April 2004 Feature

Ariel Sharon: The Evolution of a Security Hawk

Will the real Ariel Sharon please stand up? Rarely in the history of the State of Israel has an individual appeared about whom there has been such a bitter debate. Some Israelis hail Ariel Sharon as the hero of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and for his continuing battle against Palestinian terrorism, including the assassinations of Hamas chiefs Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi. Other Israelis see him as a traitor for his willingness to give away Gaza and part of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Still other Israelis — primarily on the left of the Israeli political spectrum — as well as most Arabs, despise Sharon for his invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and for the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps there in the aftermath of the invasion. Yet other Israelis, witnessing his establishment of the Likud party in 1972 and his massive election victories in 2001 and 2003, hail him for his political acumen, while at the same time questioning some of his business practices, which have embroiled him in a quagmire that might cost him his premiership.

To understand Sharon is, first and foremost, to recognize that he is not an ideologue, but a pragmatist, very much in the model of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. Thus, unlike Effie Eitam of Mafdal (The National Religious Party), Sharon is not a religious ideologue who believes not only that God gave Israel the West Bank but also that it would be a sin against God and even a reversal of the messianic process if Israel was to give up any of the West Bank. Neither is Sharon a Likud Party ideologue like Benjamin Netanyahu, who believes the whole world is against Israel and that Israel has to hold the maximum possible territory to defend itself against its enemies. Finally, although he grew up in a Mapai (Labor Party) household, Sharon did not grow up to be a doctrinaire socialist like the late Histadrut leader Pinchas Lavon, but rather embraced the mamlachtiut (the State comes first) doctrine of Ben-Gurion.

If Sharon can be said to have been fixated on anything, it was on Israel’s security. As he makes clear in his memoirs, he was dedicated to the propositions: (1) that Israel’s borders had to be secure; (2) that Israel had to hold the high ground wherever possible; (3) that Arab terrorism was a major threat against Israel: and (4) that the only way the Arabs could be deterred from sending terrorists to attack Israel was by Israel’s mounting major retaliatory attacks that would demonstrate to its Arab neighbors that there were serious costs involved if they encouraged or even tolerated terrorist infiltration from their borders.

The evolution of Sharon’s ideas on security can be said to have stemmed from two formative experiences in his life. The first was the battle for Latrun, a Jordanian fortress on the heights commanding the road to Jerusalem during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. From Latrun, Jordanian forces were able to interdict Jewish efforts to resupply the besieged Jerusalem. As a junior officer in this battle, Sharon led a group of ill-trained and ill-equipped Jewish soldiers, some of whom were very recent immigrants from the Holocaust-devastated Jewish communities in Europe, in an attack on Latrun that proved to be a major failure. From this failure (Israel was not to capture Latrun until the 1967 Six-Day War), Sharon learned the importance of properly training and equipping his men and the need to hold the high ground whenever possible. He was to put the first lesson into practice soon after the 1948 war when he was made commander of Unit 101, the commando force he led in the early and mid-1950s on numerous retaliatory raids against Egyptian and Jordanian military positions and villages that served as jumping off points for terrorist attacks against Israel. While these raids sometimes led to civilian casualties, as in Kibyeh and Qalqilyah, Sharon felt the raids were necessary, both to raise Israeli morale (Israel was suffering hundreds of casualties per year from the terrorist attacks) and to bring home to the Arab governments the costs of their policy of fostering terrorism.

After his service in the 1956 Suez War, which involved a controversial storming of the Mitla Pass in the Sinai, Sharon’s military career stagnated, until he was rescued from military obscurity by David Ben-Gurion, who with the approval of Yitzchak Rabin, had Sharon made Chief of Staff of Israel’s Northern Command. In this position, he became exposed to yet another aspect of Israel’s security when he helped prevent, through military action, Syrian diversion of the Jordan’s headwaters on which Israel depended for much of its water.

Sharon’s first taste of military glory came in the June 1967 Six-Day War when, as a division commander, he proved extremely effective in the capture of the Sinai, so successful in fact that following the war, Rabin made him commander of the Sinai. Here, however, he came into conflict with higher-ranking officers, especially Chaim Bar-Lev, who had a different view of how to defend the Sinai than did Sharon. In the face of Egyptian artillery attacks in what became known as the War of Attrition (1968-1970), Bar-Lev argued for the construction of a series of defensive fortifications along the canal, which became known as the Bar-Lev line. Sharon vehemently opposed this plan, calling instead for a mobile defense in depth, arguing that that would be the better way to defend the Sinai. Sharon, although later proven to have been correct by the events of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, lost this political battle and was essentially forced to leave active duty, although only temporarily. This incident reveals another facet of Sharon — he was not cowed by superiors and stated openly (and loudly) what he thought, whether the recipient of his criticism was Bar-Lev or Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Needless to say, this did not make him popular with his superiors and was one of the reasons he was never made Israeli Chief of Staff.

