Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (73 page)
Unbeknownst to Halevy and the Mossad, the IDF planning branch under Giora Eiland had been brainstorming, too, and it came up with very similar ideas. Halevy and Eiland were invited separately to Sharon’s residence in Jerusalem for breakfast on the same morning. Halevy attests that the prime minister’s appetite at his breakfast—the second—gave no hint that he had already eaten once with the army general. Both were invited to the ranch the next day for further discussion. Sharon instructed them to go together to Jordan and Egypt and then to Washington and other friendly capitals to sell their idea.
In the Roosevelt Room at the White House, the Israeli officials made their presentation to assembled Brahmins from several departments of the Bush administration. “Why Arafat is not capable of becoming a viable partner for a peace negotiation,” Halevy began reading from a lengthy document he had prepared in English. “He does not
really
want to establish a Palestinian state at this time.” In
London, Halevy recalled, he sat on the carpet explaining it to
Tony Blair and his adviser David Manning in the residential part of 10 Downing Street. “I cannot recall why we were sitting on the carpet, but we were.” From London he went on to
Moscow. Reading from his document, Halevy assured his interlocutors that “significant persons in the PA will cooperate in an intelligent and sophisticated plan of action designed to elevate Arafat to the position of ‘symbolic’ leader.”
The Palestinians, who sent a senior minister, Nabil Shaath, to Washington at the last moment to influence the drafting, were aghast at the content of the president’s speech. But Arafat gave stern orders to welcome it and not display their dismay in public. Sharon, in mirror image, made sure there was no crowing from his side.
T
he transition in the
Prime Minister’s Bureau from Shani to Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s longtime personal lawyer, was unexpected and unexplained. But the bureau weathered it without serious disruption. “One Friday midday,”
Marit Danon recalled, “I get a call from
Uri Shani, who tells me he’s leaving. He didn’t say why, and I didn’t want to pry. I was in the supermarket later, standing at the checkout line, when the prime minister phones. ‘Everything’s going to stay exactly the same,’ he says. I was worried but couldn’t speak too freely with all the other shoppers around, so I just said, ‘I hope so.’ This needled him. ‘I tell you everything will be the same! You’ll see.’ He seemed to feel he needed to persuade me.”
With Shani gone and the gregarious, easygoing Weissglas in his place, someone else was going to have to run the bureau if it was to retain the style and standards of crisp efficiency that Shani had maintained. That someone was Danon. With the tacit consent of everyone from Sharon down, she now became the fulcrum around which the disciplined working of the office revolved. Weissglas made the decisions; Danon made sure they were implemented. By now, fifteen months into his prime ministership, Sharon was visibly more comfortable and confident, sometimes even relaxed in his job, which he clearly had begun to enjoy. But he was rarely happy.
Every night, says Danon, before he left the office, no matter how late it was, Sharon would pause for a moment at the photographs of Lily that he had hung on the wall opposite his desk. He would stand and look at them and then walk on through the door.
He was an elderly widower who lived with his family. On Sunday mornings I’d sometimes ask him how his weekend had been, and he would reply, “Marit, I’m a lonely man.” That’s what he’d answer. I’d say, “Prime Minister, how can you say that? You’re surrounded by your lovely grandchildren, your family …” He needed married life. But I’m not sure if after Lily’s death he was open to it anymore. He spoke of Lily very frequently, of the deep friendship between them. Clearly she had been his pillar of support and at the same time his mouth and eyes to the world. He wasn’t a man for small talk; she fulfilled that side of him.
There was a picture of Gur on the wall, too. None of Margalit, though he’d speak of her, too. He spoke of her with respect and admiration, as a strong and very able, competent woman. She had risen very young to become a top psychiatric nurse. Of Gur he spoke with great pain. It was hard for me. Awkward. Sometimes I had to control myself not to cry in his presence.
Sharon took his loneliness home to the prime minister’s official residence, a modest stone house in the suburb of Rehavia, surrounded since Rabin’s assassination by high walls and watchtowers. “He didn’t like it,” says Danon.
