Even if we set aside for a moment the impossibly narrow borders that Sharon envisaged for the Palestinians, his very countenancing of Palestinian statehood, however hypothetical, was still anathema at that time to much of the Israeli Right (and heresy to the religious Right). This was probably the first time (apart from his ideological swerves during the Shlomzion episode, which he subsequently denied) that Sharon intimated publicly, albeit by insinuation, his pragmatic thinking on this touchstone political issue.
In a way, acceptance of Palestinian independence was less of an ideological leap for Sharon than for the others in his camp and for many in the Labor Party, too. After all, he had always favored Palestinian statehood—but centered on Jordan, not on Palestine. That was the essence of the “Jordan is Palestine” doctrine that he had espoused for so long, in defiance of the political orthodoxy. He therefore did not need to shake off the dogmatic Israeli denial of Palestinian national aspirations that constricted Israel’s policy thinking under both Labor and Likud. He had never donned that particular piece of political and intellectual corsetry.
But while the Palestinians stressed that Abu Mazen had visited Sharon’s home with Arafat’s blessing, Sharon insisted that his attitude to Arafat was unchanged and that he would continue to boycott him. “We know that in war civilians get killed, and we all regret that. But the purpose in war is not to kill civilians. Arafat ordered the killing of civilians—of children, women, old people. That is why I refuse to speak to him.”
He made a point, too, of telling the Knesset that Abu Mazen’s visit was fully coordinated with the prime minister, who was “very interested” in it taking place. That was a cruel rubbing of salt into the wounded ego of David Levy, who had vociferously protested being left out of the loop, even though, as foreign minister, he was supposed to be running the negotiations with the Palestinians. The dynamic of Levy’s discomfiture and eventual displacement by Sharon was already under way.
A month later, in August 1997, Sharon met with the U.S. peace envoy, Dennis Ross, in Jerusalem, at the specific request of the prime minister. The envoy briefed the minister on the state of ongoing interim negotiations, and Sharon talked about his ideas for the permanent status negotiations. But more important than the substance of their talk was the fact that it took place at all. It was the first time for years that a high-ranking American official sat opposite Sharon, the bogeyman of the Bush-Baker era (and no special favorite of the Clintonites either). More than anything, it signaled that he was on his way back to the heart of the matters that mattered. In November, he was in the White House, sent by Netanyahu to expound to the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and other key officials on his ideas for eventually parceling the West Bank between the two nations.
He knew full well, he told his American hosts, that his original “enclaves” scheme was no longer relevant, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. He knew the Palestinians needed contiguity, and he believed that he could provide it, with tunnels, bridges, and overpasses. He knew above all, he said, that a Palestinian state was inevitable. He wanted, therefore, to reach “strategic understandings” with the United States on the size and nature of the security zones that Israel would need to keep, and also on key issues like water resources. An unnamed senior American official was quoted in the Israeli press as saying that Sharon had left an impression in Washington of “moderation and pragmatism.”3
He was working hard, mainly on himself, to create the same impression in the eyes of the political community back home. “In the past, he was often to be heard voicing uncomplimentary comments on the prime minister’s performance,” wrote Yossi Verter, Haaretz’s political reporter, with his customary understatement. “Not anymore.”4 But Sharon could still not resist an occasional swipe even in his new role as Bibi’s loyal and devoted elder minister. “A few days ago,” he told delegates at the Likud Party conference in November, “the prime minister said to me, ‘There’ll be a tough fight at conference. I’ll need your help.’ And I replied, ‘That’s a bit difficult, because I don’t know whether to help your right hand or your left hand.’ ” The audience roared with laughter. The ministers on the dais smirked and guffawed. The reporters on the side chortled. Only Netanyahu seemed nonplussed and grinned awkwardly. The phrase became an instant perennial, still trotted out whenever Netanyahu’s famous indecisiveness is up for discussion.5
“Bibi confided to me his view,” wrote Dennis Ross, the American peace envoy, “that a leader can never afford to give up ‘his tribe’—those who are fiercely loyal to him, who identify with him because of shared roots, long-standing ties, and emotional connections. Bibi never figured out how to reconcile his ambition to be a historic peacemaker with the reality of his political tribe, which did not believe peace with the Palestinians was possible, and were certainly not prepared to pay the price that a test of peace might entail.”6
Some would say that was too charitable a reading of the tribe and of the leader who strung along the Americans for years and ultimately chose the shortsighted pretensions of this tribe over the nation’s crucial long-term interests. Sharon, at any rate, became his prime minister’s close ally during 1997–1999, both in stringing along Ross and his bosses in Washington and in trying to have it both ways with the Likud’s political base back home.