Sharon’s last major military post was as commander of Gaza, where he was successful in wiping out PLO terrorism by 1971. Following this command, he retired from the active-duty army but, like almost all Israelis at that time, remained in the reserves. He retired to his farm in the Negev and entered politics. In 1972, persuading Menachem Begin of the Gahal Party (Gush Herut and Liberalim), that Gahal needed to broaden its appeal in Israeli society by reaching out to former Labor Party members and others, he put together the Likud Party by attracting RAFI (a breakaway party from Labor), and other small parties. In creating Likud, Sharon (who became a member of its Liberal faction) demonstrated serious political skills. Sharon’s broadening of Gahal into Likud was one of the reasons why Likud was to come to power in the 1977 Israeli elections.

The other major reason for Likud’s victory in 1977 was, of course, the lingering memories of Israel’s near defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As is well known, it was Sharon, now a mobilized reserve division commander, who be-came the Israeli hero of the war by leading the crossing of the Suez Canal and threatening Cairo, although his battles with senior commanders over the proper strategy to fight the war led to charges of insubordination from which he was cleared by the Agranat Commission.

Following the war, Sharon, now a bona-fide military hero, became a hot political commodity and was elected to the Knesset on the Likud list. However, he appeared to tire of the political bickering in the Knesset and seized the opportunity to retire from it when the Labor Party, in 1974, enacted a law that a person could not be both a Knesset member and also hold command of a reserve division. Still, Sharon did not fully give up politics and, in the 1975-76 period, became an advisor to Rabin, although he differed with him over the so-called “Red-Line” agreement by which Israel acquiesced in the entry of the Syrian Army into Lebanon to fight the PLO, arguing that it would threaten Israeli security.

Part of Sharon’s problems with other members of the Likud Party lay in the fact that he was not one of the original members of Herut, but had been “parachuted” into the Party’s leadership by Begin, and, as a consequence, was both envied and resented by other Herut faction politicians. Consequently, for the 1977 elections, hoping to capitalize on growing Israeli disenchantment with the ruling Labor Party, he organized his own party, Shalomtzion (Peace to Zion). Running on a dovish platform, he indicated his willingness to speak with PLO leaders and ad-vocated a Palestinian state east of the Jordan river, running on the platform, “Jordan is Palestine,” a position he was to adhere to for more than a decade-and-a-half. Unfor-tunately for Sharon, however, another Israeli protest party had arisen, DASH (The Democratic Movement for Change), and it was to capture 15 Knesset seats to only two for Shalomtzion. Shortly after the elections, Sharon met with Begin and agreed to merge his party into Likud. In return, Sharon, a farmer, became Minister of Agriculture.

As Minister of Agriculture, Sharon began to actively promote a program that has long been associated with his name — the rapid construction of settlements on the West Bank. While the Labor Party had begun the construction of settlements around Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley, Sharon was to increase greatly the settlement effort. Shar-on’s plan was to control the heights overlooking the coastal plain where the majority of Israel’s population and industry is located, the area around Jerusalem to the east, north, and south, and the West Bank hill areas that dominated strategic road junctions. Indeed, as early as 1972, Sharon had remarked that there had to be an Upper Jenin, an Upper Nablus, and an Upper Ramallah on the West Bank, just as there was an Upper Nazareth in Israel. Sharon also placed a number of settlements in the Galilee in an effort to control the Israeli Arab population there, which was becoming increasingly assertive.

Sharon’s settlement-building efforts included the Sinai Desert, even after Sadat had made his historic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, and these efforts, which Sharon insisted were necessary for Israeli security, complicated Israeli-Egyptian relations in the late 1970s. Ultimately, however, on the issue of the Sinai settlements, Sharon was overruled by Begin, who did not want to jeopardize the chances for peace with Egypt. Ironically, Begin assigned Sharon to the task of dismantling the Sinai settlements, a task he completed by April, 1982.

Perhaps the act for which Sharon has been the most criticized was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, soon after Israel’s final withdrawal from the Sinai. At the time, the PLO had established a state-within-a-state position in Southern Lebanon, from which it had been launching both terrorist attacks and Katyusha rockets against Israel, until the United States managed to secure a shaky border cease-fire in 1981. Still, not only were Jews being killed by Palestinian terrorist groups in Europe and elsewhere in the world, but the PLO threat to Israeli security remained in Southern Lebanon, and Sharon was determined to eliminate it. In addition, Sharon hoped to establish an alliance with the Christian factions in Lebanon, led by the Phalange Party of Bashir Gemayel, and push the Syrians out of Lebanon. Perhaps his most ambitious goal was, by destroying the PLO state-within-a-state in Lebanon, to convince the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza to accept the limited autonomy that the Likud-led government was prepared to give it.