The residence radiated coldness as far as he was concerned. He’d use it for official events. And for midday naps. But he could never feel warm there like he did at the ranch, with Gilad’s family. The ranch was enveloping, embracing. The children, the farm, the animals, the
ground itself. I’ve never known anyone who loved the land so much. Loved the clods of earth.
He had a little button under the cabinet table which connected him straight to me in the office downstairs. Many times in the middle of cabinet meetings he would buzz, I would go running upstairs in my high heels, and he would give me a little note: “Please call Gilad and ask how many millimeters of rain have fallen at the ranch.” Or “Please call Gilad and find out how many ewes have given birth.” He was very verbal, incredibly verbal for a man. He used to say to me, when it rained, “What I would like now is to be lying in front of my burning hearth, wrapped up in a coarse blanket …” In the last two years he rarely slept in Jerusalem. Even if his day ended at 2:00 a.m., he would go back to the ranch. By helicopter or by car, whichever the security detail decided.
Meirav Levy started working for Sharon before the 2001 election as his makeup artist, applying white powder to his scalp to make his famous forelock look even more striking and a touch of rouge to his cheeks. By the time he became prime minister, she was in constant attendance. She, too, witnessed his aversion to the official residence. During the first term, Omri would sometimes come and sleep over. But after the 2003 elections Omri became a member of the Knesset, and that ended. Sharon was very alone. He would wake up alone in the morning and come home at night—alone again. The kitchen staff would arrive at 6:30–7:00, but he would be up from 5:00, with nothing to drink. He didn’t make coffee himself. He would stay in his room, listening to the radio, listening to reports from his military staff, listening to
Ra’anan Gissin’s press survey over the phone. He could not look out of the windows: they were kept closed and curtained for security reasons. At the ranch, an aide recalled,
when he drew back the curtains, he’d see a rolling landscape. Here—just bulletproof glass and a courtyard … And at the ranch he’d see the children. They’d come into his room and give him a good-morning kiss. That would make his day.
When he was alone in Jerusalem, he wouldn’t have much for breakfast. He’d try to diet. He’d invite his driver, Gilbert, or the security guards to join him. They’d have slept in the house; they had little rooms downstairs … By 7:00 he’d be on the road to the office. If he was at the ranch, he’d leave at 6:30. He liked to invite people for breakfast sometimes, and then he’d lay on a nice spread.
This is something of an understatement. Sharon’s breakfasts, both at the ranch and at the residence, were famous for their rich variety of fishes and cheeses, eggs and vegetables, breads and honeys and other delectables with which he would assiduously ply his guests. He himself was known to partake of two or even three breakfasts, one at the ranch, one at the residence, and one at the office, in the course of a morning. In one instance, attested to separately by his spokesman Perlman and his military secretary Kaplinsky, he moved seamlessly from breakfast to lunch without any diminution of appetite. “One day,” Perlman recounts,
there was a huge breakfast at the ranch, and we ate and ate and ate. At midday, Kaplinsky and I slowly and heavily made our way to the car and drove up to the office in Tel Aviv. Arik meanwhile gets himself organized and flies up by helicopter. At about one o’clock he sees us in the corridor. “Er, come in for a moment, would you?” So we come in. No sooner had we sat down than one of the kitchen staff walks in with three trays laden with mountains of rice and a half a chicken atop each one. Kaplan and I look at each other, and we both know we can’t eat anything. We’d barely finished feasting an hour earlier, after all. Sharon, slowly, slowly, cuts and eats, cuts and eats. He looks up at us. “Er, eat something, why don’t you? It’s really good.” “We can’t eat, Prime Minister.” He finishes his meal and then says, quietly, “Do you think it would be piggish of me if I just tasted a morsel of yours …?” He began tucking in, slowly and methodically, and finished both our portions, too.
“It’s a true story,” Kaplinsky confirms.
