Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (7 page)

One of the revamped paratroop battalion’s earliest operations, in March 1954, followed the murder of eleven bus passengers on a winding road in the
Negev called Ma’aleh Akrabim, or Scorpions Hill. The assailants were
fedayun
from across the Jordan border. The target chosen for reprisal was the West Bank village of Nahalin, where the paratroopers were to blow up houses again. The new policy of attacking only military targets had not yet fully gelled. Arik handed out flashlights to the troops with which they were to scour the homes before demolishing them. In the event, Arab Legion units tried to block their access, and a pitched battle developed between the two forces. The end result was seven legionnaires killed in the operation and three civilians, including the
mukhtar,
or headman, of Nahalin.

Three months later, following the murder of a farmer near
Kfar Saba, the target was an Arab Legion camp at
Azoun, on the West Bank. The dovish Sharett was now prime minister, Ben-Gurion having retired, at least temporarily, and gone to live on a remote Negev kibbutz, Sde Boker. Sharett approved the army’s reprisal plan. Arik handpicked seven of his men to carry out this mission. The commander was Aharon Davidi, Arik’s deputy. Leading the squad through nine miles of West Bank territory on the dark, moonless night was
Meir Har-Zion, commander of the battalion’s reconnaissance company and a man with uncanny navigational skills. Two of the others were also ex–Unit 101 men,
Yitzhak Gibli and Yoram Nahari. Sharon sat with the seven as they pored over aerial photographs and maps and saw them off at the border at nightfall. They were kitted out in civilian clothes and armed with non-army-issue tommy guns. Even though the IDF was now beginning to direct its reprisals at the neighboring armies, it apparently still sought to cling to the ostensible deniability of the “vigilante” fiction.

At the camp, they split into two groups. Each stormed a large tent,
spraying automatic fire and hurling
grenades. As they withdrew, Gibli was hit in the leg. They lifted him and kept running, but he was hit again, this time in the neck. They bandaged him quickly. The surviving legionnaires were firing wildly in all directions. Soon they would come after them. Gibli begged to be left. “Just give me a grenade,” he told Davidi. “When they reach me, I’ll blow myself up with them.” Davidi consulted with Har-Zion. It was against their battle ethic to leave a wounded man in the field. But they decided there was no choice; if they stayed, they would all suffer the wounded man’s fate (which they fully assumed would be death or suicide). But Gibli was not killed and instead was taken prisoner. On his cell wall, he recalled four decades later, he scratched the first letters of Arik’s and Davidi’s names, “to remind myself who I am and where I come from.”
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Arik for his part, surprised and delighted to learn that Gibli was alive, now embarked on a determined effort to get him back in the way he knew best: kidnapping Jordanian soldiers wherever he could pounce on them. In one instance, he had a jeep painted in white with UN markings and dressed up two of his men as Palestinian peasants and Har-Zion as an Israeli policeman. They were to drive to the border to “return” the two straying peasants. When a Jordanian patrol came to “receive” them, they would grab the officer and head back with him to Israel. The officer in question saw through the fresh paint or the peasant dress and backed away in time. On another occasion, Arik sent two women soldiers across the border to entice legionnaires, also without success.

He was like a man possessed, endlessly repeating the mantras that the paratroopers don’t leave a man in the field (which they had) and that the IDF does everything possible to bring its men home. He was a lieutenant colonel by now, having been promoted after being wounded leading an attack in July 1954 on a fortified Egyptian army position near
Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. “I was hit in the thigh,” he recounted in a nostalgic lecture, as prime minister, forty-nine years later.

Sharon’s mantras reflected the spirit he inculcated in the paratroopers, and these did in time pervade the whole army as ideals to be aspired to.

Under Arik, a commander’s decision to leave a wounded man would be justified only in the direst straits, as Gibli’s case proved. For Arik, what also changed was the lengths to which he believed the IDF should go to get its POWs back. His unremitting attempts to seize Jordanians led to serious strains with Dayan and his head of operations, Colonel Meir Amit. Dayan wrote in his diary:

The “business of unapproved operations” was never really resolved between the two men. This conversation was a harbinger of many conversations to come over the next two years and further in the future, when Sharon was to lead much larger formations under Dayan’s overall command.

In his memoirs, Dayan wrote of Ben-Gurion’s “special affection” for three IDF officers:
Haim Laskov,
ⁱ
Assaf Simchoni, and Sharon. The founding father saw in all three of them “the antithesis of the
galuti,
or diasporic Jew. The
New Jew was a fighter, bold, self-confident, expert in the art of war, in weaponry, in field craft, in the region, and in the Arabs. Ben-Gurion could not bear casuistry and beating around the bush. He didn’t like the Talmud; his heart rebelled against two thousand years of exile. He yearned for the Israelites of the Bible, living on their land, farming and fighting, independent and proud and building
their national culture. Haim, Assaf, and Arik were like those ancient Israelites in his eyes.”
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Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar writes that the Old Man told him he admired two soldiers above all for their bravery and resourcefulness: Dayan and Sharon.

Sharon himself failed to understand that his easy and frequent access to Ben-Gurion rankled with other, more senior officers. “With the room full of generals and staff officers, he would call me to be next to him … It was a situation that cried out for tact on my part, but at the age of twenty-six I didn’t recognize the need.”
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Regardless of the tension between Sharon and himself, Dayan was consistent and unequivocal in recognizing the reprisal operations as a key factor in strengthening the IDF. “Dayan saw the reprisals as a means of educating and training the army,” writes his then aide-de-camp, Mordechai Bar-On. “The long series of combat failures during the years before his appointment as chief of staff, and especially during 1953, worried him deeply, and he saw his main task as chief of staff to restore the IDF to fighting efficacy … The reprisal actions were the chief instrument.”
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Dayan insisted that the army’s regular infantry brigades improve their combat effectiveness and that more units develop the commando skills which the paratroopers expended so much effort acquiring. With time, Dayan records in his memoirs, other units began to take part in the reprisal operations. “The paratroopers ceased to be solely an army formation and became a concept and a symbol—the symbol of courageous combat.”

