Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (6 page)

Perhaps it was his cavalier attitude to Arab lives that had persuaded the
Jerusalem Brigade commander, Shaham, to recommend Arik for Unit 101 in the first place. Shaham himself once recounted how he had been assigned two new battalion commanders, Arik and Shlomo Lahat, nicknamed Chich, who was also studying at the
Hebrew University.
^h
“Chich arrived, took command of a battalion, and the first thing he asked was, ‘Where do we train?’ Arik came and received a battalion too, and his first question was, ‘Where can we fight Arabs,
where can we kill Arabs around here?’ That was the difference between him and others.”
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But Major Arik Scheinerman, aged twenty-five, did not make the policy. He merely executed it more effectively than it had been executed before Unit 101 came into being. His military leadership, first at Unit 101 and afterward as commander of the paratroopers, meant that the reprisal operations achieved greater success than in the past. It also meant that the conflict with the surrounding states escalated; the operations achieved
too
great success, as Ben-Gurion himself later observed.

Like Shaham, though, like Moshe Dayan and other top officers, Arik wholeheartedly identified with the reprisals policy. Indeed, time and again at Unit 101’s camp at Sataf, in the Jerusalem hills, the unit commander’s voice was to be heard blasting and cursing the powers that be for not being even tougher in the border warfare and specifically for not approving more cross-border operations for Unit 101.

On October 12, 1953, Palestinian infiltrators gruesomely murdered a mother and her two children in the Israeli village of Yahud, east of Tel Aviv. General Glubb, the British commander of the
Arab Legion, promised to hunt down the killers. He invited Israel to send tracker dogs over the border to help in the search, but they lost the scent. Glubb condemned the murders at Yahud.

Nevertheless,
Mordechai Makleff, the chief of staff, and his deputy, Moshe Dayan, met the next morning with the acting defense minister,
Pinhas Lavon, and with Ben-Gurion, who was vacationing and thus formally not involved in the decision making. They decided on a reprisal operation against
Kibbiya, a nearby Palestinian village on the West Bank. Fifty of Kibbiya’s 280 homes were to be blown up. Arik was called to Central Command headquarters at Ramle. Unit 101 was to give diversionary support to the paratroop battalion that would conduct the large-scale operation. The paratroop commander was hesitant, explaining that his men were neither trained nor prepared for the action. Arik stepped in immediately. Unit 101 was trained and prepared, he said. He could take command of the whole force and lead the operation the following night.

Arik himself led the combined force of a hundred paratroopers and twenty-five men from Unit 101. Returning at dawn, he reported that a dozen Jordanian National Guardsmen and two legionnaires had been killed in exchanges of fire early in the operation.

“In a few more minutes we were in the village proper,” Sharon recorded in his memoirs.

But there were people inside. Sharon writes that he went home to
Jerusalem to sleep and learned only later in the day, from Jordanian radio, that “sixty-nine people had been killed, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Israel claimed the victims must have been cowering unnoticed in cellars or basements and were killed by mistake in the explosions. The Arab Legion claimed many of the bodies had bullet wounds.
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Ben-Gurion made matters worse by going on the radio several days later to claim that the attack on Kibbiya had been carried out not by the IDF but by a
vigilante group of local Jewish villagers enraged by the incessant raids on the border settlements and finally by the triple murder in Yahud. This was not the first time that Israel had denied the IDF’s role in reprisals and resorted to the vigilante canard.
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It fooled no one, especially since some thirteen hundred pounds of explosives had been expertly laid to blow up forty-six buildings in Kibbiya—hardly the work of an enraged posse. Great Britain, Jordan’s patron, voiced “distress and horror” at the outrage. Washington said that “those responsible should be brought to account.” Israel was condemned and excoriated around the world.

