Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (5 page)

It was run by
Yitzhak Rabin, a former top Palmach commander who had distinguished himself in the war and had decided to swallow the forcible disbandment of the Palmach and make his career in the IDF. On completing the course, Arik was appointed intelligence officer of Central Command, an unexpectedly steep step up on the ladder of promotion and an opportunity to make his mark on the top brass. His first contact with Moshe Dayan, then commanding officer (CO) of Southern Command, came in a large-scale training exercise. Arik was intrigued to find that the already-famous general scored his successes by not playing by the rules. Dayan launched his attack on Central Command before the war game had officially begun, gaining a strategic advantage but eventually running out of fuel. Arik led a counterattack that salvaged some at least of Central’s honor. Later he was carpeted on the grounds that intelligence officers do not lead field operations—and resolved there and then to quit the intelligence corps.

His activities during this year were repeatedly stymied by bouts of malaria, for which the antidote was increasingly large doses of quinine. In the end the army doctors recommended a complete break and change of climate as a way of ridding his system of the bug, and he set out to see the world. But first, “My father and I went to a clothing store in
Tel Aviv, where I bought my first sport jacket and a pair of what were then known in Israel as ‘half shoes,’ to distinguish them from the high-top boots that everyone always wore on the farm. When I arrived at Orly airport in
Paris, my uncle took one look at my outfit and blanched.”
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Duly kitted out by his uncle Joseph’s bespoke tailor, Arik spent a fortnight taking in the culture and living the high life in Paris. Then it was on to
London, where he had three friends from the war:
Yitzhak Modai and Dov Sion, both young Israeli officers, and
Cyril Kern, an English Jew who had volunteered for the IDF in 1948 and was now back in the U.K. making money in the rag trade.

From London, Arik flew to
New York, where his host was his aunt
Sana. She helped him get a driver’s license, explaining to the examiner that he was an Israeli army officer and hence his rudimentary English. She flew down to Florida, and he took her car on a leisurely swing through Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, joining her in Palm Beach for New Year’s 1952. “By the time I returned to Israel I felt like a man of the world. More important, the malaria seemed to have disappeared.”

Back in uniform, he found himself assigned to Northern Command, where once again his path crossed that of Dayan and once again Arik signaled to the famous general that they were two of a kind: single-minded, devious, and resourceful. Two Israeli soldiers had crossed the border with Jordan and been captured. Dayan, now CO Northern Command, asked his intelligence officer whether he thought it might be possible to pick up a couple of Jordanian soldiers to help expedite the Israelis’ repatriation. Arik, careful to sound equally blasé, merely offered a noncommittal “I’ll look into it.” But as soon as Dayan left his room, he phoned one of his officers, Shlomo Hefer, and arranged for the two of them to drive to a remote spot on the border.

They pretended they were looking for a lost cow and got into a shouted conversation with a Jordanian sergeant and three soldiers, inviting them across to drink coffee under a tree. Arik, in reasonable Arabic, asked the sergeant to send one of his men back to ask about the cow. He sent two. No sooner were they out of sight than Arik and Hefer drew their weapons and bundled the remaining two into their vehicle. The next morning, Dayan found a note on his desk: two Jordanians were in the cells below his office, waiting to be interviewed. Dayan, in a cover note to the chief of staff attached to Arik’s report of the capture, wrote, “In my opinion, this operation, which was carried out with sense and with daring, is worthy of special mention.”
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“It was the beginning of a complicated lifelong relationship between us,” Sharon wrote later, “that was to be marked by deep feelings of respect, but by suspicion too … He positively relished the idea that someone would do this kind of thing … Typically he would convey his intentions in an ambiguous way, leaving plenty of room for initiative and interpretation … If the result was success, fine. But if it was a failure, well then, the responsibility was not his but yours.”
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Dayan’s tenure at Northern Command lasted only half a year; he was promoted to deputy chief of staff and moved to the High Command
in Tel Aviv. Arik was all the more susceptible to a sustained barrage of nagging from his parents, especially his mother, to continue his education. The army, reluctant to lose a promising officer, suggested a leave of absence for the purposes of study at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period he would be commander of a reserve battalion in the
Jerusalem Brigade. Perfecting the picture from Arik’s viewpoint, Gali was moving to Jerusalem too. Having completed her studies as a psychiatric nurse, she was to work in a small psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of the capital. The couple married without much ado at the office of a military chaplain whom Arik knew. They found a basement apartment for rent, and Arik began diligently taking classes in Middle Eastern history. “It was a wonderful time,” he writes.
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But it didn’t last. The situation on the borders was steadily worsening. Ever since the war ended (and indeed, even before), Palestinian refugees had been infiltrating back across the unmarked frontiers of the
West Bank and the
Gaza Strip. Some sought to return to their former homes: if one member of a family could establish residency, there was a chance for the others to come back under a family reunification scheme. Others simply tried to harvest the crops, the fruits, or the olives growing on their former lands. Often the land was now worked by Jews: the government deliberately located new settlements close to the armistice lines in order to stake the state’s claim to every inch of the territory that remained in its hands after the war. New
immigrants were channeled to these border settlements and encouraged to farm the land. Government instructors gave rudimentary guidance to those who had never been farmers before.

