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In the eye of the storm
By Anshel Pfeffer
Many world leaders enjoy making the yearly pilgrimage to the narcissist grandstanding-fest at the UN General Assembly. Shimon Peres, for example, likes it so much that he still shows up in New York every September, despite not having been prime minister for almost a decade. Ariel Sharon on the other hand, in his fifth year as premier, saw the inside of the building on First Avenue last month for the first time. So why did he go this year?
His advisers explained that Sharon was "cashing in" on the international credit he earned through this summer’s Gaza withdrawal and proudly spoke of the dozens of leaders who requested special audiences with him.
But Sharon is a practical man. He doesn’t need the UN to meet President Bush. He has an open invitation any time to come to Washington and Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sharon has already racked up more White House hours than any previous Israeli prime minister. And besides Bush, who else was it really worth flying 10 hours each way to see, especially two weeks before a crucial showdown in the Likud central committee? Putin? Blair? Erdogan? All are much closer in their own countries.
Another much more plausible explanation is that Sharon’s victory parade overseas was mainly planned for the benefit of his local constituency. Sharon wanted to show the Likud members that he is now an elder statesman and for that he should remain party chairman.
But there are two serious flaws with this theory. First, Israeli voters have rarely been impressed by the international stature of their politicians. If they had been, Peres would have won an election at least once. Second, if Sharon was really hoping that his minutes of fame on the international stage would help him on the local scene, he would have made his party members proud with a heart-rousing aggressive Zionist speech. Instead, he extended an olive branch to the Palestinians and said that they "deserve a sovereign existence in a state of their own,‘ and that Israel would make more ’painful concessions" for peace.
The only possible reason for this behavior is that Sharon just loves it this way. It’s simply in his nature to thumb his nose at his critics and rivals and not to go out of his way in the least to try and placate disappointed supporters and allies.
We all know someone like this: the born contrarian who always takes the opposite view to the consensus, picks a fight at every party. Sometimes it’s entertaining, often it’s exasperating. The big difference in Sharon’s case, however, is that the guy getting on everyone’s nerves is the prime minister, and he’s been getting away with it for almost five years. In fact he’s been doing it his entire military and political career, for over half a century. And, if the results of the Likud Central Committee vote on the issue of advancing the party primaries are an indication, he might be getting away with it for years to come.
Say what you will about disengagement, no other Israeli leader, with the exception perhaps of David Ben-Gurion, could have withstood the intense pressure generated by opponents of the evacuation — and much of the time still have seemed to be actually relishing the attacks.
Sharon positively rejoices in the hurricane that he creates around himself, constantly confounding and contradicting every previous expectation and assumption about him. Like a hurricane, his devastating force advances and changes with little warning or logic. Like a hurricane he never apologizes. But a majority of the Israeli public seems quite content to put its trust in Arik and be swept along by his force.
This was definitely the year of Ariel Sharon. But the process whereby he became the most dominant Israeli prime minister since Ben-Gurion and the way he managed to command the support of the public, the military and the government apparatus to carry through such a divisive policy, needs some explanation.
It couldn’t have happened to a less likely figure.
While Sharon was certainly no stranger to the Israeli public before coming to power, his ascension to the top was anything but meteoric.
In the early 1950s, although military censorship forbade newspapers to publish Sharon’s name, it was already being whispered as the commander of the fabled 101st special operations unit and, later, of the 202nd Paratroopers Brigade when he was only 28.
Alongside the beginnings of hero-worship, there was also already growing criticism within the IDF and the government of his conduct and character, a deepening suspicion of his unwillingness to follow orders, his disregard for casualties and his propensity for not always giving a full and honest account of his actions. As a result, following his disastrous foray into the Mitla Pass in the 1956 Sinai Campaign, he was sidelined for seven years — one of several career exiles.
He was plucked from obscurity by chief of general staff Yitzhak Rabin in 1964 and finally promoted. The experience of being shunted to the side, far from humbling Sharon, only increased his motivation to advance. On the eve of the Six Day War in 1967, he was among the cabal of generals who, behind Rabin’s back, pressured Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to go to war and to broaden the war’s objectives. Sharon came out of the war a hero once again — with relatively little criticism of his methods — but his volatile behavior made others reluctant to appoint him to more senior posts.
Sharon began flirting with senior politicians, both as a way to put pressure on the military leadership to promote him, but also because he saw politics as his next natural step. Eventually he was awarded the coveted Southern Command in 1970 and immediately embarked on a ruthless campaign to rid the Gaza Strip of terrorist activity. Again there were those who applauded and those who abhorred his methods.
In 1973, realizing he would never be appointed IDF chief of staff, he resigned to enter politics. Only a couple of months later he was drafted again to command a division on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War. Sharon’s division was the first to cross the Suez Canal, an achievement that once again turned him into a national hero. He was greeted in many places with the song "Arik king of Israel," while as usual, the other generals accused him of working against the official war plans to grab glory and public attention.
Sharon left the IDF for good after the Yom Kippur war, but his political career advanced haltingly. He was instrumental in bringing about the formation of the Likud Party but, while some of the party leaders were eager to have the retired general grace their list in the elections, others did everything in their power to block his entry.
Frustrated, Sharon formed his own party which, after winning only two Knesset seats in the 1977 elections, he merged with the Likud. Sharon then began pressuring Menachem Begin to appoint him defense minister. Begin appreciated him but was wary at the same time. "He is a brilliant general but a vicious man,‘ was Begin’s appraisal. He explained his reluctance to give Sharon the defense portfolio quipping that ’Sharon might encircle the Prime Minister’s Office with tanks." He was to receive the coveted post only in 1981 and had it taken away only two years later. By the time the Kahan Commission — set up to investigate Israel’s role in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon — decided that he was unfit to serve as defense minister, Sharon had already become the most controversial of all Israeli leaders,
with a large part of the public blaming him directly for the deaths of hundreds of soldiers in the Lebanon campaign.
