Where there is no vision, the people perish.
— King Solomon
We will never know what Sharon really intended with the disengagement. Was he really sacrificing Gaza, the pawn, to defend the queen — Judea and Samaria? Dov Weisglass, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, interpreted the disengagement as a means to prevent a political solution. Abandoning Gaza “supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda…until the Palestinians turn into Finns.”
Sari, no fan of formaldehyde, decamped to Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute in the fall of 2004 to write his memoirs, around the same time that Arafat passed away suddenly in Paris. Along with most Palestinians, Sari was convinced that Sharon had put his nemesis in the grave. Because Harvard no longer permitted smoking inside buildings, Sari wrote out his memories onto notepads while sitting or pacing in Harvard Square.
He began his memoir with an account of his father Anwar, the Oxford-educated judge, and his struggles against my father’s generation of Zionists. When I was a boy, the sea, the sky, and the deserts seemed limitless until I looked just to the east of our banana plantations. There the barbed wire, land mines, and Syrian guns on the Golan formed an impenetrable barrier. The Arab world was for me a vast no-man’s-land.
Sari’s no-man’s-land began behind his family villa. As a boy he liked sitting in his upstairs bedroom and staring off at a UN observation and border-crossing station, the signs warning of land mines, and a grapevine that had managed to survive all the fighting. He’d also peer over the back wall and wonder about the Jews on the other side. The fact that he couldn’t pass through Mandelbaum Gate, the Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Jerusalem, didn’t produce in him a sense of claustrophobia because, before 1967, Palestinians could easily travel to the rest of the Middle East. Sari’s one-legged father, wounded by one of our snipers while defending the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948, could freely steer his Oldsmobile to Damascus, Beirut, or Bagdad.
Sari’s book ends with a description of his contemporary Palestinian life in an East Jerusalem neighborhood abutting Sharon’s Separation Wall:
My wife Lucy and I once liked to sit on the balcony just before dusk and look out at the church towers on the Mount of Olives, the golden sheen coming off the Dome of the Rock, the weaving contours of Suleiman the Great’s walls wrapping their way around the city. We both were intoxicated by the unique fusion of earth and the sunlight basking the entire pastoral surroundings. Today, if I somehow managed to climb onto the balcony of the apartment — it has been abandoned — I would see a 20-foot high, fortified steel barrier crowned with razor wire, complete with watchtowers…ribboning its way through Jerusalem like a malevolent landscape sculpture.
The book’s other bleak images include those of IDF “soldiers parading through the streets of Jerusalem”; the “bigotry and sanctimoniousness of Israeli officialdom”; the “continuing onslaught against the city my family has lived in for 1,300 years”; and the specter of a “gruesome bi-national reality of apartheid.”
By the end of 2004 my joint project with Sari had led me to reassess the vow I’d made to Shelly Yachimovich four years earlier in the television interview, and I had begun to consider entering politics. I was also moved by the disengagement, and our response to it. Most Israelis accepted that we had to leave Gaza if we were ever going to make peace with the Palestinians. My problem with Sharon was with how he yanked out the settlers. His unilateral actions reinforced the Hamas line that we understand only power.
If despite all my decades of experience it had taken Dr. Sarraj to open my eyes to Hamas’s “victory” over us, I couldn’t blame average Israelis for mistaking brute force for strength. Israelis needed a sextant to help them see where their leaders were taking them. They also needed leaders whose actions inspired hope in a better future, for us and for the Palestinians. I felt I had no choice but to try to throw a wrench into our malfunctioning political system.
In December, I walked to the Labor Party headquarters in Tel Aviv and tossed my hat into the ring for the next parliamentary election. Asked by a reporter outside the building about my intentions, I held nothing back: “I am not entering politics to be another Knesset member. If I enter the political arena, I want to be prime minister. Period.” Stating my ambition so bluntly was the first of many mistakes I would make in politics.
On my first day of political life I made some formidable enemies. Israel’s political system is run by party machines and power cliques, which makes it next to impossible for outsiders like me to rise to the top. Biba, who never questioned my prowess in fighting naval battles and terrorists, confessed she didn’t think I was cut out for politics. “You’re way too honest,” she said to me one day in the grocery store. Referring to my cocky self-confidence outside party headquarters, she reminded me that “even on a wonderful spring day when the sun is shining, you’re still five foot four.”
“Biba, I’m entering politics because I’m honest,” I responded. Pointing at the other shoppers, I added, “All I need to do is reignite people’s hope in a better future.”
