David Rubinger, an award-winning press photographer, had been taking intimate and memorable pictures of Ariel Sharon for decades. On election night, inside Sharon’s hotel suite, his victory tableau seemed suffused with prophetic insight: a one-frame promo of the five tempestuous years to come. On the left, smug and beaming, is Uri Dan, the sharp-penned journalist whose much-scorned prophecy had now come true.a Dan had been Sharon’s spokesman, amanuensis, friend, and indefatigably adulatory apologist since the 1950s. Now he confidently anticipated a position of prominence and influence in the Prime Minister’s Office. He would be rudely shunted aside.
Dan’s arm is draped around the shoulders of another jubilant Sharon associate of fifty years’ standing, an ex-British, now–South African textile merchant named Cyril Kern. Kern came to fight as a young volunteer in the 1948 war. A wartime comradeship grew into a lasting friendship between the two men and their families, sustained by Cyril’s frequent visits to Israel and stays at Sycamore Ranch. He was entirely unknown to the general public. Two years later, embroiled in allegations of shady political funding for Sharon, his name would become a household word.
Next in line, thrusting a smiling face between Cyril and Arik, is another longtime friend and funder, the ex-Israeli, now-American businessman Arie Genger. He is about to embark on a brief but not insignificant career as unofficial messenger between the prime minister of Israel and the White House. He was assisted on this mission by the happy coincidence of being on friendly terms back from his student days, as he proudly told Sharon’s aides, with Lewis “Scooter” Libby, powerful chief of staff to the powerful new vice president, Richard Cheney.1
And last in the group, Sharon himself, fixing the camera with a relaxed, composed, but distinctly non-exultant look. In the following days, reporters began to comment on how restrained and almost solemn Sharon appeared after his election triumph. He had reached the apex of his political life, but he hardly seemed to be rejoicing, at any rate not outwardly. With time, this behavior would become the hallmark of his increasingly popular leadership: coolness, restraint, an aura of mature unflappability and gravitas.
Behind the front line in Rubinger’s composition is a group of laughing, chattering, plainly euphoric Likud Party activists. Sharon, turned away, seems to be almost pointedly ignoring them. That, too, would prove prophetically significant as his prime ministership unfolded. Omri Sharon, who had run the campaign and would run his father’s relations with the party faithful, is seen in another frame, bending down to embrace the new prime minister.
Omri’s partner in the campaign, Uri Shani, who would now become the all-powerful director of the Prime Minister’s Bureau, was typically invisible but undoubtedly present behind the scenes. One celebrant discreetly not in the room was Muhammad Rashid, Yasser Arafat’s financial adviser. He had spent much of the earlier evening with Omri at the offices of the Sharon family lawyer Dov Weissglas, watching television coverage of the voting. Why the three were together, why they continued to meet and talk over the next few weeks, and why Rashid seemed to welcome the election outcome that the Arab world, and indeed much of the wider world, mourned and feared—these questions fueled rumor and speculation as the new team prepared to take over.
Rashid was the Palestinian Authority’s representative on the board of the hugely lucrative Oasis Casino in Jericho, which had drawn thousands of Israeli gamblers each evening in its heyday but now stood silent and empty because of the intifada. Weissglas represented the PA’s partner in the enterprise, Martin Schlaff, an Austrian Jewish businessman and friend of the Sharons’. Once the television exit polls were in, Rashid phoned Arafat. “I told you, he’s won big-time,” he said, and immediately set about trying to broker a meeting between the two old enemies. Sharon did not say no. He insisted, though, that a meeting would have to be conditional on a major move by the Palestinians to suppress the rampant violence of the intifada.2
Only Omri and a very few others in Sharon’s coterie were privy to these early diplomatic feelers. For much of the outside world, and certainly for the defeated and dispirited Israeli peace camp, Sharon’s triumph exacerbated a nightmare that had begun on the Temple Mount and was now threatening to engulf all of Palestine in bloody conflict. There seemed no prospect or hope of any meaningful diplomacy. The Guardian put it baldly:
Sadly, Mr. Sharon needs no introduction. From his infamous role in the 1982 Lebanon invasion to his deliberately provocative, personal intrusion into Arab East Jerusalem last September, the ex-general and Likud leader has been a consistently prominent foe to peace, a confrontational rejectionist to match the hardest of Hamas or Hizbullah hardliners.
Israeli doves were devastated. People uninhibitedly gave voice to their moral and political despair and, in many cases, their physical fear for their own and their children’s futures. Some spoke openly of looking to leave the country and build their lives elsewhere. Remembering him as the builder of the settlements, the instigator of the Lebanon War, and, most recently, the provoker of the Palestinian uprising, they expected only the worst from Sharon as prime minister. The speed and starkness with which Barak’s policies and promises had all collapsed were driven home now by the huge margin of his defeat. Sharon swept home with a 62–38 majority.b Every middle-of-the-roader, every floating voter, seemed to have turned his or her back on the Labor Party leader, on the Oslo process, and effectively on peace with the Palestinians.
For Marit Danon, the dread and desperation posed an immediately practical problem. “I was in panic,” she recalls. “Both because of my political views and because I was frightened of what would happen. I’d been reading up about him. One night I had to get Barak to sign some documents, and I let it out. ‘Prime Minister, I won’t work with that man … I don’t sleep nights … I can’t stay here … My conscience won’t allow me to.’ ”
Danon had worked as the private secretary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as well as of the politically more palatable Rabin, Peres, and Barak. “Barak slammed his fist down on the desk. I think this was the first time he raised his voice at me. ‘You’re not leaving this place! He’s not the man you think he is … Listen to me. This is a man who reads, who loves music and art. He’s not what he looks like from the outside.’ Back home, I thought to myself that I’d had a good working relationship with Barak and he wasn’t going to dupe me deliberately. I’d give it a chance.”3c
In the world’s chanceries the reactions to Sharon’s victory were similarly horrified or at best ambivalent. Statesmen mouthed the requisite diplomatic congratulations through clenched teeth. In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued an “impassioned plea” for restraint. Leaders in the region should “recognize the absolute importance in controlling the passions, in controlling the emotions,” Powell said. This made predictably little impact in Syria, where officials described Sharon as a racist, a war criminal, and a terrorist and predicted his election probably meant war. In neighboring Lebanon, too, the newspaper Almustaqbal, owned by Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, ran the headline “Israel Has Voted to Reject Peace.” In Egypt, though, the state-owned Cairo Radio urged the Arab world to give Sharon a chance. Here, Begin’s return of the whole of Sinai had been a dramatic change of policy and ideology that gave hope, however slender, that Sharon, too, might change his thinking.
Sharon was eager to set about proving that the fears and trepidation about him were misplaced, the dredged‑up detritus of times long gone. He was determined to build the closest possible relations with the United States. He had been effectively decreed persona non grata in Washington under the first Bush. A first friendly phone call from George W. Bush was encouraging. The president recalled his heli-tour of Israel as Sharon’s guest back in December 1998. Neither of them had thought then they would meet next time as heads of their respective countries, Bush joked.d
Sharon had not waited for the election to make contact with Arafat. Toward the end of January, he dispatched Omri, Dov Weissglas, and Eytan Bentsur, his director general back at the Foreign Ministry, on a discreet mission to Vienna, where they spent a long evening at Martin Schlaff’s home together with Muhammad Rashid.
They were not, however, discreet enough. A report of their trip was broadcast the same evening on Channel 1 (state-owned) television. It said they had flown to see Schlaff. Weissglas was quoted as saying they would meet with “a Middle Eastern personality” who happened to be in Europe. The trip, he insisted, had nothing to do with Schlaff’s business affairs. This immediately triggered speculation, much of it pejorative, about the Sharon family’s rich friends, about kickbacks and corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and about possible connections between the two.
Weissglas, flying back into the storm, denied the Jericho casino had even been mentioned at the talks in Vienna. But the Labor campaign hammered away at the attorney’s multitasked role as Schlaff’s business representative, Sharon’s libel lawyer, and now Sharon’s political emissary to … Schlaff and Rashid, the casino partners. “Sharon’s world blurs between business interests and policy considerations,” Labor accused.
But no one could produce any hard proof of bribery—then or later. Sharon himself claimed the meeting in Vienna had been Arafat’s idea and was intended for Rashid to learn firsthand about Sharon’s policies. It had nothing to do with the casino. “I don’t gamble with the fate of the country the way Barak does,” Sharon quipped. On the Palestinian side, Minister of Information Yasser Abed Rabbo complained the leak helped Sharon contend he was in dialogue with the Palestinians. “We want to prevent this criminal and murderer from attaining power,” he thundered. But he did not deny that the meeting had taken place.
Allegations of corruption dogged Sharon virtually throughout his term. It was almost taken for granted that Sharon’s family finances and his political funding were shot through with conflict of interest, at the very least. In tens of thousands of Israeli homes that weekend, people lectured each other knowingly about Sharon’s vast (for Israel) ranch, and where had he got the money for it? And what did he owe the rich men who helped him buy it? And all his other rich friends in America and Europe, and Israel? But this pervasive presumption of impropriety seemed to have little or no effect on voters—not at the 2001 election, which took place ten days after the Vienna story broke, and not in the 2003 election, which, as we shall see, was also preceded by seriously uncomfortable media disclosures.e
Barak himself led Labor in intensive negotiations with Likud for a fortnight after the election, then suddenly announced that he was taking a break from politics after all, as he had originally announced on election night, and would not serve as defense minister or as any other minister. The Labor top echelon, with undisguised reluctance, gathered in late February to elect Shimon Peres interim leader in place of Barak, pending a party-wide leadership primary later in the year. Peres wasted no time in agreeing to Sharon’s terms for the unity government. Labor made a last, feeble effort to get the Treasury instead of Defense. But Sharon was adamant: the purse strings stayed in the hands of the Likud. He earmarked Silvan Shalom, a hungrily ambitious Likud figure, for that post—and only then telephoned Netanyahu, who was in New York, ostensibly to ask him to join the government. “What position?” Netanyahu asked. “Come home and we’ll talk about it.” Netanyahu got the message. “There’s no need to talk,” he said. “I wish you every success.” Peres took the Foreign Ministry; his Labor colleague Binyamin Ben-Eliezer got Defense.
Sharon’s treatment of David Levy was breathtakingly shabby. Levy had led his three-man faction out of Barak’s coalition, hastening its collapse. “I’m sorry, David,” Sharon told him, blithely ignoring the enormous debt he owed the man from Beit She’an for single-handedly preventing Netanyahu from leaving him out of his government in 1996, “I don’t have a department for you.” He suggested that Levy become a minister without portfolio, which the onetime deputy prime minister, foreign minister, housing minister, and absorption minister indignantly spurned. “I’m not going to sit there just to warm a chair,” he told reporters outside Sharon’s office.
A month for cobbling together a coalition is considered, in Israel, almost lightning speed. On March 7, Sharon stood proudly on the Knesset podium to read out his list of twenty-six ministers. “I could have formed a more compact and more homogeneous government,” he said, meaning a rightist-religious alliance. “That would have been easier to run the country with. But I fear the price we would have had to pay to keep it going would have been too high.” That same day, he demonstrated the advantage of leading a broad-based government and not being held in thrall to a bevy of little parties. The Knesset, led by the two biggest parties, Labor and Likud, voted to abolish the direct election system for prime minister and restore the old method whereby the voter cast one ballot only—for the party of his choice. This was an impressive show of consistency: Sharon had always opposed the direct election reform that was enacted nine years earlier, and he continued to oppose it, even though it had brought him to power so convincingly.
The peroration of his inauguration speech was taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which prompted Tamar Gozansky, a much-liked Hadash (communist) MK, to call out: “He freed the United States from slavery. It’s time you freed us from the occupation.” Sharon ignored that and concluded, to a hushed house: “It is Lily’s birthday today. Lily was at my side and supported me through all the hard times and the happy times, and in all my struggles. At this moment I and my family miss Lily very much. Thank you all.”
By the time of the inauguration, Sharon’s aides, working quietly, had negotiated a draft cease-fire accord with Arafat’s men. Sharon himself, despite his vaunted distaste, had spoken twice on the telephone with the rais, in English and without interpreters. He said he would send a trusted emissary to meet with him and his people in Ramallah. He had sent the most trusted of all: Omri.
This could only be interpreted as a positive gesture toward Arafat. Omri went together with Yossi Ginossar, a former Shin Bet man now in business with Palestinian partners who had served both Rabin and Barak as a discreet messenger to the PA. They had two meetings with Arafat, who was attended by Rashid and other aides. Subsequently, Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and the chief Oslo negotiator, Abu Ala, now Speaker of the Palestinian parliament, visited Sharon at the ranch. Sharon proposed a temporary Palestinian state on 42 percent of the land—effectively Areas A and B. This was rejected, unsurprisingly. But on February 28, the draft cease-fire was concluded to end the current violence and resume formal peace negotiations. It would have ended the intifada right at the outset of Sharon’s term.f
The draft was never signed. A senior Palestinian official hinted privately to the Israelis that Arafat had backed away at the last minute. Rashid, the chief go-between, disappeared for several weeks, and when he finally surfaced, he, too, confirmed that “the rais rejected my plan.”4
Sharon, meanwhile, was preparing for his first visit to Washington. The president invited him to come on March 20, barely a fortnight after he took office. That looked like a friendly sign, but it also seemed to indicate that the administration wanted early confirmation of its own assurances to other governments of Sharon’s newfound moderation and perspicacity.