The Americans understood that Netanyahu’s preference was to cede nothing and play for time. They hoped, nevertheless, that they could engage the other side of his conflicted political persona, the side that craves success. After the Meshal affair, the Clinton administration was intent on seeing Netanyahu pursue the implementation of Oslo II, the Interim Agreement, which Rabin had concluded and Netanyahu had ratified but which remained a dead letter in regard to its provision for three further redeployments (FRDs) by Israel on the West Bank. The second of these FRDs was due to have been carried out in September 1997, but the first remained unimplemented.
Coincidentally, and conveniently for Sharon, the timing coincided with David Levy’s resignation from the Foreign Ministry. Levy had been moving steadily leftward on both domestic and foreign policy and increasingly chafing at Netanyahu. Now he chose to quit over an evolving state budget that he found far too tough on low-paid working people. Netanyahu made no immediate move to replace him at the Foreign Ministry, but Sharon quickly became the leading candidate, at least in his own eyes. He stepped up his public praise of Netanyahu.
There now followed a long period of months during which Sharon performed the most elaborate minuet, dancing between the ostensibly—but only ostensibly—irreconcilable positions of loudly opposing a double-FRD from 13 percent of the West Bank and quietly intimating that he could in fact live with it, if he became the foreign minister who negotiated it. Thirteen percent became the line behind which the Americans decided to dig in, after being pushed steadily back by Netanyahu from the original 20 to teens and then to low teens. It was fairly arbitrary, but they had lined up the Palestinians beside them, and they did not intend to budge.
The crunch came in the fall of 1998, when the Americans issued invitations to the two sides to attend a summit conference in order, at last, to wrap up the FRDs. The hard Right in Netanyahu’s coalition threatened open rebellion. The government was in imminent danger of collapse. Netanyahu finally played his ace: Sharon would be foreign minister. He would be responsible henceforth for the peace process with the Palestinians. And, as a fast-working analgesic for the hard-liners’ angst, Sharon would join the Israeli delegation to the conference. Sharon for his part was still publicly proclaiming his opposition to 13 percent. The implication was that he would carry the fight to the summit. “Tie us up, hand and foot!” he demanded of the cabinet.
On October 14, 1998, the day before the summit was to begin at the Wye River Plantation conference center in Maryland, Sharon’s appointment was formally approved by the cabinet. He flew off after the prime minister to the United States, first to visit King Hussein at the Mayo Clinic, then on to Wye, where he arrived near midnight on the fourth day of the conference. President Clinton asked to meet with him alone, and they sat until nearly two o’clock in the morning. It was the first time they had met, and plainly the American side hoped that Sharon, now that he had achieved his ambition to get back into the center of policy making, would prove an asset in the negotiations.
Sharon’s foremost concern at this relatively early stage of a conference that was to distend into a nine-day marathon was to impress upon the public back home the firmness of his determination not to shake hands with Arafat. No requirements of pomp or protocol attaching to his new office would weaken his resolve. This ultimately non-substantive issue consumed him, and the Israeli media, to an obsessive degree—given, after all, that Sharon had pressed so hard, and for so long, to get into the room where decisions were made and where Arafat sat and talked with Israel’s leaders.
