The hope of peace for us Israelis lies in the principle of separation between the Palestinians and ourselves. I feel it is my solemn duty to warn my country at this time: If, heaven forbid, Israel fails in the coming years to implement this crucial principle of separation from our Palestinian neighbors—preferably by agreement, otherwise unilaterally—then it will be putting in mortal danger not only the security of its citizens but its very essence as a Jewish and a democratic state.”
Ariel Sharon’s investiture as prime minister, on March 7, 2001, was such a captivating political and human drama that the packed Knesset had no mind for the parting words of his discomfited predecessor. Yet within three years, Ehud Barak’s message would ring prophetic. It seemed to have portended Sharon’s momentous act of unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Did Sharon recognize the man he ousted as a source of his inspired if ham-fisted lunge at implementing the “principle of separation”? If he did, he certainly never articulated such recognition. Probably he never articulated it even to himself.
But there had been something so uncharacteristically considerate and respectful in Sharon’s relationship toward the soon-floundering and desperate Barak through the nineteen tortured months of his magnificent but mad prime ministership that the tempting conclusion is that he, at least, was listening to the younger man. Listening, and thinking hard. Otherwise, how to explain his constant striving, as leader of the Likud opposition, to enter a national unity government under the Labor prime minister who was single-mindedly trying to dump the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and almost all of the West Bank—all the occupied territories that the Likud has sworn to keep? Would Menachem Begin have countenanced a unity government under this Labor Party leader, whose policies had become those of the hated and despised Peace Now? Would Yitzhak Shamir? They would have tongue-lashed Barak as a military hero turned political coward. Granted, Sharon, too, tongue-lashed him. Granted, too, Sharon insisted that if there were to be a unity government, it would have to be under different policy guidelines. But how different? Sharon’s own evolving ideas of what might be an acceptable unity platform seemed increasingly remote from the Likud’s pristine doctrines.
Granted, politicians and pundits all knew that the autocratic Labor prime minister and the ersatz, temporary, fortuitous, short-term leader of the Likud—for that is how everyone saw Sharon—both never took their eyes off Bibi. The polls all told the same story: during the early months of Barak’s prime ministership, Netanyahu was the only rightist politician who could have given him a reasonable fight. As Barak’s popularity declined, Netanyahu alone was shown beating him while all other Likud possibles still lost to him. Only toward the end of Barak’s tumultuous term, when it became clear that Netanyahu would not run against him, did Barak begin to lose to Sharon in the polls.
The stop-Bibi theory behind the Barak-Sharon axis was much too strong to deny. And yet it was not strong enough to fully account for the political behavior of Barak and Sharon, individually and as a mutually desired, never consummated unity partnership. Barak, his ego as vast as his ambition—and as his political and interpersonal ineptness—swept into power determined to make peace at one fell swoop with Syria and Lebanon to the north and with the Palestinians to the east (the West Bank) and west (Gaza). He believed he could do it and brusquely dismissed anyone who thought he couldn’t.
Sharon thought he could. Almost fatalistically, Sharon, now leader of the opposition, anticipated Barak negotiating a peace treaty with Syria and running with it for reelection. He was convinced during the Camp David summit (July 2000), and then during the negotiations that followed its collapse, that Barak would eventually sign a permanent status accord with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and that the majority of the Israeli public would support it. Sharon did not believe he could prevent it. Rather, as with Rabin’s Oslo Accords, he believed his historic task was to improve it, to mitigate damage and avert danger by helping negotiate the details and the implementation—even while maintaining, rhetorically at least, his fundamental opposition to the far-reaching concessions on which these agreements were to be founded.
On the face of it, the Sharon-Barak relationship lacked the special intimacy that fueled the Sharon-Rabin connection. The two of them had not, after all, “eaten from the same mess tin.” And yet, in a way, they had, despite the generation gap. “Ehud Barak is a courageous soldier,” Sharon made a point of saying, not once, but many times in the course of their relatively brief political rivalry. And Barak had served under Sharon’s command in the Yom Kippur War.a Barak’s courage was an objective fact. He was the IDF’s most decorated soldier. But Sharon was not usually generous with his compliments to politicians, especially in matters that he really cared about, like battles and bravery. There was a special relationship here, too, and it transcended the political divide.
In the crowded Knesset that afternoon in March 2001, Barak continued with his meticulously prepared parting speech: “An Israel that controls a little less territory but that has clearly defined borders, and lives within those borders with a solid Jewish majority and with confidence in its character, its purpose, and the justice of its cause—an Israel like that would be stronger and more secure than an Israel which continues to bleed in steadily worsening demographic chaos, and in steadily deepening international isolation.”
If he had talked like that to the Israeli public, boldly and honestly, when he was prime minister and people were listening to him, Barak might still have been prime minister. But that was pointless hand-wringing over profound character flaws in a leader who never really understood the political process in a parliamentary democracy, then or later. The “peace camp,” the taste of missed opportunity acrid on its tongue, braced to face life under the man it had deprecated and feared for decades. The Knesset Speaker, Avrum Burg, a leading dove who was injured by the grenade that killed Emil Grunzweig in the anti-Sharon demonstration in 1983, did signal service to the country that day when he declared: “I address the leaders of the world, in the name of the Knesset of Israel, which represents all of the people of Israel, and I say: From this moment forth, let the world know, and let us know—this is the legitimately elected prime minister of Israel. Right or wrong, he is our prime minister, and no man other than he will henceforth decide who rules in Jerusalem and who speaks for Israel in the capitals of the world.” For Barak, though no friend, Burg had sage words, too. “History,” he said, “will without doubt render a more generous judgment than the voter has just done.”
The excitement was so great in the house that not only did the outgoing prime minister’s prophetic words go unnoticed but Sharon’s speech, too, barely impacted on the collective consciousness of the members and guests. Peace, he said, was going to involve “painful compromises on both sides.” The new government, which would be a Likud-Labor unity partnership (but with Likud’s rightist partners in it, too, and without Barak, who was quitting public life), would seek “realistic arrangements” with the Palestinians on the way to that final, painful peace. He had used the same word—“painful”—during the election campaign. It was hardly vintage Sharon and was vaguely disturbing for the hard-line Right. But it sounded noncommittal enough for them not to worry about it unduly.
Twenty-two months earlier, on May 18, 1999, Ofir Akunis would have bet his bottom dollar that that scene in the Knesset would never, ever be enacted. “I wasn’t 90 percent sure that Bibi would be back,” the young Likud Knesset member, then the party’s spokesman, recalled. “I was 99 percent sure. So were all of us. And if it wasn’t to be Bibi, for whatever reason, then there were younger-generation figures who were jostling for attention. Silvan Shalom, Limor Livnat, Tzachi Hanegbi. All of them looked more likely candidates than Sharon.” That near-certain assessment, Akunis explained, was what moved the stricken party leaders on the day after the election defeat and the scene at the Hilton hotel to offer Sharon the temporary leadership.
Sharon’s chief advantage, in the eyes of his ambitious comrades, was his age. By the time the next election was held—presumably, given the size and confidence of Barak’s coalition, in 2003—he would be seventy-five, hardly the age for a first run at the prime ministership. This comfortable calculation led the Likud leaders to a seemingly logical deduction: Sharon wouldn’t want to run in the primaries for permanent chairman of the party and prime ministerial candidate.
The comrades should have sensed that something was amiss in their calculations when it quickly became clear that their temporary chairman was indeed contemplating the prospect of running for permanent chairman, or alternatively of somehow extending his temporary chairmanship into a permanence-like limbo. The nineteen members of the sadly reduced Likud Knesset faction,b convening on June 1 to discuss “lessons of our election defeat,” were surprised and bemused to hear from Sharon that he would probably compete in the primaries. Wasn’t he a bit old, somebody ventured bravely. Sharon rounded on him, at his most caustically sarcastic. “I don’t suggest,” he growled, “that we run in the primaries waving our birth certificates. In general, it’s not a good idea to wave one’s birth certificate. Rather, I say—wave your certificates of achievements.”1
Despite Sharon’s repeated protestations that his grandmothers lived deep into old age and that the genes therefore were on his side, age became a key theme in the race. To parry the crass ageism emanating from his two younger rivals, Ehud Olmert (fifty-three) and Meir Sheetrit (fifty), Sharon proposed, and managed to push through the central committee, a resolution that the Likud would hold another leadership primary before the next general election. The main task of the leader elected now, therefore, would be to rebuild the party after its defeat. Rebuilding needed internal peace and harmony. Sharon, solid and experienced, was the man best capable of providing them.
Sharon had another advantage: his warm personal relationship with Barak. Granted, Olmert was on good terms, too, with the Labor prime minister. But the Sharon-Barak nexus was different. Sharon, it was felt within the still shell-shocked party, might well lead the Likud into four years of partnership in a unity government under the seemingly unassailable Barak. Sharon, it was said, might be minister of finance in this scenario. What remains incontrovertible, at any rate—and needs to be stressed over and over in view of what unfolded less than two years later—is that, whatever Sharon’s own inner aspirations, no one else in the party, or indeed in politics in general, seriously contemplated the possibility that Sharon might become prime minister.
Sharon spent most of the primaries campaign on the road. In his large, worn-out Cadillac, the candidate and his aides, sometimes with a journalist in tow, would be out early. “On Monday, he began his day at 5:00 a.m.,” wrote Danny Ben-Simonc in Haaretz.
He toured the far north, stopping in Ma’alot, where he spoke to a group of Russian-immigrant writers and artists, then on to Beit Jan, a Druze village near Yokneam, then a meeting with supporters in Migdal Ha’emek, and finally a wedding in the family of a Likud activist. He got back to his ranch after midnight. After four hours’ sleep, he was back in his car for another day of hard labor. “Age?” he says, wounded to the quick. “This is the age to begin! What do people want from me? When one sets out to win, age doesn’t matter at all.”
Everything was going well, until Omri and Uri Shani, the campaign manager, let their hair down—of all places in an interview with a leading Yedioth Ahronoth journalist—and said that the armored Cadillac “makes a huge impression on the Indians.” There were other pearls in the same genre: “All the Likud activists really care about is jobs and money,” and so forth.2 Senior figures in the party demanded that Shani be sacked. They could hardly demand the same for Omri, but clearly he had fouled the nest. Touring the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, a famous stronghold of Likud support, later that week, Sharon and his entourage were greeted by large signs: “Indians and Proud of It.” The visit was not a success, the renditions of “Arik, king of Israel,” less than lusty. Sharon published a statement saying he had “sternly upbraided” the two offenders. “They claim to have said what they said in jest. That, too, is serious. Such sentiments are alien to the Likud, even in jest.”
The crisis passed, and Sharon won comfortably, on the first round, with 53 percent of the vote, against 24 percent for Olmert and 22 percent for Sheetrit. “His victory was almost entirely grounded on the support of the Bibi camp,” Ofir Akunis recalled. He described a sweaty celebration in the Independence Hall, on the ground floor of the Likud’s rather down-at-heel headquarters building in Tel Aviv, Metzudat Ze’ev.d Smiling and relaxed, Sharon reveled in the congratulations of supporters and opponents alike. Lily was there with him, and she, too, was warm and gracious, but she kept fending off well-wishers who tried to kiss or embrace her. She was under treatment for her cancer and had to beware of infection.