The visit laid the foundation for a remarkable—because so unexpected and seemingly incongruous—empathy between George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon (though it is unsurprising that Bush 43 shrugged off warnings and pejorative depictions of Sharon from members of the Bush 41 administration). For all new Israeli prime ministers, their first visit to Washington is almost an extension of their election victory celebration. For Sharon—and especially given the name and provenance of his host—it was the very acme of his long-yearned-for rehabilitation.
The Israeli press punditry pointed out that the U.S. administration had yet to define detailed policy goals in the region beyond the broad aim of crushing or at least containing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hence, according to the pundits, Sharon had been allowed to drone on about the dangers of terrorism worldwide (he mentioned bin Laden), about Arafat’s inadequacies, and about Israel’s security needs, without Bush pushing him harder on the nitty-gritty issues of the occupation and the intifada.g
But for all of Bush’s broad sympathy with his Israeli guest, the private meeting was not all declamatory. Sharon surprised the president, in the deepest confidence, with a remarkably far-reaching catalog of the areas he would be prepared to cede, and the settlements he would be prepared to dismantle, in the context of an end-of-belligerency agreement with the Palestinians. This would be less than full peace but a substantial interim step on the road to eventual peace (which, in Sharon’s view, could take fifty years to reach). Bush for his part made Sharon promise that despite his loathing for Arafat, and despite the president’s own barely veiled contempt for him, Israel would not physically harm the Palestinian leader.
The violence at home, meanwhile, was steadily escalating. In March 2001, Palestinian suicide bombers attacked civilian targets inside the green line. There had been a spate of such attacks inside Israel during the mid-1990s, but in the “al-Aqsa Intifada” thus far suicide attacks had been confined to the occupied territories, targeting soldiers and settlers. (There had been car bombings and other forms of terror attacks inside Israel.) Israeli Military Intelligence saw the change as a calculated strategic decision and attributed it directly to Arafat. He had given the Islamic organizations the “green light,” Sharon was told.
Shaul Mofaz, then IDF chief of staff and subsequently Sharon’s minister of defense, recalled a clandestine report that reached him on February 11 of a meeting between Arafat, his security chiefs, and key Hamas leaders at which the rais asked, “Why do the Jews not have more deaths?” And he added: “You know what to do.” “That was the day,” said Mofaz, “when he unleashed the wave of suicide assaults inside Israel that grew more and more devastating until it climaxed in the Passover seder attack in the hotel in Netanya a year later.”5
When Arafat asked his question, the Palestinians had sustained more than three hundred dead in the intifada and Israel around sixty. Not all intelligence experts concurred as to the hierarchical nature of the intifada and the measure of blame and responsibility that should be attributed to Arafat. When the suicide bombings multiplied, some argued that individual motivation, especially revenge over the killing or wounding of a close relative, needed to be factored in alongside ideological and organizational aspects to fully analyze and understand the spectacular growth of this ghoulish form of terror.6
Sharon roundly blamed Arafat for everything on the Palestinian side of the intifada, including the suicide bombings. His preoccupation during these early months was over the growing mood of helplessness among the public as the bombings took their arbitrary toll of Israeli civilian lives. But above all, he was concerned about the army’s ability to fight back and win. “In my day, we didn’t know how to do these things,” he observed caustically when treated to a state-of-the-art computer presentation by senior IDF officers early in his term. “But I’ll tell you what we did know how to do. We knew how to fight.”7
He seriously feared that despite the almost immeasurable disparity of military power, the army was incapable of defeating the Palestinian armed uprising. “He felt the army, for all its might, was helpless,” Uri Shani recalled. “Something had gone seriously wrong. The main problems, as Sharon saw it, were unsuitable commanders and inadequate training. The elite units were brilliant, but the regular forces deployed in the West Bank and Gaza—he wasn’t sure they had the capacity to defeat the intifada. For years, Lebanon had been seen as a fighting front, whereas the Palestinian territories were a policing assignment.”8
The prime minister’s concerns were not just tactical. “He felt the IDF, in addition to its operational weaknesses, lacked a basic understanding of the ripple effect of losing … of the need to demonstrate effective military strength if you were going to show flexibility on the diplomatic front.”
In June 2001, after a ghastly Friday night suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv seafront that left 21 teenagers dead and 132 injured, Sharon ordered the army to prepare to enter the casbas, the Palestinian inner cities, in pursuit of terror cells. Chief of Staff Mofaz noted that the soldiers’ lives would be in danger because there weren’t enough ceramic bulletproof vests to go around. Sharon retorted that the emergency stores were full of these vests, so much so that Israel had been supplying them to neighboring Jordan. Mofaz replied that these stores were intended for war. “Kaplanh and I exchanged glances,” Shani remembered. “We knew what was coming. ‘This is war, in case you haven’t understood till now,’ Sharon thundered. ‘We are at war!’ ”
Sharon did not see the hardy and usually aggressive Mofaz as his problem, but rather the echelon of field commanders below the chief of staff. His solution was to take to the field himself. “There were dozens of visits to units in the West Bank,” said Arnon Perlman, Sharon’s close aide and spokesman. “He focused on the colonels and the lieutenant colonels, the men who commanded the brigades and battalions. He would spend hours with them, going over ideas, poring over maps. He would come away feeling the army was not prepared, conceptually, for winning this war. That he needed to shake it up himself.”9
Sometimes he would invite groups of field officers to his office in Jerusalem. He would regale them with accounts of the exploits of Unit 101 in the 1950s and of his anti-terror operations in Gaza in the 1970s. His message never varied: surprise the enemy; throw him off balance; come at him from an unexpected angle; attack, always attack.
For all his nostalgic, blustering exhortations to the officer corps, Sharon as prime minister was a very different, much more cautious commander than the brutal major of the 1950s, the ruthless general of the 1970s, or the intemperate defense minister of the 1980s. “He consciously allowed himself to be restrained, by me, by others,” Minister of Defense Binyamin Ben-Eliezer recalled years later. Sharon ranted and bellowed in fury after particularly heinous terror attacks, demanding instant and massive retribution. “Kill the dog” was his mildest demand, often screamed into the telephone, usually in reference to Arafat. But by the time the first meetings took place with the defense minister and senior IDF officers, the prime minister’s wrath was subsiding and cooler councils prevailed.
Moshe Kaplinsky, who was appointed military secretary to the prime minister in July 2001, said he “quickly discovered that Sharon as prime minister was very different from his image … much more realistic and controlled. He understood that not everything was military force. Yes, I thought restraining him would be part of my job, to the extent that a military secretary can restrain a prime minister. But in intimate consultations I saw how he thought about the ramifications of every move. I saw this was a complex man; not the simplistic advocate of brute force that one had been led to believe.”10
International diplomacy had moved into high gear with the publication of the Mitchell Report on April 30. As we saw, the commission declined to lay the blame on Sharon for triggering the intifada with his visit to the Temple Mount. Nor did it give succor to the Israeli contention that Arafat had preplanned the uprising. But it also spoke movingly about the need to stop the violence and offered a blueprint for a way forward. This included
• an immediate end to the violence;
• an immediate resumption of security cooperation;
• “the Palestinian Authority [should] make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations and to punish perpetrators”;
• “the Government of Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements”;
• “the GOI should ensure … non-lethal responses to unarmed demonstrators”;
• “the PA should prevent gunmen from using Palestinian populated areas to fire upon Israeli populated areas and IDF positions”; and
• “the GOI should lift closures, transfer to the PA all tax revenues owed, and permit Palestinians who had been employed in Israel to return to their jobs.”
The PA announced on May 15 that it accepted the report and supported its immediate implementation. Sharon for his part said Israel accepted the report, too—with two reservations and one condition: it rejected the settlement freeze; it objected to the criticism of the IDF; and it demanded seven days completely free from violence before implementation could begin.
The Mitchell proposals became the basis of American and international diplomacy, with efforts focused on getting the parties to translate their ostensible acceptance into tangible action. Sharon stuck to his seven-day demand, which, given the chaotic situation in the territories, he could confidently assume would not be met. This conveniently enabled him to ignore the initial requirement from Israel in the Mitchell Report: the settlement freeze. In late May 2001, though, in response to mounting international pressure, he proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire, “save for life-threatening instances.” The IDF stopped initiating operations in the territories and tightened its open-fire regulations. The Americans were to procure parallel steps from Arafat, but the most he would agree to was a resumption of meetings between officers for security coordination. This initial, tentative upturn was blown to smithereens at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the Tel Aviv promenade that Friday night in June.
On the following Sunday evening, Sharon visited the injured youngsters and their families at the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. He was not a frequent visitor at hospitals or at gravesides or at the scenes of terror attacks. His aides explained that the security phalanxes around him made such visits burdensome. Not all commentators were convinced. Some recalled pointedly that as defense minister, too, during the Lebanon War, he generally steered clear of hospitals and funeral parlors.
He was visibly moved by the self-discipline of some of the injured Russian immigrant kids, biting back their pain, summoning up a determined smile when the prime minister swept in trailed by a bevy of cameras. “Restraint, too, is a component of strength,” he proclaimed at an impromptu press conference at the hospital. “We are waging a very hard battle indeed. The behavior of the injured boys and girls is truly admirable, as is the behavior of their families, dignified behavior by people who have only recently come to this country.”11
There was nothing impromptu in Sharon’s choice of words. The phrase “restraint is strength” instantly became an aphorism, as its author, Reuven Adler, knew it would. It came to articulate what was seen as the quintessence of the new Sharon: prudent, calm, long-suffering, conscious of the complexities of Israel’s predicament. Sharon enhanced the effectiveness of the phrase by appearing to apply it both to himself and to the young patients smiling through their pain. “When will it all end?” Larissa and Victoria, both encased in plaster, asked him as he walked slowly between the beds in the orthopedic ward. “It’s gone on for a hundred years,” he replied. “Only peace will end such attacks,” one of the girls ventured. “I am trying all I can to bring that about,” the prime minister quietly answered her.
“ ‘Restraint is strength’ worked,” Uri Shani said, looking back, both as a slogan and as a policy, though it was not popular with the Israeli public at the time. Israel did not strike back then. But when it did lash out nine months later, invading the Palestinian cities in Operation Defensive Shield, it enjoyed the broad support of the (post-9/11) Bush administration. “The fact that we restrained ourselves brought us political strength. The image of schoolchildren blown up at a beachfront club touched the world.”12
The upshot was that within months of his coming to power, the visceral fear of Sharon in Israel and around the world largely dissipated. The many Israelis who were convinced, and terrified, that his advent would inevitably mean a drastic escalation in Israel’s response to the intifada, with the concomitant dangers of igniting a regional war, recognized that that wasn’t happening.
Abroad, too, leaders and commentators who had excoriated Israel under Barak for its disproportionate and indiscriminate use of military force against the Palestinians, and had warned direly that Sharon’s election would bring a bloodbath, began to concede that they were wrong. The overall level and intensity of Israel’s military activity remained essentially unchanged for the first year of Sharon’s premiership. Targeted assassinations of Palestinians increased. But the overall rate of Palestinian fatalities never returned to the peaks of October and November 2000, while the number of Israeli victims rose toward the end of 2001 and soared in March 2002.
For many mainstream Israelis, the initial fear morphed into an uneasy distrust. This distrust was never fully to fade. Sharon’s intentions, and even more so his motives, would always be impugned by his detractors and suspected, or at any rate questioned, by the broader public. But the distrust was to be increasingly tempered by two other attitudes that gradually embedded themselves in people’s minds: reliance and, however grudging, admiration. Sharon as national father figure was an image that many people contemptuously eschewed in 2000. Five years later, almost incredulously, they were embracing it.
For Ariel Sharon to preach, and even more so to practice, “restraint is strength” was every bit as dramatic a reversal of his lifelong policies and lifelong image as the disengagement from Gaza four years later. The drama was less apparent at the time, and is perhaps less easy to pinpoint in retrospect, because, unlike the disengagement, it consisted of omission rather than action. Even when he did finally unleash the army, in Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, he did so with restraint—relative to the IDF’s real strength and relative, too, to the initial fears and dire prognostications about what he would do. This reversal of the whole flow of his public life until then led to a surge in his popularity. It would contribute significantly to the support he enjoyed in the broad center and even on the left of the Israeli spectrum when he eventually embarked on the disengagement from Gaza three years later. “Restraint is strength” paved the way for the disengagement.
From Shani’s perspective, “restraint is strength” was also the culmination of his own makeover of Sharon during the previous two years, working closely with Sharon’s son Omri. Though a true expression of the prime minister’s policy, it was also a slogan, an extension, in a way, of the sophisticated sloganeering of the election campaign.
Marketing or reality? Image or substance? For Shani, the etymology seems inextricably blurred.
I’m not talking about marketing. When a man says, I want to be prime minister, and I’m prepared to change my behavior in order to achieve that goal … I won’t be the same man. I’ll behave differently. I’ll consult with people and listen to what they have to say—that’s not just marketing.