Talking, as distinct from shaking hands, was kosher in the new foreign minister’s book. The very next evening he participated in a dinner that Clinton gave for the senior delegates and held forth expansively to the Palestinian leader on farming and animal husbandry. This, however, as the Israeli press breathlessly reported, was after he had demonstratively ignored Arafat’s gesture of greeting as he entered the room—“General Sharon,” Netanyahu announced to the assembled company by way of introduction—and dexterously contrived to shake the hands of Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Nabil Shaath while avoiding that of Arafat.
The Palestinians, in their briefings, grandly dismissed Sharon’s antics. The rais’s gesture, they said, far from obsequious, was intended to convey the thought that Sharon had tried to crush him in Beirut, yet here he was, sixteen years later, the American president’s honored guest—and Sharon’s negotiating partner.7 Beneath the posturing, though, Arafat was hurt, and he harped on it long after in conversation with his intimates.8 Arafat’s own behavior had been the opposite of churlish. Sharon had asked Arafat, through a reliably discreet middleman, not to overly decry or condemn his appointment as foreign minister and not to boycott him. And sure enough, the Palestinians’ public reaction to Sharon’s appointment was the least strident of all the Arab states. Arafat himself made do with an anodyne observation that this was an internal Israeli matter. In private conversations with the Americans, the Palestinians pointed to the potentially favorable effect of Sharon’s appointment, if indeed he and Netanyahu intended to push through the FRDs. “The time for moderate leaders will come later,” the Palestinians told their American interlocutors.9
“The Wye River Memorandum,” as it was called, provided for a 13 percent first-and-second FRD. All of it was to be from Area C to Areas A and B, as the Palestinians and the Americans had insisted. “Everyone was euphoric,” Dennis Ross wrote, recalling the predawn moment when the draft was finally approved. But it didn’t last. “The President and Bibi were sitting alone; no smiles, only stern looks. They were barely talking, and Bibi looked positively stricken.” The hiccup that seriously threatened to choke the euphoria was Jonathan Jay Pollard, the U.S. Navy analyst turned Israeli spy who had now served thirteen years of his life sentence. Earlier in the year, Netanyahu had formally recognized—he was the first prime minister to do so—that Pollard had spied for Israel. Now he wanted the president to pardon the spy as part of the Wye package, which included Israel’s release of 750 Palestinian prisoners. Clinton’s CIA chief urged him to resist.
In the event, Netanyahu caved. Sharon was around throughout this frantic eleventh-hour drama. Some reports later said he thought Netanyahu should hold out for Pollard even at the expense of the accord.10 But the bottom line is that over Pollard, as over the accord itself with its 13 percent FRD, Sharon at the end of the day acquiesced and gave the prime minister his political support.
Yet even in this long-desired position in the prime minister’s intimate proximity, Sharon still managed to keep dancing his two-directional minuet. He was foreign minister, he had been a key negotiator at Wye, he advocated and defended the accord, yet now he urged the settlers to move swiftly and unilaterally to seize lands adjacent to their settlements as a way of warding off the dangers of Wye. In point of fact, only three disused outposts were to be dismantled under Wye. Yet Sharon told a group of settlement leaders on November 15 that they should push out the boundaries of their settlements without asking or waiting for official approval.