It is hard, in light of how fast he fell, to recall how high Barak seemed to be riding when he came into office in 1999, directly elected with a solid popular majority and seemingly myriad possibilities of putting together a stable and cohesive coalition. He was Israel’s golden boy. Kibbutz-born, a dashing military career, with brain as well as brawn, just four years in politics and already at the summit, committed to making peace, he seemed unstoppable. On election night, a huge crowd gathered at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where the man Barak regarded as his mentor had been murdered. Now Barak proposed to take up his bloodstained mantle. People wept openly as he declared, in sonorous tones, with his familiar, not unattractive lisp, “This is the dawn of a new day.”
Many in the crowd chorused back at him, “Just not Shas.” Shas had become a byword for sleaze. Its leader, Arye Deri, had been convicted of bribery and fraud a month before and sentenced to four years in prison. The trial and conviction, far from deterring voters, had become Shas’s election platform. The slogan was “He’s innocent!” The result was seventeen seats, by far the highest tally Shas had ever attained.
But Barak, like Rabin before him, recognized the crucial need to include at least one religious party in his peacemaking coalition. The national-religious community had become almost homogeneously hard-line, intimately tied to the settlers. The National Religious Party joined the government at first but was certain to secede as soon as serious peace negotiations began. But the ultra-Orthodox, growing rapidly because of their young marriages and large families, were conflicted between their xenophobic anti-Arabism and the instinctive political moderation of their rabbis. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, had ruled back in the 1970s that withdrawal from the biblical territories was permissible if it saved lives. Barak was determined to have him at his side as he set out to make peace, as Rabin had when he embarked on Oslo.
Like Rabin, too, Barak proposed to seat Shas ministers at his cabinet table alongside their most strident foes: Meretz. Rabin, hardly a political charmer, had worked overtime to keep that strange couple together. He managed to do so until after Oslo. Barak, socially gauche and an unconcealed misanthrope toward politicians of every stripe, managed to put both parties’ backs up almost from the start and eventually lost them both. He started, in fact, with the two ultra-Orthodox parties in his mammoth seventy-five-seat coalition,e but lost the five members of United Torah Judaism that first summer in a gratuitous fight over transporting a large electricity turbine to a power station on the Sabbath.
Barak’s political maladroitness might have been mitigated had the new prime minister surrounded himself with politically savvy, smooth-talking aides and used them effectively. He had these in abundance, gifted young people devoted to him, but he managed to set them, too, at each other’s throats. The blood on his office carpet never seemed to dry, and he seemed to take peculiar pleasure in shedding more and more of it. The rumor mills began feeding the political gossip columns, and eventually even the languid torpor and sense of resignation enveloping the Likud and its leader began to give way to a vague consciousness that all was far from well on the other side of the aisle.
All the gossip, of course, and all the seepage of political strength would have been stanched had Barak’s main order of business—making peace—proceeded satisfactorily. Tragically, though, despite his frenetic activity from the get-go, his grand ambitions on the peace front crashed, too. Ariel Sharon, as his luck would have it, was on hand to pick up the pieces.
“Barak’s peace strategy was simple, at least on paper,” writes the historian Ahron Bregman. “He would first strike a deal with Syria, then get Israeli troops out of [south] Lebanon … then—and only then—turn seriously to the conflict with the Palestinians.”3 Regarding the Palestinians, moreover, Barak proposed a radical change from the incremental strategy of peacemaking prescribed by the Oslo Accords, in which the hardest problems were left till last. Instead, he wanted to achieve a final, comprehensive peace agreement in one fell swoop. “We don’t need to waste our time on little issues,” Barak told Yasser Arafat when the two leaders met at the Erez checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, just days after the new Israeli government was sworn in. The “little issues” were Israel’s fulfillment of the Wye agreement.
Such out-of-the-box thinking, although refreshing after three years of Israeli foot-dragging under Netanyahu, set warning bells tinkling among the disappointment-hardened Washington professionals. But Bill Clinton bubbled with enthusiasm. “I’m eager as a kid with a new toy for the meeting I’m going to have with the new Israeli prime minister,” he told a Democratic fund-raiser in Florida on July 13.
They met alone in the Oval Office for two and a half hours, without even note takers present. Clinton unhelpfully swelled Barak’s ego by telling him, “There are only two people in the world who I know are capable of thinking of the third, fourth and fifth steps, it’s you, Ehud, and myself. But you do it better than I do.”4 Later, they flew with their wives to Camp David and stayed up there talking till nearly 3:00 a.m. “It was a night full of hope,” Clinton recalled.
An intensive spate of diplomacy unfolded between the frenetic new Israeli premier and the ponderous Syrian president, who had held power in Damascus for more than three decades and whose health was now visibly failing. The difficulty was apparent right from the start: Barak told Clinton he was not prepared to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, line, as Syria demanded, if Syria insisted that that line ran right along the shore of Lake Kinneret.
Clinton tried to narrow the gaps both on the line and on security arrangements. In October, at Barak’s urging, Clinton wrote to Assad saying he believed the gaps were bridgeable and stressing that an Israel-Syria agreement would mean a new era in America’s relations with Syria. In December, Assad told Secretary Albright in Damascus that he was ready for immediate, high-level talks with Israel without preconditions and was delegating Minister of Foreign Affairs Farouk Shara as his representative. Barak decided that he himself would represent Israel. The talks were set for December 15 at Blair House, the official guest residence opposite the White House.
On December 13, in a hushed and expectant Knesset, Ehud Barak declared with appropriate pathos that peace with Syria and with the Palestinians would be “the apex of the realization of the Zionist vision.” He spoke empathetically of the eighteen thousand Israelis living on the Golan. They would face uncertainty as the negotiations went ahead and the pain of sacrifice if the two countries reached agreement. He promised to submit the agreement to a plebiscite. He was confident it would be approved.
The opposition, led by Ariel Sharon, duly performed its constitutional role. But it was a perfunctory performance. “The Golan is not lost,” Sharon said, winding up his speech. “Our fight for it is just, and therefore we will prevail. I call from here to all the citizens of Israel who fear for the future: Join our struggle. Together with you we will triumph. Thank you.”
Party members knew of Lily’s illness and Sharon’s long and difficult hours at her side through trips to New York and treatments. “He gave her a lot of time,” Akunis recalled. “He was very preoccupied. But beyond that, I had the feeling he was sluggish. The truth is the whole Likud was pretty soporific as an opposition at that time. Sort of groggy, on the ropes.”5
Another Likud source who sat in on the faction meetings during this period remembers the MKs delicately ignoring Sharon’s frequent snoozing. “They weren’t troubled,” he says, “because they were all basically waiting for Bibi to come back. They didn’t really regard Arik as their leader.”6
As if to dramatize this low, sad period in his life, on December 19 his beloved Sycamore Ranch burned half down to the ground. There was no question of terror or arson; a bird’s nest near the chimney top caught fire from sparks flying upward. The roof and upper floor were gutted. A lot of the couple’s belongings were lost. They moved into the adjacent home of their son Omri while the long job of rebuilding began.
Despite Barak’s still-undented aura of supreme confidence and the sense of resignation that seemed to hang over the Likud, Sharon’s expressions of tenacious opposition to withdrawal from the Golan seemed to capture a shift of popular sentiment. Public opinion polls, both those published in the media and those commissioned privately by Barak’s bureau, showed that a referendum was by no means a foregone conclusion, after all.
The polls apparently accounted for Barak’s exasperating assertion to the Americans, on the eve of the Washington meetings of December 15–17, 1999, that he could focus only on “procedural issues” at this stage and would not agree to meet alone with Shara. “I cannot afford to discuss substance,” he explained lamely to Dennis Ross. “The risk of leaks is too great … I may be undercut politically and rendered incapable of making the decisions necessary for agreement.”7
“Barak now had a really serious attack of cold feet,” Bregman records. The two delegations reconvened after the Christmas–New Year break at a secluded conference center belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service outside Shepherdstown, a small town in West Virginia.
Three days after the conference Akiva Eldar published in Haaretz, word for word, an American draft peace treaty submitted to the two sides at Shepherdstown in the strictest secrecy. The document referred in detail to provisions for normalization and security between the countries—the two areas in which Israel had pushed for Syrian concessions—but it fudged the critical borderline question, the key question for Assad that Barak was not prepared to answer. A number of other issues still in dispute were rendered in alternative bracketed texts, one reflecting the Israeli position (I), the other the Syrian (S). The leak of Syria’s concessions to Israel without concomitant Israeli concessions, in an Israeli newspaper to boot, confirmed all Assad’s suspicions that somehow the Americans and the Israelis were in cahoots. He told Clinton he would not send representatives to another round of talks.
Barak hoped the Israeli public would have learned from the reports out of Shepherdstown that he was driving a tough bargain. But for at least 150,000 demonstrators, gathered on a chilly night in Rabin Square in downtown Tel Aviv just after Shepherdstown ended, that was not the lesson learned. Their placards and their chorused chants made it clear they still felt Barak was about to sell out. Two of Barak’s ministers, Natan Sharansky of Yisrael B’Aliya and Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, sat on the dais, alongside opposition politicians and Golan mayors. They had both abstained in the Knesset on December 13. But that was a passive demonstration of displeasure. This was an open act of defiance.
The Palestinian track was also demanding attention. The deadline for implementing the next further redeployment was fast approaching. At a meeting early in January, Arafat asked Barak to include three villages close to Jerusalem among the territories that were to become Area A—that is, wholly Palestinian controlled—in the imminent FRD. The villages were effectively suburbs of the holy city. One of them, Abu Dis, was the site of the Palestinian parliament building, still under construction. Barak didn’t say no, which for Arafat was as good as saying yes. In the Knesset, Sharon accused Barak of “lying and cheating, not to the enemy, God forbid, but to our own loyal citizens.”8
On March 26, Clinton, encouraged by Barak, met with Assad in Geneva. He assured the Syrian leader that Israel now accepted the June 4 line, but Barak wanted to be sure “that Israel retained sovereignty over the water of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River and therefore the borderline should not touch either one.” Assad, wan and sickly looking, replied: “Then they don’t want peace … The lake has always been our lake; it was never theirs … There were no Jews to the east of the lake.”9 Clinton later recalled Assad saying, “Look, you and I are friends, but there’s not gonna be a deal if I don’t get to run my feet in the lake.” There was no further reason to sit and talk, and after barely an hour the meeting ended.
Sharon followed some of this from his temporary home alongside the fire-ravaged ranch house. Lily was in bed now most of the time, venturing out almost only to go to the hospital for treatment. “A man gets used to living in a beautiful house for twenty-five years, with her touch all over it,” he told Amira Lam in Yedioth Ahronoth on March 10. “Every plant and vase, the pictures on the piano, the embroidered towels in the bathroom, the table napkins lovingly folded. I would come home, and the music that we both loved was always playing. I would sit in my armchair, and Lily would pour me a drink, and when I still used to smoke, sometimes she might light me a cigar, and we would sit and talk. We don’t have that now, and I really miss those moments.”