Unfortunately for Sharon, while the first of his goals was realized through the destruction of the PLO’s militarized enclave in South Lebanon, his other goals were not. Within a few years of the invasion, the Syrian position in Lebanon was strengthened, the Christian Lebanese were further subordinated to Syrian power, and the Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty of 1983 was discarded. Even worse, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, seeing Israel dragged down into a prolonged guerrilla war and having to fight the Shia Lebanese in South Lebanon who initially had welcomed Israeli forces as liberators, became even more restive, erupting into an Intifada five years after the Israeli invasion.

Of all of these failures, Sharon is most remembered for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Here again, his concern for security seems to have been at the root of what happened. Essentially, when as a result of Israeli military pressure during the siege of Beirut, Arafat and many of his PLO fighters were forced to leave Lebanon under a US military escort, Sharon was suspicious that Arafat had deliberately left a number of PLO fighters behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they could reconstitute themselves as a threat to Israel. Consequently, Sharon enlisted the services of Bashir Gemayel’s Phalange militia, Israel’s erstwhile ally in Lebanon, to search the refugee camps. Unfor-tunately, at this point, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated (most probably by the Syrians), and when the Phalange searched the refugee camps, they were thirsting for revenge against the Palestinians who had been their enemies since the mid-1970s. The end result was the killing of between 300 and 400 Palestinians and a blot on the record of both the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and Sharon, who was subsequently charged with “indirect responsibility” for the massacres and forced to give up his post as Defense Minister.

While some predicted the end of Sharon’s military career as a result of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, this was not to be the case. In the Likud primary of 1984, Sharon got 42.5 percent of the votes, second only to Yitzhak Shamir’s 56 percent, and my own interviews of Israelis in the summer of 1984 confirmed Sharon’s continued popularity. Indeed, Sharon became a minister in the national unity government that emerged as a result of the 1984 Israeli elections and served in its inner cabinet. Sharon continued to serve, on and off, in Likud governments until the Labor victory in the 1992 elections under Yitzchak Rabin. Four years later, with elections looming in the aftermath of both the assassination of Rabin and Hamas terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Sharon, in another clever political move, convinced David Levy not to run against Benjamin Netanyahu in the race for Prime Minister, under Israel’s new election format. Netanyahu won a narrow victory over Shimon Peres, thanks in large part to Levy’s not splitting the vote of the Israeli right-wing. Seeing Sharon as a possible competitor, Netanyahu was initially reluctant to give him an important cabinet post, but under pressure from Levy and other Likudniks, Netanyahu relented and made him Minister of Infrastructure. Two years later, on the eve of the meetings at the Wye Plantation with Clinton and Arafat, Sharon was elevated to the post of Foreign Minister as Netanyahu sought to gain support from Israel’s right-wing parties for the agreement he would be negotiating at Wye. Unfortunately for Neytanyahu, his coalition fell apart soon after the signing of the Wye agreement, and Israel faced new elections in May 1999. Netanyahu was decisively defeated by 56 percent to 44 percent in that election by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, and Netanyahu left both the Knesset and the leadership of the Likud Party. His replacement as Likud Party leader was Ariel Sharon.

By this time, it should have been evident to all that Sharon was a very successful opportunist, whether on the battlefield or in politics, and rumors that abounded at the time that Sharon would only be a caretaker until Netanyahu’s return should have been thoroughly discounted. Indeed, after Barak faltered, in large part because of the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada in September 2000, Sharon was ready to make his move. Perhaps thinking that the Israeli electorate would never vote in Sharon as Prime Minister, Barak called for early elections in February 2001. This was a major political miscalculation, as Sharon defeated him by a 2-1 margin, as the Likud leader promised to establish a national unity government and restore security to Israel.

Unfortunately for Sharon, the Al-Aksa Intifada escalated in intensity, replete with suicide bombings and rocket firings from Palestinian positions in Gaza both at Israeli settlements there and at Israeli villages near the Gaza Strip. While these Palestinian actions led, in June 2002, to the Israeli reoccupation of the major Palestinian cities on the West Bank (except Jericho) and to a major Israeli campaign of targeted assassinations against Palestinian terrorist leaders (if not yet Arafat), Sharon did not succeed in restoring security, as he had promised. While the Israeli Prime Minister did manage to sideline Arafat politically, keeping him locked up in his compound in Ramallah, and gaining American support for the isolation of Arafat; in recent years, pragmatist that he is, Sharon came to realize that these policies were not sufficient. Following the 2003 elections, which he also won overwhelmingly, Sharon began to change his security policy. There were to be three major changes.