Biba, drawing on her decades of experience as a social worker and family therapist, tried to talk some sense into me. “Look,” she said as she pulled items from the shelves and dropped them into the cart I was pushing. “I love you, but let me tell you something. If an abandoned child gets adopted, he has hope. But if the same child gets abandoned a second time, his fear of abandonment is so extreme you’ll never reignite that initial flicker of hope. Fear is a safer option. You are dreaming if you think you can get Israelis, who’ve been betrayed so often, to hope.”
Though I suspected she was right, her message conflicted with my upbringing. To be sure, centuries of persecution and being surrounded by enemies have taught Jews to be fearful. But my parents’ generation buried the painful past and focused on building a better future. If they could do this after losing family members in the Holocaust, why couldn’t we? I figured we just needed a different kind of leader, someone orienting us toward the possibilities of the future and not the traumas and failures of the past.
It turned out my entry into politics would have to wait a year. The disengagement Sharon initiated was in full swing, and during this period, for the first time in our marriage, Biba and I joined forces politically to push for a better Israel. We both empathized with the settlers. How would my father feel if the IDF sent in bulldozers to uproot our plantations and knock down everything we’d built? Biba became a founding member of Shuvi, Hebrew for “come back,” a civil society organization to support the settlers who’d lost their homes, synagogues, and cemeteries. Just as I had said in the speech in front of the Tel Aviv crowd at Rabin Square, Shuvi’s message was that settlers were neither weeds nor enemies; they were instrumental in forcing the Arab world to come to terms with us, and as such supporters of peace should carry them on our shoulders as returning heroes.62
Amid the turmoil surrounding the disengagement, Imma died, leaving Abba alone in the hut they’d shared for more than half a century. Aunt Hava, too, was sick with cancer, and I dropped by the kibbutz whenever I could. With a journalist for the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, who wanted to know more about my early influences, I returned to the Sea of Galilee and the Kinneret Cemetery. But I didn’t bring her to the kibbutz to meet Abba. Why not? she asked. I told her that Abba, ever the idealist and dreamer, had little respect for politicians these days — myself included. “He’s happy to talk about equality, solidarity, the prophets of the Bible, or our Declaration of Independence. But our conversations steer clear of contemporary politics.”
“And what is his dream now?”
“That a person’s life span be shorter than the expiration date on his dreams.”
When I said this, I didn’t think the journalist was taking notes. To my surprise, when the article came out it included the lines about Abba’s shattered dreams. I immediately phoned him up and apologized.
“No need,” he said. “The article wasn’t so bad. You just told the truth.”
Abba began to lose weight and, for the first time in his life, stooped and shuffled and wheezed when he breathed. He suspected he had cancer, but doctors found nothing wrong. Though I never dared raise the subject with him, I suspected he suffered from the death of a dream. Israel had become bourgeois, and many of the kibbutzim were privatizing; even Degania Alef, the mother of kibbutzim — which houses a museum to the utopian visionary A. D. Gordon — was being privatized. An additional reason for his melancholy was that the kibbutz revolution, the determination to win back the Land of Israel acre by acre, was most alive in the thriving religious settlements in Judea and Samaria. He saw with perfect clarity how the ideals he had pursued in his youth had metastasized into a messianic religious vision leading to the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Each time we left the cramped hut and headed to the lake, we had more or less the same conversation. I’d ask him about his heart condition, and he’d change the subject by pointing to a cluster of exposed rocks close to shore.
“Island’s still there.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Damned drought. You remember how high the lake used to be when you were a boy?”
“I do.”
“It would take quite a storm to cover those rocks,” he’d say with a frown. “Do you think it’ll happen?”
“We’ve had big storms in the past, Abba.”
“But what if the storms don’t come?”
“Abba, the storms will return.” And even if we run low on water, I added, we were leading the world in desalination technology and drip irrigation.
After one of these visits, in the car driving back home, it finally dawned on me that Abba hadn’t really wiped the slate of history clean as I had claimed to Sari and the people at Macalester College in Minnesota. The past maintained its grip on him, even if he wasn’t aware of it. I began to suspect, for example, that he’d kept me in the dark for years about leaving his parents in Romania not because they didn’t matter but because he felt guilty that he left them behind to face the Holocaust.
The more time I spent with him, the more contradictions I noticed. He abandoned religion in his youth and replaced God with human solidarity, yet he never touched pork. “I have the stomach of a religious Jew,” he told me. On Shabbat he listened to cantorial concerts on the radio.
I also realized that I’d inherited some of Abba’s contradictions. During a discussion on the Gaza disengagement, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a towering figure in the religious settler community who was one of the paratroopers in 1967 who conquered the Temple Mount, asked me if I felt like a foreigner in Hebron.