The interview made poignant yet somehow uncomfortable reading. Poignant, because Lily was lying upstairs as he spoke with the reporter, sinking to her death. Uncomfortable, because he was so frank and almost maudlin, but also because he seemed to be parading, not to say exploiting, his personal sadness on the magazine cover of the country’s largest-circulation newspaper. On the other hand, he was leader of the opposition at a crucial time for the country; he legitimately needed to show that he was functioning despite his burden of worry and grief. “I know there is all kinds of talk in the party, that this is affecting my work,” he said.
I admit it’s hard. But it is not impairing my ability to function. I live between concern and hope, but that doesn’t affect my performance.
It was a pretty hefty blow [when Lily was diagnosed with lung cancer]. But we got ourselves together at once. We went abroad. We started treatment there. I never allowed myself to break down even for a second. One must not break down, especially when there are tough decisions to be made … I’ve seen the greatest victories and the most terrible disasters in my life, and I’ve never broken down. But if you ask me if tears didn’t choke my throat when I spoke to the doctors, then that’s not true: they did. And how they did. And now, too, every so often I have a kind of crisis when I see her, this girl with inexhaustible energy, fighting, suffering … But I haven’t lost my confidence. And I do not acquiesce, not for one minute, in her being in this condition.
I told her this morning that at the very first opportunity I want us to go back to the concert hall, to our own seats, which it took us so many years to get to. We started with one ticket in the gods, behind a pillar. Then it was two, slightly lower. And we gradually made our way down. Now we sit in row five. I told her the first thing I’m going to do is take out a subscription to the new concert series.
On March 24, the temporary home became a house of mourning. The entire political community, regardless of affiliation or ideology, turned out for Lily’s funeral on a hilltop near the ranch or for a consolation visit during the seven-day shiva period of mourning. They all knew her personally, because she had always been at her husband’s side. Even during her illness, she had made the effort to be there for him. Shimon Peres spoke for many of them when he said, “Lily was a wonderful woman who fought her illness with uncommon courage and with the same devotion and determination with which she stood by her husband’s side through every one of his battles.”
“You fought till the last moment, with fortitude, with serenity, with dignity,” Sharon said in his eulogy at her graveside. “You left our world loving and enveloped in the love of all your family and friends. They will love you forever.” She was just sixty-three.
During the shiva mourning period Sharon made it clear, as he had in the interview, that Lily’s absence would not end his political career. But there was more than that. Though cut off by his bereavement, Sharon discerned that the Geneva denouement might mean that Barak was weakening faster than anyone had expected. To a group of party activists who came to comfort him, Sharon said: “Carry on, carry on—and in the end you will breach the wall.”
“I really liked that,” Ofir Akunis recalled. “I remember it to the present day. Sharon had been party leader for the best part of a year, but this was the first time I felt he was seriously exhorting us to action. The ‘wall’ was Ehud Barak, and the message was, if we keep attacking, we can defeat him. Sure enough, politics seemed to come back to life in the following months as Barak’s popularity continued to drop.”10
Another Likud member, who had feared that Lily’s death would leave Sharon suddenly old and lonely, found himself wondering at the speed and feistiness of his resurgence. “There were more important things to do than to mourn Lily … so he did them,” this man recalled, drily. “Arik dearly loved Lily. He would stroke her hand and gaze into her eyes. But did he love her for herself or out of his overwhelming love of himself? I remember later someone suggested that Arik was so egocentric that apart from his sons he couldn’t actually love another person. He loved to have her with him, because she loved him and spoiled him. When she was no longer around, she was no longer around.”11
Within days of the Geneva letdown, Barak gave orders—no tactic this, but a momentous, if impetuous, decision—to have the army out of Lebanon long ahead of his original July deadline. Since there was to be no agreement with Syria, the withdrawal would be unilateral. He sent a stern warning to Damascus not to interfere as the Israeli troops pulled out.
At the same time, he resolved to travel to Washington to present his plans to Clinton. He spoke of a three-way summit with Arafat in the summer. He would bring a comprehensive peace plan, he promised the president.12
The clearest indication that Barak was serious was his appointment of two unimpeachable peaceniks as his envoys to a series of discreet Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that now got under way, first in the region and later in Sweden. The purpose of these talks, at least in Barak’s mind, was to prepare the ground for the make-or-break tripartite summit, along the lines of the Carter-Begin-Sadat summit at Camp David in 1978. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a professor of history whom Barak had incongruously appointed his minister of internal security, had long argued for sweeping Israeli concessions on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Alongside him, Barak appointed a former army officer and now a successful lawyer, Gilead Sher, also a confirmed dove.
The interaction in the months ahead between Barak and these two gifted but difficult men was to bring Israel to the brink of peace, much, much closer than any previous leaders had ever dared to go.
On May 8, Barak and Arafat met at Abu Mazen’s home in Ramallah. Their negotiators then enplaned for Sweden, where, courtesy of the prime minister, Göran Persson, they held relaxed, secluded conversations at a remote government guest complex. Ben-Ami indicated that the three “settlement blocs” that Israel wanted to keep would require annexation of 8 percent of the West Bank.13 This was unacceptable to the Palestinians. But it was already a far cry from the double-digit annexation being bandied about in public. And the concept of land swap, a political unmentionable in Israel until then, was firmly on the table at the Swedish guesthouse.
This hopeful beginning was soon disrupted when serious violence broke out in the Palestinian territories around May 15, Naqba Day in Palestinian parlance, the anniversary of the creation of Israel. Barak ordered the negotiators home.
In the north, the IDF’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon was gathering pace but increasingly looking like an undignified flight. Thousands of Lebanese civilians, marshaled by Hezbollah, were marching southward, sweeping through the crumbling lines of the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s mainly Christian militia ally in the “security zone.” Barak gave orders to speed up the pullback. SLA men and their families desperately but fruitlessly clustered at the border fence demanding to be let through, too.
The constant toll of military deaths in the unending guerrilla war with Hezbollah would now, hopefully, end. A wave of visceral relief swept the country. The withdrawal, moreover, had been accomplished without any further loss of Israeli lives. But the abandonment of the SLA gnawed at the national conscience. And Hezbollah trumpeted the Israeli retreat as a great victory for its Shiite fighters and a shining example to the Palestinians of what armed resistance could achieve.
Barak pointed to the unilateral withdrawal as a bold act of leadership and the honorable discharge of a solemn electoral commitment. Sharon tried to tap into the public’s ambivalence. “It’s a very good thing that we’ve gotten out of Lebanon,” he told the Knesset on June 5. “It was the right decision, though it should have been taken earlier. But while getting out was right, the way it was done was absolutely wrong.” The “erosion of the IDF’s deterrence” in the eyes of the Arab world would make Arafat even more intransigent. “He wants to achieve what the Hezbollah ostensibly achieved … to the last centimeter.” Unbeknownst to Sharon, that logic was shared by the Palestinian negotiators who were working with Ben-Ami and Sher on ideas for compromises. “What have you done to us with this crazy withdrawal from Lebanon?” Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia) complained.14 Mohammed Dahlan, the head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Forces and a powerful political figure in the PA, said the Israeli withdrawal “gave our people the message that violence wins … the message from Barak was that he would move under pressure … that he would withdraw only if forced to.”15
Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon provided double closure for Sharon. By bringing back the army to the international border, Barak finally stanched the hemorrhaging of IDF blood that began in June 1982 and had never really stopped for eighteen years. Moreover, by briefly reopening the national debate over Lebanon, Barak showed that time, and perhaps Sharon’s own incessant battles with his critics, had had their effect. The burden of Lebanon no longer made Sharon unelectable.
Buoyed by the public’s support for the Lebanon withdrawal, and with the Syrian track in indefinite abeyance following the death of Hafez Assad on June 10, Barak now swung all his energies behind his push for a tripartite summit. Arafat was reluctant, fearing that if the summit failed, Clinton would line up with Barak to blame him for it. Clinton promised him that whatever happened, he would not point fingers afterward, and he invited the two leaders to come to Camp David on Tuesday, July 11.
Like the abortive Geneva summit between Clinton and Assad, Camp David has been subjected to a good deal of twenty-twenty hindsight analysis by participants and pundits. Clinton did go back on his word and blamed Arafat for the summit’s lack of success. Others faulted the U.S. president for allowing himself, as they saw it, to be cajoled by Barak into holding the summit in the first place. Clinton made no determined effort, moreover, once the summit got under way, to break down Barak’s high-handed decision not to deal with Arafat directly and to leave the negotiating to their subordinates. There was no substantive dialogue between the two leaders, even though Barak’s logic for pressing Clinton to host the summit had been that the endgame must be conducted by the principals themselves.
Barak decided early that there was no chance of a breakthrough until the eve of Clinton’s scheduled departure, on the eighth day of the summit, for a meeting of the G8 in Okinawa. That naturally became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the first week was spent treading water. On the night before Clinton left, Barak asked to meet with him alone and presented him with a proposal that both gobsmacked and delighted the Americans: the partitioning of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian Quarters, Israel over the Jewish and Armenian Quarters. The Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, would be handed by UN resolution to the joint custodianship of Palestine and Morocco, the nation that chaired the Islamic Conference’s Jerusalem Committee. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over all the outer Arab neighborhoods of the city, and there would be shared sovereignty in the inner neighborhoods. Barak whittled down his demands to control the Jordan River border, now suggesting an IDF presence in a small area for a period of years. He spoke of some land swap as compensation for Israel’s annexing up to 9 percent of the West Bank for its settlement blocs. There would be a “satisfactory solution” to the refugee question.
The idea of sharing Jerusalem, including the Old City, between Israel and the Palestinians has since become so commonplace, at least among pro-peace advocates, that it is instructive to rehearse here the U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk’s words to Bregman in Elusive Peace: “The idea that half of the Old City would be under Arafat’s sovereignty was completely unthinkable to any American at Camp David, and any Israeli, other than Ehud Barak himself.” Bregman adds: “This was a generous, even stunning offer … that had never before been proposed by an Israeli prime minister.”
Even those superlatives are inadequate to express the change that Barak wrought in more than thirty years of Israeli dogma. “United Jerusalem,” in the distended city limits that Israel unilaterally imposed after 1967, was an axiomatic and virtually consensual tenet of Israeli policy. It was rehearsed by politicians of the Right and of the Left—apart from the Far Left—in almost every speech, like a catechism. “The united city, never to be divided again.” Audiences would applaud automatically. Suddenly all this was challenged, opened to rational reexamination.
But when Clinton took the offer to Arafat, the Palestinian leader demurred. Custodianship was not sovereignty, he pointed out. He did not have the right to cede sovereignty over the Haram. He insisted, too, on exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the Palestinian suburbs adjacent to the Old City (the inner neighborhoods). He remained impervious to the combined pressures and blandishments of the president, the secretary of state, and the national security adviser. He managed to infuriate Clinton still more by insisting that the ruins of the ancient Jewish temple were not in Jerusalem at all but in Nablus, blithely nullifying thereby important parts of the Old and the New Testaments.