First, he adopted the position of the Labor doves, that it was necessary to build a fence between Israel and the West Bank to separate the Israeli and Palestinian peoples until such time as a new Palestinian leadership would emerge that would renounce terrorism. The security fence, according to the Labor doves, would have two purposes. In the first place, it would, like the fence around Gaza, help protect against terrorist infiltration into Israel. Second, by separating the two peoples, it would preclude Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the more than two million Palestinians living there, which would circumvent the demo-graphic threat that annexing the West Bank would entail. However, while the Labor Doves wanted the fence to go more or less along the 1949 armistice lines, Sharon amended the plan so that Israel could annex a number of the settlement blocs he had helped to create. Still, the fence meant that a number of the smaller, and more isolated settlements in the West Bank would be on the Palestinian side of the fence, and this led to criticism of the fence plan by right-wing elements in Israel.

A second major change of strategy was for Sharon to concentrate on securing the optimum relationship with the United States, even if this meant making concessions to Washington. At a time when most of the world, including Israel’s major trading partners in Europe, was siding with the Palestinians against Israel, a close tie with the United States was seen by Sharon as a security imperative, which would protect Israel in such international forums as the United Nations. It would also assure that Israel would continue to receive high-tech military assistance from the United States, such as the arrow anti-missile missile, which the two countries are jointly developing. But to cement this relationship, which was also a personal one between Bush and Sharon, Israel had to accede to US wishes, to a certain extent. Fortunately for Sharon, the Bush administration had come to take Israel’s position that Arafat was an unredeemed terrorist who would play no serious role in the peace process, although the US was not yet ready to agree to Israel’s wishes to eliminate him. Nonetheless, Sharon had to be sensitive to US objections as to the path the security fence would take, and on the illegal West Bank settlements that had sprung up since Sharon took office in 2001. Furthermore, Israel, despite some reservations, had to agree to the US-inspired “Road Map” for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, which Bush made public after the US capture of Baghdad in April 2003. Gone, indeed, were the days of October 2001, when Sharon loudly complained that the US was treating Israel like Britain and France had treated Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich conference in 1938. Nonethe-less, in return, Sharon extracted some major promises from the Bush Administration, during his meeting with Bush in Washington on April 14, 2004, including the stipulation that Israel would not have to accept the return of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and that Israel’s final borders would not be those of the 1949 armistice lines. In this context, it appears that Sharon’s effort to cultivate the United States has paid major dividends and has indeed contributed to Israeli security.

The third major change in Sharon’s strategy was the decision to pull Israeli troops and Israeli settlements out of Gaza. For a man who once said the defense of Netzarim (a Jewish settlement in the middle of Gaza) was as important to the defense of Israel as the defense of Tel Aviv, this was a major change indeed. To be sure, the terrain being flat, Gaza had none of the high points that Sharon remained so concerned about. Nonetheless, a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, without an agreement with the Palestinians, and under Palestinian fire (however weak it had become) reminded a number of Israelis of Barak’s unilateral pull-out from Southern Lebanon in May 2000, also without a political agreement, and also under fire. This action, most Israelis now believe, encouraged the Palestinians, four months later, to launch the Al-Aksa Intifada with the evident hope of ousting Israel, at the minimum, from the West Bank and Gaza. To counter this criticism of his now being “weak on terrorism,” Sharon assassinated the two top leaders of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin and Abdul Aziz Rantisi, and has threatened to assassinate Arafat as well. He also extracted from the United States, during Sharon’s April 14th visit with Bush, the statement that the United States would support Israel’s future anti-terrorist activities, meaning that Israel would get American backing if it had to strike Palestinian positions in Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal, if the region was being used to attack Israel.

Given this brief overview of Sharon’s life and actions, what can be concluded about the Israeli leader? First, he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and in this he very much follows the pattern of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Thus, if a policy doesn’t work, or is deemed too costly, he is willing to scrap it, as in his decision to leave Gaza. In addition, ever the political opportunist, he is willing to adopt policies suggested by others, such as the security fence between the West Bank and Israel, even if he has adapted the idea to include a number of Israeli settlement blocs. Third, over the years, his understanding of Israel’s security needs has widened. Thus his decision to cultivate the United States, even if Israel had to make concessions on the path of the security fence and on settlements, demonstrated his understanding of the key role of the United States in assuring Israeli security. In this, he also follows the path of Ben-Gurion, who chose to withdraw from the Sinai and Gaza after the 1956 war (an action Sharon opposed at the time), rather than incur the displeasure of the United States.

In sum, Ariel Sharon, the security hawk and astute Israeli politician, has clearly matured as to his thinking about Israeli security during the period he has served as Israel’s Prime Minister. However, whether he will survive politically to oversee the implementation of his planned withdrawal from Gaza, or whether a new Palestinian leadership will emerge to serve as a partner for Sharon in the peace process, are questions only the future can answer.•

About the author
Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science at Baltimore Hebrew University and Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Among his publications are Israel in the Begin Era, Israel Under Rabin, and Israel’s First Fifty Years.