Behind the self-righteous facade there was both shock and worry in Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion asked to see the officer in charge of the Kibbiya operation. “It was an exciting moment for me,” Sharon recorded later, in unwonted understatement. He was fairly bursting with pride. The “Old Man” quizzed him about the operation and about the men of Unit 101. Perhaps he suspected they were ex-Etzel fighters, prone to massacring and to disobedience. Arik told him they were mostly moshav and kibbutz youth. “They were the finest boys we had, I said, and there was no chance they would ever act except under orders. Then Ben-Gurion said, ‘It doesn’t make any real difference what will be said about Kibbiya around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’ ”
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Sharon may have been embellishing, but his grasp of the prime minister’s remarks was accurate. Alongside the concern over international
fallout from Kibbiya there was a grim gratification in Ben-Gurion’s circle that at last the army could be relied on to deliver a bloody but unmistakable message to the other side. “There were tragic consequences that were nobody’s fault,” Dayan wrote. “But from a purely military perspective, this was a first-class operation … The lesson for the whole army was that the government’s instructions were no longer mere wishful thinking but rather minimal expectations. Instead of army units returning from operations and explaining why they had failed to carry out the assignment, the paratroopers were explaining why they had done more than expected.”

Still, the worldwide castigation was a sober reminder of Israel’s vulnerability. “The lesson,” Dayan wrote, “was that we must direct our reprisals against military targets. What was ‘permitted’ to the Arabs, and indeed to other nations, was forbidden for Jews and Israelis and would not be forgiven them. Not only foreigners but citizens of Israel themselves and Jews overseas expect from us a ‘purity of arms’ far more exacting than that demanded of any other army.”
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The reprisals policy was drastically revised. No longer were Arab civilians and Arab villages and refugee camps to be considered legitimate targets. The IDF’s border war now shifted to focus on the armies of the states flanking Israel. Their regular armies, especially the Egyptian troops in the Gaza Strip, were actively supporting, arming, and encouraging the bands of armed Palestinian infiltrators, known as
fedayun
. The states, therefore, were responsible. Repeated military discomfiture could bring them, it was held or hoped, to rein in the marauders.

The exploits of Unit 101, although not public knowledge at the time, were the stuff of word-of-mouth legend throughout the army. So were its off-duty feats, which of course contributed to its dazzling panache in the eyes of less privileged soldiers. Unit 101’s camaraderie was elitist, brash, and brutal. One Friday evening in December 1953, a 101 man driving one of the unit’s jeeps was stopped by military police in
Tiberias. He failed to address them with due deference, and they took him to their base, where three of them knocked him about a bit. He reported to his own base. Within hours, a posse of comrades had been rounded up, made its way to Tiberias, stormed the MP base, located the three assailants, and set about them with clubs. All three required hospitalization.

An inquiry was duly launched; Shaham was carpeted; Shaham called in Arik. Arik penned a fulsome apology to the IDF chief of operations, expressing “the most profound regret in my own name and in the name of every one of my men, for the grave incident that took
place … I am confident such an incident will never recur. I do hope this incident will not cast a shadow on the excellent relations between my unit and the Military Police.”
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Back at Sataf, the posse members were sent home on a two-week furlough; when they returned, Arik informed them that they had been confined to base for a fortnight.

F
ive months after Kibbiya, Unit 101 ceased to exist as an independent military formation. It was merged with the paratroop battalion. Presumably, both lessons of Kibbiya were at play here: on the one hand, Dayan (who was appointed chief of staff in December 1953) wanted a larger fighting force imbued with the spirit of Arik’s commandos; on the other hand, he wanted that spirit embraced, contained, and rendered more disciplined and less antiestablishment—less prone, in other words, to embarrass Israel by intemperate action.

The merger was seen as a hostile takeover by the men themselves, and there were murmurs of defiance. Some of the best fighters in the unit had joined it in order to escape the spit and polish of the regular army. There would be no more beating up of MPs when they were part of a proper battalion. Arik invited Dayan to Sataf to woo and win them over. “You have established new standards of combat, new benchmarks for completing missions,” Dayan said, stroking their individual and collective egos. “Now it’s time to instill those standards into the entire army.”