Right at the outset I said to him, if you want to be prime minister, you need to have 60 or 70 percent of the people supporting you. If you’re seen as extreme right-wing, you don’t have a chance. If you plonk down settlements all over the place … Omri kept saying: There is a chance. I wasn’t sure. I was sure, though, that he was prime ministerial timber. That he was a man who could take decisions. I said, every time he talks extreme, or thinks extreme, we’ve got to pour a bucket of cold water over him. Like if you have a child who’s hyperactive, you’ve got to give him Ritalin, and give him a balanced diet, and give him a calming environment, because at the end of the day he’s a brilliant child. But if you allow noise and hullabaloo around him, then he’ll be crazy. I’m trying to construct a colorful metaphor. This is Arik Sharon. When he was surrounded by people who worshipped him, who told him all day long, You’re the greatest; you’re a howitzer, you’re the leader of Israel, which he wasn’t, and they boosted the extremist side of his character, of his behavior, of his policy thinking … Look at his relations with the U.S. when he was defense minister—he didn’t give a damn for them—compared with when he worked with us, before he became prime minister and as prime minister.13
What Shani depicts as his and Omri’s successful effort “to bring out the inner Arik” was seen by some of Sharon’s old retainers as a veritable kidnap. “After Lily got ill, Arik started to change,” a former aide recalled sadly. “She was his compass; that’s how he regarded her. Without her, Omri started to run riot. He took control of his father. He took his father to bad places. He sent himself as emissary to Arafat. He said to his father, ‘Let me handle it’…The most painful moment was after the Dolphinarium. We’d got carte blanche from the U.S. to act. Here in Israel there was total consensus that we’ve got to act. And … nothing!”
In this aide’s pained, nostalgia-filled reading, the radical change that took place in Sharon’s policy thinking was brought about by the overwhelming influence of Omri. “ ‘Restraint is strength’? I’m trying to explain to you this joke … The closeness of that family is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate. ‘All for one and one for all’ is a gross, gross understatement of their sense of solidarity. They trusted no one but each other, relied only on themselves.”
Omri, the ousted aide conceded, may genuinely have changed his own views on the conflict with the Palestinians. But Arik—never.
When Arik was minister of infrastructures, I once said to him, “Why don’t you say you’ve got no problem with the Palestinians having a state? What do you care if they call themselves a state, as long as they don’t have an army and an air force and we control their borders?” He nearly threw me out of the window! As prime minister, I once said to him on the phone, “Why don’t you dismantle Netzarim [an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip]? We need two battalions to defend it. Soldiers are getting killed there. Civilians are getting killed. Take it down …” I nearly dropped the phone from the decibel level of his shouts! And then he went and dismantled all the settlements in Gaza.14
Omri listened impassively to an account of this bitter indictment and said only, “I was an easy target. Whoever wanted to attack him attacked me.” He phoned later to say, “You’re overdoing my role, my influence, my views … I wasn’t him.”15
Omri’s diffidence is closer to the truth than Shani’s arrogance or than the spurned aide’s bitter refusal to stomach his adulated leader’s change of heart. “To say that Sharon was an instrument in the hands of Uri and Omri and Reuven Adler is an exaggeration,” Avi Gil, a close aide to Shimon Peres, confirmed. “He was very dominant, very opinionated. Politicians aren’t puppets.” Gil was both an insider and an outsider during the formative period of Sharon’s prime ministership. As Peres’s man, he was not a member of Sharon’s close coterie. And yet the coterie embraced him almost as one of their own, using his professionalism in their diplomatic activities and his interpersonal savvy in helping to keep the Sharon-Peres relationship running smoothly.
There was an informal atmosphere around the prime minister, Gil said, and people were encouraged to bat ideas around. Sharon felt enormously grateful to the people who helped him present an image of himself to the public that made him prime minister. “And they continued to be around him—Uri and Omri and Adler and others. But I do not believe that Sharon was dramatically influenced, in cardinal issues, against his will. He was clever and cunning and endowed with a healthy sense of humor so that he didn’t really care if someone claimed to have influenced him. He could live with it.”16
Another astute insider-outsider perspective came from Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister during this first phase of Sharon’s rule:
Sharon was still totally preoccupied with defense, as he had been his whole life. But as prime minister he saw things differently. If anything, I was the one who wanted to hit out harder, particularly against the suicide bombers and the people behind them. He was for more careful, gradual, and considered actions. Yes, he went into a storming rage after terror attacks. But he knowingly let himself be restrained. He shouted and screamed, “Kill them,” “Assassinations,” “Bomb Arafat.” But then he calmed down, and things were decided differently.
As time went on, he continued to change. I’d known him for many years, in the army and in politics, and I felt it clearly. It was the effect of how he was impacting on the outside world and how the world impacted on him. From a persona non grata he became a legitimate leader and eventually an admired leader. Arik had been through a lot in his life. I’d almost go as far as to call this a brainwash. By Western leaders. By Bush, mainly. By Blair; he liked Blair. By others. They learned his weak points. They saw the gulf between his image and his sensitivities. He was a tough guy—the world likes tough guys—but he was talkable to. By his second year he felt he was being made welcome. This had a fantastic effect. You saw his eyes light up when he talked about Bush or even Mubarak.
It was the effect of his experience as a player on the world stage, Ben-Eliezer believes, that principally accounted for Sharon’s subsequent further transformation, from settlement builder to settlement remover. “I knew he was totally determined to carry through this move. It began long before, with the security fence. Once he’d internalized the need for something, he would go for it, to the end. He was always like that. He had the feeling that the world expected something from him, and from him alone. To make the breakthrough.”17
• • •
While Uri Shani’s boasts—and the old loyalist’s accusation—about Shani’s influence on Sharon’s mind need to be substantially discounted, Shani can justly take credit for running a tight ship at the Prime Minister’s Bureau, imposing iron discipline on everyone, including his boss. The prime minister’s other aides all attribute Sharon’s eventual success and popularity, in no small degree, to the smooth functioning of the bureau, in terms both of its quiet efficiency and of the remarkable—indeed unique in Israeli prime ministerial annals—absence of interpersonal quarrels and rivalries among the close advisers. Years later, still all singing from the same hymnbook, they say of themselves and of each other: We all had big egos; we all left them at the door when we came to work for Sharon; Uri Shani was our model and mentor in this respect.
Even Marit Danon, who faults Shani for overstating his influence on Sharon, praises him as “a very, very good manager. Everything worked. There were no snafus. How does that come about? First, everyone is punctual. Things happen precisely when they’re scheduled. Then there’s the personality of the leader and his relationship to his staff. And finally, the team spirit. This was a very cohesive bureau. None of Sharon’s close aides was sitting there with one eye on his future Knesset career (apart from Gideon Sa’ar, the cabinet secretary). To the present day, we’re almost like one family.”18
Danon’s own presence on the team was due to Shani’s diktat, as he tells it:
When Sharon first came into the bureau, we had a quarrel over the secretary. I’d been there for two weeks ahead of time, organizing things. I decided we want Marit and not Arik’s longtime secretary, Sara Shema. He approved of my other arrangements but balked at that. “What,” he said, “I can’t even have my own secretary?” I said simply, “No, you can’t. You’re the prime minister. You’re not the manager. You’re here to take the political decisions, the military decisions. You don’t run the office.” He agreed. I believed, and still believe, that prime ministers rise or fall on the way their bureaus operate. Of course that’s not 100 percent of the story; but it’s 60 percent at least!
Shani’s despotism extended to the highest officials in the land.
I resolved from the outset that this prime minister would not meet alone, “four eyes only,” with anyone. Not the head of Mossad; not the head of Shin Bet; not the IDF chief of staff—no one. I and the military secretary, or I and the policy adviser, or one of them alone, plus a tape recorder, would be present at every meeting.
Once, after “Gandhi’s”i murder in October 2001, he was sitting with the head of Shin Bet, [Avi] Dichter, together with me and the military secretary and the tape recorder, and the head of Shin Bet says to him, “I’d like to talk to you four eyes only.” The military secretary jumps up and leaves the room. After all, this is the prime minister and the head of Shin Bet. I said, “Sorry, there’s no four eyes.” Arik says to me, “Excuse me, yes?” I say, “You excuse me. There’s no four eyes, Arik. I know what he wants from you in four eyes, and it’s not going to happen.” He went ballistic. He banged on the desk. “I demand to sit with Dichter!” I said, “Look, I’m sorry to have to remind you, but remember Sabra and Shatila? Remember the commission of inquiry? If I leave the room, that’ll be precisely the point on which you won’t be covered at a commission of inquiry. I’m not leaving. Think carefully. If you want me to leave—order me out of the room.” All this in front of Dichter. Arik subsided, and they continued the meeting as though nothing had happened. Arik was crafty; he understood, despite his rage, that I knew something he didn’t know, and wanted only to protect him.
Dichter, in the “six eyes conversation,” asked Sharon to issue a statement explaining that he, as prime minister, had approved the Shin Bet’s not having guarded Ze’evi. Ze’evi had refused to have a close Shin Bet escort, 24/7.
In other words, Dichter was saying, “Give me a rope and I’ll hang you!” I didn’t wait for Arik to answer. I said, “The prime minister will not do that. But I will help you, because you are an excellent head of Shin Bet and we’re in wartime. If we were at peace, Dichter, I’m looking you in the eyes and saying quite frankly, you’d have to go, because the Shin Bet screwed up and a minister was murdered. What do you mean, ‘He didn’t want to be guarded’?! You screwed up. But we’re at war. So you and I together will deal with this thing and fix it. But it won’t touch the prime minister.” Arik just listened. We got up and left the room. I issued a statement in my own name. It was the first I’d ever issued. And there was no commission of inquiry into how and why Gandhi was murdered, which is remarkable when you come to think of it.19j
• • •
After the Dolphinarium, Sharon’s efforts and his time were devoted almost entirely to fighting “the war” and conducting the diplomacy surrounding it. The U.S. administration sent the head of the CIA, George Tenet, to negotiate an immediate cease-fire and implement the Mitchell proposals. After hours of argument, he handed out a “working paper” and demanded a yes-or-no answer.
Sharon said yes. Tenet spent hours with Arafat in Ramallah, lying on the floor of the rais’s office with crippling back pains and haggling with him from this supine position. In the end, Arafat said yes, too, though he wrote Tenet a letter emphasizing the linkage between the Tenet Paper and the Mitchell Report, particularly the section of the report that required an Israeli settlement freeze.
On June 13, the two leaders each announced to his own people a new cease-fire and his acceptance of the Tenet Paper. Arafat’s staff contacted a few of the key Fatah-linked activists and instructed them to hold their fire. Orders were transmitted to the Tanzim youth movement and the al-Aqsa Brigade cells across the Palestinian territories. But the PA did nothing to impose the cease-fire on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Islamist militias. In the ten days following the joint announcement, six Israelis were killed in shootings and bombings in the territories. Within weeks, Tenet’s effort had sunk into oblivion, and the country was in the throes of a new wave of escalation.
Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was under heavy pressure from the Saudis to toughen its stance against Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. Crown Prince Abdullah sent the president a stern letter, calling in question the entire American-Saudi relationship.20 In his response, Bush committed himself, for the first time, to a “viable independent Palestinian state.” In the State Department, too, work was under way on a major Middle East policy speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell, later in the fall, that would signal a more energetic and more evenhanded American approach to Middle East peacemaking.
For Sharon, says the then U.S. ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, this Saudi-U.S. exchange exacerbated his constant anticipation and fear of vigorous U.S. diplomatic intervention in the conflict. This was the ambassador’s explanation of the Israeli leader’s bizarre, provocative—but somehow ultimately canny—behavior in the period following 9/11.
Like every head of government, Sharon put in a condolence call to the president on watching the fall of the Twin Towers. He was called back about twenty-four hours later. He offered his sympathies and solidarity. Bush thanked him and said that now more than ever the United States understood what Israel is up against in its fight against terror. “Then,” Kurtzer recalled, “Bush says, listen, you can do me a favor. I know you’ve authorized Shimon Peres to go meet Arafat. Well, this would be a good time to do it. Sharon says no, I’m not ready to do this now. He gets off the phone, and now you have a split screen: In the Oval Office, they’re pissed, because Sharon is the first person in the world to say no to the president after 9/11, on something that they don’t think is very cosmic. Sharon is pissed because the truck seems to be coming down the highway at him faster than ever.”
The next day, Sharon held a conference call with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “His anxieties and the anxieties of some of the people on that call fed off each other,” Kurtzer recalled.
I heard about it and asked to see him alone. I’d only been here two months, and we didn’t yet have a relationship. But this is what ambassadors do. I tried to explain to him American politics and life after 9/11, which is my job. I told him, you understand what happened to us intellectually, but you don’t understand it emotionally. Because you’re a country that’s been attacked. You’ve been at war for sixty years. We were attacked once, in 1941 … three thousand people is huge. It’s not like anything happened to us, but everything happened to us. And in that context, I said to him, for you to say no to Bush on anything … If he asked you for the moon, the answer had to be yes. Well, he got angry at me, and the answer was no. And this built up and built up and built up to his Munich speech.21k
In the weeks between 9/11 and the Munich speech, both Bush and Sharon made public statements voicing their support for the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state. Sharon, aware that this was the thrust of Bush’s letter to Crown Prince Abdullah, made his statement on September 23 to a gathering of teachers at Latrun, the site of his 1948 brush with death in the bloody, failed battle against the Jordanians. “Israel wants to give the Palestinians what no one else gave them—a state. Not the Turks, the British, the Egyptians, or the Jordanians gave them this possibility.”
