In 1993, I interviewed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in New York City when he was a civilian, a warrior on the battlefield of politics, no longer in the IDF. The following is based on that interview. While we can dissect his military and political acts ad infinitim, the man never changed his basic philosophy of life, war and peace. I did not know then that I was speaking to a prophet.
Ariel “Arik” Sharon fought for peace as a soldier, a diplomat, politician and Jewish leader from his teenaged years until he suffered a stroke in 2006, at the height of his career and popularity. He was the man responsible for rescuing the IDF in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, and was also in charge of returning Gush Katif to Gaza and pulling the IDF out of Southern Lebanon. He had his stroke just weeks before the Gaza pull-out, which he said would not take place until there was “sheket,” and there was none, but that did not stop Deputy PM Ehud Olmert from pulling everyone out and treating them badly.
One cannot help but wonder if Sharon would have done that had he known that the rockets were still coming and what the ultimate consequences would be. He lost his battle with George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Condoleezza Rice when they forced Palestinian elections on him, elections that caused a huge increase in terror and death in Israel and everywhere in the Middle East.
It was clear from our interview that Sharon had no illusions or great expectations from Hamas, the P.L.O. or Hezbollah. He despised Yasir Arafat, and never underestimated his indecency. He knew that despite the Shia/Sunni divide, that when it came to attacking Israel and Jews, the terrorists would never stop. Instead of the peace he sought, rockets have rained on Israel from both Hamas and Hezbollah, and the PA still funds and extols terrorism.
For most of his active years, the former general and war hero never let go of his maps. He toted them around in an old paper bag wherever he went. Insiders at the Israeli Embassy used to say that he schlepped them to the most unusual places, including the Pentagon, in case there was a “map emergency.” And if ever there was a “map emergency,” in 1993, the Oslo Accords and the handshake between Yasir Arafat and Itzhak Rabin on the lawn of the Rose Garden during the Clinton Administration was it. Sharon used his maps to prove his political and security points.
Sharon was in New York at that time to push his pet project—Ateret Cohanim—in the Old City of Jerusalem. He and others were buying homes in the old Jewish quarter, a predominantly Arab neighborhood. The philosophy was simple: don’t kill them, don’t oppress them, buy them out and keep the deeds.
The view from his sitting room in New York overlooked all of Central Park, Long Island Sound and the Ramapo Mountains. In the distance, you could see the Hudson River snaking toward Bear Mountain. (He said the first time he came to America he was fascinated by all that water, and rented a jalopy he drove across the country…taking pictures of bodies of water all the way to California.)
Revered and reviled, Ariel Sharon suffered for love of country, personally, professionally and politically. His life and the history—and the land—of Israel were deeply intertwined. each having a lasting effect on the other. No matter what side of the fence you are on Ariel “Arik” Sharon’s dedication and love for Israel was unquestioned.
He was consistent. The philosophy and views he expressed in his 1988 book, Warrior. didn’t change after the letter of mutual recognition was signed by the Israelis and Palestinians early in September, 1993. Sharon wanted a negotiated peace. He even planned for it.
But the recognition of Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, as chief negotiator for the Palestinians left him livid. And it was not the first time. Sharon’s plans often went awry and not always by his own hand. Usually it was a commanding officer, miles from the field of battle, who called shots that needlessly cost Jewish lives, leaving Sharon frustrated, furious and the scapegoat. Often politicians, like Golda Meir or Yitzhak Rabin, thwarted his every move.
Fed up with the lack of organized opposition to the Labor party, where he was deeply rooted and with whom he had disagreed too many times, he helped create the Likud in 1973. His uneasy alliance with Menachem Begin began when Moshe Dayan and other political military types tried to throw him out of the army. When the headlines screamed about a possible Begin/Sharon political alliance, the Labor government’s military allies sent “Arik” on a world tour until after the elections in 1973. Four years later, Likud’s victory in the polls unseated Labor for the first time in 29 years, and as Sharon said, “marked the emergence of Israel as a bona fide two-party state.”
A legendary soldier—he spent 28 years in the military and another 33 years as a politician—Sharon was once left for dead on a real battlefield as well as the more vicious battlefield of politics. He was always his own man, and walked his own path.
And Sharon walked the entire territory occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War many times. He knew every wadi and rock. As a matter of principle, he believed you should be 100 percent familiar with your terrain—in case you need to defend it. Right after the war in 1967, he put Israeli military schools in old Jordanian army posts and began developing the basics of a settlement plan for Yitzhak Rabin.
Four months after the Likud victory in 1977, he presented that plan to the new cabinet. History had convinced him that “basic intelligence dictates that we act purely on the basis of our own needs. That did not mean that some kind of political accommodation [with the Palestinians] was completely out of the question, but it did mean that first and last we would look to our security.”
Sharon advocated building a line of urban, industrial settlements on the ridges overlooking the coastal plain and the plain of the Jordan River, in addition to a line of settlements along the Jordan from Beit Shean to the Dead Sea. What Sharon and his people looked for as they climbed through the hills, day after day, was high, important terrain and vital road junctions. They were making their maps and built the settlements, the “facts on the ground” of Israel’s security in the “territories.” And wherever settlements were built, water and electricity were offered to nearby Arab villages.
Sharon, a realist, knew since he was a child that Israel needed to make peace with the Arabs. He didn’t claim to know all the answers, but knew that any national solution for peace needed to be grounded in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And Sharon, more than anyone, was aware of the dangers inherent in peace.