There was not much enthusiasm for the merger on either side. Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Harari, the commander of the paratroopers, a former British army officer, fully expected to command the enlarged battalion. Dayan disabused him. The paratroopers themselves looked askance at the scruffy crew who sidled reluctantly into their spick-and-span base at Beit Lid, north of Tel Aviv.

The handover ceremony said it all. Harari, ramrod straight, starched, and buckled, precision marched to his spot on the parade ground, facing the flagpole. He read out a terse parting speech and ordered officers who had asked to leave with him to fall out and line up beside him. Many did.

Arik quickly distributed the few dozen Unit 101 men among the different companies of the four-hundred-strong battalion. And he sent all the companies off on prolonged training exercises in different parts of the country, so as to dissipate any lingering umbrage. “Within weeks,” a young officer wrote decades later, “it became clear that 101 had not merged into 890 the paratroop battalion but rather 890 had merged into 101.”

The 101 commandos-now-890-paratroopers ceased their excesses against the military police and, much more important, against Palestinian civilians. But with the new pattern of attacking military targets, and attacking on a much larger scale than previously, the risks inherent in the reprisal operations became even greater, certainly in the eyes of the foreign minister,
Moshe Sharett, and the doves in government. Escalation was inevitable, given that the clashes were now between armies. The numbers of soldiers killed, wounded, and captured—Egyptian soldiers, Jordanian soldiers, and also Syrian soldiers—were embarrassingly high for their respective governments. Yet the
fedayun
infiltrations persisted. The atmosphere in the region steadily, dangerously deteriorated.

Again, it was Sharon’s military prowess, tactical skills, and leadership gifts that contributed significantly to the success of the military operations conducted within the revised reprisals policy. Again, though, he did not make the policy. However enthusiastic an executor he was of it, he was only that—the executor, not the architect. He did not conceive it, nor was he ultimately responsible for it. Retrospective discussions of this period that blame Sharon for triggering the chain of events that led to the 1956 Sinai War give him too much credit (or discredit). Granted, his own incessant pushiness, his expansive, extroverted personality, his unbridled, loudmouthed criticism of the moderates, all contributed to his ostensible importance in the scheme of things (and all enhanced the strictures of his critics). Granted, too, he was much coddled by Ben-Gurion. And he for his part took every available advantage of his access to the premier and defense minister. But he was never in the inner coterie, not one of the bright young men like Dayan and
Shimon Peres and
Teddy Kollek whom the Old Man nurtured and whose company he patently preferred to that of his own old party comrades. They were policy makers, inasmuch as they were present at the conception and formulation of policy. Sharon never was.

It was Ben-Gurion who required Arik, as he did other officers and diplomats, to Hebraize his diasporic-sounding name. The Sharon is the name of the geographic district around
Kfar Malal, and it vaguely emulates the sound of Scheinerman. Vera and Samuil (who had long used his Hebrew first name, Shmuel) readily concurred, although they themselves kept the old family name.

There is no record of what Gali thought. There are hints, however, of broader dissatisfaction on the part of Arik’s young bride over the dramatic change of course their life had taken. When he went back into the army and started coming home late, or not at all, from raids or training exercises, Gali’s frayed nerves showed through. “She
used to give him a hard time,” an army comrade,
Gideon Altschuler, recalled more than fifty years later. “My wife and I lived near them in Jerusalem, and we were good friends. The two of them didn’t always live harmoniously. She didn’t understand that when your man comes back from an operation across the border, that’s not the time to pick a quarrel with him.”
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When Arik took over the paratroop battalion, the young and still-childless marriage was strained even more. “He hardly ever came home,” according to one account, “and when he did, it was only for a few hours—during which time he subjected her to long-winded army stories. She asked him many times to be around more often, but Sharon was engrossed in his military life.”
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