In hindsight, this speech was the harbinger of the transformation to come. “His end goal was clearly partition,” says Avi Gil. “That’s why he accepted publicly the principle of a Palestinian state.” But the speech made little impact at the time. No one in Jerusalem or in Washington took Sharon’s declaration too seriously because it was assumed that the borders he was contemplating would be rejected by the Palestinians as inadequate and the security conditions he proposed to demand of them would be unacceptable. No one was thinking at that time in terms of unilateral action. On the far right, nevertheless, the speech deepened suspicions. When Bush spoke, a week later, some of Sharon’s hard-line critics blamed his Latrun speech for the president’s public espousal of Palestinian national aspirations.
Bush’s “vision” of an independent Palestine living at peace alongside Israel was articulated at a press conference in the Oval Office on October 2. “The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision, so long as the right of Israel to exist is respected,” the president said. That was doubtless true, at least since the United States began a dialogue with the PLO in the late 1980s. But it had never been spelled out before so explicitly. The administration was at pains to stress that the new policy pronouncement had been in the works before 9/11. The pundits all presumed, nevertheless, that the decision to go public now was linked to Washington’s efforts to garner Muslim world support for the imminent military assault on Afghanistan.
Then, on October 5, Sharon lashed out at Bush with a pathos and ferocity that left the world aghast. “I appeal to the Western democracies,” Sharon proclaimed in prepared remarks to journalists in Tel Aviv, “and first and foremost the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the terrible mistake of 1938. Then, the enlightened democracies of Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia in return for a temporary, comfortable solution. Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense. We will not be able to accept that. Israel is not Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight against terror.” He went on to review the failed cease-fire efforts and ended: “We can rely only on ourselves. And from today onward, we will rely only on ourselves.”22l
Washington was livid and demanded an immediate retraction. Within a day, Sharon’s office sensibly issued a statement explaining that his words had been misinterpreted. Sharon himself bawled out Ambassador Kurtzer on the phone. “It’s your fault. You stirred things up in Washington. Your reporting of the speech shaped their thinking.” When he finished, Kurtzer replied coldly: “Mr. Prime Minister, you created this crisis. I didn’t even hear your speech, let alone report it.”
In the Munich speech, Sharon’s near-compulsive apprehensiveness over American diplomatic involvement in the conflict seemed to sweep aside all other considerations. His own aides were aghast. “He wrote the speech alone,” one staffer recalled, “in his own hand, and sent it by fax from the ranch. As soon as I read it, I started sweating. I rushed over to Shani, but he said that Sharon was insisting. I phoned him and got shouted at: ‘That’s what I’m going to say, and that’s all there is to it!’ ”
But Sharon read Bush right. Their relationship soon pulled out of this trough and developed into a closeness rarely achieved between leaders of the two countries. “That the president liked Ariel Sharon wasn’t the point,” Aaron Miller explained. “When it came to fighting terror, seeking peace, and promoting democracy, Israel was on the right side of the line. Arafat and the others had chosen the wrong side.”23
Arafat moved with desperate speed not to be caught wrong-footed by 9/11. Initial outpourings of joy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were quickly smothered, on his orders, by the PA’s security forces.24 He called in TV crews to film him giving blood in a Ramallah hospital for those injured in the al-Qaeda attacks. That same evening, a close aide met with three prominent Hamas figures in Gaza to deliver an unequivocal message from the rais. “From now on, you must do nothing that can damage the Authority. If Sharon succeeds in portraying us as terrorists, no one on earth will support us.” The Fatah-linked Tanzim, too, was sternly warned to rein in its men. “We all heard,” the Gaza Tanzim boss, Sammy Abu Samadana, recalled later. “But everyone went back home and did as he pleased.”25
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) certainly did. On October 17, two of its activists trailed the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam “Gandhi” Ze’evi, to his hotel room in Jerusalem and shot him dead. It was an act of revenge for the assassination by Israel of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP leader, ten weeks earlier, and it was a great coup. Ze’evi was not merely the highest-ranking Israeli to be assassinated by Palestinians; he was a symbol and spokesman of the most extreme anti-Palestinian sentiment in Israeli political life. When Sharon, in the run‑up to the election, had sent a greeting card to Arafat for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, Ze’evi commented that he, too, “would have sent Arafat an envelope, but not with a greeting card inside.”26
“The era of Arafat is over,” Sharon declared after Ze’evi’s death, laying the blame on the rais.m The Shin Bet caught two members of the assassination squad and tracked down the others, including the man who masterminded the plot, Ahmed Saadat. They were holed up in Ramallah. Israel gave precise information to the PA and the United States. Arafat ignored the demands that he arrest them.
Sharon’s relentless assault on Arafat’s credibility with Washington was hugely assisted by the saga of a small cargo ship called the Karine A, which Israeli intelligence had been shadowing for weeks toward the end of 2001. Flying a Tongan flag of convenience and commanded by a Palestinian naval officer, the ship had taken on fifty tons of arms and ordnance at the Iranian island of Kish. The weapons were paid for, according to Israeli intelligence, by Fuad Shubaki, head of finance in the PA and Arafat’s confidant.27 When the ship turned toward the Suez Canal, intent on unloading its cargo off the Gaza coast, Israel decided to act. Chief of Staff Mofaz commanded the interception personally on the night of January 3, 2002, from an air force Boeing 707 command-and-control plane high above the Red Sea.
The first person Sharon told about the combined ops success was a man who he knew would appreciate its finer points: the former U.S. Marine Corps general Tony Zinni. “I asked Sharon if I could break the news to Arafat,” the general writes in his memoirs. “I wanted to see the look on Arafat’s face when I told him about it.”28 Zinni had been appointed in November U.S. special envoy to the region. He confronted Arafat with the Karine A on the first day of his second trip. “ ‘That is not true,’ Arafat shot back. ‘This was not our ship. It’s an Israeli plot. This is an Israeli setup.’ ”29
Sharon sent Mofaz to Washington with detailed and unambiguous evidence of Arafat’s personal involvement in the illicit (under Oslo) arms purchase. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, saw the Israeli chief of staff as soon as he arrived. She took the evidence to the president that same evening.30 Arafat made matters worse for himself by writing a letter to President Bush strenuously denying any link to the ship. It was transparently untrue, and Bush took it as a personal insult to his intelligence. “The president wrote him off after that letter,” an American diplomat recalled.
By this time, the intifada violence had spiraled to new heights.
On November 27, a Palestinian disguised as an Israeli soldier sprayed bullets around the bus station in the northern town of Afula, killing 3 and injuring 30. Two days later, a suicide bomber on a bus killed 3 passengers at Hadera. Two days after that a double suicide bombing in the center of Jerusalem left 11 dead and 180 injured. On December 2, the following day, 15 died in a suicide bombing on a bus in Haifa. Hamas claimed responsibility for both of these attacks. On the fifth, an Islamic Jihad bomber apparently detonated his suicide belt prematurely on a street in Jerusalem; several passersby were injured. On the ninth, again in Haifa, a suicide bomber exploded himself at a busy junction, injuring 30. On the twelfth, two suicide bombers injured Israelis traveling in two cars to a settlement inside the Gaza Strip. And on the same day, on the West Bank, 10 bus passengers were killed and 30 injured in an attack outside the settlement of Emanuel. Within hours of this last outrage, the Israeli Air Force had bombed Arafat’s headquarters in Gaza and destroyed his fleet of three helicopters.
Arafat, under intense American pressure, issued orders on December 16 for “a complete halt to all operations, especially suicidal operations.” He vowed to “punish all those who carry out and mastermind such operations.” A lull in the violence followed. Any hope of it lasting was dashed, though, by Sharon’s decision, in mid-January, to authorize the assassination of a prominent and popular Tanzim militant, Raed Karmi. That, at any rate, is how many critics of the prime minister interpreted the even bloodier escalation in the violence in the early months of 2002.
The twenty-seven-year-old Karmi, formerly a PA intelligence officer, had become the undisputed boss of Tulkarm and the surrounding area. In the early months of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Karmi was answerable, at least nominally, to the senior Fatah figure in Tulkarm, Dr. Thabet Thabet, a dentist by profession and a man with many friends in the Israeli peace camp. These friends continued to maintain later that Thabet had remained a moderate and had done his best to rein in the swashbuckling Karmi. But the Shin Bet insisted that Thabet actively instigated attacks by Karmi and his men on settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. Ehud Barak accepted this extrajudicial indictment cum conviction, and Thabet was assassinated outside his home on December 31, 2000, by an army sharpshooter.
Thabet’s killing divided Israelis. But Karmi’s act of brutal revenge united them and marked him as a doomed man. Two young Tel Avivans were espied in a Tulkarm restaurant on January 23, 2001. They had come, with an Israeli-Arab friend, to buy provisions for their own restaurant on Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv’s trendy downtown drag, a million light-years from the intifada. Karmi and his thugs kidnapped them at gunpoint, drove them out of town, and shot the two Jews dead. They sent the Arab home to tell the tale.
Karmi was arrested by PA police and briefly jailed in Ramallah. But he easily escaped. For the whole of the next year he evaded Israeli hunter-helicopters and undercover hit teams while continuing to take his toll of Israeli lives, mainly on the West Bank roads but also inside Israel. In January 2002, with the new cease-fire spreading a partial and precarious quiet,n the Shin Bet tracked Karmi to his latest paramour and found that he was carelessly visiting her at the same time every morning, when her husband was out of the house. In his terrorist activities, the Shin Bet told the prime minister, Karmi was blithely ignoring the cease-fire, even though he had assured his Fatah superiors and an EU diplomat sent to pacify him that he would abide by it. He had two suicide belts ready for use and could send them on deadly assignment at any time. He was a “ticking bomb” and thus a legitimate target for elimination. Senior IDF officers and Minister of Defense Ben-Eliezer opposed Karmi’s assassination at this time. They argued it would trigger a wave of reprisals. They believed that Arafat had been so weakened by 9/11 and compromised by the Karine A that the cease-fire might hold this time and perhaps be widened into a general pacification. But Sharon preferred the advice of the Shin Bet’s chief, Dichter, and Chief of Staff Mofaz, and the order went out: kill him.
The means chosen was a roadside bomb, hidden in a wall. Israel was to feign ignorance; such devices were used in internecine feuds among the Palestinian militants. But someone in the Prime Minister’s Bureau was indiscreet, and within hours the true story was out. Marwan Barghouti, the best-known Fatah-Tanzim leader on the West Bank, responded at a press conference in Ramallah: “If there is no security for the people of Tulkarm, there will be none for the people of Tel Aviv. The cease-fire is dead. Sharon has opened the gates of hell.”31
Three days later, on January 17, a young Palestinian walked into a bar mitzvah celebration in Hadera, just across the green line from Tulkarm, pulled out an M16 assault rifle, and emptied two magazines into the celebrants. Six died and dozens were wounded. The assailant was finally shot dead. In Tulkarm, militants rejoiced on the streets, firing their rifles in the air. The cease-fire collapsed. Following Raed Karmi’s killing, the al-Aqsa Brigades attached to Fatah threw off any previous inhibitions about crossing the green line. A grisly rivalry developed with Hamas and Islamic Jihad over which organization could send more successful suicide bombers into Israel proper.
Sharon’s prime ministership was approaching a critical point; many of the key players were still not resigned to his durability as the long-term national leader. He was losing height in the polls, week after week. After a suicide bombing on December 1 in downtown Jerusalem, crowds had gathered on the hosed-down pedestrian mall, chanting “Sharon, go home” for the first time. “They’re right,” he told his aides in his New York hotel, preferring to hear the literal meaning of the ominous mantra. He ordered his U.S. visit cut short and his plane readied to return home at once.32
The sharpest slippage in his standing was happening within his own rightist constituency. “You keep shouting, and I’ll keep fighting terrorism,” he told an unruly gathering of the Likud central committee some months before. The committee members didn’t like his talk of restraint being strength. They applauded politely when the prime minister came into the hall but exploded into a paroxysm of cheering and chanting when Netanyahu made his entrance. Netanyahu spoke of the “three years of relative quiet” under his government. He was at his most disingenuous when he voiced his ostensible approval for the three tenets of Sharon’s policy: “No negotiations under fire.” “But there are!” the audience bayed back, as he knew they would. “No negotiations under terror.” “But there are!” they shouted. “Jewish blood shall not be cheap.” “But it is. It is!”33
On his left flank, too, Sharon’s situation was not reassuring. Labor had gone through an ugly primaries process, replete with accusations of fraud and vote rigging, and had eventually installed Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer as its new leader. That was good from Sharon’s standpoint: the other candidate, Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg, had pledged to take the party out of Sharon’s coalition. But Ben-Eliezer would be awaiting the right opportunity for Labor to secede, if not over defense policy, then over domestic issues. The party could hardly go into a general election as the docile junior partner in a government run by Arik Sharon.
