Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (26 page)

T
he election results were a disappointment for Sharon. The Likud did fairly well, increasing its representation from 32 seats to 39 in the 120-seat Knesset. But the
Labor Alignment still held firmly to the reins of powers with an invincible plurality of 51 seats—a drop of only 5 from the previous Knesset. Labor’s allies—the National Religious Party (10 seats, down from 12) and the Independent Liberals (stable at 4 seats)—made their mathematical calculations and slid back into the familiar postelection mode of negotiating a new coalition with Labor.

But the new political arithmetic did not fully articulate the public mood. The people had preferred Labor to the Right, but they did not want the prewar leadership to continue in office. They wanted new men to head the new Labor government. Lone demonstrators back from the front lines attracted angry throngs. The streets seemed to seethe with resentment. Sharon, newly elected to the Knesset and about to take his seat, contributed to the gathering storm with a parting order of the day to his 143rd Division. The canal crossing, he wrote, carried out by their division had won the war. It had been achieved “despite blunders and mistakes, despite failures and obstacles, despite hysteria and loss of control.” Now, he continued, the war was over, and talks were taking place with Egypt. “I feel the need to fight on another front … That is why I am leaving. I want you to know that I have never before served with fighters like you. You are the finest of them all … If we have to come back and resume our fight—I promise you that I will be with you.”
^a

That same afternoon, Sharon called a news conference at the
press center in Tel Aviv. No longer in army fatigues but still striking a photogenic pose in a black turtleneck and leather jerkin, he blasted the disengagement of forces agreement just concluded with Egypt.

Under the prodding of the U.S. secretary of state,
Henry Kissinger, Israel had agreed to withdraw from the west bank of the canal, and Egypt had agreed to pull back most of its forces from the east bank. Some lightly armed Egyptians were to remain on the east bank in a narrow “limited forces zone.” An adjacent strip of desert would be held by a UN Emergency Force, and a third strip was designated another “limited forces zone” in which IDF troops would be restricted to light arms.

To Sharon and the Likud, this was “the retreat of a victorious army, led by a defeated government.” Sharon poured scorn on Dayan’s assertion that Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader, seriously sought to make peace with Israel. If Dayan was mistaken, “it could cost us thousands
of lives. We’ve just ended a terrible war caused by the government’s mistake … You can’t base a disengagement accord on one side’s sudden belief that the other side wants peace.”
³

From the press conference he drove on to a massive antigovernment demonstration nearby. Begin,
Yitzhak Shamir, and he were the main speakers. Afterward, he was mobbed by well-wishers. “Arik, king of Israel,” was on everyone’s lips.

Despite the fulminations from the Right, the disengagement with Egypt was not unpopular. It ended the desultory exchanges of fire along the cease-fire lines that had continued since the war, and it enabled many thousands more reservists to be demobbed at last. (On the Golan, a mini-war of attrition rumbled on until April, when, again after persistent shuttle diplomacy by
Henry Kissinger, a separation of forces agreement was signed there, too.)

But popular outrage over the war itself did not abate; the returning soldiers gave added impetus to a swelling tide of disaffection. “It was not just my resignation or Dayan’s that was being called for in that storm of protest,”
Golda Meir recalled in her memoirs. “It was a call to eliminate from the scene everyone who could possibly be held responsible for what had happened and to start all over again with new people, younger people, people who were not tainted by the charge of having led the nation astray. It was an extreme reaction to the extreme situation we were in, and therefore, though it was very painful, it was understandable.”
⁴

She hoped to fend it off, nevertheless. In March, she presented her new government to the Knesset. Dayan had offered to quit, but she insisted that he serve again. However, she was on borrowed time, and it ran out in less than a month. On April 2, the commission of inquiry that the government had appointed to examine the lead-up period to the war and the first two days of fighting submitted its interim report. The five-man panel—Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, another justice of the Supreme Court, the state comptroller, and the former chiefs of staff
Yigael Yadin and
Haim Laskov—recommended the dismissals of Chief of Staff Elazar, Chief of Intelligence Zeira, and other intelligence officers. It severely censured the CO of Southern Command Gonen and recommended that he be suspended pending its final report. The commission cleared Golda and Dayan of “direct responsibility” for the intelligence blunder and the delay in mobilizing and deploying the troops. As for their indirect responsibility, the commission said it would not pass judgment on the accountability of the civilian leadership because ministerial responsibility was a matter for parliament and the electorate.

These findings were tantamount to an invitation to the political opposition, and, more important, to the extra-parliamentary opposition that was daily growing on the streets of the cities, to redouble their pressure for the government to go. The commission stoked the public anger, moreover, by its ruling exonerating Dayan of direct, personal responsibility for the debacle. This was bitterly and publicly attacked by Elazar in his resignation letter. “In fact and in practice,” he wrote, “the minister of defense was the level of authority above the chief of staff.”

The commission’s report and the public response sealed Dayan’s and Golda’s fates and brought down the weeks-old government. “On April 10, I told the party leadership that I had had enough,” Golda wrote. “My decision is final, irrevocable,” she said. “I beg of you not to try to persuade me to change my mind. It will not help.”

Labor quickly set about choosing its “new people, younger people” to lead a new government. While Golda stayed ostensibly above the fray, her finance minister and close ally,
Pinchas Sapir, threw all his considerable weight behind
Yitzhak Rabin, the
Six-Day War victor who had just recently entered politics after his stint as ambassador in Washington. During the war, Rabin had put on his uniform, toured the fronts, and sat in on the key meetings. He appeared in many of the photographs, looking glum and smoking incessantly. But he was not involved in the “war of the generals,” nor was he tainted by the prewar negligence and arrogance that had brought on the disaster.

