Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (41 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
The jury held against
Time,
too, on the question of falsity—the second of the three verdicts that the federal judge Abraham Sofaer instructed it to render. Sharon made the most of the moment, sensing, perhaps, that it would be the zenith for him. “What has been proved now is that
Time
Magazine lied … They libeled not just a blood libel against me but against the state of Israel and against the Jewish People. We showed clearly that we spoke the truth, and
Time
Magazine lied … Had I not fought it, their terrible lie would have become unchallenged fact … That is why I see in the jury’s second decision
a great moral success for all of us.” He told reporters he would be going home straight after the third verdict, regardless of what it was. If he won on malice and was eventually awarded pecuniary damages, they would all go to a fund to protect Jewish rights around the world. He had not sued to make money and would not keep any of it if he won any.
But on the issue of malice, the jury came down on
Time
’s side. “To the question, ‘Has the plaintiff proved by clear and convincing evidence that a person or persons at Time Incorporated responsible for either reporting, writing, editing or publishing the paragraph at issue did so with actual malice in that he, she or they knew, at the time of publishing any statement we have found was false and defamatory, that the defamatory statement was false or had serious doubts as to its truth?’ To that question, we find: The answer is no, plaintiff has not so proved by clear and convincing evidence.”
g
Sharon put the best face on it, repeating the words of gratification he had voiced after the second verdict. He could draw encouragement from Begin, who, from his seclusion, issued a generous statement: “Ariel Sharon has won a complete moral victory. The issue was never one of monetary consideration, as I believe and as Sharon himself said. From the moral viewpoint, there is no doubt, in my view, that Sharon won an absolute victory.”
American law’s requirement of actual malice in libel cases involving public officials is not shared by most other legal systems, including Israel’s. Sharon’s suit against
Time
in Tel Aviv, therefore, given the New York court’s verdict on defamation and malice, became at last the slam dunk that he had hoped for when the saga began.
Time
agreed to an out-of-court settlement, paying Sharon $200,000. This was ten times more than the highest sum of damages ever awarded for libel in Israel to date. This time there was no talk of a fund for the Jewish people; Sharon kept the lot.
a
On September 22,
Amnon Rubinstein, MK (Shinui), said in the
Knesset: “When these things happen to Palestinian
children, to Arab children, the only thing he [the prime minister] has to say is that goyim kill goyim. This is outrageous. It will be quoted; it will be recorded and held against us in the annals of history. It is intolerable. Regardless of party affiliation, all of us should regard it as such.” Begin’s reply was that his words had been misquoted. “Dr. Rubinstein … has reached a hair-raising conclusion: that I said—of course this was an inaccurate leak, but never mind—‘goyim murdered goyim’ ” (The Need to Set Up a Commission of Inquiry into the
Massacre at the Refugee Camps in Beirut,
Knesset Record,
September 22, 1982).
b
At the first cease-fire the number of IDF fatalities was 214. By the end of the siege of Beirut the figure had risen to some 300, with another 1,500 injured (Morris,
Righteous Victims,
705). All told, from June 1982 to June 1985 the IDF suffered 650 dead and nearly 3,000 injured (ibid., 521). Two explosions, one an accident, the other a terror attack, accounted for 103 of the Israeli dead. On November 11, 1982, a gas leak caused an explosion at the Israeli security offices in
Tyre that brought down the entire building, killing 75 Israeli servicemen and 15 Lebanese prisoners. Almost exactly a year later, also in Tyre, a car packed with explosives blew up outside the IDF headquarters. This killed 28 Israelis and 31 Lebanese. The bombing came two weeks after the similar attacks on American and French forces in Beirut that took the lives of 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers. All three attacks were attributed to Imad Mugniya, later leader of
Hezbollah’s military wing and a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He was eventually killed in a
car bombing in
Damascus in February 2008, an assassination widely attributed to the Mossad.
c
During the
Lebanon War, foreign minister and defense minister had barely been on speaking terms. Shamir’s director general at the Foreign Ministry,
David Kimche, whom Sharon had come to know in his previous capacity as deputy head of the Mossad, served as the preferred channel of communication between the two senior ministers (Kimche interview).
d
Herut and the
Liberal Party, though joined in the Likud, still maintained separate structures at this time.
e
In the subsequent months Sharon took particular pleasure in pulling up aides who referred to “the 42 percent.” “Er, hm … point five,” he would hector, mock didactically. “Forty-two point five. Don’t let’s forget the point five.”
f
See p. 269.
g
For a fuller account of the Sharon against Time Inc. trial, please see
www.arik-davidlandau.com
.