Hebron? I told him I hated the place. During my time as head of the Shabak, the only reason I’d ever go there was because an Arab had murdered a Jew, or a Jew an Arab.
“Let me rephrase the question,” he replied with an expression of concern as if speaking with a wayward soul. “At the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, do you feel that you are a stranger without any spiritual connection, like an Israeli tourist visiting the Lincoln Memorial?”
During the 1967 war, I recalled feeling elated when news came that we had seized the Western Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. We had liberated what had been stolen from the Jewish people two thousand years earlier. “No, Rabbi, I don’t feel like a foreigner in Hebron,” I finally replied. “As a Jew, the Cave of the Patriarchs is a part of me.”
“Ami,” said the rabbi rubbing his stringy white beard between his fingers, “you are someone I can talk to. I have nothing to say to a leftist who tells me that the Cave of the Patriarchs belongs to a sheikh. If we agree that Hebron is ours, then it is ours to keep or give away. We’ll get it back when the Messiah comes, God willing. What is important is that everyone knows it belongs to us.”
It would be years before I would finally give up the toxic belief that we could make peace with the Palestinians without calling into question whether we Jews were the only ones who had historic rights to the Land of Israel.
In August 2005, Pinchas and the religious leaders of the settlement movement helped prevent a violent reaction when our government returned eight thousand settlers in Gaza and one thousand in North Samaria to the State of Israel. Secular young commanders involved in the evacuation of Homesh, a settlement near Rabbi Shapira’s Yitzhar, told me how hard it was for them to evacuate religious Jews, people with whom they thought they had almost nothing in common.
Predictably, Hamas took credit for ousting us from Gaza. I feared before long we’d have a full-blown religious war on our hands. This fast-moving disaster revived my intention to shake up Israeli politics.
Palestinian elections slated for late January 2006 further bolstered my resolve. Palestinians went to the polls to choose their own government, and Jibril, who headed the Fatah list in the Hebron district, was slated to be a powerful figure. Maybe, I found myself thinking, the two of us could dispense with Barak’s myth of “no partner” and finish what our dead leaders, Rabin and Arafat, had started.
The United States poured millions of dollars into supporting Fatah by building schools, cleaning streets, providing computers to community centers, and staging a soccer tournament. Almost no one I talked to thought Hamas had a chance because its platform seemed so far-fetched. Hamas had declared that “not one inch of the historic soil of Palestine will be ceded” and called for the liberation of all of pre-1948 Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Two weeks before the election, Fatah seemed poised for a landslide victory when Ariel Sharon, that great destroyer of Palestinian dreams, suffered a massive stroke at his ranch in the Negev. The former mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, took over and immediately called for a snap election at the end of March. To brandish its security credentials, the new head of the Labor Party, Amir Peretz, offered me a top place on its list of candidates, and I took him up on his offer.
Heading into the Palestinian election, Khalil and other pollsters were sanguine. Voters, exhausted by four years of conflict, having buried over three thousand people and with the economy in tatters, would surely give secular Fatah the victory.
But Hamas didn’t run on a platform of sharia law and Qassam rockets. Rebranding itself as the Party of Change and Reform, the terrorist group promised to sweep away years of Fatah nepotism, kleptocracy, and slime.
When the results came in, Hamas, a charity with an underground terrorist network, crushed mighty Fatah, an organization hitherto synonymous with the Palestinian struggle for independence.
I didn’t dare phone Jibril to get his assessment because rumors were that voters had rejected him in part because he had once “collaborated” with Israel to repress the Islamists. His brother Naif, the Hamas leader, won.
To make sense of Hamas’s victory, I turned to my sensor Matti Steinberg. For years Matti had been telling Shabak directors, prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and IDF brass that Hamas was a lot more popular than people thought. Matti agreed with what Dr. Sarraj had told me in London: Blow by blow, our military overreach strengthened a movement that fed off hopelessness and feelings of victimhood. His warnings having gone unheeded, Matti described his state of mind to me by likening himself to the Chinese dissident who wanted to engrave on his tombstone, HERE LIES ONE WHO DID A FEW THINGS THAT NEEDED TO BE DONE AND SAID A FEW THINGS THAT NEEDED TO BE SAID.
Matti foresaw two Palestines, one in Gaza, a festering sore run by a triumphant terror organization, and the other in the West Bank dependent on Israel to keep its government in power. “I am thinking about the immense burden we are imposing on the coming generations,” Matti said about Israel’s self-defeating strategy.
In March, I entered the Knesset. The Labor Party was a junior member of a governing coalition with the Kadima Party’s Olmert as prime minister. Labor’s Amir Peretz, who’d fought in the Yom Kippur War but had no experience as a military commander, took over the Ministry of Defense. Bibi, as if risen from the dead, led the opposition.