The attack in Hadera was followed later in January by a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. The bomber was a young woman, carrying more than twenty-two pounds of explosives on her body. During February the attacks intensified. On the tenth, two soldiers were killed in a bold assault on the main gate of the IDF’s Southern Command headquarters at Beersheba. On the fourteenth, Hamas militants set off a massive 420-pound charge under an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip. Five days later, six soldiers were shot dead by two Fatah al-Aqsa Brigades assailants who calmly walked up to their roadblock west of Ramallah, pulled out rifles from under their jackets, and opened fire.
On March 3, seven reservist soldiers and three civilians were killed at another West Bank roadblock. On March 14 in the Gaza Strip, the same armored corps regiment sent out another of its tanks to patrol the same road, and once again Hamas was lying in wait. The charge, 220 pounds of high explosives, tore through the Israeli-made Merkava, killing three of its crew. The pain and shame felt nationwide were exacerbated by resentment toward the settlers. Army officers had complained about the poor positioning of the West Bank checkpoint, but the settlers insisted on having it just there because it “gave them a sense of security.” The tank’s mission had been to scour the road ahead of a school bus from Netzarim, the Gaza Strip’s most isolated settlement, which required three whole army regiments to protect it.
For the Palestinians, the roadblocks, like the tanks, were iconic symbols of their occupation and suffering. The suicide bombers were their “strategic weapon,” their answer, as they insisted, to the disparity of firepower between the IDF and their own guerrilla forces.
By March 2002, suicide bombings, interspersed with shooting attacks, were an almost daily occurrence, not only in Jerusalem and the other Israeli cities near the green line, but in Tel Aviv and Haifa, too. On March 9, Café Moment, literally around the corner from the heavily guarded official residence of the prime minister in Jerusalem, was blown up by a Hamas suicide bomber, leaving 11 dead and 54 injured. On March 20, a suicide bombing on a bus in the north killed 7. Another in Jerusalem the next day killed 3 and injured 80.
Israel’s main cities took on the aspect of ghost towns. Half-empty buses plied half-empty streets. Car drivers steered clear of them, in case they exploded. Shopping malls and markets echoed eerily to the footsteps of the few hardy customers who still ventured into them. Restaurants and cafés, those that stayed open, were mostly empty; many of them were now patrolled by uniformed civilian guards. Hotels were empty, too, as tourism dried up to a wartime trickle. Businessmen arranged their meetings with overseas partners and clients in nearby Cyprus. Foreign airlines also took to flying over, empty, to Cyprus to spend the night there and return briefly to Tel Aviv in the morning to pick up the few customers who were still flying. International sporting fixtures took place abroad: no teams would come to Israel. The economy was reeling. But, more seriously, so was the people’s confidence that this plague of indiscriminate carnage could be defeated.
Not since the terrible first days of the Yom Kippur War did such a pall of depression descend on the nation. Back then, Israelis faced an existential threat as two large and well-equipped armies broke through Israel’s lines and seemed poised to advance toward the heartland. Now, with the Jewish state much stronger and more populous, small and relatively weak Palestinian paramilitary groups posed what on paper ought to have been a policing problem. And yet the fear and uncertainty that gripped ordinary families were making for an ominous corrosion of national resilience. Mothers trembled and wept, literally, as they sent their children to school in the morning. The ubiquity and unpredictability of the suicide attacks were turning ordinary urban life into Russian roulette. The impossibility of deterring on pain of death someone who was determined to die imbued all the precautions and protective measures with a sense of despair.
Preventive intelligence, moreover, seemed increasingly useless as the “profile” of the suicide bomber morphed from the young, male, religious fanatic to a broad and inclusive swath of Palestinian society. Male and female, religious and secular, illiterate and intellectual, poor and well-to-do, unemployed refugee camp dweller and yuppie—all were represented among the bombers and would-be bombers. Intifada activists, both Islamist and secular, were swamped during this period with people clamoring to be strapped up with a suicide belt and sent out to die. Their motivations were as varied as the candidates’ backgrounds. Religious zeal and an entrancement with death and heaven still inspired many youngsters to volunteer. But increasingly, experiences of personal injury or humiliation of the bombers or their close relatives at the hands of Israeli forces furnished the fury that drove them to kill and die. Often, of course, motives were mixed and confused.
Suicide bombings accounted for barely one half of 1 percent of the violent attacks on Israelis during the intifada. But they accounted for almost half of the deaths incurred in those incidents. They accounted, too, for Sharon’s plummeting popularity in March 2002 and for the sense in Jerusalem that the long-predicted invasion of the West Bank towns and military takeover of the entire territory were now inevitable and imminent.
Despite the escalating violence, talks led by the U.S. peace envoy, Tony Zinni, were succeeding in narrowing gaps. On March 24, the tough-talking general presented the two sides with what he called “the Zinni Bridging Proposals.” These were designed to secure an immediate cease-fire and then move to implementation of the Tenet Paper.
The Israeli reply to Zinni was delivered at 2:00 a.m. on March 27, straight from Sharon’s office. The two IDF negotiators, Major General Giora Eiland and Brigadier General Eival Gilady, had asked to see Sharon. They were ushered in at midnight. “Sharon made us work very hard,” Eiland recalled later. “What if, what if, what if?” But the two officers persuaded him not to unpick any particular provision but to accept the whole package. Eiland was ready to wait with the good news till the morning, but Gilady said, “We’ve kept the prime minister busy till two a.m. Let’s get Zinni busy as well.” They phoned the American envoy, and Gilady formally announced: “The state of Israel accepts your proposals and we are ready to implement them from tomorrow.” Zinni, half awake, replied, “You’ve got to be kidding. You accept it?” He ordered his State Department aide, Aaron Miller, “to push as hard as you possibly can with the Palestinians.”34
Miller, however, ran into a wall of Palestinian procrastination. “Now under ‘house arrest’ in his compound in Ramallah, Arafat was focused much more on trying to get the Israelis to let him out than he was on saying yes or no to Zinni’s ideas.”35 Zinni faulted Sharon for making “a hero, a martyr, and a victim out of Arafat. The American government pressed him to let Arafat go, but the gut hatred between those two is so bad he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Of course, this enhanced Arafat’s stature on the street.”
Zinni and Miller were at a Passover seder at the home of an Israeli official when the upshot of Arafat’s dithering and Sharon’s vindictiveness struck home. “During the meal,” Zinni writes, “news came of a horrific suicide bombing at a Passover celebration in a hotel restaurant, with heavy casualties. This bombing had a tremendous effect on the people of Israel. It was their 9/11.”36
For Israelis, Yom Kippur and the Passover seder are the most widely observed religious rituals of the year. But Passover eve is more than a religious time. It is the time when families get together. They bond through eating, drinking, singing the ancient hymns, and talking. For Israelis, the suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya on Passover eve, which took 28 lives and left 140 injured, was a national trauma. “I knew immediately we had come to the end of our road,” Zinni writes. For Sharon, as all his aides instinctively knew, it was the end of his first period as prime minister. “Restraint is strength” would not be abandoned, but both sides of the equation would now be adjusted: there would be less restraint and much more strength.
Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF invasion of all the major West Bank towns apart from Jericho and Hebron, and many of the major refugee camps, was decided on that same night. The operation should be limited to the West Bank, the army proposed, since the fence encircling Gaza was proving almost hermetically effective against terror incursions from there. The inner cabinet met and quickly endorsed the army’s plans. Orders went out to start preparations. Sharon knew he had the nation behind him.
At the full cabinet the next night, Sharon added his voice to those of the ministers like Silvan Shalom and generals like Mofaz who demanded that Arafat be deported and never allowed back. Peres argued against this. “I don’t want another Jesus story on our shoulders,” he said. “Arafat outside could be no less effective than Arafat inside … Arafat is also a political leader, not just the leader of a former terrorist organization.”37 The heads of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence also all spoke against expelling Arafat. They warned he might resist and be hurt, or even take his own life, if Israeli soldiers tried to capture him. Sharon finally relented, as he may well have intended to do from the outset. His original promise to Bush had not expired, and Powell now phoned to remind him of it. The cabinet’s eventual decision was to declare Arafat (though not the PA) an “enemy” who would be “isolated” in his muqata compound “at this stage.” The last three words were added by Sharon to imply the threat of further action later.
That same night, IDF armored columns began trundling toward Ramallah and Bethlehem, and emergency call‑up notices went out to more than thirty thousand reservists.38 It was the biggest mobilization since the Lebanon War. “We are at war,” Sharon declared in a television broadcast. “A war for our home.” Israel had done everything possible to attain a cease-fire, “and in return we have got only terror, terror, and more terror.” Arafat, he said, was “an enemy of the free world and a danger to peace in the region.”
The reservists’ response to the sudden summonses was dramatically better than the usual turnout for reserve duty, when shirking and bellyaching are fairly widespread. The tanks and armored personnel carriers were “oversubscribed” in many units, and soldiers literally scrambled for a place on board. The army encouraged media coverage; the reservists interviewed all sounded positive about the operation despite their own natural apprehensions and discomfort. Some sounded outright jingoistic. If any further spur were needed, it came in the form of another ghastly suicide bombing, on March 31, this time in a busy restaurant in Haifa. Fourteen people died and forty were injured. Again, as at Netanya, Hamas claimed responsibility.
Invading the zones ruled by the PA was not in itself a wholly new departure for IDF ground forces. They had been making incursions into the Palestinian towns for several months, in pursuit of suspects or in the wake of a terror attack. Usually, these raids focused on a specific building or cluster of buildings where militants were thought to be hiding. Shin Bet men accompanied the troops, and the initial purpose was to arrest the suspects, though the raids often ended in firefights. The operations were usually wound down at dawn or, at most, extended for a couple of days. If they went on longer, admonitions from Washington helped expedite the withdrawal.
Defensive Shield was different. Beyond its sheer size, it was open-ended; it embraced the refugee camps as well as the towns; and the initial American reaction was mild, though it got tougher later. The formal goals were vaguely worded. IDF Central Command was to make war on terrorists and those who sent them on their missions. It was to dismantle infrastructures of terror, to hit at terror activists and suspects, and to “levy a price from the Palestinian Authority.” It was unclear from this wording whether the purpose was to bring about the total collapse of the PA and a return to direct Israeli administration of the West Bank. In any event, that did not happen.
The nighttime raids had never ventured into the hearts of the densely built refugee camps. Run by the various militant groups, which often clashed with each other, they had been virtual no-go areas even for the PA police. At the end of February, however, a month before Defensive Shield, a decision was made to raid simultaneously two important camps, Balata near Nablus and Jenin camp, near the town of Jenin. The two crack infantry brigades, Golani and the Paratroopers, carried out the operation, which went far more smoothly than had been feared. There was armed resistance in both camps. The IDF lost two. The Palestinians lost dozens. “Collateral” killing, the euphemism for civilian casualties, was relatively light.
To avoid explosive booby traps that the defenders had planted all around the likely access routes, the soldiers advanced through the houses instead of along the streets. This involved drilling or sometimes blasting holes through the walls of people’s homes. A week later, the army surrounded the refugee camp at Tulkarm, trapping some fifty armed militants within. With the memory of Balata and Jenin still fresh, they were persuaded to give in without a fight. They filed out stripped to the waist and holding their weapons above their heads, as television cameras captured the moment.
This experience and these tactics served the IDF in many of the incursions that made up Defensive Shield. In the words of a UN report, “The operation began on 29 March with an incursion into Ramallah, followed by entry into Tulkarm and Qalqilya on 1 April, Bethlehem on 2 April, and Jenin and Nablus on 3 April. By 3 April, six of the largest cities in the West Bank, and their surrounding towns, villages and refugee camps, were occupied by the Israeli military.” In many of the actions, Palestinian resistance was scattered, disorganized, and ineffective.
Ramallah fell without much of a fight. By midnight on the night of the twenty-eighth, Israeli infantry had taken over the radio station in the center of town. By dawn, the muzzles of IDF tank barrels were pointing at Yasser Arafat from virtually under his office window. The tanks had smashed down the main gate of the muqata complex. The soldiers first swarmed over the prison wing, where the PA was ostensibly holding the killers of Minister Rehavam Ze’evi; the man who sent them, Ahmed Saadat; and Fuad Shubaki, who Israel believed was behind the Karine A. But they had been spirited away to Arafat’s own suite just minutes ahead of the invading force. The Israelis freed twenty-six men held in the prison cells as collaborators, then blew up the building. They shelled and bulldozed other buildings in the compound and shut off water and electricity supplies to the central block where Arafat and some four hundred aides and guards were holed up, effectively under siege. Sporadic shooting continued for four days, until a group of Israeli and foreign peace activists managed to slip through the army’s lines and join the beleaguered rais and his motley forces. Their presence deterred further gunfire.