The paratroop battalion “has set high standards of combat,” Dayan told the
General Staff in February 1956. “It has proved that we can achieve those high standards, and has thereby had an influence throughout the army. It has demonstrated what the level of commitment of the individual fighter can be and ought to be in battle. If one man had succeeded in moving the entire army forward in this regard, it is Arik.”
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But there were moments of weakness, too, even of cowardice. And there were serious lapses of ethical standards, despite the lessons ostensibly learned from the
Kibbiya operation. In February 1955,
Meir Har-Zion and three other paratroopers crossed the border and killed five
Bedouin in cold-blooded revenge for the murder of Har-Zion’s sister. The sister, Shoshana, and a friend had gone hiking on the Jordanian side of the border, heading for the Dead Sea. They never returned. Har-Zion formally quit the army, enlisted three paratrooper friends, and went after the killers. They picked up six Bedouin, murdered five,
and left the sixth alive to tell the tale. Har-Zion maintained that these were the killers, but there was no clear proof of that.
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“The entire episode was a throwback to tribal days,” Sharon writes in
Warrior
.

Tribal or not, Sharon provided Har-Zion with a tracked vehicle, a driver to take him right up to the border (“the best I had”—
Yitzhak Gibli, now back from Jordanian captivity), and weapons with which to conduct his vendetta. And what’s more, Dayan knew in real time that he had done so. “Dayan called to ask what had happened…‘I tried to persuade him [Har-Zion],’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen. So I gave him some help.’ ‘Can we still stop him?’ Dayan asked. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘It’s too late for that.’ ”
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When the four returned, they were feasted and feted by the paratroopers.

Prime Minister Sharett demanded that the four men stand trial “or else we will lose the right to demand that neighboring states try and punish murderers [of Jews].” Ben-Gurion, who had now returned from his desert retreat and was serving as minister of defense, agreed. Har-Zion and his friends were arrested. Sharon hired an able young lawyer,
Shmuel Tamir, to plead their case. But Tamir was a vocal and eloquent member of Menachem Begin’s
Herut Party and a thorn in the government’s flesh. Ben-Gurion was furious, more over the political deviation in hiring Tamir, apparently, than over the killings that Sharon had abetted. Ben-Gurion gave Sharon a stark choice: sever your ties with Tamir at once, without telling him why, or leave the army at once. Sharon chose the former, explaining to Tamir only years later why he had been forced to do so.
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In a fawning and disingenuous letter to Dayan—disingenuous, it would seem, on both their parts—Sharon vigorously denied any taint of disloyalty. “There is no unit in the army more admiring of and loyal to the chief of staff than the paratroop battalion.” He admitted to “mistakes” in the Har-Zion affair but insisted that he “genuinely and sincerely believed at the time I was doing the right thing … I never intended, Heaven forbid, to embarrass the IDF in any show trial, and I certainly had no political intent regarding the lawyer.”
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Ben-Gurion, in his diary, faulted Sharett for publishing the names of Har-Zion’s three accomplices and justified Har-Zion’s refusal to cooperate with the police investigators. The upshot was an internal IDF investigation. There was no trial and no punishment. Har-Zion was back in uniform within months. “The final outcome of the affair,” writes the historian Benny Morris, “reflected Ben-Gurion’s position in general. He never really wanted to prosecute four of his most favorite soldiers, especially since a trial might have thrown light on other ethically dubious actions of
Unit 101 and the paratroopers.”
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A much more ominous drama was meanwhile building up between Israel and Egypt. On February 17, 1955, an Israeli farmer was murdered near Rehovot. Clearly the killers had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip. Sharon submitted a plan to attack in reprisal a small Egyptian army unit encamped south of Gaza City. Ben-Gurion and Dayan together persuaded Sharett to agree. The order to the paratroopers, they explained, would strictly forbid them to kill enemy soldiers “except if that proves vital for the fulfillment of the mission,” which was defined as blowing up buildings in the camp and in the nearby railway station.

To ward off suspicious snooping by UN observers, the paratroopers left their forward camp at the kibbutz of Kfar Azza together with girl soldiers, all singing and laughing as if they were off on a hike. As they approached the border, they split off into separate attacking forces. One headed for the Egyptian army camp, another for the station; a third set up an ambush on the main road from the south, to intercept reinforcements.

Bad navigating led to mistakes, and the first and second forces found themselves in a vicious firefight with Egyptian soldiers. Eight paratroopers died, and a dozen more were injured. The Egyptians lost fourteen men. A number of buildings were destroyed, and the attacking units withdrew under fire, carrying their dead and wounded with them. The third force, meanwhile, wiped out a column of Egyptian reinforcements, killing twenty-two men without loss. Waiting on the border, Dayan listened to Sharon’s grim report impassively. “The living are alive and the dead are dead,” he said, wheeled around, and left the scene.

Ben-Gurion published a paean of praise for the paratroopers. “The cabinet has unanimously asked me to convey to the paratroop battalion our feelings of appreciation and admiration for the spirit of Jewish heroism demonstrated in this battle … I am sure that these feelings are shared by the entire country. The paratroop battalion, which enjoys the love of the whole nation, has proven once again for all the world to see the triumph of Jewish heroism and has added a glowing page to the annals of the Israel Defense Forces.