The infiltration soon gave rise to violent and sometimes fatal confrontations. Some refugee-infiltrators did not confine themselves to their own former farms or villages but scoured the wider area for produce, tools, irrigation pipes, livestock, anything worth taking. Some settlements formed
vigilante groups to protect their property, since the border was wide open and the army was plainly unable to patrol its entire winding length.

The government for its part ordered the army to maintain a ruthless shoot-to-kill policy along the armistice lines.
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The purpose was twofold: to keep the refugee-infiltrators out for fear of a mass return that could quickly undermine the new state’s conveniently manageable 80/20 Jewish/Arab
demographic; and to reaffirm, each day anew, the inviolability of the armistice lines, even in the absence of full peace treaties. Subsequent orders issued by the IDF High Command forbade shooting at women and children. Male infiltrators, too, were not to
be shot at without due warning, unless they opened fire first. In practice, even after these limitations were imposed, shoot to kill continued to be the order of the day in some IDF units. In others, nonviolent infiltrators were rounded up and sent back or handed over to the UN observers.

The harsh deterrent policy against the refugee-infiltrators was the focus of political argument then and thereafter. Also still in dispute is whether the Israeli policy caused or at least catalyzed the next spiral of escalation. Increasingly, the Palestinian infiltrators came in armed bands, out to kill and maim indiscriminately. Israel’s response was to launch reprisal raids across the borders, against the villages or
refugee camps from which the marauders were believed to have set out.

It was the dissonance that developed between that vaunted policy and its execution on the ground that sucked Arik back into the army and catapulted him to military prominence and national fame. Time and again, reprisal actions over the borders ended in frustrating failure. The postwar army seemed to have lost its fighting edge. IDF units were driven off with ease by poorly armed Jordanian militiamen. Often, the raiding party failed to make contact altogether, losing its way in the dark.

Arik had an opportunity to show how it should be done in July 1953.
Mishael Shaham, commander of the
Jerusalem Brigade, won approval from the High Command to go after a particularly lethal Palestinian marauder who lived in the village of Nebi Samuel, overlooking Jerusalem from the north. But Shaham could not get a regular IDF infantry unit to take on the assignment. So he called in Arik, one of his reserve battalion commanders, and asked him to undertake the mission with whatever men he could pull together. By nightfall, seven crack fighters were strapping on their webbing and checking their tommy guns. They were a motley collection: not men from his battalion at all, but comrades from war days and a couple of present-day soldiers discreetly wooed out of their units. The fact that Shaham, a regular army colonel, countenanced this semi-guerrilla setup reflected his desperation at the almost daily toll of Israeli lives and property that the infiltrators were exacting in the area under his command.