They needed no further encouragement. In the months that followed, spurred on by Sharon, by their determination to thwart Wye, and finally by their sense that the rightist government was about to fall, the settlers grabbed “hilltop after hilltop … Within a few weeks, new settlements were established, one after another, unhindered. Netanyahu was fighting for his political life and needed the settlers’ votes. The settlers scorned the IDF Civil Administration officials who tried to enforce the law. ‘You will not be able to stop us; we have help from on high,’ they said. In at least four cases, Netanyahu ordered that Civil Administration inspectors who came to evacuate the settlements be stopped.”11
Sharon hosted Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem for what was billed as a first preview of the permanent status negotiations. Sharon brimmed with bonhomie, his aide Tomer Orni recalled. The Palestinians, he said, must “jump ahead” economically. It was completely untenable—and made peacemaking veritably impossible—that the Palestinian GDP per capita was a mere fraction of Israel’s. He suggested that the two of them, together, visit the model Israeli high-tech industrial park at Tefen in the Galilee, near Abbas’s birthplace at Safed. Sharon himself was looking into a vast desalination project in the sea near Gaza. Why didn’t he and Abbas go together to the United States to seek funding? They must meet frequently to promote these ideas, to create economic interdependency between Israel and the PA and thus deepen both sides’ stake in peace.12
The brilliantly gifted literary critic Yoram Bronowski, who wrote subtle and cruel television reviews for Haaretz, seized on Sharon’s facial tic, long a favorite prop of Israeli comics and cartoonists, to illustrate the inconsistency of his positions at this time. In a television interview soon after Wye, Bronowski noted, the whole comportment of the foreign minister seemed to broadcast the “inner conflict in which he finds himself. Thus, the ‘best’ agreement is also a ‘dangerous’ agreement. He didn’t ‘applaud Arafat,’ he merely ‘stood up and clapped, like everyone else.’ As he said these things, his nose seemed to move, like in children’s stories, in the opposite direction from his mouth. For a moment, it seemed to be growing longer, or at least to be denying its owner’s words … Is it possible that his lips will vote in favor, while his nose, or his ears, vote against?”13
In the event, the Knesset vote went smoothly, and the first phase of the Wye Agreement was duly implemented on Friday, November 20, 1998, in the area around Jenin. Territory comprising 2 percent of the West Bank was transferred from Area C status to Area B, and a further 7.2 percent from Area B to Area A.
The next phase of the withdrawal was scheduled for December 14. It did not happen. As November ended, Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank and especially in East Jerusalem in favor of prisoner release grew daily more violent. On December 2, Netanyahu and his inner cabinet—by now seriously beleaguered by rightist political allies turned critics—resolved that further withdrawal would be conditional on Arafat calling off the prisoner campaign, taking effective action against incitement, and committing not to issue a unilateral declaration of independence. The Palestinians balked. None of this was in Wye, they said. It was all pretexts dredged up by Israel to avoid withdrawing and to provoke a crisis just as Clinton was due to visit Gaza and make a historic appearance before the Palestinian parliament. Ministers still loyal to Netanyahu, meanwhile, feeling their cabinet seats increasingly wobbly beneath them, began muttering about why Clinton needed to come in the first place. His visit would only deepen the fissures within the coalition. Sharon was hastily dispatched to Washington to try, somehow, to hold things together.
The irony of the former persona non grata now reappearing in the U.S. capital on a mending mission was not lost on either side. In an unscheduled meeting with Clinton himself, Sharon turned on all his charm and effusive good manners to while away the time on anything and everything—other than the scheduled next withdrawal. He had brought with him a tasteful gift for the president, which he spent precious minutes elaborately bestowing. “If Clinton asked himself afterward what happened,” a senior Israeli diplomat recalled, “he would have answered that Sharon set out to avoid the issue—but he’d have had to admit that he did it elegantly!”14
By the time Clinton arrived in Gaza on December 13, 1998, at the head of a large delegation, both the Israeli coalition and the Wye Accords were in parlous condition. Netanyahu and Sharon tried to confine their bickering with the Americans to whether the Palestinian parliament needed to vote for the abrogation of the PLO Charter or whether an acclamation would suffice. But in the end they had to admit to Clinton that they would need “a brief respite” before proceeding with the next withdrawal, even if the session in Gaza passed off satisfactorily. There were many other issues, they claimed, on which the Palestinians were not living up to their Wye commitments. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued back; the president barely shrugged. Plainly, he had given up the ghost as far as this Israeli government was concerned.
The meeting of the Palestinian parliament in Gaza proved an emotional and memorable event. The members, duly responding to Arafat’s request, approved almost unanimously his letter to Clinton abrogating the offensive provisions of the Palestinian National Covenant. Clinton’s sensitive and finely honed rhetoric moved everyone present and the millions who watched on television. The Palestinians, he declared, were “free to determine their own destiny on their own land.” He spoke of the Palestinian “history of dispossession and dispersal” and praised the parliament’s act of abrogation. His appearances in Israel, especially at a school in Jerusalem, elicited an outpouring of warmth from the public there, too. But the diplomacy remained paralyzed.