The predictable Palestinian civil war broke out within months. Even though President Bush had been talking about democracy in the Middle East for years, he threw his support behind Olmert and his decision to boycott and arrest the democratically elected Hamas leaders in the hope of keeping Abu Mazen in power. According to Matti, these machinations only strengthened Hamas, which now branded itself as a national party acting on behalf of the Palestinian people, against Israel and a Palestinian government cooperating with the occupier. The Israeli government’s actions also lent credence to Hamas’s argument that violence, not diplomacy, was the most effective weapon against the occupation.
After the election Hamas seized total control of Gaza. Hamas fighters, faster and smarter than the Fatah forces, fired mortar shells at the headquarters of the security forces in Gaza, a complex of buildings I knew well from my meetings there in the 1990s. Hamas executed some of the Fatah security men with shots to the back of the head; others they tossed from the rooftops of high-rises.
On July 12, Hamas’s ideological brothers in Lebanon, the Hezbollah, killed three IDF soldiers in armored Humvees on our side of the border, and abducted two other soldiers; five more soldiers died in an attempt to rescue their kidnapped comrades.
The next morning I woke up to my pager beeping. It was Minister of Defense Amir Peretz. He called a few minutes later with an update on the Hezbollah attack and asked me for advice.
“My recommendation is that together with Olmert you call a press conference and, in front of the world’s media, give Hezbollah and the Lebanese government a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to return the abducted soldiers.”
“Do you think they will accept our demand?”
“No. But it will buy you a day. Neither Olmert nor you has commanded wars. You need time to lay out your strategy. Never start a war if you don’t know how you’re going to end it.”
In the end Prime Minister Olmert and Minister of Defense Amir Peretz ignored my advice and conducted one of the most unnecessary wars in the history of the State of Israel. For thirty-four days I watched an underground movement with a few thousand fighters fend off the strongest army in the Middle East. Barbara Tuchman would have called the war a March of Folly.
As with Hamas, the more often we decapitated the Hezbollah Hydra, the greater its support from the Palestinian masses and Islamic governments. The Saudis, Iranians, and other potential adversaries took notice of our failure.
By the time the fighting finally stopped and the military funerals slowed to a trickle, I was convinced Peretz, as head of the Labor Party, shouldn’t be our candidate in the next general election. As a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Intelligence Subcommittee, I had seen up close the egregious arrogance of the leaders who got us into the war. I told Peretz I was challenging him earlier than I had planned. If I won, I’d also take over the Ministry of Defense in a country reeling from the latest Lebanese debacle.
Just as the election for head of Labor heated up, Ehud Barak returned from retirement to challenge me. I enjoyed the theatrics of campaigning against him. I must have spoken in town halls or high school gyms in every community in Israel, Jewish and Arab. Battles come in many forms: For some you have to put on a wet suit and swim across enemy lines; others require a wiretap and a black hood. For this one my weapons were stump speeches, handshakes, and debates with Ehud about Israel’s greatest threats and opportunities. My model was Tony Blair, and my mantra was “New Labor.” I even enlisted my friends from Flotilla 13 to appear with me on a talk show. There is nothing commandos detest more than politics and public relations, but for me my former comrades-in-arms sat in a television studio and told the Israeli public they were ready to go into battle with me to defend the values and ideas we shared.
I told voters that Barak hadn’t learned the lessons of the 1990s. We needed to foster trust, a concept lacking in his lexicon, if we were to bridge the wide rifts within Israel among secular and religious. To defeat Hamas’s terrorist wing, we would also need to regain the trust of our Palestinian partners by taking concrete steps toward Palestinian independence. Helping Palestinians build their own state would make Israel both safer and more just.
While I talked about trust and hope, Ehud based his platform on fear. We were living in a jungle, he said. With Hezbollah to the north and Hamas to the south, did voters really want an untested politician like this “extremely left-wing” Ami Ayalon calling the shots? No. Israel needed steely-eyed men with no illusions.
Just four days before the Labor Party election, my message of hope was ahead by 4 percent in the opinion polls. People were already slapping me on the back. Here’s to the next minister of defense! Here’s to the next prime minister!
Not so fast, more cynical friends cautioned. Ehud recruited all the Labor ministers and most Knesset members, and we were neck and neck among 120,000 members of the Labor Party. There was also our twisted psychology at work. “Ami,” said one old friend who’d been in the game much longer than I had, “don’t believe the polls. People might say they want hope, but the minute they get into the voting booth and the curtains are drawn, they’ll vote with their gut. Don’t underestimate the power of fear.”
How right these pessimists were.