He was, however, tainted by rumors that as IDF chief of staff he had suffered a nervous breakdown before the Six-Day War—rumors that were now given new credence by his then deputy, now a hawkish and vindictive Likud figure,
Ezer Weizman. Weizman urged Labor central committee members to prefer the rival candidate,
Shimon Peres. Rabin, he advised them, could not be relied on to stand firm under pressure.

Rabin desperately needed a military figure of equal military prestige and comparable nationalistic credentials to step forward and defend him before Weizman’s allegations hit the headlines. Arik Sharon, who remembered how Rabin had saved his career in 1963 when he was in the deep freeze, did not hesitate. He called around to every national newspaper, offering his unequivocal confidence in Rabin’s leadership qualities.
⁵
On June 3, Rabin’s government was sworn in. Reluctantly, but unavoidably given his rival’s clout in the party, Rabin named Peres minister of defense.

Sharon, watching from the Likud benches while the Labor leaders took their places around the cabinet table, was almost visibly chafing
in his seat. As long as Golda and Dayan had hung on, there was enough adrenaline coursing through the political system to make life in the opposition bearable. There was a real prospect of forcing new elections. But once Rabin took over, the postwar waves of political pandemonium abated. The vista of four more years of Labor rule and Likud speech making was too arid for Sharon to contemplate. Yet his path back to the professional army was effectively blocked now by the appointment of
Mordechai Gur—another general untainted by Yom Kippur; he had been serving as defense attaché in Washington—as the new chief of staff in place of Elazar. Sharon and Gur were enemies from the time of the paratroopers’ revolt back in 1957.

Sharon tried to get his reserves command restored. Labor ministers and members of the Knesset (MKs) were vociferously opposed to this, but Rabin insisted. They responded, though, with a draft amendment forbidding senior officers with field commands to serve in the Knesset. There were other MKs serving as officers in the reserves, but only Sharon had—and now sought again—a field command. In December 1974, the cabinet endorsed the measure. Sharon, always courting victimhood, naturally saw the legislation as aimed specifically at him. This time he was probably right. But he had not been enjoying backbench life much anyway, nor been fully engaged in the Knesset, though he did chair an important and top secret subcommittee that supervised defense spending. He announced his resignation from the House.

The Likud faction convened for a requisite outpouring of outrage at the government’s arbitrary injustice and grief over losing Sharon. “If I’d known how much you all love me,” Sharon said archly, “maybe I wouldn’t have resigned.”

As for Labor, “they’ve achieved exactly the opposite of what they intended,” wrote
Yoel Marcus in a
Haaretz
column. “They wanted to stop him becoming a general again and to stymie his political career by gagging him. But now he’ll be both: three days a week an officer, and the rest of the week a public statesman. Forcing him to quit the Knesset was the biggest favor. If he had stayed there, he’d have slowly sunk under the gray grind of party politics, which he is totally not cut out for.”
⁶

In another turn of good fortune, Sharon was able to project himself to the public as vindicated, indeed extolled, by the Agranat Commission over the grave and politically devastating charge of insubordination in the face of the enemy. As part of his postwar, pre-politics media blitz a year before, Sharon had told the newspaper
Maariv
in January that he regretted obeying the High Command’s orders to attack
Missouri on October 21.
^b
“I should have disobeyed an order I knew was wrong,” Sharon said. “I should have disobeyed and accepted a court-martial for my disobedience.”
⁷

This triggered a firestorm of criticism and controversy. The Agranat Commission, whose remit effectively ended on the third day of the war, was asked nevertheless to take up this crucial question of obedience in wartime. “When is it permissible for a commander, of whatever rank, to disobey orders?” Sharon was asked bluntly by Justice Moshe Landau, a commission member.

Sharon replied that as a basic rule all orders must be obeyed. But special situations could arise, and October 21 was one.

In February 1975, in the published section of its final report—the vast bulk of which remained secret
^c
—the Agranat Commission effectively exonerated Sharon, though at the same time did not endorse his rationale.

W
hatever Justice Agranat and his four colleagues had said or had meant to say about Sharon’s alleged insubordination, their comments were vindication enough for Prime Minister Rabin to be able to do what he had probably been planning to do for some time: hire Sharon as his adviser. The original job definition, “defense adviser to the prime minister,” quickly fell prey to the animosity between Rabin and Peres. So Sharon was called just “adviser.”
⁹
Peres hired Sharon’s old
friend, comrade, and rival Yisrael Tal as
his
defense adviser, although of course, as defense minister, he had the entire
General Staff to advise him.

Sharon understood that in part at least he was being used as a weapon in the escalating duel between Rabin and Peres. This did not deter him, though it would complicate his relations with Peres over the years. What did worry him, though, as he considered Rabin’s tempting offer of a role at the heart of power, was the prospect of his rightist credentials being compromised by his perceived association with the Labor government’s peace policy.

Under relentless pressure from Kissinger, Rabin was negotiating an ambitious “
interim agreement” with Egypt. Under its evolving terms, Israel would withdraw some thirty miles from the canal to a line east of the Mitle and Gidi passes. The UNEF buffer zone separating the two armies under the original postwar cease-fire and separation arrangements, and the two limited forces zones that flanked it, would all shift eastward. The proposed withdrawal meant that Israel would also cede the lucrative oil field at Abu Rodeis, farther down the
Gulf of Suez coast. Israeli cargoes, though not Israeli ships, would be allowed through the Suez Canal.

An important new element in the agreement was a hands-on American surveillance role. The United States would set up watch stations in the UNEF buffer zone, to be operated by two hundred American civilian personnel. Israel and Egypt could also each set up a surveillance station in the zone. In addition, U.S. planes would carry out daily surveillance flights over the area and would supply the data from them to Israel, Egypt, and UNEF.