Bethlehem also fell easily, but there, too, the IDF was dragged into an extended siege situation. Due to a snafu by a heli-borne commando unit that was to have surrounded and sealed off the Church of the Nativity, more than two hundred Palestinian militants, retreating before the invading force, were able to take refuge inside the ancient Christian shrine. Thirty-nine days of complicated negotiations followed, accompanied by sporadic exchanges of rifle fire that took its toll of the venerable stonework. The church, with its web of subterranean chapels, suffered other damage and desecration, too. The Greek, Latin, and Armenian monks who share the shrine according to rigid, time-encrusted rules tried to continue their sacred rites despite the siege. Some donated food to the hungry militants; others surrendered it less willingly. The Israelis allowed in some food, sometimes. Palestinian civilians managed to boost supplies by throwing packages from the surrounding rooftops into the church precincts. European and American diplomats labored to bring the episode to a bloodless end.
If the Palestinians holed up in the church showed disregard for its historic treasures, some Israeli forces displayed callous contempt, and in some cases outright covetousness, for the property of Palestinian civilians caught up in the fighting. The couple dozen indictments filed in military courts after Defensive Shield hardly did justice to the widespread looting and vandalism that some units, particularly reservist units, left in their trail. Tanks in some cases made no effort to avoid crushing cars, electricity pylons, and water hydrants under their treads.
In Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank, the IDF scored its smoothest military success. The old casba of the town was seen as a formidable militant stronghold, and the IDF pitted against it top-flight infantry regulars backed by tanks. Over four days of street fighting, the Israelis pushed hundreds of militants into a small area of the casba where, on April 8, they eventually surrendered. Just one IDF officer was killed in the fighting and more than seventy Palestinians. Most of the dead were fighters, but the figure included a family of eight, wiped out by a stray tank shell.
In nearby Jenin refugee camp, meanwhile, the Israeli operation was anything but smooth. Hamas and Fatah activists set aside their ideological differences to fight together under the command of a former PA officer, Abu Jendal. He divided the camp into small zones and sowed each of them with mines and booby traps. His fighters, operating in small, well-coordinated groups, put up dogged and effective resistance to the cumbersome advance of an IDF reserve division. The Israelis called in attack helicopters, but their daily forward movement was still slow and labored, and they were taking casualties.
With Defensive Shield still in train, Arafat in palpable peril, and Jenin still unvanquished, Bush began to signal that his forbearance was running out. He had been unequivocal in his initial, sympathetic support of the operation and had made it clear that for him the Israeli action was part of the global war against terror that he had declared after 9/11. But now he had an announcement:
I’ve decided to send Secretary of State Powell to the region next week to seek broad international support for the vision I’ve outlined today … an immediate and meaningful cease-fire, an end to terror and violence and incitement; withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah; implementation of the already agreed upon Tenet and Mitchell plans, which will lead to a political settlement.
Tony Zinni, still in the region, went to see Arafat ahead of the secretary’s arrival. “Sharon didn’t object. So my security guys saddled up in their SWAT gear—black helmets, Kevlar, the whole deal—and off we went … By then, Arafat’s Muqata headquarters had been turned into Berlin in the spring of 1945.” The Americans had to clamber over rubble and file into the beleaguered headquarters one by one, under the rifles of nervous Palestinian guards. “The place smelled bad,” Zinni recalled. “Things were grim. I met Arafat in a dimly lit little room; there was a semiautomatic weapon by his side. All his aides looked like drowned rats, stressed out and beaten; but he was in his glory, upbeat and animated, more alert and fired up than I had ever seen him. The siege had brought out the fighter in him. ‘I am under siege,’ he announced dramatically, enjoying the hell out of the moment.”39
Sharon made it clear to the secretary of state that the reoccupation of the towns was not going to be indefinite. “But there are some objectives that still have to be achieved.”40 One of these objectives was taking Jenin refugee camp, where the Israeli reservists were still being held off by the well-organized defenders. On April 10, the IDF took its worst casualties in the campaign when an infantry unit was ambushed in the heart of the camp and suffered thirteen dead. After that, the army used armored bulldozers to smash its way through wide swaths of densely populated alleys and courtyards. Helicopter gunships and tanks rained fire on the defenders.
The battle reached its inexorable end during Powell’s visit. Most of the Palestinian fighters surrendered. Abu Jendal, their commander, died fighting. But the Palestinians, defeated by overwhelming force, briefly threatened to turn the tables on Sharon as they had done in Beirut twenty years before—with a world-shaking accusation of massacre. For several days, the region and the world were once again engulfed in allegations that Israeli soldiers under Sharon’s command had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Palestinians. Moreover, unlike at Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis were not just vicariously responsible; they had actually shot, bombed, and bulldozed the victims to death.
This time, though, there was no massacre. In fact, despite the length and intensity of the fighting and the scale of the destruction in the center of Jenin camp, there were relatively few fatalities. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to UN figures, and twenty-three Israeli soldiers. Most of the Palestinians were armed fighters, though some were innocent civilians caught in the imbroglio. Most of the inhabitants of the camp managed to flee to the neighboring town of Jenin before the fighting began.
The massacre canard had many fathers, among them the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who spoke on television of war crimes and five hundred dead, and the UN envoy Terje Larsen, who went into the camp on April 15 and told reporters, “I am shocked at the sight and smell of corpses and destruction … This is horrifying beyond belief.” But the Israelis themselves carry much of the blame for their own discomfiture. The IDF spokesman, Ron Kitri, spoke of an estimated two hundred Palestinian dead. Worse yet, he and his bosses sealed off the whole Jenin area from local and foreign press coverage for several days. The IDF and Shin Bet commanders on the scene made matters still worse by taking large numbers of Palestinian men away from Jenin for questioning and then releasing them miles from home with no means of communicating with their beleaguered families.
For Yasser Arafat, beleaguered himself in Ramallah, Jenin was his “Stalingrad,” as he put it, a victory of Palestinian arms and honor. But when Powell came to see him twice at the muqata, much against Sharon’s wishes, he gave the secretary nothing with which Powell could push back in Washington against the neocons, the pro-Israel lobby, and the powerful conservative Christian forces within the Republican constituency that were becoming increasingly vocal against the Palestinian leader. Arafat claimed he had been effectively neutralized by the Israeli attacks on the PA. But Powell said, “You still have influence and authority … and that’s what we’re looking for you to use.”41 He left the region after ten frustrating days, and with nothing to show for them. He spoke vaguely of a possible peace conference and his intention to return, but the administration was not behind him.
The charge that Israel used disproportionate force in Defensive Shield was powerfully reinforced by the scenes of destruction at the camp, and it resulted in a UN Security Council resolution on April 19 calling for an inquiry into “recent events in the Jenin refugee camp.” Israel initially went along with the UN demand. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” said Sharon’s spokesman for the foreign media, Ra’anan Gissin. The U.S. delegation drafted the Security Council resolution. But soon after, senior army generals persuaded Ben-Eliezer, and together they persuaded Sharon, that they could not afford to cooperate with a UN inquiry for fear that this process might end up with Israeli officers facing charges in an international court.
The upshot was a convenient trade-off: the Americans engineered the quiet demise of the UN inquiry; Israel lifted the sieges in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Some creative diplomacy by Britain gave Sharon a sufficiently face-saving solution to his demand that the wanted men besieged in the muqata and in the Church of the Nativity not be released. Tony Blair had tried to persuade Sharon back in November that Arafat could never agree to hand over Ahmed Saadat, Fuad Shubaki, and the others but that he might agree to British monitors assisting in their Palestinian imprisonment. “Is that offer still on the table?” Sharon’s aide Danny Ayalon now asked the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, Sherard Cowper-Coles, in an out-of-the-blue telephone call.42 A week later, Andrew Coyle, a former governor of the famously austere Brixton Prison, waited outside Sharon’s office door at midnight while Cowper-Coles and Dan Kurtzer, his American counterpart, argued within over the conditions under which Saadat, Shubaki, and the four others would be held in a PA jail in Jericho, with Coyle supervising. “He wants to see you,” Cowper-Coles came out and told the tough ex-warden. “Tell him exactly what it’s like in Brixton for an IRA prisoner.” It was not going to be quite like that for the Palestinians. But Sharon was apparently satisfied by Coyle’s no-nonsense mien and agreed.43
The siege in Bethlehem ended a week later, after complicated negotiations involving Muhammad Rashid for the PA, the Tel Aviv CIA station officer for the Americans, and a former British MI6 agent, Alastair Crooke, representing the EU. Thirteen Palestinians with Israeli “blood on their hands” were deported to Cyprus aboard a British RAF plane; twenty-six more were exiled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip; and the remaining eighty-four Palestinians in the church (a hundred-odd had been allowed to leave earlier) were released to their homes.
Defensive Shield was over. Some 260 Palestinians had been killed,o thousands injured, and close to two thousand arrested. Most of the Palestinian dead were armed men, but there were many innocent deaths and injuries and widespread damage to property. The Israelis had lost 34 soldiers, 23 of them in Jenin. Another 60 Israelis had been killed in terror attacks during the period of the operation. One of the bloodiest, on May 7, was a suicide bombing in a gaming club in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv. Fifteen people died, and 55 were injured in that attack; Hamas claimed responsibility.
Still, the surge of terror deaths seemed to be receding. April’s figure was lower than March’s, and May’s would hopefully end lower than April’s. Clearly, Defensive Shield had not “solved” the problem. But it had salved the pernicious spread of helplessness and despair within Israeli society. It might not have been a military masterstroke. Perhaps no such stroke is possible in a regular army’s struggle against armed militants. But by seizing the initiative, it restored Israelis’ confidence in their state and their army and, by extension, in their prime minister.
This restored confidence, which showed dramatically in the polls, stemmed both from the massive deployment of military power and from a notable moderation in its use. This was Sharon’s only war as prime minister, as it turned out, and he ran it very differently from his past military campaigns. With tens of thousands of soldiers under arms and on the move, the death and devastation in the Palestinian territories could have been of an entirely different dimension. Given the firepower he had mobilized, he unleashed relatively little of it. For all his banging on the table and barking at his generals, he kept Defensive Shield within the confines of his new, prime ministerial weltanschauung: restraint is strength.p
Arafat marked his release from five months of siege with a stately progress by helicopter and car through the battered towns of the West Bank on May 13. He met with bereaved families, embraced orphans, spoke words of encouragement to injured people. But the public at large was largely absent from the streets. The rais’s return was far from triumphal. Commentators put this down to the unpopularity of the deal he had struck in Bethlehem, especially the deportation of some of the men trapped in the church. One place where enthusiastic crowds did gather was the Jenin camp. But Arafat, apparently fearing local Islamic radicals, declined to leave his car. His convoy swept past the battered camp. In the months that followed, Arafat did not leave the muqata much. He did not go abroad, or even visit Gaza, apparently for fear that Israel would not let him return.
Arafat owed his freedom above all to Crown Prince Abdullah. He was effectively the Saudi ruler; King Fahd, his half brother, was elderly and not really functioning by this time. Abdullah had flown to Crawford, Texas, on April 25 and virtually threatened Bush with a major rupture in relations if Arafat continued to be besieged by the Israelis.
Abdullah had recently proposed peace and normalization between Israel and all the Arab countries in return for the creation of a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. The key issue of Palestinian refugees was “to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” “Agreed” meant Israel could not be forced. It signified Arab recognition that most of the refugees and their descendants would not return to Israel. Commentators presumed the plan was floated to curry favorable sentiment in the West following 9/11, in which most of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Nevertheless, this was the first time the Saudis had expressly held out the prospect of Israel’s full acceptance into the Arab region. In normal circumstances, Prince Abdullah’s plan would have had a powerful impact on Israeli public opinion. In fact, it was barely noticed. It was submitted to and approved by the Arab Summit in Beirut on the very day of the suicide bombing at the hotel in Netanya. Instead of a wave of hope and encouragement, Palestine was swept by a new wave of violence. Sharon gave the plan a cautious and perfunctory welcome.
For the Palestinian president, Defensive Shield had been a heavy, though not a mortal, blow. Ironically, the IDF’s attacks on the PA security forces and its ransacking of government buildings vindicated Arafat’s claim that he was powerless to impose his authority on Hamas and the other militant groups. The Israelis, however, were past caring, having effectively given up on any security cooperation with the rais and his multiheaded security apparatus.
In many of the towns and refugee camps, street power now passed to the militants, with armed gangs of al-Aqsa Brigades and others roaming around uninhibited, brandishing their weapons, and meting out summary and brutal justice to alleged collaborators with Israel. Ramallah and Jericho were the last redoubts of PA military control. Much of the PA’s civil administration managed to continue functioning, though—schools, hospitals, municipal services. But without effective policing, law enforcement and tax collection faltered. Daily life deteriorated. Freedom of movement, which had been hampered by Israeli roadblocks since the start of the intifada, was now even more severely constrained. Roads between villages, even between neighborhoods in the same town, were severed by mounds of earth or concrete cubes piled up by army bulldozers. The effect on the economy was direct and disastrous. Tens of thousands of working people joined the lists of the unemployed. Many of them turned to the Hamas-affiliated welfare agencies for material help.
By forcibly reopening the whole of the West Bank to IDF and Shin Bet control, Defensive Shield contributed in time to the suppression of the intifada, and in particular to the detection and prevention of suicide bombings. Nevertheless, Defensive Shield gave Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, pause for thought about the limits of military power deployed against a nation in revolt. Despite the show of force, despite the killing and capturing of militants, among them senior figures in the various armed organizations, despite the deployment of the army and the Shin Bet throughout the West Bank, terror attacks continued. More and more influential Israelis now joined the growing clamor among the public for a “security fence,” a barrier between the West Bank and Israel that would physically block the suicide bombers on their way to murder and death. Barak had ordered staff work on the fence toward the end of his term, but when Sharon swept him from office, the idea seemed to have been swept out with him.