But Arik Sharon’s eating was not just a matter of quantities; it was equally a matter of manners. As a little boy, he had to wield his knife and fork with a book tucked under each arm. If he dropped the books, the food would be taken away. To his last day he would eat like this [holding the knife and fork with his arms tightly at his sides], which wasn’t easy with his big belly … And the pace of his eating was also critical. He would eat very slowly, carefully chewing every mouthful. He would look at every bite before putting it in his mouth. He could eat all day—start in the morning and finish at night. By the same token, he could eat nothing for hours. But if someone said, “Would you like something to eat?” and ordered food, he’d immediately lose his concentration and start asking, “What’s happening with the food? When are they bringing the food?” We’d say, “You’ve ordered falafel
from a particular shop. It takes half an hour to get there, half an hour back, a few minutes to pick up the order.” But he’d say, “Phone up and find out. Maybe something’s happened to the messenger …” Once I witnessed him eat nine portions of falafel one after another. How? Slowly…
His tastes were catholic, but one particular favorite was a dish that most of his countrymen intensely dislike: Loof. This is a Hebrew corruption of the original British army’s meat loaf. The Israeli version came in a can and was a staple in the IDF from the early years right through to the 1980s. For Sharon it remained a staple. “I didn’t know it still existed,” says
Marit Danon. “But it did, and he had to have it. We all joked about it, and he joined in; but he wouldn’t give it up. We’d get the staff to fry it up for him in slices, and he would eat it with great gusto, as though it were some gourmet dish, munching away, slowly and deliberately.”
Loof, falafel, or cordon bleu—whatever the menu it had to be served on crisp white linen, with white napkins for Sharon and whomever he could get to join him. He hated eating alone and always urged staffers to partake. The staffers, though it wasn’t formally part of their jobs, made sure his appetite was catered to. “We didn’t want him invading Iraq because he was hungry,” Perlman jokes. Conditions at the Israeli prime minister’s office, an ugly 1950s office block, are remarkably Spartan.
r
There is no private dining room for the prime minister, and Sharon would have his white tablecloth and gleaming cutlery laid out on his office desk. To take the edge off the unaesthetic drabness of the place, he would insist on freshly cut flowers in a vase each morning. “I can’t stand to see flowers thirsty,” he once told Marit when the waterline did not quite reach all the stalks. In the background, a
music system quietly played classics or the Hebrew or Russian songs he loved. It had to be on when he walked into the empty room each morning.
Before he walked in, he would pause, without fail, at Marit’s desk and say “Good morning, how are you?” to her and other staffers present. “You could see he grew up in a European household,” says Marit.
“There was something hugely dissonant between his behavior in practice and his ‘quintessential sabra’ image. He would not go through a door ahead of a woman. At the beginning, we would both stand inside his room with neither of us prepared to go out first. And he would automatically stand—no mean feat for a man of his girth—when a woman entered the room. It took time before he stopped standing for me or before he stopped protesting if I walked next to him carrying a briefcase, instead of him carrying it for me.”
Sharon’s close aides are still close to each other years later. All of them have nostalgic stories about the interest and concern he showed not only for them but for their families. “I daresay Avigdor has already complimented you on your new hairstyle,” the prime minister gushed to the wife of his director general,
Avigdor Yitzhaki.
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“He had to know everything,” says Perlman. “He phoned my wife, Roni, in
Paris when she was still my fiancée, to see if she’d found a wedding dress. When she said she had, he asked her to describe it to him. She described it and went on to ask, ‘Prime Minister, why is this of interest to you?’ He said, ‘Because I’ll want to kiss the bride on her wedding day and I don’t want to step on the train.’ ”
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“It was important to him that everyone should get married and have families,” another aide recalled.
The fact that I’d been married for several years and didn’t have any
children was a matter of constant concern to him. He and Lily would have had six children if they could have. He kept up the pressure, as though he were my father. When I got pregnant, he was really pleased. He insisted that career was no reason not to have children. During his term, lots of people at the office—secretaries, drivers, aides—got married or had children. There was a real abundance in this area. He had us keep a list of all the births. Big families were important to him, perhaps because he’d come from a small one.
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“I miss him every day,” Marit Danon admitted. “We would talk about books he was reading, books I was reading. Where do you find a CEO in a small company, let alone a prime minister, so caring about the people around him? Once, soon after he took over, he said to me, ‘Go after the tea lady and ask her what’s wrong. Her eyes look so sad today.’ The woman was gobsmacked. She was over her head in personal problems.”