Clinton returned to Camp David on July 23 and plunged back into the discussions with renewed energy. But Jerusalem remained the crucial deal breaker. That is how the president himself assessed the summit on the morning of July 25, after trying one last time, and failing, to move Arafat on this issue. Shlomo Ben-Ami agreed. The considerable progress made on borders and security “was only hypothetical,” he wrote later, “because in the Palestinians’ working assumption it was conditional on Israel’s accepting the fundamentalist Palestinian positions on two key issues: Jerusalem and the refugees.”
Writing as a historian as well as a politician and negotiator, Ben-Ami saw in the religious zealotry prevalent in the Muslim world on the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees the factor that furnished the deeper reason, or pretext, behind Arafat’s position. He noted that both the imam of al-Aqsa and the mufti of Jerusalem, the second an Arafat appointee, spoke out during Camp David forbidding on religious grounds any concession on sovereignty.16
Tragically, this analysis can be applied to Ben-Ami and Barak. They, too, were influenced by the religious fundamentalism on the Israeli side regarding the Temple Mount. They, too, were swayed by this fundamentalism to advance a position at Camp David that made a pragmatic compromise on Jerusalem effectively unattainable. In a cynical and ultimately hopeless effort to win support from zealot circles in Israel, Barak and Ben-Ami proposed that a synagogue for Jewish prayer be built on a tiny area of the Temple Mount. This drew outraged rejection from Arafat and his top aides.17
Back in 1967, Moshe Dayan vested administration of the Mount/Haram in the Muslim waqf, or religious authority, and banned Jewish prayer there. Jews, like anyone else, were free to visit this sacred site. But only Muslims were allowed to pray there. Happily, as Dayan knew, this edict coincided with the provisions of the Orthodox Jewish law, the halacha, which forbade observant Jews to set foot on the Mount until the Temple was restored in God’s good time. Orthodox Jews had meticulously observed this prohibition for centuries. After 1967, the chief rabbinate of Israel solemnly reaffirmed it.
For many years, pressure to pray on the Temple Mount came from a marginal group of ultranationalist but not especially Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount Faithful. They would make periodic set-piece attempts to enter the precincts with prayer shawls and would be carted off by the police. The Muslim authorities, though forever warning of nefarious Jewish plots to take over the Mount and destroy the mosques, were well aware of the Israeli government’s strictly enforced ban on Jewish prayer there.
The Muslim warnings, however, turned out not to be wholly without foundation when a Jewish underground was discovered by the Shin Bet security service among Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the Golan Heights in the mid-1980s. Among its plans was one to plant explosives beneath the mosques. Although the underground group was excoriated by the settler leadership, in the wake of this episode the blanket religious ban on ascending the Temple Mount began to fray. One prominent plotter, released from jail after five years, began agitating in favor of sacrificing the Paschal Lamb on the Mount. Settler rabbis searched for ways of ritually purifying people so as to enable them to tread on the Mount without defying the age-old Orthodox halachic ban. Others ruled that the ban did not apply to certain parts of the precincts, and they began exhorting religious Jews to visit those areas of the holy site.
Barak and Ben-Ami’s synagogue proposal fed into this dangerous trend within the settler-based community. It also contributed to the breakdown of Camp David, providing Arafat with proof for his suspicions that Israel was ultimately bent on taking over the holy site. In the wake of the failed summit, political attacks on the government were suffused with religious jingoism centering on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Even though the synagogue idea faded from the negotiations after Camp David, it remained a part of the backdrop to Ariel Sharon’s ill-advised visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, which preceded—some say triggered; some say caused—the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada.
Sharon’s action, too, was designed to feed the jingoism, which he had been busily fomenting throughout the summer. His perverse provocation must be seen in this broader context of political and religious ferment.
“Mr. Speaker, no prime minister has the right to make concessions over Jerusalem,” Sharon proclaimed in the Knesset on July 24, while Camp David was still in progress.
Jerusalem is the birthright of the entire Jewish people. Our generation had the honor of liberating Jerusalem and uniting it, and we must preserve it in precious trust for future generations. Arafat says, and I must say I really admire him for this … that in the matter of Jerusalem he needs the approval of the Arab and Muslim world. Barak, on the other hand, doesn’t understand that before he signs anything, before he agrees to anything even verbally, he must have the consent and approval of the entire Jewish people, in Israel and in the Diaspora.18
A week later, with Barak now back, the controversy raging, and the coalition floundering, Sharon lambasted the prime minister. “Eighteen times in your election broadcasts you promised not to divide Jerusalem. You promised it would remain united forever. You have broken every promise you made. You say you speak in the name of your supporters. But they no longer support you, Mr. Barak. They’ve changed their minds, like you changed your promises.”19f
Barak had already lost Shas, the National Religious Party, and Yisrael B’Aliya. The three coalition partners bolted on the eve of Camp David. David Levy, who had switched sides and become Barak’s foreign minister, now announced his resignation, too. The government no longer commanded a Knesset majority. That made the regular business of governing difficult. But Barak could still rely, just about, on the “blocking bloc” of Jewish and Arab MKs that precluded an alternative, Likud-led government.
On August 15, Sharon attacked the synagogue scheme: “Barak has agreed to cleave in two the heart of the Jewish people: the Old City of Jerusalem … He is ready to concede on the Temple Mount. He is trying to soften the blow by demanding that Arafat recognize the Jews’ right to pray. This very proposal, that Arafat recognize our right to pray at the holy of holies of the Jewish people, is in itself debasing and only goes to show to what depths our side has sunk.”20
The holiness of Jerusalem, he continued, was “many times more meaningful for the Jewish people than it is for the Christians and Muslims.” The Jewish people “were the only pioneers in the annals of the Land and of Jerusalem who transformed the rocky and … barren scrubland into green and arable terraces. They did this by hard work and sweat; no other people were creative in the same way. The Jewish people were the first who built a glorious temple in Jerusalem, which was the font of holiness for the entire nation and the entire land.”
Sharon was a thoroughly secular Jew. But this confused exposition on “holy” and “holiness” reflected more than the modern, secular Jew’s grappling with the significance of a unique, religion-based national identity in today’s world. It was also a politician’s shameless milking of these emotive terms for whatever populist advantage he could get from them. But, as we have seen, politicians on both sides of the Israeli divide were engaged in this dubious pursuit.
At the UN Millennium Summit in New York in September, Clinton and Arafat discussed vesting sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram in the Organization of Islamic States. Barak was encouraged, although for his part he spent much of his time in New York persuading world leaders that the outcome of Camp David proved that Arafat was not a serious partner for peace. Negotiators for the three sides continued batting ideas about. Clinton’s presidency was running out, but he still hadn’t given up hope of pulling off a peace deal in the closing weeks of his term.
Back home, in an unwonted gesture of conviviality, Barak invited Arafat and his top aides to dinner at his home in Kochav Yair. He sent an army helicopter to bring them over. Nava, his wife,21 radiated good cheer and plied her guests with good food. Barak and Arafat strolled arm in arm through the French doors and sat alone in the garden, without note takers. They seemed to get along fine. Their aides wondered why they hadn’t tried this simple technique of talking to each other at Camp David. Clinton, apprised ahead of time, phoned in to exhort them. They confirmed to the president that their negotiators would be leaving for Washington that same night for further intensive talks.
There was an elephant in the room, but no one seemed to notice it. According to Gilead Sher, “Nobody mentioned the imminent visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of the opposition, to the Temple Mount.”22 The dinner took place on September 25. Sharon’s visit was scheduled for September 28. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the minister of public security, was effectively doubling as foreign minister (the only job he really wanted: he was formally appointed foreign minister on November 2, 2000, and held both portfolios until the end of the Barak administration). He was to fly out to Washington later that night at the head of the Israeli negotiating team.
In the garden, the visit did come up. “Why didn’t Sharon visit the Haram when he was defense minister or foreign minister?” Arafat complained to his host. “That’s our democracy,” Barak replied. “I can’t prevent the leader of the opposition from visiting the site.”23
In any event, any disturbing thoughts about the impending visit did not cloud the upbeat atmosphere at the dinner or at the talks that opened in Washington a day later. These talks were intended as a final refinement of the parties’ positions, and a final attempt at narrowing the gaps between them, before the United States presented its own package of proposals designed to bridge or resolve all the remaining points in dispute.
Ben-Ami took time out from the talks on September 27 to be briefed over the telephone by his commissioner of police, Yehuda Wilk, as to what was expected the next day on the Mount. “He told me that on the basis of intelligence assessments he recommended allowing the visit to go forward,” Ben-Ami recalled. “He said he had a contingency plan in place to get Sharon out fast if serious violence erupted.” The minister for internal security spoke by phone, too, with Jibril Rajoub, the PA’s head of preventive security on the West Bank. “Rajoub told me that if Sharon did not enter the mosques themselves, he believed there would not be any rioting, and whatever demonstrations did take place would be kept under control.”24
In Israel, September 27 was a busy day, too. In the afternoon, the radio broadcast the propitious announcement that Benjamin Netanyahu had long been waiting for with great and mounting trepidation. He was not going to be prosecuted for bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust. And his wife, Sara, was not going to be prosecuted for theft. This was good news indeed. His political career would not be hobbled for months or years, perhaps even forever. The couple’s conduct in relation to a longtime family retainer was, in the words of the attorney general, “dismal and worthy of the most stringent criticism.” But that was veritable music to the Netanyahus’ ears. For in the next paragraph of a lengthy report, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein explained that however reprehensibly they had behaved, their actions and omissions did not meet the criteria for a criminal prosecution. He therefore ordered the files against them closed for lack of evidence.g
Netanyahu issued a string of suitably contrite statements. His loyalists could barely contain their exultation. He would come roaring back now, they confidently predicted, to sweep away the debris of Barak’s collapsing coalition and restore the Likud to its rightful place of power. They mocked recently renewed talk of a unity government as the Canute-like last-gasp efforts of the failed prime minister and the over-the-top Likud stand-in leader to turn back the irresistible tide of Bibi’s return in triumph.
That same morning, the reporter Yossi Verter accompanied Sharon on a tour of a bellwether bastion of Likud supporters, the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem. The stallholders were friendly, but their chorused advice to their visitor was “Arik, step aside for Bibi.” “That simple call,” Verter wrote in the next day’s Haaretz, “encapsulates the condition of Sharon, of Bibi, and of the Likud.”25
• • •
By the time most Haaretz readers digested this analysis the next morning, Sharon was on the Temple Mount, and history was changing, though the protagonists did not yet realize it.