Once Clinton left the region, the collapse of the coalition quickened. Rumors swirled around Sharon again: Would he bid for the leadership? At a low-key and unhappy session of the Likud central committee on December 26, Sharon proclaimed categorically, “I don’t want to be prime minister … I object to these incessant attacks on the prime minister that haven’t let up from the day he took office … I myself always knew when to stop. I always stopped when the government was in danger of falling.” Two days later, Likud and Labor jointly announced a date for elections: May 17, 1999. The 140-day limbo period, plus the time it would take to form the new government after the election, was in line with the Israeli political tradition, where governments take a very long time between their death and their burial.
For Ariel Sharon, it was to be time well spent. Few people today, even inside Israeli politics, remember that he served as foreign minister; he left no lasting mark on this prestigious but often overrated portfolio. He hardly could, given that for his entire tenure he represented a government collapsing or collapsed. But it left its mark on him.
Eytan Bentsur, a long-serving professional diplomat whom Sharon kept on as director general of the ministry, was subsequently to develop deep reservations over Sharon’s policies as prime minister and profound distaste for his ethical conduct and for the coterie of friends and advisers who surrounded him.b Nevertheless, Bentsur was full of praise for Sharon’s performance at the Foreign Ministry. “He was a man you could talk to. He would encourage everyone to speak freely. There was no dogmatism about him. And he was really easy, pleasant actually, to work with. He didn’t throw his weight around.”
According to his chief of bureau, Tomer Orni, Sharon took his appointment as foreign minister with great seriousness and embarked on a round of briefings and conversations with policy experts from across the spectrum, scribbling furiously in his little orange notebooks as though their analyses of the conflict and the region were all new to him. “He saw the Foreign Ministry as his preparation for the prime ministership—regardless of the slender political prospects, as he and everyone knew, that he would ever actually make it to prime minister.”
Despite the diplomatic chill, Sharon did manage to set up one lengthy, unpublicized meeting with Abu Ala, the senior PA official who negotiated the Oslo Accords. It took place at his ranch in late January 1999. Abu Ala drove down from Jerusalem incognito. Sharon had a log fire blazing in the hearth, Lily served cookies, and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. The host let the guest into a home truth. “For making war,” Sharon explained, “Israel needs a left-wing government. But for making peace, there has to be a nationalist government.” The election campaign was by no means over, he said, and the shape of the new government was unpredictable. Abu Ala said the PA had resolved to do nothing that could be perceived as intervening against the Likud. That was his message from Arafat. The rais, he said, respected Sharon as a man of his word.
What they should do, Sharon continued, was to forget the elections and get on with the peace process. Let’s take a specific issue, he suggested, and work on it. For instance, the “safe passage” route that was to link Gaza and the West Bank. Abu Ala said the Palestinians wanted that to be extraterritorial. Sharon said Israel would never agree. Abu Ala recounted his own humiliating experiences at Israeli army roadblocks. Sharon voiced anger at the soldiers’ behavior and sympathy for the Palestinians. He spoke of the danger of terrorism triggering a cycle of violence that could engulf the region. Abu Ala said he, Abu Mazen, and Arafat himself were potential terror targets. The dialogue flowed back and forth with ease. Abu Ala contributed to the ambience by making no mention of Sharon’s call to the settlers to grab the hilltops.