F
or much of the decade after the
Lebanon War, Yitzhak Shamir served either
as prime minister or as vice prime minister. He was finally defeated in 1992 by
Yitzhak Rabin, and Labor replaced Likud as the party in power. Three days later, in an uncharacteristic lapse into momentary candor, Shamir admitted to an interviewer that he had always intended to drag out peace negotiations indefinitely while vigorously expanding the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
1
Later he denied having said it, but everyone, at home and abroad, believed the original story rather than the denial.
2
President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz and President Bush and Secretary of State Baker all tried hard to prod things along. But Shamir was rocklike in his intransigence. After
Desert Storm, Baker managed to drag him to Madrid, where a Middle East peace conference offered a glimmer of hope for the future of the region.
For the “peace camp” in Israel, Shamir’s decade was a lost decade, a decade of diplomatic disappointments that brought on the
Palestinian intifada, or uprising. For the
“national camp,” it was time well spent, building up and consolidating the network of settlements that Begin and Sharon had spread across the Palestinian territories during the Likud’s early years in government.
For both camps, the decade was one of intense, unremitting struggle over their very different visions for the future of the country. A remarkable paradox held sway in public life:
Likud-Labor unity governments ruled for years (1984–1990), yet beneath that formal, fragile facade there was no letup in the ideological battle that divided Israeli society. If anything, the divisions deepened and widened. They reflected not only politics but religion, culture, and class, too. Increasingly, the “peace camp” represented the better-off, better-educated Ashkenazi middle class and intelligentsia. The “national camp,” led by the Likud, succeeded in bringing together under one political roof groups that
felt themselves excluded from “the elite”: the mainly poor, mainly Sephardi working class in run-down city suburbs and small provincial towns; the growing ultra-Orthodox sects; the large modern-Orthodox community whose leaders had abandoned their historic alliance with Labor and whose ideological vanguard, the West Bank settlers, now provided ideological fervor for the whole “national camp.”
For Sharon, it was a decade of frustration and fury. The first five years were suffused with bitter recrimination in the aftermath of a war that refused to reach closure. In his relentless pursuit both of rehabilitation and of renewed political power, Sharon exploited the sharpening polarization of Israeli public life. He cast himself as the wounded champion of the Right, unfairly brought down by the Left. Relentlessly, he rammed the controversy around the Lebanon War into that Left-Right, dove-hawk mold. Albeit Begin, the historic leader of the hawks, had ultimately abandoned him, forcing him out of the Defense Ministry, but that was an aberration, engineered by a cabal of closet doves who surrounded the former prime minister. Some of them, Sharon maintained, continued to influence the new Likud leader, Yitzhak Shamir. He, Sharon, was the authentic, reliable, and unswerving leader of the hawks. That was why he had been brought down; that was why he must rise again.
But the
Lebanon War and its interminable aftermath reinforced Sharon’s image in the minds of many Israelis, even in the “national camp,” as a warmonger, and not a very astute or successful one at that. Sabra and Shatila added a dimension of monstrosity and of abiding shame. For all their deprecation of this judgment of him, Sharon’s party rivals never balked at using it against him. He was, they snidely opined, unelectable. His unremitting attacks on Shamir, displaying both disloyalty and extremism, made their opinion all the more persuasive.
S
haron’s constant accusation was that he had been betrayed by his political enemies and allies alike, and that in betraying him, they were betraying the most fundamental interests of the state itself. By stabbing him in the back, his detractors were unraveling the fiber of national solidarity. By accusing him of leading the army into an unnecessary war, they were courting the risk of every future war being branded unnecessary by men who lacked the patriotism to fight it.
