BICOM

Few individuals have had more impact on the history of the State of Israel than Ariel Sharon, who was prime minister until his incapacitation in January 2006. On 5 January 2014, BICOM Director of Research Toby Greene interviewed David Landau, former editor of Haaretz, correspondent for The Economist and the author of a major new biography of Ariel Sharon entitled ‘Arik’, published this month by Knopf.  The following is an edited transcript of the interview. You can listen to the interview here.

Sharon has a huge legacy, both as a military commander and as a politician, how would you sum up his contribution to the history of Israel?

You’re quite right in pointing out that this man basically left two legacies, one as a military commander and second as a politician. Let us deal with the military one first because it is easier. Although even that is a matter of controversy. By no means all the Israeli military establishment accept that he was crucial in turning around the Yom Kippur War. But nevertheless, I spoke to a lot of people, from generals to privates and I found myself fully persuaded by people who had no interest or commitment to Sharon, that his role in the matter of crossing the Suez Canal was probably crucial and that without him they may not have succeeded.

His toughness, his determination was what led them. I found it very interesting too, looking at Cabinet protocols from that period, that as far as Golda Meir was concerned – she was prime minister and she really was the national leader at the time – her assumption throughout was … that the man who would command this was Ariel Sharon.  This was despite the political rivalry which had already become a fact of life, because Sharon had been so central in creating the Likud.

Sharon brought this extraordinary boldness and courage to his leadership. He believed in his ability and made decisions that often went against what his commanders wanted him to do. He thought he knew what was best. Where did that come from?

In part it came from Moshe Dayan, with whom he’d had a complex relationship for a very long time. If there was one person in Israel that he admired it was Dayan. And for whatever reason, Dayan was very, very firm and unrelenting in the matter of Ariel Sharon – who some of the generals wanted to have fired in the middle of the war – and Dayan would not hear about it; would not allow it. As far as Dayan was concerned, despite the ‘wars of the generals’ as we call it, Sharon was the distinguished, courageous and imaginative general that he needed down there.

I loathe to use that description ‘self-assured’ because it implies there was something wrong, and that he was out to fight the other generals, but he had confidence in his own battlefield assessments. The first person I went to interview, writing a book about Sharon, was Ehud Barak. Ostensibly, they were rivals, at that time, Barak was prime minister, Sharon was leader of the opposition. Barak could not have been more generous in my interview, and almost adulatory, towards Sharon as a military commander. Barak told me that he’d gone over, for his personal interest, a lot of the recorded radio traffic from the Yom Kippur War and he said without any doubt, any hesitation or compunction, that this man was the greatest battlefield general that we ever had. So when you say self-assured, he felt that he could see it, and they’re not listening to him, maybe for political reasons or for personal jealousies.

In the histories of some countries, generals save those countries, change their history and that is part of the history of the country. I believe that Sharon saved us, in a way, from an Egyptian victory. I don’t know what an Egyptian victory would have done to us, I’m not saying they would have conquered Tel-Aviv, but we would have looked very different.

When you talk about his political legacy, that’s much more complicated. I want to suggest that instead of the word ‘legacy’, we use the word ‘precedent’. In other words, the disengagement from Gaza [in 2005] has established in Israeli history an important precedent: that power is wielded in this country, as in every democratic and legitimate country, by the government. The flip side of that is that movements, particularly extra-parliamentary movements, have no right to challenge that.

If you were in Israel at the time, the atmosphere before the disengagement was one of extreme apprehension by many people who took seriously the threats of the settler movement. The settlers often used the phrase ‘milhemet ahim’, civil war. And there was a genuine fear that this thing could deteriorate into civil war. I went round to see him and said to him, “If things go wrong will you personally go down to the Gaza Strip and personally command all the soldiers that you’ve deployed there,” and his answer was, self-assured if you like, “you worry too much.”

Part of it was his direct fault. He encouraged this [settlement] movement, when he said “grab every hilltop”, when Barak failed to get an agreement [with Yasser Arafat in 2000]. Nevertheless, as prime minister, we used to use that expression about Sharon which people thought was so apposite, from a poem, “ma sh’roim m’po, lo roim m’sham.” What we see from here, we don’t see from there.