Sharon had returned the night before from a trip to Russia, the first of three he was to make there during his short spell as foreign minister. The frequency of his flights to Moscow raised eyebrows, especially in light of an ill-advised visit he had made to Russia as minister of infrastructures in June 1997 that had since mushroomed into the latest of his uncomfortable brushes with the law. That indiscretion (at best) involved his relations with one of the businessmen who accompanied him: Avigdor Ben-Gal, chairman of the government-owned Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), director of the government-owned Tahal water company, would-be entrepreneur, former army general, longtime critic of Sharon’s running of the Lebanon War, and, by coincidence or not, a witness soon to give evidence for the defendant in Sharon’s libel suit against Haaretz.c
Ben-Gal took part in meetings between Sharon and high Russian officials where a projected pipeline project was discussed that would transport natural gas from Georgia to Turkey and on, under the Mediterranean, to Israel. Ben-Gal made no secret of his desire to be involved in this lucrative venture. Sharon, despite their years of strained relations, introduced him as the IAI chairman and a military hero. A fortnight after they returned to Israel, Ben-Gal testified in the trial. He said that a lecture he had given ten years earlier, in which he accused Sharon of misleading Begin in the war, had been “nonsense and rubbish,” based on information he had since learned was completely groundless. Lawyers for Haaretz lodged a criminal complaint against him, alleging a gas-for-evidence bribery deal.
The attorney general ordered a police inquiry. In the months that followed, Sharon, Ben-Gal, and many others spent long hours in police interrogation rooms. On April 30, 1999, almost two years after the events, and, as so often in Sharon’s corruption cases, just days before the election, reports leaked out that the police were recommending that Sharon be indicted for bribery, perjury, suborning a witness, and a string of lesser charges. In the event—after the election—Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein and State Attorney Edna Arbel decided to close the file for lack of evidence. “In a case based solely on circumstantial evidence,” Rubinstein wrote, “the test is whether the evidence leads to only one logical conclusion. This case, in our opinion, does not pass the test.”d
In the end, no pipeline was built, and Israel continued to buy its natural gas from Egypt and, later, from its own offshore fields. But Sharon’s drive to expand Israel’s relations with Russia was undaunted by this disappointment, or indeed by the waves of ugly speculation that now accompanied his sallies to Moscow. “Russia is a superpower,” he told Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov on the January visit. “I have no doubt you will overcome your present difficulties and resume the global role which is properly yours.” He portrayed himself to his hosts as a proud and consistent Russophile with a fair knowledge of the language—he made a point of correcting the interpreters—and a love for the culture that he had absorbed from his mother.
Plainly, he had one eye on the large ex-Soviet immigrant constituency at home. He would make a point of beginning his diplomatic meetings, and especially those in Russia, with the declaration: “I am a Jew. First and foremost a Jew. That to me is the most important thing.” “On his first visit to Moscow in January,” Orni recalled, “he began in this way with the president of the Duma, Gennadiy Seleznyov, and added: ‘I have come here to talk about the Jewish people.’ ” There had been some ugly instances of anti-Semitism in the parliament, and he waded in straightaway. “With the defense minister, Marshal Igor Sergeyev, he made the same ‘Jewish’ opening and went on to praise the Red Army’s role in ‘destroying the Nazi beast’ and spoke of the many Jews who fought with distinction in its ranks.” To Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Sharon asserted that the million Russian immigrants in Israel were “a bridge of friendship” between the two countries. He had called on the Jews in Russia to continue to immigrate to Israel, he said, and he hoped to see a million more. Primakov replied diplomatically that they necessarily differed on this matter, since Russia was a multicultural society and, from his perspective, there was no need for the Jews to leave. However, he added, the government would “not interfere with anyone who wants to go, though we won’t encourage it either.”
Bentsur, the director general, also emphasized Sharon’s “extraordinary sensitivity to the Jewish dimension” of Israeli policy making. “One time, for instance, I was asked to fly to Vienna to meet representatives of the Hungarian Jewish community. They seriously feared an explosion of fascistic anti-Semitism in their country. I remember Sharon phoned me in Vienna to ask for details. I felt his concern was totally sincere. He would expound on the themes of Jewish suffering and Jewish rights in every diplomatic conversation. He saw Israel, and indeed he saw himself, as the guardian of Jewish interests worldwide.”15
While Iran, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and anti-Semitism were the issues that took up most of the talks, it was Sharon’s maverick stance on the Balkan conflict that attracted most attention, both at home and in Washington. Sharon stood out in his unconcealed preference for the Serbs, who were backed by their traditional ally—Russia. Urged by his professional staff at the Foreign Ministry to join his voice to worldwide condemnation of the Serbs, he agreed only to a general and vaguely worded condemnation of all aggression against innocent persons. “Today bad things are being done to the Albanians; not long ago bad things were done to the Serbs.”