In a television appearance after the massacre, he steered the conversation away from events at the camps to an earlier, hitherto-unpublished episode: his decision during the war, together with Chief of Staff Eitan, not to mobilize an entire reserve infantry brigade because of
mutinous murmurings within its ranks. The interviewer was aghast; this could undermine the whole ethos of the citizen army. That was precisely the point, Sharon said. Criticism was all well and good. He was all for it. He absolutely wanted the massacre to be investigated. All the way. Leave no stone unturned. “Our strength as a nation is our ability to speak freely. I believe in that. But! But there have to be limits. Everything has to have limits. We face a hostile world. We’re still sitting on a powder keg. And I want you to know that this thing makes me tremble. The fact that I had to sit with the chief of staff and decide not to mobilize a reserve brigade of the IDF.”
T
here, then, was the real danger: the enemy within. A straight line led from criticism to mutiny. From criticizing him to endangering the very survival of the nation. So what to do? asked the interviewer. Ban all criticism? “Criticism is legitimate,” Sharon replied. “But there is a limit to what a nation can take, a limit to what it can accuse itself of. A nation must understand that. It must understand that it has to survive. If we want to keep on living, then, alongside the moral thing—to prevent reprehensible things from happening—there must be a unified stand. We must all stand together. People among us must not help our enemies to destroy us.”
3
Part of the “enemy within” was, of course, the media. “You all know what the media are; I don’t need to tell you,” Sharon roared to a crowd of young rightists in downtown
Jerusalem in September 1983. “PLO! PLO!” came the answering roar. He told them, nevertheless. The media were “hypocrites, champions of self-destruction, corroders of the nation, suppliers of fuel to anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic machines from Damascus to Moscow.” The Kahan Commission was another of his regular targets. It had “put weapons into the hands of Israel haters throughout the world,” he told the Jerusalem crowd. “A terrible injustice has been done to the Jewish people, to the State of Israel, and also to me personally.”
a
“He was simply paranoid. There’s no other word for it.”
Yossi Beilin, who served as cabinet secretary for Shimon Peres’s half of the rotating prime ministership (September 1984 to October 1986), looked back bemused at “the kind of friendship” that developed between Sharon and himself during that peculiar government, which Sharon had been so instrumental in creating:
He used to drop into my office almost every week, before the cabinet meeting, sit down, and immediately start slagging off other people. “Yossi, you should know, so-and-so is dangerous. He’s out to get you. He’ll stab you in the back …” It was a friendship grounded in his unshakable conviction that everyone was against him. People were against me too, he explained. But I was too naive to understand, and he, because of our friendship, would warn me and try to protect me. I came to see him as a haunted man. A haunted man. Convinced that the whole world was plotting against him, that he must fight them, constantly fight them.
At cabinet, he always fell asleep after half an hour and awoke only when food was brought in. “He would write me cute notes, ‘Yossi, did I miss anything important?’ The subtext, of course, was that in his eyes nothing was important if he wasn’t involved in it, preferably running it. When the food came, however mediocre it was, it focused his entire attention. He would reach out a huge hand and load up with sandwiches or cookies, whatever was on offer, and proceed to eat it all down with deliberate concentration. ‘Eat something. Why don’t you eat?’ he would whisper to me, an expression of his friendship.”
4
Three times during Peres’s twenty-five months as premier, Sharon provoked the Labor prime minister into almost sacking him. Presumably, he thought this tightrope trick scored him points inside the Likud. Arguably, he was right. But unarguably, it weakened him in the country, reinforcing his image as an obtuse and foulmouthed extremist. Since Sharon was not obtuse but highly intelligent, and not naturally foulmouthed but polite by instinct and education, a certain mystery hangs over this behavior. Surely he and his advisers understood that at
the end of the day the Likud would not vote in as its leader a man who was seen as rude and extreme and therefore unelectable as prime minister? Where was the sophistication behind this strategy of extremism? Or were the periodic explosions of spleen not wholly under his own or his political counselors’ control?