Flanked by half a dozen members of the Likud Knesset faction—a pretty poor showing, the electronic media were quick to note—and by phalanxes of police, Sharon spent forty-five minutes on the Mount. He looked over a recently refurbished underground hall that the waqf had inaugurated as an overflow mosque. Some Israeli archaeologists had loudly protested this quasi-excavation, and the academic dispute quickly morphed into a political controversy. Sharon steered clearh of the two Muslim shrines, the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, as Jibril Rajoub had requested. And as Rajoub predicted, the visit passed without serious violence. The police kept a rigorous separation between Sharon’s group and a thousand-odd Palestinian demonstrators, mostly youngsters, who hurled stones and curses at the Butcher of Beirut.i Also prominently present were several Israeli-Arab MKs. They were seen chatting and even joking with their Likud Knesset colleagues, but as soon as the television cameras panned onto them, they let loose a tirade of invective.26
The demonstrations and stone throwing continued after Sharon and his party left. The police fired tear-gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets at the stone throwers. Rioting spread to other parts of the Old City. The Jerusalem police chief, Arye Yitzhaki, asked the Knesset member Ahmad Tibi and Palestinian waqf officials to help persuade the rioters to disband. Some thirty policemen and a dozen demonstrators were reported hurt, none seriously. Sharon issued a press statement that he was sorry about the injured policemen, “but it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount and I was right to do so.” A Labor Party spokesman said it was a miracle that “Sharon’s exhibition of counterfeit patriotism had not ended in bloodshed.”
All in all, Sharon was pleased with himself. The idea—it was a gimmick really—to visit the Mount had not been unanimously popular with his friends and advisers in his informal “ranch forum.”27 Omri thought it was “not intelligent” and declined to accompany his father. Gilad went instead, while Omri drove to the cemetery outside Tel Aviv to ensure that all was ready at his brother Gur’s graveside for the annual family memorial gathering the next day.28
By afternoon, the Likud was fully preoccupied again with Netanyahu’s exculpation and the looming leadership contest. The morning’s escapade was fading. Sharon had sent a message of congratulation to both the Netanyahus, adding the hope, at once unctuous and ironic, that Bibi would henceforth “be able to join us in the struggle against … the Barak government.” Now, at a pre–Jewish New Year toast at party headquarters in Tel Aviv, he was in fighting fettle. “No gifts!” he proclaimed. “There’ll be no gifts here.” If people expected him to make way for anyone else, they were going to be disappointed. The gifts metaphor was not lost on his audience. None of the three leading newspapers made Sharon’s visit their lead story the next morning. Yedioth Ahronoth wondered whether Sharon had hoped to rob Netanyahu of the limelight on his day of exoneration and celebration.29
In Jerusalem and Washington, too, officials allowed themselves to breathe easy as the ominous fallout of Sharon’s visit seemed to die quickly away. Warnings by a lone police officer in Jerusalem, Nisso Shaham, and by a lone former security officer then in Washington, Yisrael Hasson, that more and worse trouble was yet to be expected fell on strangely desensitized ears. Intelligence reports that pointed to a possible eruption of violence after prayers on the Mount the next day, Friday, resulted in an almost routine decision to reinforce the regular police presence there. Even the murder, at dawn on that Friday morning, of an Israeli officer by his Palestinian comrade on a joint patrol near Kalkilya set no alarm bells ringing.j
Ben-Ami flew home overnight. From the airport he made his way straight to national police headquarters in Jerusalem—not, however, with a view to taking personal control over a potentially explosive situation, but rather to announce his choice of the next police commissioner. He had written a speech on the plane explaining to the assembled senior officers why he had decided to appoint Shlomo Aharonishki, commander of the Tel Aviv region. The Jerusalem commander, Yitzhaki, grievously disappointed, left at once for the Mount, where some twenty thousand worshippers had gathered and where the young men among them were reported to be piling up stones, bottles, and other projectiles.30
Yitzhaki was one of the first to be hit. Despite his helmet, a stone caught him on the back of the head. He passed out. Blood streamed from the wound. He was evacuated, and rumors started to spread among his men that not only had he been unfairly passed over for the commissionership but he was dead. (He was not, nor badly hurt.) Stones rained down meanwhile on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall plaza below the Temple Mount plateau. Yitzhaki’s deputy ordered his men to charge the rioters. Police sharpshooters began firing live ammunition. Other policemen shot rubber-coated bullets from close range. The result was seven Palestinian dead and more than a hundred injured. Blood spattered the flagstones of the holy site. Only the advent of Mickey Levy, the levelheaded and authoritative police commander of the West Bank, brought a modicum of calm. He made contact with waqf officials and with Jibril Rajoub, and together they worked out a “cease-fire”: the police would withdraw from the Mount, and the Palestinians would rein in the rioting and stone throwing. By mid-afternoon the Mount was quiet.
But the morning’s events had been carried live on Voice of Palestine, the PA radio, and screened on Al Jazeera. The sermon was always broadcast on a Friday; this time it had become a running commentary on the carnage. Grief and outrage swept Palestinian communities on both sides of the green line.
What should have happened next was that the police, under their minister and senior commanders, should have assessed that the wave of protest could spread through the Israeli-Arab community and lead to riots and acts of violence inside the country. They should have ensured, above all else, that their units were deployed at likely flash points in sufficient force and properly equipped with nonlethal riot-control gear as befits a civilian police force preparing to confront demonstrating citizens of its own country almost certain to be unarmed.
What should have happened, too, was that the army under its minister, Ehud Barak, and chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, should have anticipated that the protests could spread from the Mount to engulf the occupied territories in a torrent of raging violence.
What should have happened long before the bloody riot on the Temple Mount was serious thinking and planning in the army for how to confront mass popular unrest in the territories. After all, that had been the nature of the first Palestinian intifada (1987–1993), which the IDF, under Yitzhak Rabin for much of that period, had such great difficulty combating and curbing in a humane way. The state comptroller, in his 2000 annual report, severely criticized the fact that the IDF had made no serious attempt to develop nonlethal or less lethal methods of riot control.
Ideally, too, after thirty-three years of occupation, the IDF should have trained special units for riot control, instead of assigning whatever infantry or armored regiment—conscripts trained to fire rifles or guns—happened to be deployed in the specific area at the specific time of a riot. When the entire West Bank and Gaza were swept by violence, as they were now, virtually all units deployed there were pressed into these police duties, for which they were both unsuited and unprepared.
On the day after the Friday deaths on the Temple Mount, the army, confident in its preparations for a low-grade war, gave battle to the young Palestinian rioters who massed at road junctions and outside military bases across the territories. There was some sporadic shooting at the Israeli troops. And that night, gunmen in Ramallah opened fire on the outlying houses of the nearby Jewish settlement of Psagot. The army’s response in many of the clashes, with sharpshooters and sometimes other soldiers, too, firing large quantities of live ammunition,31 inevitably felled unarmed rioters alongside the gunmen. At least six Palestinians died on the West Bank that first day and four more in Gaza. More than a hundred were wounded.32 A twelve-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Dura, was filmed by a French television cameraman caught with his father in the center of a vicious firefight at the Netzarim junction in Gaza. They ducked behind a barrel. The father tried to shield him with his own body. To no avail. Mohammed’s death was screened throughout the world that night; instantly it became the iconic image of an intifada that was taking scores of young Palestinian lives for hardly any Israeli ones.k
The next day, the serious violence reached the Israeli-Arab sector. Rioters blocked a major highway to the north. They burned banks and government offices and vandalized other public property. Thirteen Arab men and youths, all but one of them Israeli citizens, were killed by police gunfire on that Sunday and Monday. The outbreaks of violence did not finally subside until a week later.
The death of a dozen citizens at the hands of the police was a national trauma. But even more traumatic, and with farther-reaching effects, were the widespread horror and fear that pervaded Jewish Israel in the wake of the Israeli-Arab rioting. For the first time since the creation of the state—and this unblemished record included all the various wars and the first intifada—the Israeli-Arab minority appeared to be rising up in rebellion, out of solidarity with the Palestinians beyond the sovereign borders of the state. The unrest even reached Jaffa, the mixed Arab-Jewish part of Tel Aviv where the two communities had lived for decades in reasonable harmony. These were days of near panic. The unspoken but ever-present nightmare of Arab irredentism seemed to be unfolding. The intensity of this trauma experienced by the Jewish majority inside Israel increased the level and intensity of lethal violence employed by the army—and condoned by the public—against the Palestinians across the green line during those early days and weeks of the intifada.
Two arguments broke out in Israel immediately: Had Arafat planned the intifada in advance? Did Sharon cause it by his visit to the Temple Mount? On the face of it, the two positive propositions seemed mutually exclusive: if Arafat had planned it, Sharon didn’t cause it. But that immediately begged the important question, what was “it”? Sharon could incontrovertibly be said to have caused the fairly minor fracas that occurred during and immediately following his visit. But did he “cause” the next day’s tragic events on the Mount? Could those events have been avoided, or at least mitigated, by greater moderation on the part of the police? And even after the deaths on the Mount on Friday, could Barak and Mofaz and Ben-Ami have contained the spiraling violence by a more judicious deployment of the army and the police—even if Arafat or lower-level Palestinian figures were avidly fanning the flames of this, their preplanned intifada?
The official Israeli position, from the outset, was that Arafat had been plotting for months to unleash another round of violence in the territories if he did not get his way at the negotiating table. Sharon’s visit, it therefore followed, was not the cause of the intifada; at most it served as a trigger or a catalyst by provoking public outrage that the Palestinian leadership cynically latched on to as a pretext to launch the preplanned violence. By the same token, Arafat could have stopped the violence or at least reduced it, just as he started it.
Barak and Sharon both subscribed to this narrative. For Barak, it explained why the talks had failed: Arafat was not negotiating in good faith. It exonerated him, moreover, for not preventing Sharon’s visit to the Mount. Even if he had prevented it, that would not have prevented the intifada. And it put the lopsided death toll in a more palatable light, at least for the Israeli public. Arafat had deliberately brought on the Palestinian fatalities. He veritably reveled in them; they were his political goal.
For Sharon, of course, this version of events minimized the adverse import of his visit to the Mount. Not that he ever expressed regret or remorse for it. “I find it totally unacceptable that your spokesman was quick to make a false statement that my visit to the Temple Mount ‘may have caused tension,’ insinuating that it ignited the riots,” he wrote to Secretary of State Albright on October 2. “Your spokesman has been swayed by slanderous propaganda on the part of the Palestinian leaders and media.”
In an interview months later to his longtime acolyte Uri Dan, he contended that his ascent to the Mount “would have remained a political gesture—part of my fight against the concessions that the government was preparing to make—if the Palestinians had not deliberately used it as a pretext to unleash their campaign of violence and terror that was in the works since the Camp David summit.”33
Ben-Ami agreed. Writing four years later as a historian again, he professed “no doubt at all” that without Sharon’s visit, which was “the perfect pretext,” the Palestinians would have found another springboard from which to launch their intifada. He cited a speech by Arafat in Nablus on June 25 warning of a possible return to armed struggle. That was the decision that Arafat had made as soon as Camp David ended in failure.
That did not mean, though, Ben-Ami wrote, that Israel was blameless. He listed the settlements, the settler-only roads, the blockades and sieges, the Netanyahu government’s rejectionism, “and the ambivalence of the Barak government, too, especially in regard to the settlements,” as valid accumulated cause for the Palestinians’ burning resentment.34 He did not list his own performance as the minister in charge of the police.