Sharon’s reasoning was complex. First, there was the memory, still very much alive among some Israelis, of the Serbian people’s support for persecuted Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, a distinct rarity among the nations of Europe. Then there was his basic belief that Israel needed to improve its relations with Russia. Beyond that, Sharon urged Israeli policy makers to look to the future: if armed intervention by outside powers to enforce a solution to a regional conflict was legitimate in one part of the world, it would be legitimate in other parts of the world. Israel could become a future victim of such legitimacy.
Netanyahu tried to stand behind Washington while at the same time not falling out with Sharon on the eve of the election. His office formally announced that Israel supported the NATO bombing. Sharon still tried to have it both ways. “As loyal friends of the U.S.,” a Foreign Ministry statement said, “we expect U.S. and NATO forces to do everything to end the sufferings of innocent people and bring about a resumption of negotiations between the parties as soon as possible.” But the Americans were in no mood to appreciate minor ameliorations in what they saw as Sharon’s treacherous position. Secretary Albright made him sweat when he visited Washington in March 1999. “It makes me wonder,” she observed sarcastically, “that Israel is not fully supportive of the United States in Kosovo. To tell you the truth, I’m shocked.”
Unbowed by this drubbing, Sharon flew on to Moscow, where he basked in the glow of his self-arrogated status of global fixer. He assured Prime Minister Primakov that he had spoken in Washington on Russia’s behalf to Stanley Fischer at the International Monetary Fund and to James Wolfensohn at the World Bank, and he hoped a loan would be forthcoming. As for Mrs. Albright, “you will be happy to know that she really likes you. It made me almost jealous.”
Primakov praised Sharon for his position on Kosovo, “which is not like that of Netanyahu.” Sharon, at his most statesmanlike, suggested that the Americans wanted Russia’s help in reaching a solution in Kosovo. “They’re pushing us into a corner,” Primakov replied grumpily. Sharon said Russia could improve its international image and standing if it would only speak out publicly against the atrocities. “Women are raped there daily, and you don’t say anything. It’s not my business. I’m just telling you my impression.”
Plainly, Sharon enjoyed his time as foreign minister. He was cold-shouldered by some world statesmen; Britain’s foreign secretary, Robin Cook, was one notable example. But others were cordial enough, and with one in particular, Germany’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, Sharon built a warm relationship. His enjoyment was clouded, however, by the start of Lily’s battle with cancer. She was diagnosed in February 1999. Sharon devotedly accompanied her to examinations and treatment in Israel and the United States.
• • •
Sharon’s last trip to Moscow as foreign minister was originally scheduled to coincide with a visit to the Russian capital by Hafez Assad, the president of Syria. As it happened, Assad canceled due to ill health. Sharon urged his Russian hosts to work urgently in order to bring Israel and Syria to the negotiating table—at least according to Ze’ev Schiff, the respected defense analyst. Writing in Haaretz during Sharon’s visit, Schiff asserted that the foreign minister was proposing to the Russians an immediate mediation that would lead to Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights in two stages in return for a full peace treaty with long-term security arrangements on the Heights.16 Sharon flatly denied Schiff’s report. The story, he insisted, was a complete fabrication.