Sharon’s popularity surged after Defensive Shield, but so did support for the fence. In a Maariv poll published in June 2002, 69 percent of those questioned favored building a fence, and only 25 percent opposed it. “Perhaps this is the secret of the fence’s broad popularity,” wrote the analyst Chemi Shalev. “It’s both a physical barrier and a symbolic, emotional bulwark, an opaque screen behind which people feel they can push the Palestinians and all the grief they bring with them and, as far as most people are concerned, the settlers too.”
Sharon could no longer ignore the public demand. On June 23, the cabinet formally approved plans for the first stage of the separation fence. It would stretch for seventy miles, from Salem on the northwestern tip of the West Bank south to Kassem, opposite Netanya. It would hug the old green line on parts of its route but would periodically belly into the West Bank to encompass major Israeli settlements. Some of this bellying would take in Palestinian villages, too. Two other small stretches of fence were also approved, north and south of Jerusalem, both of them on West Bank land. The Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new department that would supervise construction of this first stage and prepare for the subsequent stages that would eventually seal off the entire West Bank.
For Sharon, the decision to build the fence was his first substantive break with the settlers and with the pristine dogma of “Greater Israel.” This was not mere talk of a hypothetical Palestinian state arising from a hypothetical negotiation at some vague time in the future; it was the tangible and immediate consequence of unilateral action that the government was taking. It would mean that farther-flung settlements that Sharon himself had deliberately located in the Palestinian heartland would find themselves on the wrong side of a fence. Sharon and the ministers could contend all they wished that the fence was solely a security barrier with no political significance. No one believed that, least of all the settlers who would be crossing through it each day on their way to and from work in Israel.
The long struggle on which Sharon now embarked—against the Palestinians, against the Americans, against world opinion, and against Israel’s own high court—over the precise route of the separation fence was itself the most convincing proof that he understood full well that the fence would become the baseline for a future border. Arguably, Sharon’s decision to build the fence was no less momentous or historically significant than his later decision to disengage from Gaza and dismantle the settlements there and in the northern West Bank. The two decisions, in fact, need to be seen as an integral progression along a path of unilateralism that Sharon was steadily adopting as his overarching strategy toward the conflict.q
Unilateralism could exist and flourish, however, only to the extent that the international community, and especially of course the Americans, forbore to insist on bilateralism—that is, on a credible peace negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. As his good luck would have it, the very next day after the fence decision by the cabinet in Jerusalem, Sharon and the world received public and formal confirmation from Washington that as far as George W. Bush was concerned, negotiation with Yasser Arafat was no longer a viable option.
“Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership,” the president declared in a long-expected, meticulously drafted statement on the Middle East. With Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice at his side in the Rose Garden of the White House, Bush called “on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.” Bush’s message was starkly clear: as long as Arafat stood at the head of the Palestinian people, the United States would not be promoting or supporting their claim to statehood.
Bush reiterated his “vision of two states living side by side in peace and security.” But he immediately added—and this was critical in Sharon’s eyes—“There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror.” The order of business, then, was to be: first fight terror, and only then make progress toward peace. “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.” Even the short-range American demands, that Israel pull back its troops to the pre-intifada line and cease settlement building, were preceded by “As we make progress toward security …” The president added that the PA was tainted by “official corruption. A Palestinian state will require a vibrant economy, where honest enterprise is encouraged by honest government.
“When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors,” Bush continued, “the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.” As for the eventual full realization of his two-state vision, “The final borders, the capital and other aspects of this state’s sovereignty will be negotiated between the parties as part of a final settlement.”
“Dismantle their infrastructure,” whatever that meant, was a recognizably Israeli phrase. And small wonder: Sharon and his top aides had been intimately involved in the American drafting process, offering language and arguing about the wording almost till the moment of delivery. The Israeli input began during Defensive Shield, when Efraim Halevy, the outgoing head of the Mossad, brainstormed with his senior staffers with a view to offering Sharon a forward-looking exit strategy once the fighting was done. The Mossad men came up with a plan called “An Alternative Leadership for the Palestinian People.”
Unbeknownst to Halevy and the Mossad, the IDF planning branch under Giora Eiland had been brainstorming, too, and it came up with very similar ideas. Halevy and Eiland were invited separately to Sharon’s residence in Jerusalem for breakfast on the same morning. Halevy attests that the prime minister’s appetite at his breakfast—the second—gave no hint that he had already eaten once with the army general. Both were invited to the ranch the next day for further discussion. Sharon instructed them to go together to Jordan and Egypt and then to Washington and other friendly capitals to sell their idea.
In the Roosevelt Room at the White House, the Israeli officials made their presentation to assembled Brahmins from several departments of the Bush administration. “Why Arafat is not capable of becoming a viable partner for a peace negotiation,” Halevy began reading from a lengthy document he had prepared in English. “He does not really want to establish a Palestinian state at this time.” In London, Halevy recalled, he sat on the carpet explaining it to Tony Blair and his adviser David Manning in the residential part of 10 Downing Street. “I cannot recall why we were sitting on the carpet, but we were.” From London he went on to Moscow. Reading from his document, Halevy assured his interlocutors that “significant persons in the PA will cooperate in an intelligent and sophisticated plan of action designed to elevate Arafat to the position of ‘symbolic’ leader.”
The Palestinians, who sent a senior minister, Nabil Shaath, to Washington at the last moment to influence the drafting, were aghast at the content of the president’s speech. But Arafat gave stern orders to welcome it and not display their dismay in public. Sharon, in mirror image, made sure there was no crowing from his side.
The transition in the Prime Minister’s Bureau from Shani to Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s longtime personal lawyer, was unexpected and unexplained. But the bureau weathered it without serious disruption. “One Friday midday,” Marit Danon recalled, “I get a call from Uri Shani, who tells me he’s leaving. He didn’t say why, and I didn’t want to pry. I was in the supermarket later, standing at the checkout line, when the prime minister phones. ‘Everything’s going to stay exactly the same,’ he says. I was worried but couldn’t speak too freely with all the other shoppers around, so I just said, ‘I hope so.’ This needled him. ‘I tell you everything will be the same! You’ll see.’ He seemed to feel he needed to persuade me.”
With Shani gone and the gregarious, easygoing Weissglas in his place, someone else was going to have to run the bureau if it was to retain the style and standards of crisp efficiency that Shani had maintained. That someone was Danon. With the tacit consent of everyone from Sharon down, she now became the fulcrum around which the disciplined working of the office revolved. Weissglas made the decisions; Danon made sure they were implemented. By now, fifteen months into his prime ministership, Sharon was visibly more comfortable and confident, sometimes even relaxed in his job, which he clearly had begun to enjoy. But he was rarely happy.
Every night, says Danon, before he left the office, no matter how late it was, Sharon would pause for a moment at the photographs of Lily that he had hung on the wall opposite his desk. He would stand and look at them and then walk on through the door.
He was an elderly widower who lived with his family. On Sunday mornings I’d sometimes ask him how his weekend had been, and he would reply, “Marit, I’m a lonely man.” That’s what he’d answer. I’d say, “Prime Minister, how can you say that? You’re surrounded by your lovely grandchildren, your family …” He needed married life. But I’m not sure if after Lily’s death he was open to it anymore. He spoke of Lily very frequently, of the deep friendship between them. Clearly she had been his pillar of support and at the same time his mouth and eyes to the world. He wasn’t a man for small talk; she fulfilled that side of him.
There was a picture of Gur on the wall, too. None of Margalit, though he’d speak of her, too. He spoke of her with respect and admiration, as a strong and very able, competent woman. She had risen very young to become a top psychiatric nurse. Of Gur he spoke with great pain. It was hard for me. Awkward. Sometimes I had to control myself not to cry in his presence.
Sharon took his loneliness home to the prime minister’s official residence, a modest stone house in the suburb of Rehavia, surrounded since Rabin’s assassination by high walls and watchtowers. “He didn’t like it,” says Danon.
The residence radiated coldness as far as he was concerned. He’d use it for official events. And for midday naps. But he could never feel warm there like he did at the ranch, with Gilad’s family. The ranch was enveloping, embracing. The children, the farm, the animals, the ground itself. I’ve never known anyone who loved the land so much. Loved the clods of earth.
He had a little button under the cabinet table which connected him straight to me in the office downstairs. Many times in the middle of cabinet meetings he would buzz, I would go running upstairs in my high heels, and he would give me a little note: “Please call Gilad and ask how many millimeters of rain have fallen at the ranch.” Or “Please call Gilad and find out how many ewes have given birth.” He was very verbal, incredibly verbal for a man. He used to say to me, when it rained, “What I would like now is to be lying in front of my burning hearth, wrapped up in a coarse blanket …” In the last two years he rarely slept in Jerusalem. Even if his day ended at 2:00 a.m., he would go back to the ranch. By helicopter or by car, whichever the security detail decided.
Meirav Levy started working for Sharon before the 2001 election as his makeup artist, applying white powder to his scalp to make his famous forelock look even more striking and a touch of rouge to his cheeks. By the time he became prime minister, she was in constant attendance. She, too, witnessed his aversion to the official residence. During the first term, Omri would sometimes come and sleep over. But after the 2003 elections Omri became a member of the Knesset, and that ended. Sharon was very alone. He would wake up alone in the morning and come home at night—alone again. The kitchen staff would arrive at 6:30–7:00, but he would be up from 5:00, with nothing to drink. He didn’t make coffee himself. He would stay in his room, listening to the radio, listening to reports from his military staff, listening to Ra’anan Gissin’s press survey over the phone. He could not look out of the windows: they were kept closed and curtained for security reasons. At the ranch, an aide recalled,
when he drew back the curtains, he’d see a rolling landscape. Here—just bulletproof glass and a courtyard … And at the ranch he’d see the children. They’d come into his room and give him a good-morning kiss. That would make his day.
When he was alone in Jerusalem, he wouldn’t have much for breakfast. He’d try to diet. He’d invite his driver, Gilbert, or the security guards to join him. They’d have slept in the house; they had little rooms downstairs … By 7:00 he’d be on the road to the office. If he was at the ranch, he’d leave at 6:30. He liked to invite people for breakfast sometimes, and then he’d lay on a nice spread.
This is something of an understatement. Sharon’s breakfasts, both at the ranch and at the residence, were famous for their rich variety of fishes and cheeses, eggs and vegetables, breads and honeys and other delectables with which he would assiduously ply his guests. He himself was known to partake of two or even three breakfasts, one at the ranch, one at the residence, and one at the office, in the course of a morning. In one instance, attested to separately by his spokesman Perlman and his military secretary Kaplinsky, he moved seamlessly from breakfast to lunch without any diminution of appetite. “One day,” Perlman recounts,
there was a huge breakfast at the ranch, and we ate and ate and ate. At midday, Kaplinsky and I slowly and heavily made our way to the car and drove up to the office in Tel Aviv. Arik meanwhile gets himself organized and flies up by helicopter. At about one o’clock he sees us in the corridor. “Er, come in for a moment, would you?” So we come in. No sooner had we sat down than one of the kitchen staff walks in with three trays laden with mountains of rice and a half a chicken atop each one. Kaplan and I look at each other, and we both know we can’t eat anything. We’d barely finished feasting an hour earlier, after all. Sharon, slowly, slowly, cuts and eats, cuts and eats. He looks up at us. “Er, eat something, why don’t you? It’s really good.” “We can’t eat, Prime Minister.” He finishes his meal and then says, quietly, “Do you think it would be piggish of me if I just tasted a morsel of yours …?” He began tucking in, slowly and methodically, and finished both our portions, too.
“It’s a true story,” Kaplinsky confirms.
But Arik Sharon’s eating was not just a matter of quantities; it was equally a matter of manners. As a little boy, he had to wield his knife and fork with a book tucked under each arm. If he dropped the books, the food would be taken away. To his last day he would eat like this [holding the knife and fork with his arms tightly at his sides], which wasn’t easy with his big belly … And the pace of his eating was also critical. He would eat very slowly, carefully chewing every mouthful. He would look at every bite before putting it in his mouth. He could eat all day—start in the morning and finish at night. By the same token, he could eat nothing for hours. But if someone said, “Would you like something to eat?” and ordered food, he’d immediately lose his concentration and start asking, “What’s happening with the food? When are they bringing the food?” We’d say, “You’ve ordered falafel from a particular shop. It takes half an hour to get there, half an hour back, a few minutes to pick up the order.” But he’d say, “Phone up and find out. Maybe something’s happened to the messenger …” Once I witnessed him eat nine portions of falafel one after another. How? Slowly…
His tastes were catholic, but one particular favorite was a dish that most of his countrymen intensely dislike: Loof. This is a Hebrew corruption of the original British army’s meat loaf. The Israeli version came in a can and was a staple in the IDF from the early years right through to the 1980s. For Sharon it remained a staple. “I didn’t know it still existed,” says Marit Danon. “But it did, and he had to have it. We all joked about it, and he joined in; but he wouldn’t give it up. We’d get the staff to fry it up for him in slices, and he would eat it with great gusto, as though it were some gourmet dish, munching away, slowly and deliberately.”