In the event, the reprisal raid was a flop. The man was not at home, and anyway the dynamite charge that Arik’s men laid failed to blow off the door of his house. It did, however, rouse other villagers who began firing vigorously at the raiders, who in turn chucked a few grenades and beat a retreat. Yet when they returned to base at dawn and told their story, Shaham was well pleased. At least they had reached
the target and engaged it. That was a lot more than most such operations achieved.

Shaham wrote to Ben-Gurion, prime minister and minister of defense, urging that the army set up a special force to conduct reprisal raids. Asked to recommend a commanding officer, he said he had the very man. Arik, sorely tempted, shrank back at the thought of Gali’s likely reaction, let alone Vera’s. He had an important test in history the next day, he muttered to Shaham. “Why study history when you can
make
history?” the colonel replied.
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A fortnight later Arik was called before the chief of staff,
Mordechai Makleff, and formally offered the task of creating and commanding the proposed special force.

“I
’m dying of hunger. Where’s that porcupine we hunted yesterday?”

“Coming right up! He’s on the grill with onions as big as a bull’s balls.”

This gastronomical exchange between Major Arik, big-bellied, silver-haired, but baby-faced commander of
Unit 101, and his deputy,
Shlomo Baum, is one of the salient memories of one young officer, Moshe Yenuka, who had come for an interview at the elite unit’s base in the Jerusalem hills. The commander, Yenuka recalled, wore sandals on his bare feet and a large pistol strapped to his belt.

Arik cherry-picked his men from all over the army, often to the chagrin of rival commanders. While he encouraged an atmosphere of informality between officers and men that harked back to the egalitarian traditions of the
Palmach, he was demanding and unforgiving in the strenuous training programs that he put in place in Unit 101. And while discipline was lax on base, it was harsh and inflexible on operations. Unit 101’s esprit de corps rested on a new, much higher benchmark of what constituted “mission accomplished.” The officers exhorted the men, and the men exhorted each other, to persevere despite casualties, to drive home their attacks, and always to bring their dead and wounded back with them, never leaving them to the enemy’s mercies.

Arik began pressing Shaham and the High Command for assignments. Among the first was a mission to drive a clan of Bedouin encamped in the Negev back across the border into
Sinai. Jeep-borne soldiers of Unit 101 stormed through the encampment firing their weapons at will. A few of the Bedouin were wounded; the rest fled in panic. The Israelis burned their tents and confiscated abandoned weapons. They chased the fleeing Bedouin to the border, where, in a
demilitarized zone between Israeli and Egyptian territory, Unit 101’s jeeps ran into a larger Egyptian force. “Get out, or we’ll do to you what we did to you in ’48,” Arik barked at the Egyptian troops. “We’re leaving now. If you shoot, we will immediately turn back and attack you.”

I
t worked and gave the guys a lot to laugh about when they got back to base. But some in the unit were uncomfortable with the action against the Bedouin.
Meir Har-Zion, a Unit 101 man whom Moshe Dayan was later to praise as the finest soldier Israel ever had, recorded years later in his memoirs a “sense of imperfection” that pervaded him at the time. “Is this the enemy? Is it all justified?”
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Arik tried to persuade them that Israel needed to assert its sovereignty and shore up its borders and this was the only way to do it. Dayan himself, in his memoirs, writes that these Bedouin, members of the Azazme tribe, “served Egyptian intelligence by passing on information and by planting mines and carrying out acts of violence inside Israel.”
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Shortly after, Unit 101 was ordered into action against the al-Burej refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, and again a dispute arose over the likely fates of innocent civilians. Shmuel Falah, one of the soldiers, refused to take part in the attack. Arik allowed him to switch to a second platoon whose task was to blow up the home of an Egyptian military commander. In the debriefing, defending the deaths of women and children, Arik railed that the women were “prostitutes serving the armed infiltrators who kill our innocent civilians.” The chief of staff,
Mordechai Makleff, phoned Shaham to demand an explanation of how fifteen civilians had died in the operation. Shaham called in Arik. Arik explained that a guard had given the alarm; the Unit 101 men found themselves in a tight spot; they had had to shoot their way out of the refugee camp.