I think, having some opportunity to be exposed to him, that towards the end of his prime ministership, those words took on a constitutional sense. He saw that as prime minister of Israel, he had difficulty running the country, because this group, Gush Emunim, the settler movement, was thwarting his ability to run the country. That’s what he determined to put a stop to, in the context of the disengagement. He was very aware he was taking them on. It makes the contradiction even more sharp, in as much as he was so responsible for the political growth and influence of Gush Emunim. But nevertheless, as prime minister he realised that constitutionally this was impossible; you couldn’t run a country like this.

What do you think made him make his dramatic about turn in 2003-2004, from being one of the foremost advocates of settlement construction throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to being the one to set the precedent of forcibly removing settlements?

I want to suggest that this is someone who was now putting his mind to the basic problem of the Middle East conflict, and he came to the conclusion, which so many intelligent people have come to  before him. Until that time, when he wasn’t prime minister, he wasn’t required to think about changing his old-fashioned, doctrinal, dogmatic positions. But now as prime minister, carrying this huge burden, he thought about it differently. He cannot gamble with the fate and future of the country which are his responsibility. He looks around and he sees – as we saw in the peace camp – he sees demography and he sees geography. And he uses that language and resists efforts to move him from that language. There is one saga that I recall, that [then Attorney General] Eli Rubinstein suggested to him, maybe instead of occupation you could [use another term]. But Sharon insisted on sticking to it.

People are loath to take on something as straightforward and seeming so naive as this idea that he changed his mind because he could not leave the situation as it was. He often said that if we leave it as it is, we will lose our friends, and we may lose America. He said right through his prime ministership that the relationship with America was the most important element of his politics.

There are very many, very controversial elements of Sharon’s life and career, not least incidents which relate to the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and particularly the massacres carried out by Phalange militiamen allied to Israel in the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatilla. Do you think that he had regrets about such incidents in his past?

He said at the time that he regretted Qibya [a reprisal raid into Jordan in response to attacks on Israel from Palestinian fedayeen fighters in 1953, in which 69 people were killed, including a high proportion of civilians]. He didn’t intend that these people die and said, “We tried to check that the houses were empty,” right at the time. He said that he was shocked and stunned to hear on Jordanian radio that there were so many casualties. That was definitely an example of what he, at any rate, represented as regret. Sabra and Shatilla of course he regretted because it nearly knocked him out of politics forever, and he felt it wasn’t really his fault.

What do you think that he would have done as PM, had he not been incapacitated in the way that he was?

I hope I convince the reader that had he carried on, despite what he’d publicly declared, he would have gone for another unilateral withdrawal on the West Bank. And I think I bring evidence; he set up a committee, under Aaron Abramovich, although they came back with a fairly negative report. I believe [that was his intention], especially the way his whole persona was suddenly, among diplomats and statesmen across the world, changed and he found himself celebrated at the UN General Assembly in the autumn after the disengagement. And he enjoyed that, there’s no question. He suddenly was not a persona non-grata in America, on the contrary. All that helped convince him that this was the right way to go.

Finally, in the pantheon of Israeli leaders throughout Israel’s 65 year long history to this point, how do we convey how important he was?

Well he was important in as much as he deconstructed the Likud and the right-religious coalition, which he basically constructed. He built the settlements which have dogged us since then. He didn’t conceive of them, Menachem Begin conceived them. He built them on behalf of Menachem Begin; don’t lets ascribe to him the dreams and the strategy. But he did what Begin and afterwards Yitzkak Shamir wanted him to do. I don’t accept that he somehow was imposing himself on the nation. There were two prime ministers under whom he served. But then at the end [in implementing the Disengagement Plan as prime minister] he made it impossible for a lot of die-hard Likud people to live with him. Then he said, “I can’t govern like this, with a party not really behind me,” and he seceded and that broke up the very powerful rightist/religious coalition.