Loof, falafel, or cordon bleu—whatever the menu it had to be served on crisp white linen, with white napkins for Sharon and whomever he could get to join him. He hated eating alone and always urged staffers to partake. The staffers, though it wasn’t formally part of their jobs, made sure his appetite was catered to. “We didn’t want him invading Iraq because he was hungry,” Perlman jokes. Conditions at the Israeli prime minister’s office, an ugly 1950s office block, are remarkably Spartan.r There is no private dining room for the prime minister, and Sharon would have his white tablecloth and gleaming cutlery laid out on his office desk. To take the edge off the unaesthetic drabness of the place, he would insist on freshly cut flowers in a vase each morning. “I can’t stand to see flowers thirsty,” he once told Marit when the waterline did not quite reach all the stalks. In the background, a music system quietly played classics or the Hebrew or Russian songs he loved. It had to be on when he walked into the empty room each morning.
Before he walked in, he would pause, without fail, at Marit’s desk and say “Good morning, how are you?” to her and other staffers present. “You could see he grew up in a European household,” says Marit. “There was something hugely dissonant between his behavior in practice and his ‘quintessential sabra’ image. He would not go through a door ahead of a woman. At the beginning, we would both stand inside his room with neither of us prepared to go out first. And he would automatically stand—no mean feat for a man of his girth—when a woman entered the room. It took time before he stopped standing for me or before he stopped protesting if I walked next to him carrying a briefcase, instead of him carrying it for me.”
Sharon’s close aides are still close to each other years later. All of them have nostalgic stories about the interest and concern he showed not only for them but for their families. “I daresay Avigdor has already complimented you on your new hairstyle,” the prime minister gushed to the wife of his director general, Avigdor Yitzhaki.44 “He had to know everything,” says Perlman. “He phoned my wife, Roni, in Paris when she was still my fiancée, to see if she’d found a wedding dress. When she said she had, he asked her to describe it to him. She described it and went on to ask, ‘Prime Minister, why is this of interest to you?’ He said, ‘Because I’ll want to kiss the bride on her wedding day and I don’t want to step on the train.’ ”45
“It was important to him that everyone should get married and have families,” another aide recalled.
The fact that I’d been married for several years and didn’t have any children was a matter of constant concern to him. He and Lily would have had six children if they could have. He kept up the pressure, as though he were my father. When I got pregnant, he was really pleased. He insisted that career was no reason not to have children. During his term, lots of people at the office—secretaries, drivers, aides—got married or had children. There was a real abundance in this area. He had us keep a list of all the births. Big families were important to him, perhaps because he’d come from a small one.46
“I miss him every day,” Marit Danon admitted. “We would talk about books he was reading, books I was reading. Where do you find a CEO in a small company, let alone a prime minister, so caring about the people around him? Once, soon after he took over, he said to me, ‘Go after the tea lady and ask her what’s wrong. Her eyes look so sad today.’ The woman was gobsmacked. She was over her head in personal problems.”
His own sadness showed through at night. “Perhaps you’ll come upstairs and have a bite to eat?” Perlman recalled the prime minister asking late in the evening at the Jerusalem residence. “We go upstairs and we eat and it’s twelve, twelve thirty, one, and I can’t go. We’re talking on and on. What about? About anything. Just gossiping. I must have left eventually after two, and I remember thinking to myself, he’s a powerful man and he’s the prime minister, but at the end of the day he’s all by himself.” Kaplinsky, too, sometimes found himself called into the office at ten or eleven o’clock at night “just to have someone to talk to before going home, alone. What did we talk about? About everything. It always began with the army and spilled over to everything. Everything. Conversations in the night between two people.”47
There were rumors that he would marry Michal Modai, the widow of his old friend, army comrade, and political colleague Yitzhak Modai, the former finance minister who had died in 1998. A onetime beauty queen, she was still a stately head turner and had made her own public career as the president of World WIZO, a women’s Zionist organization. The Sharons and the Modais had been friends for decades.
“Sources?” Modai said.
There were all sorts of sources! My driver at WIZO told me that in his synagogue one Saturday the people were talking about Sharon being alone and needing to get married. Someone said that not every woman can be the wife of the prime minister; you need a representative sort of woman. Someone else said, “What about Michal Modai?” Soon, people started asking my secretary when’s the wedding date. A good match, eh? I know the public thought so. But it was complete poppycock. Once we met at an event where he spoke. I went over to him, and of course he kissed me. I said, “Right, we’ve been photographed together. Now there’ll be more rumors.” But we’d known each other long enough not to have to stop kissing when we met just because of rumors … Did I know he was lonely? I knew from Yitzhak that politics is a tough job and being at the top is that much tougher. But it keeps you busy around the clock, so I really didn’t think that loneliness was his problem. Anyway, I wasn’t going to drive up to Jerusalem to entertain him.48
For Marit Danon, everything in Sharon’s character, both the toughness and the introversion, went back to his childhood in Kfar Malal.
He was very talkative; I’d never had a boss who talked so much. Always about Kfar Malal, always about how hard it was. I’m no psychologist, but his pain sounded authentic, no matter how often he retold the same stories: how his mother’s hands were worn rough from work; how he himself had to work so hard with his father in the fields; how his family was ostracized; how he never went to other kids’ houses and always wondered what they were like inside. He told me that his mother would shut herself away one day each week to write home to her family in Russia from whom she’d been torn away. I found that genuinely moving. I felt the loneliness of this fat little boy coming through. He was always a bit of a fatty, I think. One day, a year or more before he collapsed, we got a letter from the Aharonowitz School in Kfar Malal. They were celebrating their seventieth anniversary, and would the prime minister please write a few words of greeting. The letter sat on his desk for weeks. They kept phoning. He kept asking me, “What should I write?” and I said, “Just write about something nice from third grade or something.” He replied, “Marit, don’t you understand? There wasn’t anything nice there.”
a “Those who didn’t want him as chief of staff got him back as minister of defense; and those who don’t want him as minister of defense will get him back as prime minister.” See p. 216. Dan’s 1983 prediction had since entered Hebrew idiom as a byword for hubristic, revenge-filled fantasy.
b The final figures were 1,698,077 votes for Sharon, or 62.38 percent; 1,023,944 votes for Barak, or 37.62 percent; the margin—674,133 votes, or 24.67 percent. Voter turnout was the lowest ever in an Israeli election: 62.28 percent, compared, for instance, with 78.7 percent in 1999. But this was the only ever Israeli election just for prime minister, not for the Knesset.
c Four months later, Marit Danon walked into Sharon’s room and “apologized ‘for the terrible opinion I had of you.’ I didn’t blame the media or anything. I laid it on myself. I said, ‘Prime Minister, I need to make a confession.’ I felt I had to do it; it was really weighing me down. Because he’d been beyond the pale for me. Absolutely beyond the pale. He was dumbstruck.” Her eyes mist over as she recalls this scene. In the 2003 election, though, she says, she voted, as always, Meretz.
d Particularly encouraging for Sharon to recollect was then governor Bush’s reaction to the view from the air of pre-1967 Israel’s ten-mile “waistline.” According to Mel Sembler, a Republican activist who organized the 1998 trip for Bush and three other governors, Bush remarked: “We’ve got driveways in Texas longer than that” (Miller, Much Too Promised Land, 324).
e Bentsur insisted, in an interview for this book, that there was no impropriety in the Vienna meeting, at least at the session in which he participated. “The casino never came up. We were trying to weave channels of communication so we could start working together as soon as Sharon came into office. It was entirely proper, and in fact quite promising.” But Bentsur did not dismiss a friend’s subsequent suggestion, purportedly based on an intelligence source, that he was taken along as a front to cover separate talks of an improper nature. “I think Omri and the others are corrupt from head to foot,” he said of Sharon’s close advisers. Bentsur was the first of several high-ranking public officials—we shall encounter the head of the Mossad and the army chief of staff later—who left the government service after clashing with Sharon’s staff and became outspoken critics of Sharon’s alleged corruption, though without being able to adduce smoking-gun evidence to clinch their accusations.
f Published only years later, the draft provided that
• Israel was to pull back its troops within four weeks to their pre-intifada positions;
• final status negotiations would resume by the end of April;
• a Sharon-Arafat summit would be held in March, to be followed within three days by security coordination talks on various levels;
• Israel would carry out the still-unimplemented third further redeployment (FRD);
• Israel would refrain from unilateral actions in Jerusalem and from building new settlements; and
• the PA would commit to fight terror and prevent attacks; Arafat would denounce terror and violence; as a goodwill gesture, Israel would release forty Palestinian prisoners.
g Indyk recounts how Bush pulled him aside and asked, “ ‘Why didn’t Arafat take the [Clinton] deal?’ I responded that there was enough blame to go around. However, if I had to give the most important reason, I would say it was lack of leadership on Arafat’s part. ‘That’s exactly right. No leadership,’ said the president. ‘…Now there’s nothing to be done because Arafat already rejected an offer that Sharon is not going to repeat … There’s no Nobel Prize to be had here.’ He obviously felt he had it figured out” (Indyk, Innocent Abroad, 379). Aaron David Miller, another Clinton Middle East man, conveys the same presidential wisdom more graphically. “Colin Powell summed up the president’s view best for me: ‘I don’t want to do what Clinton did because it takes a lot of time. The prospects of success, rather than fear of failure, are really quite low … and I got two wars going on. Why am I going to fuck around with these people?’ ” (Miller, Much Too Promised Land, 324).
h Sharon’s military secretary Moshe Kaplinsky, later CO of Central Command and then deputy chief of staff.
i Rehavam Ze’evi, tourism minister and leader of the ultranationalist Moledet Party, was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in October 2001.
j Shani was ruthless in winnowing out people he didn’t want—including people to whom Sharon had promised jobs. Eytan Bentsur was one. The veteran diplomat claimed later that he saw that the Sharon team were “amateurs and boors”—and walked out. Shani claimed he showed Bentsur the door because he was “not a team player.” The man appointed foreign policy adviser was Danny Ayalon, a relatively junior Foreign Ministry man on reassignment to the Prime Minister’s Office.
That was just the start of Ayalon’s lucky streak. “I advised Peres not to accept any candidate put up by Sharon for ambassador to Washington who was not a professional diplomat,” Peres’s senior aide and Foreign Ministry director general, Avi Gil, recalled.
Block every proposed political appointment, I said, and then, once they’re exhausted, let’s present them with a list of Foreign Ministry candidates. That’s what happened. There was a big lunch at the prime minister’s residence, and Peres said, “Arik, let’s make a really nonpolitical appointment from among our professional diplomats.” Sharon said, “Whom do you have in mind?” and I immediately produced a list of twelve senior diplomats. Arik started discussing some of the names. He didn’t rule them all out. Just then Danny Ayalon walks in with some document for Sharon to sign. Peres was feeling so triumphant that he exclaims, “Every Foreign Ministry man can be a candidate. Even Danny Ayalon.” Ayalon, needless to say, was not one of the twelve names on the list. But Sharon, like a shotgun, banged his hand down and said, “We’ve got an ambassador!” He’d come to know Ayalon, apparently, and he liked him. I started whispering frantically to Peres, but it was too late. (Gil and Ayalon interviews)
k Sharon’s no quietly turned into a yes, and Peres and Arafat met on September 26, the day before Yom Kippur, at the Dahaniye Airport, close to the Gaza-Egypt border.
l Danny Ayalon, then still in Jerusalem as Sharon’s policy adviser, blames Sharon’s unofficial emissary to Washington, the businessman Arie Genger, and also the long-serving director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, for whipping up “a sincere but unfounded sense that the Americans were going to dump us after 9/11 in order to cozy up to the Arabs. Genger usually read the American scene accurately. But this time he was way out. And Hoenlein, who saw molehills as mountains, nagged him incessantly. A professional diplomat would not have fallen into that rut.”
m This was not far-fetched: the PFLP, though independent, was not an opposition force within the PA. Abu Ali Mustafa’s office in Ramallah, where he was killed by a helicopter-launched rocket, was only a few hundred yards from Arafat’s muqata headquarters.
n By IDF figures, Palestinian shooting attacks were down 75 percent. The Palestinians said the IDF had nevertheless killed twenty-one people in the three-week period following December 16, demolished dozens of homes, and made multiple incursions into Area A (Harel and Isacharoff, Seventh War, 185; Economist, January 31, 2002).
o Harel and Isacharoff, Seventh War. Miller cites a figure of 300 Palestinian dead.
p Sharon declined, moreover, to open a second front in the north, despite strenuous efforts by Hezbollah and Palestinian groups in Lebanon to provoke him into doing so.
q Haim Ramon interview, Tel Aviv, September 2009.
r Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor, planned an office-plus-residence compound near the present office, away from the residential heart of the city. It would have given the incumbent a significantly improved quality of life. But Netanyahu, when he took over in 2009, demonstratively shot down the plan as too lavish and extravagant. As a result, the residents of Rehavia and the adjacent districts are still disturbed at all hours by the sirens and slamming doors of the prime minister’s cavalcade. And he himself and his family are still entombed behind the high walls and reinforced windows of the old residence.