“No countries and no media subscribe to the Israeli version of events,” France’s president, Jacques Chirac, said, railing at Barak on October 4 at the Élysée Palace in Paris. “The whole world shares the same feeling … Sharon provoked these incidents and he did so with the consent of your government.”35
Chirac certainly spoke for much of the world. “It is hard to believe,” wrote the British newspaper The Independent, “that Mr. Sharon, perhaps the Israeli politician most detested by the Palestinians, did not expect trouble—trouble that, as he is an opponent of further concessions by Israel, can only serve his aims.” At the UN Security Council, Israel was lambasted by delegate after delegate for Sharon’s provocation and for the army’s subsequent use of disproportionate force against the Palestinians’ protests. The Friday fatalities on the Mount were largely elided between Sharon’s visit on Thursday and the splurge of violence across the West Bank that began on Saturday. Sharon was the villain, with Barak and Ben-Ami in supporting roles. Arafat’s part, if he had one, was seen as that of victim.
But some world opinion, even in the first few days, was more nuanced. The New York Times, for instance, though asserting that Sharon’s “provocative and irresponsible visit” had been the “precipitating incident,” warned on October 3 that “now the fighting has taken on a life of its own.”
Israeli public opinion, too, reflected the complexity of what was happening. “Pride and provocation—no matter what. Those were the hallmarks of the visit,” Haaretz editorialized on October 2. Yoel Marcus, the paper’s leading columnist, asserted that Sharon had “caused the conflagration that has led thus far to dozens dead and hundreds injured.”36 But the Palestinians were blamed, too. “The territories are burning, and Arafat is doing nothing to extinguish the flames,” wrote Maariv’s Oded Granot. “Sharon’s visit … provided the Palestinian Authority with the excuse it needed to ignite the battlefield.”
Sharon’s action was quickly subsumed into the broader crisis. The broader crisis, moreover, rendered his action, even in the minds of his critics, retrospectively less pigheaded and pernicious than it initially appeared. Even moderate Israelis began to think that the Palestinians had shown by their subsequent behavior that perhaps Sharon had a point. “These events prove that we must not cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians,” wrote Ron Ben-Yishai, the veteran defense analyst of Yedioth Ahronoth and the reporter who first confronted Sharon on the telephone with the horrors of Sabra and Shatila (and subsequently testified against him before the Kahan Commission).l Sharon had acted unwisely this time, too, Ben-Yishai wrote. But the violence on the Mount and beyond had been instigated by the PA’s own security forces. “The man whose security chiefs deliberately ignite a firestorm on the holiest site to Islam and to Judaism is plainly not fit to have the sovereignty over that site vested in him.”37
By the month’s end, Haaretz’s Ze’ev Schiff added his authoritative endorsement to official Israel’s accusation that the intifada had been preplanned. Ironically, Schiff wrote, Israel owed Arafat a debt. “He has brought us back to recognize our strategic reality: Israel is still a nation at war, and it needs to behave like one when it weighs its options and considers the limits of its concessions.38m
Another violent shock for Israelis came on October 12. Two reservists driving in a civilian car mistakenly entered Ramallah. They were set upon by a mob, dragged to a police station, and beaten to death. One of their assailants leaned out of a window and held up his hands, dripping with blood, for the mob to see and cheer. Another phoned one of the men’s wives on his cell phone and announced, “I’ve just killed your husband.”
The country was swept by a paroxysm of anger and impotence. These feelings were not relieved when Barak ordered air force helicopters that night to bomb and strafe the Ramallah police station and other PA offices in the West Bank and Gaza but to give sufficient advance warning so that in practice the attacks were on empty buildings. In a less flamboyant but more effective response, Barak gave orders to the security services that every Palestinian militant involved in this bestial outrage be brought to justice or killed.
Barak had rejected the PA’s demand for a UN inquiry into the Temple Mount episode. In effect, he was protecting Sharon’s action, and his own failure to prevent it, from what he presumed would be a sweeping international condemnation. The most he would agree to was a carefully selected inquiry commission headed by an American, and eventually, after much negotiating, this was appointed. Its chairman was George Mitchell, the former Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate who had won kudos around the world for his role in brokering the peace in Northern Ireland.n
The creation of the Mitchell Commission provided the backdrop conducive for yet another attempt to create a Barak-Sharon unity government. Barak tried to persuade his party ministers, meeting on October 22, that Sharon was much more moderate than he appeared. If he joined a unity government, that wouldn’t spell the end of the peace process. The Sharon of today was not the Sharon of old, Barak asserted. The ministers were unconvinced. So were Sharon’s comrades. Of the nineteen Likud members, fourteen spoke against a unity government at a faction meeting the next day. This was quickly leaked, and it reinforced the opposition on the Labor side. Sharon wasn’t even master of his own house, the Labor doves jeered.
A week later, at a Knesset session marking the anniversary of Rabin’s murder, Sharon spoke of his “yearning for a leadership figure projecting stability and reliability, radiating a deep understanding of events, an ability to analyze and to draw conclusions, and above all to take responsibility.”39 But he still didn’t mean himself. Even at this late date, he was still admonishing the younger man and urging him, in effect, to take him into his government as his deputy.
But Barak, and indeed Sharon, were no longer calling the shots. The Knesset was about to dissolve itself. It could by law do so if 61 of its 120 members raised their hands in favor. Shinui, a small, anti-Orthodox party that broadly supported Barak’s peace policy, joined now with the parties of the Right to ensure that absolute majority. Dissolution meant new elections; Netanyahu looked a shoo-in.
But now Barak suddenly announced that he was resigning as prime minister. Since the dissolution of the Knesset had not yet been approved on three readings, Barak’s resignation overrode it. Instead of general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, there would be an election for the prime minister alone. It would be held in exactly sixty days from the date of Barak’s resignation. That would be February 6, 2001. By law, only sitting MKs would be eligible to run. Netanyahu was not a sitting MK.
Sharon insisted he was as surprised as everyone else. No, there had not been any collusion between him and Barak to keep Bibi out, he retorted angrily to the many Likudniks who claimed that there had.
Netanyahu’s supporters drafted an amendment to the existing legislation to enable a non-MK to run for prime minister. Sharon immediately announced that he would support it. Netanyahu, confident that it would pass, called a press conference in Jerusalem where he formally announced his candidacy for leader of the Likud and for prime minister. Two days later, on December 12, the Likud central committee endorsed the party’s support for the “Netanyahu Law” and voted to hold the party’s leadership primary a week later, on December 19. Sharon, in a speech laced with sarcasm but also with a bitter, between-the-lines recognition that this might well be his swan song, pointedly ignored the probability that Netanyahu would displace him. He would run against Barak, Sharon told the rowdy hall, and he would beat him. “After the elections, there’ll be a country to govern,” he kept repeating. The delegates got the point and roared their displeasure.
Netanyahu made a hero’s entrance into the crowded hall, hugging and kissing ecstatic delegates as he progressed slowly to the podium. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you,” he began his speech. Their adulation was almost palpable. He spoke like a candidate confident of triumph. But there was a vaguely discordant note, which the rapturous delegates did not pick up. There ought to be general elections for both the prime minister and the Knesset, Netanyahu remarked. “The present Knesset is fractured, divided, splintered.”
On December 18, the day before the Likud primary, the Knesset voted. By a majority of 65 to 45, it passed the “Netanyahu Law” enabling a non-MK to run for prime minister. The bill was rushed through all three readings and the committee stage in one afternoon. The proceedings stopped briefly while members crowded around television screens to watch Netanyahu, at an impromptu press conference, inveigh against the law bearing his name and insist that he would not run even if it were passed. They ignored his fulminations, all presuming he himself would ignore them, too.
The prime ministership was his for the taking, but he declined to take it. True to his word, and dumbfounding backers and critics alike, Netanyahu confirmed that he was standing down. “I will not stand as a candidate in elections that … offer the winner the title of prime minister but deny him the tools to effectively lead the country,” he declared.o
• • •
Barak still had one potential trump card in his hand: the peace process. Right up to the last minute, Sharon continued to believe—and to fear—that Barak and Arafat would reach a deal. The territorial issue had now narrowed to around 5 percent of the West Bank, with swaps, and both leaders gave Clinton to understand they were “in the ballpark.”40 Dennis Ross quotes the veteran Saudi Arabian diplomat Prince Bandar, responding to a briefing on the state of the negotiations on December 19: “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy; it will be a crime.”
On December 23, in a last-ditch effort, Clinton presented U.S. bridging proposals to negotiators from the two sides. On territory, he suggested “a solution that provides between 94 and 96 percent of West Bank territory to the Palestinian state with a land swap of 1 to 3 percent.” On Jerusalem, the “Clinton Parameters” followed “the general principle that what is Arab in the city should be Palestinian and what is Jewish should be Israeli; this should apply to the Old City as well.” On the Temple Mount, the president proposed “Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram and Israeli sovereignty over … the Western Wall and the space sacred to Judaism of which it is part. There would be a firm commitment by both not to excavate beneath the Haram or behind the Western Wall.” On refugees “our guiding principle has to be that the Palestinian state will be the focal point for the Palestinians who choose to return to the area, without ruling out that Israel will accept some of these refugees.”
The Israeli negotiators Ben-Ami and Sher, diligently transcribing the president’s words, found the time to exchange furtive glances and scrawled notes in Hebrew. “We can live with this,” they both wrote. Ben-Ami noted worriedly, though, that their Palestinian negotiating partners were looking glum.41
The Barak cabinet voted on December 27 to accept the Clinton Parameters. There were reservations, but they were “within the parameters, not outside them,” in Ross’s words. Arafat, on the other hand, “was never good at facing moments of truth,” Ross writes caustically. He came to Washington but rejected the president’s proposal.
Like Clinton and Ross, Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, lays the main blame on Arafat for the failed peace process. He calls him “the artful dodger.” Indyk writes: “President Clinton formally offered Arafat Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif as one of the parameters for the final agreement. If that is what he had been holding out for at Camp David, why did he turn down Clinton’s offer? The answer, to my mind, is straightforward: rather than breaking through into a new world, he clung to what he knew best—the ways of the old Arab order.” It needed courage, Indyk adds, for Arafat to tell the Palestinian refugees “that they would not be going back to the homes of their forefathers, few of which existed anymore, even though they had known that in their hearts for a long time … Arafat was too scared to tell them the truth.”42
Even with Clinton gone, Barak sent Ben-Ami and Sher, boosted by the dovish ministers Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, and Amnon Lipton-Shahak, for a week of negotiations at Taba beginning January 21. Ben-Ami in his book writes of Israeli intelligence assessments in January that Arafat was suddenly and belatedly waking up to the prospect of Barak losing to Sharon on February 6 and the new Bush administration turning its back on the Middle East peace process. Hence his urgent instruction to Abu Ala to get an agreement at Taba. Sadly, the Israeli foreign minister adds, the new instructions were not accompanied by serious new flexibility.