Schiff, who died in 2007, was not one to fabricate stories. Soon after the 1999 election, he exposed in Haaretz in elaborate detail a long and intricate pattern of secret talks that Netanyahu had conducted with Syria, through middlemen, almost throughout his term. An EU envoy, an Omani minister, and the American Jewish businessman and public figure Ronald Lauder had all shuttled assiduously between Netanyahu and Assad in separate back-channel efforts to broker a deal.17
Three days after this account appeared, Sharon asserted, in a speech to the Likud Party branch in the West Bank settlement town of Ariel, that it was actually he who had prevented Netanyahu from relinquishing the Golan Heights. It was his vigorous intervention, Sharon asserted, that thwarted Netanyahu’s intention to send Assad, through the middleman, a detailed withdrawal map.18
The most intensive mediation effort, through Lauder, apparently took place during August–September 1998.19 It was this effort that Sharon claimed to have thwarted. Netanyahu, however, vehemently denied it. His voice thick with contempt, he insisted that Sharon played no role at all:
QUESTION: Sharon claimed the credit for stopping you from signing away the Golan Heights.
NETANYAHU: That’s false. We had a series of contacts with Hafez Assad that actually Sharon didn’t even know about.
QUESTION: When he became foreign minister?
NETANYAHU: No, I don’t think he knew about them. I don’t think he knew. He was not involved in any of the negotiations. It was done between me and the Defense Ministry and that’s it. I don’t remember ever bringing him to the conversations.20
Both Netanyahu’s version and Sharon’s are disputed in every particular by the then defense minister, Moshe Arens, who was appointed to the post (this was his third stint) in January 1999.
ARENS: I had my suspicions about [Sharon] because when I got into Bibi’s government, [I learned] that these guys had been maneuvering to make a treaty with Hafez Assad. There was only one way to make a treaty with Hafez Assad, right?
QUESTION: Give back the Golan.
ARENS: Give back the Golan!
QUESTION: Bibi claims that Sharon never knew, right to the end.
ARENS: Not true. That’s not true. And it wasn’t Sharon who stopped him.
QUESTION: Who stopped him?
ARENS: Well, first of all he never got to sit down with Hafez Assad. Anyway, I could see that Sharon was in on this deal.
QUESTION: Sharon was in on this deal?
ARENS: I knew he was. Of course he was … When I got into the government, he knew about it. Bibi couldn’t do a thing like that without Sharon knowing it. Sharon was a very dominant figure. Sharon talked to me about it. I said giving up the Golan is a crazy idea. But he wasn’t totally averse to it. He didn’t sound dead set against it. He asked me what I thought.
QUESTION: Bibi said he never knew.
ARENS: Of course he knew. It’s a lie.21
a Immediately after Oslo, Sharon urged that the Likud and its allies “proclaim before the whole world that when the Likud returns to power, it will not abide by agreements that endanger the very existence of Israel.” In the Knesset a week later he was less definite: the agreement was terrible; it could yet be improved, especially its security provisions; a Likud government would—or might, there was some deliberate obfuscation here—abrogate it. As time wore on, Sharon’s obfuscation deepened. In August 1994 he said a Likud government would honor agreements signed by Rabin. It would not try to turn the wheel back, but would rather focus on ways of preventing further concessions. And later that year, in a wide-ranging interview in Penthouse, Sharon implicitly conceded that Oslo was no longer wholly reversible. Arafat was back, in Gaza at least, to stay. In December 1995, after the signing of Oslo II and the murder of Rabin, the irreversibility had broadened: Sharon told the ultra-Orthodox magazine Hashavua that it would be both impractical and irrational for Israel to abrogate the Oslo Accords, especially now that the Interim Agreement was being implemented on the ground. “I would not now demand that areas which have been handed over to them should be taken back by us.”
The Likud, in its manifesto for the May 1996 election, declared, “The government will recognize the facts that have been created under the Oslo agreements and will act to minimize the dangers that flow from these agreements for the future and the security of Israel.” Sharon said he was “not happy” with the party’s stand, but since the majority of his colleagues had approved it, he, too, would accept it.
b See p. 366.
c See p. 236.
d The judge in the libel action was less finicky. In his judgment for Haaretz, given in November 1997, he described Ben-Gal’s appearance on the witness stand as “a sorry sight about which the less said the better.”