Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

790 Pages·2014·10.35 MB·English

by  David Landau

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by David Landau
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random
House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin
Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, LLC.
Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint from previously published material are
listed following the index.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-38535109-6
Print ISBN: 978-1-4000-4241-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landau, David.
Arik : the life of Ariel Sharon / by David Landau.—First edition.
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi book”—Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-4241-8
1. Sharon, Ariel. 2. Prime ministers—Israel—Biography. 3. Generals—Israel—Biography. 4.
Israel—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Israel—History, Military—20th century. 6.
Arab-Israeli conflict. 7. Israel—Biography. I. Title.
DS126.6.S42l36 2013
956.94054092—dc23
[B] 2012049631
Cover photograph: 1969 Portrait of Israeli General Ariel Sharon © Gamma-Keystone/Getty
Images
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
Maps © Soffer Mapping
v3.1_r1
For Jerrold
The righteous, in death, are called living.—Talmud
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE · Land of Hope
CHAPTER 1 · Poor Little Fat Boy
CHAPTER 2 · Probationer
CHAPTER 3 · Desert Storm
CHAPTER 4 · Advise and Dissent
CHAPTER 5 · His Will Be Done
CHAPTER 6 · Through the Mire
CHAPTER 7 · On the Farm
CHAPTER 8 · Wars Old and New
CHAPTER 9 · Jordan Is Palestine?
CHAPTER 10 · Backwoodsman
CHAPTER 11 · Last Man Standing
CHAPTER 12 · Summit
CHAPTER 13 · Power Failure
CHAPTER 14 · King of Israel
CHAPTER 15 · About-Face
CHAPTER 16 · Island in the Sun
CHAPTER 17 · “You Worry Too Much”
CHAPTER 18 · To Sleep, Too Soon
Acknowledgments
Interviews
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
PREFACE · LAND OF HOPE
M
y grandfather was a Hebrew teacher in Rehovot at the beginning of the
last century.” Ariel Sharon, corpulent, white-haired, looked up over his
reading glasses at the half-full Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Members
were listening politely or quietly reading. “I have a deep love for the
Hebrew language,” he read on in his incongruously high-pitched voice.
“For the miracle of its revival, for the historical wellsprings from which
it draws its words and phrases.”
There was no tension in the chamber that afternoon in January 2005.
No catcalls, no heckling. A parliamentary moment without politics.
Sharon could have asked one of his two deputy prime ministers to
represent the government at the largely ceremonial debate marking
Hebrew Language Day. But he wanted to speak himself. He had a point
to make.
Mordechai Scheinerman, Sharon’s grandfather, came to Palestine in
1910 and settled with his wife and children in the still-tiny Jewish
village of Rehovot, southeast of the barely existent Jewish town of Tel
Aviv. That made him sort of aristocracy. Not quite a Mayflower man of
the First Aliya (1882–1902), but still an early Zionist pioneer of pre–
World War I days. Palestine was a derelict corner of the crumbling
Ottoman Empire then. The dream of the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl
(d. 1904), that it would one day become a Jewish state, seemed just
that: a dream.
In his native town, Brest Litovsk in White Russia, Mordechai was an
early convert to Zionism. He became a Hebrew teacher. That was a
career choice reflecting real commitment. Hebrew, the ancient language
of the Bible and the rabbis, was struggling to reincarnate itself as a
modern vernacular. The Zionists promoted it as the language of the new-
old Jewish nationalism. But the Zionists themselves were a struggling
minority within the Jewish people. Millions of Jews, fleeing czarist
oppression, set sail for the New World rather than for sandy, sweaty
Palestine.
Mordechai Scheinerman endured the heat and mosquitoes of Rehovot
for two years, then packed up, as did so many of the early pioneers, and
headed back to Brest Litovsk. When war broke out, the family fled east,
ending up in Tbilisi, Georgia. His faith in Zionism never wavered,
though, and he instilled it in his son Samuil. Samuil Scheinerman taught
Hebrew too, but, chastened by his father’s experience, he studied
agronomy at the local university as a practical preparation for his own
eventual aliya.a
This came more quickly than planned. Walking toward the Tbilisi
Zionist club, where he held his Hebrew classes, one night in 1921, he
found the area swarming with security police of the newly formed
communist government. He veered away, hastened to the home of his
girlfriend, Vera Schneeroff, and offered her two peremptory proposals:
marriage and aliya. She was a fourth-year medical student, the daughter
of a well-to-do Jewish family, also from Belarus, and, by her own
admission, not much of a Zionist. But she accepted Samuil’s plan. They
were married forthwith and fled to the Black Sea port of Baku, from
where, some months later, they embarked for Palestine.
Samuil had completed his studies in Tbilisi; Vera nursed the hope that
she would graduate someday too, perhaps at the University of Beirut
since there were no universities or medical schools in Palestine. On a
bleak February day in 1922 they arrived in Jaffa. Vera, to her
consternation, was lifted bodily from boat to shore by a gigantic Arab
stevedore. The experience confirmed her general impression of Palestine
as a backward and uncouth place.
By then, the Zionist dream had advanced a little closer to reality, at
least on paper. The wartime British government issued its Balfour
Declaration in November 1917, favoring “the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people.” In 1920, the San Remo
Conference of principal Allied powers granted a mandate over Palestine
to Great Britain, specifically enjoining it to “put into effect” the Balfour
Declaration.b But beyond emotional rhetoric, the response among
Diaspora Jewish communities was disappointing from the Zionist
standpoint. The Zionist movement campaigned hard to persuade young
Jewish people to make aliya. It achieved only modest success.
His son’s aliya, and his own subsequent return to Eretz Yisrael—
Mordechai Scheinerman lived out his last years in Tel Aviv—restored the
old Hebrew teacher’s right to a place of honor in the annals of the
Zionist enterprise. A century later, his grandson pointedly read the
family narrative into the record of the Zionist state’s parliament. His
Zionist credentials, Sharon was signaling, were unimpeachable.
The point was not superfluous. The momentary calm in the Knesset
was deceptive. Parliament and the country were seething with
disaffection. It was spearheaded by the Jewish settlers in the occupiedc
Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, who defined
themselves as today’s true Zionists. It was directed against Sharon, who
for long years had been their champion but whom they now portrayed as
a traitor. To many, the atmosphere was reminiscent of 1995, when
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was decried by the national-religious Right
as a traitor and eventually felled by an assassin’s bullets.
Rabin died for signing a peace accord with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO). That agreement held out the prospect of
a Palestinian state eventually arising alongside Israel, thus bringing the
century-old conflict over Palestine to an equitable end. But Arafat, once
Rabin had gone, proved incapable of leading his people to peace. A
decade later, the two-state solution was foundering in a welter of
bloodshed and failed diplomacy.
Ariel Sharon, the hard-line ex-general who had been elected prime
minister in 2001 to crush the Palestinians’ intifada, now proposed to
dismantle Jewish settlements and withdraw Israeli troops from parts of
the occupied territories. To the settlers and their supporters—his
erstwhile political constituency—that was heresy, a denial both of
Judaism and of Zionism. To the peace camp at home and to governments
and public opinion around the world, Sharon’s dramatic turnabout was a
hugely hopeful change. It meant the beginning, at last, of a repartition of
Palestine between the two nations vying for it. Sharon found himself
suddenly praised where he had previously been loathed and feared.
He looked back to his text. “Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who revived
the Hebrew language, said: ‘There are two things without which the
Jews will not be a nation—their land and their language.’ ” The subtext