For the next two decades, Sharon would remain a political mover and shaker and fill other influential ministerial positions. But nobody, other than Sharon himself, believed he would ever become a serious contender for national leadership. The public consensus, and that within his own party too, was that he was a dangerous troublemaker. Even when he became Likud chairman in 1999 following Binaymin Netanyahu’s election defeat, it was universally seen as an interim caretaker position, until a more plausible candidate could be found. No one would have predicted that barely a year-and-a-half later he would be swept to office with an overwhelming 62 percent of the vote.
Everyone thought they knew Sharon.
Israel’s grim prophet Amos Oz wrote on the eve of the 2001 elections: "Sharon plans to deepen the oppression, deepen the occupation, deepen the humiliation and despair." But slowly he began confounding all the expectations.
First, he quickly bolstered his power by delivering another landslide in the 2003 elections. Then he started dismaying the Right and settlers with what, for them, were disconcerting messages that he slipped into his speeches: "painful concessions,‘ ’occupation" and even talk of a Palestinian state. His other allies, the ultra-Orthodox, felt also betrayed. For many years Sharon had been the most popular secular politician in haredi circles, but suddenly he was firing Shas ministers over a budget fracas and, after the 2003 elections, he turned his back on a political partnership of 26 years and formed a coalition without them.
"Who helped him? Who gave him his kingdom if not we the haredim?‘ fumed Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, ’and he prefers those pork-eaters, those Israel-haters, Shinui. That Sharon is ungrateful." In September 2000, when he insisted on visiting the Temple Mount — and despite promising to stay for only 10 minutes — he spent almost an hour there and seemed to be the same old provocateur up to his tricks.
But already then he was undergoing a significant change. Sharon badly wanted to become prime minister and he knew that he would have to overcome great opposition within and outside of the Likud, in the media and overseas. The man who was already past 70 agreed for the first time in his life to surrender completely to his advisers. He began deconstructing the old Arik and building the new elder statesman Sharon.
The volatile politician who had once shouted at deputy prime minister Yigael Yadin, "I will strip you naked on the cabinet table," began treating his colleagues with courtesy, though often with a thin coating of cynicism.
Gone was the feisty interviewee, the one who could always be relied upon to stir up controversy — such as the time, while still in uniform in 1973, that Sharon vented his frustration with the high command during the Yom Kippur War in an interview with The New York Times. Suddenly Sharon wasn’t giving interviews, and in all his public appearances he stuck to the messages prepared by his advisers.
Over the years, Sharon seemed to positively enjoy picking fights with the various American administrations. He was the one who spearheaded the settlements after the Likud won power in 1977, over Begin’s head and despite American objections. Sharon said that Israel didn’t owe anything to the US and that Israel’s strategic value to the US since 1967 was in excess of $80 billion. US ambassador Sam Lewis once said about him that "Sharon’s theory is to stick his thumb in America’s eye and ask us to love him.‘ The moment he became prime minister, Sharon went out of his way to build bridges with the Americans, sending special emissaries, taking their position into account before any action and using Bush’s ’assurances" as a central element of his efforts to convince supporters of the necessity of disengagement.
But is the Sharon of the last five years really a new man, or just the old dog who has learned a few new tricks?
Sharon still enjoys whipping up the hurricane around himself but now he has learned to sit calmly in the eye of the storm.
The settlers, surprised by Sharon, should really be blaming themselves for not understanding Sharon’s underlying approach. Even when he was spearheading settlement activity it was always with a view to advancing his own political agenda: thumbing his nose at Labor, at the Americans, at Begin and Shamir, showing them who was boss out in the field. Sharon was also the one who, at a crucial moment during the Camp David negotiations with Egypt, gave Begin significant political support for his dismantling of the Sinai settlements, and supervised the destruction of Yamit himself. As foreign minister in 1998, he joined Netanyahu at the Wye Plantation negotiations with the Palestinians.
Over the last few years, Sharon’s main objection to concessions to the Palestinians wasn’t ideological but more borne of hatred for his nemesis, Yasser Arafat.
Sharon made no secret of his future intentions.
"Only I can mark out Israel’s new borders," he repeatedly told his inner circle.
After he was elected in 2001, Sharon said to one of his advisers, "Three times I was called upon when the situation was beyond desperation: In the Yom Kippur War, in Gaza in 1970, and when they didn’t know how to handle the mass aliya from the Soviet Union. And now I have the same feeling, as if there is no solution. A peace built on trust didn’t succeed. [And] war? Who wants that? So the nation asks, ’where do we go on from here?’ They expect me to come up with the solution." There is nothing new about Sharon’s basic arrogance, the conviction that he is the only savior with the answers. He believed as much 50 years ago. The difference is that for the last five years a majority of Israelis seem to believe it to be true.
The realization that he was enjoying an unprecedented period of trust enabled Sharon this year to commit what amounted to an act of betrayal of his old allies, the settlers — and take little trouble to explain himself let alone apologize. Even his long-time devotee, veteran journalist Uri Dan, expressed dismay that Sharon didn’t go to Gush Katif and at least talk personally to the families who were about to be thrown out of their homes.
The persisting majority in the polls, the continuing support of the media and the masterful command of the military and government all combined to allow Sharon to get away with everything.
Veteran rocker Shalom Hanoch denied that his song Doesn’t Stop at Red Lights, released in the early 1980s, was about Sharon, though the title was used later for a Sharon biography. The title is still apt. Hurricanes don’t stop for red lightse forsook his old allies and friends yet it seems quite likely that in the coming year he will receive a renewed mandate to continue creating hurricanes — and getting away with it.
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