In the months before this final denouement, Barak had been working fitfully on an alternative policy option: unilateral separation. Separation, that is, between Israel and the Palestinians, or, more accurately, separation by Israel from the Palestinians. If there was “no partner” on the Palestinian side for the foreseeable future, given Arafat’s obduracy and the mounting violence, then Israel must act alone in its national interest by separating itself from the Palestinians along the lines of the agreement that the Palestinian leader was rejecting now but that his successors, it was to be hoped, would be prepared to negotiate at some time in the future.
The tangible expression of this new unilateralism was to be a security fence, a barrier of barbed wire and, in places, concrete wall, dotted with watchtowers and flanked by a patrol road. The IDF, no longer reliant on or desirous of cooperation with Palestinian security forces, would deploy this barrier as its bulwark against terrorist incursions from the West Bank.43p The fence was to incorporate the settlement blocs along the pre-1967 border, which Israel intended to annex in an eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians. This would mean enclosing some Palestinian areas that Israel would ultimately not wish to annex. They would be “returned” in negotiations that would one day resume. Similarly, Israel would unilaterally designate the whole of the Jordan valley as a security zone for the foreseeable future, with the understanding that this arrangement, too, would end once a negotiated final agreement came into sight again.
With each new crisis in the post–Camp David negotiations, Barak would return to these still-inchoate ideas. As elections began to loom, he tried to project them to the public, to demonstrate that Arafat’s intransigence and the intifada violence would not leave Israel powerless. “Us here; them there” was his slogan. His campaign strategists’ difficult job was to inject this unilateralism into the national debate while at the same time leaving room for a dramatic return of “bilateralism,” should the final, frenetic negotiating efforts yield an agreement after all.
There was a logical flaw in this: In practice, there was no prospect of the fence being built and the new separation policy going into effect unless the miraculous happened and Barak won the election.44 But such a miracle was only conceivable if the negotiations produced a last-moment agreement—in which case the unilateral solution would no longer be necessary…
As leader of the opposition, Sharon opposed all the Barak government’s proffered concessions in the negotiations with the Palestinians. But he regarded the process as unstoppable. And in a vicarious but significant way, reminiscent of his complex relations with Rabin during the Oslo process, he underwent together with Barak the experience of having those concessions rebuffed by Arafat and the slide into violent confrontation. Together with Barak, despite the continuing differences between them, he drew dramatic conclusions from Arafat’s intransigence. Both men concluded that the collapse of bilateral negotiations in the Israel-Palestine conflict pointed to unilateralism as Israel’s sole way forward. Both saw the demographic danger to the Jewishness of Israel inherent in indefinite occupation of the Palestinians. Both believed the United States and the international community would not countenance ongoing low-grade war and diplomatic stalemate. Thus, when Barak lectured Sharon in the Knesset, in his final act as prime minister, on Israel’s existential need to achieve unilateral “separation” between itself and the Palestinians, he was nurturing a seed that had already been planted and was growing.
Barak’s belated unilateralism as expressed in the planned fence—and its conceptual rationale, the demographic threat—were both still ideological anathemas to the Israeli Right. A fence meant partitioning Eretz Yisrael. Even if it were purportedly erected as a temporary step for strictly security reasons, it would become a permanent political reality, the Right warned. Israel would be back on or near the 1967 line, and all the settlements beyond the fence would wither or be forcibly dismantled. As for the so-called demographic threat, with more than a million ex-Soviet immigrants having unexpectedly poured into the country over recent years, only Israelis of little Zionist faith could still brandish that cowardly old canard.
In the Likud, and even more so in the settler movement, there was a vague but uncomfortable sense that Sharon was wobbling. Why did he persist in proclaiming, even after Netanyahu had withdrawn from the race, that his goal after the election was a national unity government with Barak as his minister of defense? Granted, the Knesset arithmetic would make it hard for him to form a coalition. But why Barak? Likud loyalists demanded. Barak was the man who still, even at this eleventh hour, was trying to sell out on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. And what was this vague but troubling talk by Sharon of “painful concessions,” a phrase Sharon began to use in late December? Apart from anything else, this was hardly the way to fire up party activists and get them out on the streets in the weeks before the election.45
Sharon for his part, and his campaign managers, assumed the settlers and their supporters, whatever their doubts about him, would come out and vote for him. On the “Russian front,” Sharon’s team felt confident of crushing victory. Both Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the mainly immigrant party Yisrael Beiteinu, and Natan Sharansky, head of the older and now declining Yisrael B’Aliya, urged their followers to vote for Sharon. His sloganeering in this sector was unsubtly different from the general line. In Russian, the candidate was “a strong Sharon for a strong Israel” rather than the only man who would bring peace.
The Sharon camp remained anxious, though, over the danger that another large and important constituency, the haredim,q might not turn out to vote at all. No one could confidently dismiss that prospect. There had never been an election solely for prime minister in Israel. The haredim had never before been required to go to the polling stations solely in order to vote for a Sabbath-desecrating, unkosher-eating candidate to lead the Zionist state. Granted, they had voted once before (in 1996) under the new electoral system for a secular prime minister (an overwhelming majority of them voted for Netanyahu in that impressive show of haredi political clout). But then, elections for the Knesset and for the prime minister were held simultaneously. The justification for voting in both was obvious to any Talmud student: We went to vote for our haredi party, which is our religious duty. Once in the polling station and handed two ballot slips, we voted for the (unfortunately secular) prime minister, too.
The key, as always, was in the hands of the rabbis. They had sanctioned—indeed, they had ordered—the vote for Bibi in 1996. Sharon needed them now to extend that Talmudic logic just a little bit further. For many years, he had been well enough liked in their councils. Barak, moreover, was positively disliked, having proclaimed in the fall of 2000 that he was planning a “secular revolution” that would dismantle many of the hallowed status quo arrangements between synagogue and state. But Sharon, too, had queered his pitch by voting and speaking in the Knesset, in July 2000, against the Tal Law, a controversial bill that sought to enshrine in statute the ad hoc exemption from army service granted by the state to yeshiva students. Sharon ensured that the rest of the Likud faction voted against the bill, too, despite mutterings in the ranks.
The original exemption had grown out of an agreement between David Ben-Gurion and the ultra-Orthodox parties in 1948. Back then, it affected a couple hundred yeshiva students. Each year it was extended by the minister of defense for another year. Now their number had risen to tens of thousands, to the seething resentment of those who did serve three years in the regular army and decades more in the reserves.
Sharon would have to eat his words if he wanted the votes of the haredi rabbis. He proceeded to do so with the best grace possible.
It worked. On January 27, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas sage, gave orders to his followers to take to the streets and campaign for Sharon. It would be a sin, he ruled, for anyone not to vote for him. The aged Ashkenazi rabbis who ruled the United Torah Judaism party required more wooing, but eventually they, too, came around. On Election Day, February 6, the Council of Torah Sages published a formal letter in the haredi press instructing their flock to vote for “the candidate who, it is to be hoped, will not lend his hand to destroy the status of religion.” It was a grudging, unenthusiastic endorsement. It pettily avoided mentioning Sharon’s name. But it was good enough. Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the senior non-Hasidic rabbi, let it be known that he himself intended to go and vote. The rebbe of Vishnitz, doyen of the Hasidic sages, said he would, too, if his health permitted. Sharon breathed easy.
While Sharon’s strategy with the haredim was to persuade them to come out and vote, his purpose with another large and potentially crucial constituency, Israel’s Arabs,r was to encourage them to stay at home. Their various political leaders were urging them to do so as a deliberate act of retribution against Barak in the wake of the October police shootings. Barak hoped that his appointment of a commission of inquiry into the shootings would mollify Arab opinion and lead to a rescission or at least partial relaxation of the boycott. But that had not happened. Now the Barak camp pinned its hopes on Sharon’s long-established image, from Kibbiya through Sabra and Shatila, as a cruel and indiscriminate killer of Arabs. Surely that would persuade Arab voters to swallow their anger and come out to vote?
The Sharon campaign could only soft-pedal the candidate’s military past in its television broadcasts and hope not to arouse painful memories among the Arabs. Happily, this tactic perfectly dovetailed into the campaign’s broad election strategy. This was essentially two-pronged: to say as little as possible, and to project a reassuring aura of empathy and sagacity. Saying little was simple enough: the campaign media chief, Eyal Arad, simply declined almost all requests for interviews, on air or in print. On the rare occasions when he did speak, the candidate visibly strained to confine himself to unprovocative platitudes. The message was peace, security, and unity, and he kept on message.
In television campaign broadcasts, the image of the grizzled old warrior was not completely airbrushed out; there were still the heroic scenes from the Yom Kippur War, with Sharon in his bloodstained head bandage. But that was no longer the predominant impression. Rather, viewers took away with them an oft-repeated scene of the white-haired, portly, but spry grandfather-farmer striding through his fields in gum boots, two young children running toward him. He stoops and, strong but gentle, hoists his beloved grandson into the air. He hugs him to his breast. The cows look on, in sympathetic bovine placidity. String instruments play subtly patriotic music in the background. “Ariel Sharon—leader to peace” is the slogan sung softly but with conviction by a choir of girls.
In unused footage, some of the farm animals are seen turning and trotting away as he approaches. “If they’re going to run off, people will say I frighten even the cows,” Sharon jokes into the camera. The chief goal was to portray him as strong but not frightening. Middle-of-the-road voters were to be subtly weaned of their long-ingrained fear of him.
It was probably one of the more brilliant makeovers in advertising history. It succeeded, in part at least, because the scene of rural domesticity was not false. Sharon’s home and family had always been integral parts of his life. Especially after the death of Lily, he sought out the company of his grandchildren and loved to live alongside them on the ranch. The task of Reuven Adler, his adman friend and now his campaign manager, was to project that aspect of the candidate’s persona, less familiar to the general public, and eclipse, though not entirely erase, the image of the tough old general. Old generals never die, and this one, the TV clips beamed, was still fighting fit and would know how to handle the terror and violence of the intifada. “I will bring peace that will protect us,” a sober-looking Sharon declares to the camera, now in a solid blue suit and conservative tie. The unseen girls’ choir chants that line, too, in a sentimental jingle. The mature and loving Sharon offered much more to the voter than military know-how. He offered experience, moderation, reliability, statesmanship.
In a deeper sense, beneath the saccharine texts and slick camera work, the makeover was the climax of two decades of dogged, infinitely patient work—by the admen and other advisers, but above all by the candidate himself. Sharon’s comeback began the day after he was ousted from the Defense Ministry by the Kahan Commission in 1983. Circumstance and fortune helped him to stay on the slippery pole and keep clambering relentlessly up it. But his chief mainstay was his own iron determination to recast his appeal to the broad swath of the Israeli mainstream, no longer as a swashbuckling extremist with a vicious streak and a big chip on his shoulder, but as a seasoned yet mellowed leader whom the country could rely on.
Sharon, then, was no mere actor reading his lines. He was part of the plot. Indeed, his new image was the plot. But was it all political strategy, or was it substance, too? And where is the line between them? Plainly, this windfall election was a defining moment for Sharon. Was the change in his image all slick campaigning, or did it reflect changes taking place “inside him,” in his understanding of what was required of Israel’s leader? Was his sole concern achieving popularity—first in the election, then in the job of prime minister, and finally in the history books? Or did his newfound moderation express a genuine embrace of pragmatic positions not only because they were popular but also because he was coming to believe in them?
The two advisers closest to him, who effectively ran his campaign, are divided over how to read this defining moment. For Uri Shani, the veteran aide whom Sharon had brought in to revitalize the half-moribund Likud when he took over as chairman, the election campaign was just that: a campaign. Scripted and directed by cynical professionals, it sought solely to harmonize the candidate, to the greatest extent possible, with the needs and desires of the voters. The candidate, in Shani’s narrative, was as cynical and professional as the rest of the team—at that point. Sharon did definitely undergo a dramatic and genuine change of perspective, says Shani. But it came later, when he was prime minister. Sharon’s oft-repeated line as prime minister, “What you see from here, you don’t see from there,” was literally true. Once ensconced in the Prime Minister’s Office, he began seeing things differently.
Shani recalls the moment he noticed the change creeping over his boss. “I saw him become prime minister in the real sense; no one else did.” In July 2001, now director of the Prime Minister’s Bureau, Shani was riding alone with Sharon in a motorcade speeding the Israeli leader from an Italian military airport toward Rome, on an official visit.
It was a lovely sunny day. There were the shiny limousines, the uniformed outriders, the helicopters above. I must have said something about how nice it all was, when suddenly he says, “Don’t get too enthusiastic: they exiled us from Eretz Yisrael.” I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who exiled us?” “The Romans,” he says. “What’s that got to do with this?” I asked. “It’s the same thing …”
This was a serious conversation; not some kind of charade or joke. It was the first time that I saw he was looking at things differently. Later I was to see it again, with the Americans and in other diplomatic encounters. He was looking three thousand years backward and thousands of years forward. He was looking at himself as just one link in the chain of Jewish history. His task was to carry it through his term and hand on the burden. He felt it on his shoulders. For me, it was completely unexpected.
Reuven Adler, the advertising executive and personal friend, was never part of Sharon’s official entourage and did not watch him function as prime minister on the international stage as Shani did. But Adler maintains that he, as campaign manager and copywriter par excellence, was profoundly in tune with the process of change and maturation that had been going on in Sharon for years before he became prime minister. For Adler, the 2001 election campaign was the confirmation of that process and the unambiguous signpost to what lay ahead. The slogans, which he authored, were not manipulative or cynical: they said what the candidate meant.
“I knew for sure that everything was changing with him when he approved the slogan ‘Only Sharon will bring peace.’ He sat here, in this room,” Adler recalls, looking around the bright corner office from where he directs his large advertising agency.
I told him the slogan. He looked at me for a long moment; he didn’t say anything. I was alone with him. And then he said, “Go with it.” I asked him if he was sure he knew what it entailed. He said, “I know. Go with it.”
No, we weren’t duping the voters. Israelis were looking for hope. The situation was beyond despair. Arafat was the demon, which helped Arik enormously. But basically the people don’t want endless war. The Jewish dream in Eretz Yisrael is to bash the Arabs and to give back the territories! That was my point of departure. Only a strong and charismatic leader can deliver that dream. He’s a huge leader, and if he believes in it—and in my heart I believe he wants peace—that’s what the people want: a leader who can bring them peace and quiet. Now, that’s a message you can express in a hundred pages, or you can say it in five words. I knew it would raise eyebrows, and I knew some people would dismiss it as merely cynical. I’m an image person myself, not an agenda person. But I am saying absolutely unequivocally that when we discussed the significance of the image-changing slogan “Only Sharon will bring peace,” it was entirely clear to me, and to him, that this was not just an election slogan.46
a Barak says Sharon was directly responsible for his promotion to general, against the wishes of the then chief of staff, Rafael Eitan.
He virtually imposed it on him. How do I explain that? It was to do with how he first came across me, back in 1962. I was a second lieutenant in Sayeret Matkal [the elite IDF commando unit]. One of the things the Sayeret used to do by way of training was to infiltrate IDF bases without getting caught. We would try to penetrate the operations center of a heavily guarded military installation, or to raid the commanding officer’s quarters, break into his safe, remove the contents, and leave without trace. One of my first assignments was Training Camp No. 3, near Netanya, commanded by Colonel Arik Sharon, then still “in exile” after the 1956 Mitle Pass saga. With a small squad of men I headed for the commander’s office, slipped in, cleared out the safe—and left a note in handwriting to his bureau chief, a girl I knew. Arik was pretty gobsmacked in the morning. He wanted to meet the guy who did it, and that’s how he first got to know me. (Ehud Barak interview, Tel Aviv, July 2006)
b Down from thirty-two in the previous election.
c This prominent journalist and social commentator later became a politician himself: he was elected to the Knesset in 2009 as a member of the Labor Party.
d Literally, Ze’ev’s Fortress, after the founder of the Revisionist Party, which eventually evolved into the Likud, Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
e Barak’s government initially comprised One Israel (Labor), 26; Shas, 17; Meretz, 10; Center Party, 6; National Religious Party, 5; United Torah Judaism, 5; Yisrael B’Aliya, 4; One Nation, 2. In addition, it could count on the votes of the 10 Arab MKs in support of its peace moves.
f In a formal statement that day in the Knesset, required by protocol, Speaker Avrum Burg announced that Sharon was leader of the opposition. New legislation had been passed recognizing the leader of the opposition as an official state officeholder, with attendant rights and privileges. “I have the honor of informing the Knesset that, in accordance with Section 11 of the Knesset Law, the Likud faction, which is the largest opposition faction, has informed me that Ariel Sharon, MK, is leader of the opposition. Wherefore I hereby announce that Ariel Sharon, MK, is leader of the opposition. My congratulations, sir, on your maiden speech.” Sharon replied with grace, laced with his usual irony. “Mr. Speaker, I thank you. Even though it will only be for a short time, I am happy to hold this title” (Speaker’s announcement, Knesset Record, July 31, 2000).
g Netanyahu’s brush with the criminal law involved a removals contractor cum handyman cum political activist, Yigal Amedi. He had been performing various removals assignments and other odd jobs for the Netanyahus ever since their return from Bibi’s service as ambassador to the UN in 1988. But he had never been paid. When Netanyahu lost the election, Amedi submitted a bill to the Prime Minister’s Office for close to half a million shekels ($125,000).
The suspicion was that Amedi’s various attempts over the years to wheedle from the Netanyahus various job placements and recommendations for his relations and friends were his reason for not asking to be paid. Amedi turned state’s evidence and poured out a tale full of bitter recriminations to the police. In the course of the investigation it also turned out that he and Sara had hauled off hundreds of valuable gifts given to Netanyahu in his official capacity (and therefore the property of the state) and had stored them in a warehouse.
There was not much evidence that the Netanyahus had actually helped Amedi. Still, the Israeli law of bribery incorporated the principle enshrined in Ecclesiastes 11:1: “Cast thy bread upon the waters, for after a long time thou shalt find it again.” This meant that no specific act of give-and-take had to be shown, as long as a general criminal intention could be proven. But in the Netanyahus’ case it could not, the attorney general ruled.
h Or the police steered him clear; this point was never clarified.
i The proximity of the anniversary of that event exacerbated Palestinian resentment over the visit, both in the Palestinian press and in the street.
j The killer turned himself in to the Palestinian authorities, who immediately announced that he was of unsound mind.
k The IDF appeared to accept responsibility at the time. But an Israeli government inquiry concluded in May 2013 that Mohammed was not in fact shot in the incident. In France, a media analyst was convicted of defamation in June 2013 for accusing France-2 TV of staging the death of Mohammed.
l See p. 205.
m “And another thing,” Schiff added, “a nation at war cannot be run by mothers’ organizations.” That was the veteran defense analyst’s somewhat sour reference to a women’s group called Four Mothers that had lobbied vigorously in favor of withdrawal from Lebanon. The unilateralism of that withdrawal and the undignified way it was carried out still rankled with many in the defense community, and Schiff was reflecting this. The northern border had been basically quiet following the pullout in April. But on October 7 a Hezbollah raiding party crossed into Israel and kidnapped three soldiers patrolling in their jeep. Barak, embroiled in the intifada, massed forces in the north and laid the blame on Syria. In the event, though, there was no Israeli military response.
n The commission worked for five months and presented its findings and recommendations in April to the new president of the United States, who passed them on to the new prime minister of Israel.
For Ariel Sharon, they were worth waiting for. “The Sharon visit did not cause the “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” the panel wrote. It was not a blanket exoneration. There was plenty of criticism of Sharon and of Barak, and indeed of Arafat. The commission did not buy the Israeli line that Arafat had preplanned the intifada, but it accepted that Arafat did nothing to curb the violence once it had erupted.
o “You’ll have to wait for my book,” Netanyahu replied, when asked in an interview for this book to explain his decision not to run against Sharon.
Omri Sharon insisted later that throughout these dramatic weeks his father never ceased to hope and even to expect that Netanyahu would withdraw in the end rather than stand and fight. But Yossi Verter of Haaretz, writing at the time, described Sharon as a man on a roller coaster. “Talking to him a few days ago, after the ‘welcome’ he received from the Likud central committee, one encountered a bitter and frustrated leader. Everyone was lining up with Bibi; Sharon was alone and abandoned, staring defeat in the face. Yesterday, he was a different man. ‘I kept telling you all that it would be me who runs against Barak,’ he crowed. ‘But I saw out of the corner of my eye the pitying shrugs or malicious grins that my words elicited.’ ” Sharon, wrote Verter, was “like a mortgage defaulter about to be evicted from his home who suddenly wins the lottery.”
p Israel built a security fence around the Gaza Strip in 1994, at the insistent instigation of the IDF general then commanding the southern front, Matan Vilnai, who had since left the army and become a Labor Party politician. That fence, erected precisely along the pre-1967 borderline, proved effective throughout the intifada in preventing terrorist incursions from Gaza.
q The haredim numbered an estimated 10 percent of eligible voters in the 2001 election. It is hard to be precise about the size, especially in electoral terms, of the various groupings that make up Israel’s highly sectorized society. Not every “settler” or “Russian” or haredi or Israeli Arab necessarily votes with his sector, and these classifications themselves are not airtight. Among most self-defined haredim, though, voting “discipline” is strong—the rabbis choose the candidates—and there are relatively few deviants. The 2001 election was to be particularly noteworthy in this respect: whereas the average nationwide turnout was 61.2 percent (the lowest ever in an Israeli election), turnout in haredi areas topped 90 percent, meaning that the effective haredi proportion of the vote was around 15 percent. Haredi political power looks likely to grow: in 2009, 30 percent of Jewish first-grade children attended haredi schools.
r Arabs accounted for 12.3 percent of eligible voters, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures. As with the haredim, this figure was significantly lower than their overall percentage of the population, because of the relatively high proportion of children in the Arab and haredi communities.