After Rabin recognized Yasir Arafat, Arik went on Israeli TV and told the media that Arafat should not have been the designated representative of the P.L.O. “Yasir Arafat belongs in a glass cage in a courtroom in Jerusalem, where he should be tried as a war criminal,” he announced.
As protesters in Jerusalem crowded around a vehicle approaching the prime minister’s office, screaming for Rabin’s blood, the mood changed abruptly when the door opened, and Arik’s paunchy figure was spotted. The adoring crowd surged forward. “Arik, Arik, our father,” they yelled.
Asked if Yasir Arafat could be considered a moderate when stacked against the likes of Hamas, the organization responsible for the current wave of terrorism and violence in the territories and Gaza, he said, “65-75 percent of all the terrorist activities taking place now are by Fatah, which is the P.L.O. directly under the command of Arafat, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and also, recently, on the Lebanese front. They are working with Hezbollah. He has more Jewish blood on his hands than anyone since Hitler. He should be removed from our society altogether. This is not a man with whom you can negotiate. You cannot expect anything from him.”
Would he agree that the P.L.O. has more to gain from peace talks than does Hamas?
“I think you are wrong about that,” he says. “Things should be judged by action and not by words. I don’t see any difference whatsoever between the goals and intentions of the P.L.O. and the goals and intentions of Hamas. There is one target. Jews. Kill Jews. Destroy the State of Israel. There is no difference.” He also said at that time that, “Egypt is working like crazy on nuclear weapons.”
“I can tell you how I see it,” Sharon said in 1993. “According to the current logic, the negotiations will never lead to peace. We should be going about it differently and deal with an entirely different set of issues on a much wider scope and with more serious problems than we’re dealing with now.
“The conflict is wider than Israelis and Palestinians. The major problem is that there is no will, whatsoever, among the Arab nations to reconcile with Israel. That is the basic thing. They use different tactics to distract us, but the strategy is the same. Israel should be worn down slowly… It’s a media war, and they have managed to paint the P.L.O. as peaceful. Under the title of conciliation they have managed to paint Israel as a country against peace. That put pressure on Israel and caused an internal split. Divided we fall, just as the Arabs predicted..
“Terrorism causes wars because when we cannot protect our citizens, we retaliate. Then there’s counter-retaliation and the cycle of violence escalates. Add to that the lethal personalities of the Arab dictators who are so hard to deter. They don’t care about the future. So if they kill off 250,000 of their own people, they get away with it.
“But diplomats can do great things. Talking brought down the Iron Curtain and talking is building bridges to China. But how do you talk to a psychopath? Two or three bombs in Saddam Hussein’s hands or in some Ayatollah’s arsenal are more dangerous than 300,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S.”
Sharon also admitted that in 1987, as the then-minister of defense, he thought it might be suitable to help Hamas, dreaming that they would fight the P.L.O. terrorists, because in those days, the P.L.O. was the threat. In 1993, he said, they began making concessions to the P.L.O. as the lesser of the two evils. “They are helping the P.L.O. again in the hope they will fight Hamas. You know what happens next? They will fight us together. To think for a moment that we will gain anything out of this shows a deep lack of understanding of, and a wrong evaluation of, the situation in the Middle East.” And then he added another ingredient to the lethal mix, the problem of the Palestinian refugees. The Arab countries have never absorbed the Palestinians who remained in the camps. “It is an open wound, and until you deal with it, you can sign all the peace agreements you want, and nothing will help,” Sharon said.
What were Sharon’s conditions for a peace agreement?
“Call a moratorium on arms sales immediately. That’s first. That’s the simplest thing. Then enter into arms reduction treaties and equalize military strength throughout the region. In order to eliminate the terrorists, every Arab country has to agree to dismantle, eliminate, deport or arrest those engaged in the business of terror. Dismantle all the offices of terrorist organizations operating in their cities. If any Arab country wants to become part of the process, we should tell them, ‘You want to negotiate? Stop terrorism.’ If Syria wants to sit at the table, let them stop the Hezbollah from operating in the Baalbek region, where they’ve been active since January 1976.” He also wanted the MIAs returned to Israel.
He was even prepared for the death of King Hussein of Jordan. “Now we come to what I think is the solution,” he said. “There is a Palestinian state and maybe we should look at the map for a minute. I brought it with me to Washington back in 1982 to try to solve some problems.”
Sharon pulled out a worn map that indicated the former borders, first demarcated by the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and showed me how 75 percent of that area was lost during the War of Independence, which is the first war Sharon fought in. [He was just 17.]
“In 1948, who occupied what? They occupied us. Gaza occupied? It was occupied by the Egyptians! That terrible war cost us 1 percent of our population. The Egyptians were stopped 27 kilometers from Tel Aviv. That situation lasted for 19 years, and included the loss of the Old City. Then came 1967. We asked Jordan to stay out of it. But they didn’t, and so we came back to this border. Jordan is the Palestinian state. Its inhabitants are Palestinian.” He felt that the Jordanians were the ones who should be sitting at the table and that autonomy would never work. “Autonomy should not affect areas settled by Jews,” he said. “It should not be effective in the corridors and bridges that link the Mediterranean with the Jordan Valley and conditions and terms should be laid down before autonomy is granted.” According to Sharon, the Jewish settlements under development should never, ever come under any Arab control.
Sharon pulled out another map and showed me how he had laid out the settlements. They ran together to form bridges, or corridors across the West Bank and through Gaza. The Arab villages were broken up. They would become cantons.
What was his message to the confused Jews of the Diaspora?
“First of all, stay Jews. Stick to Judaism. Learn the Bible, learn the history of the land and the people. Then move to Israel. Send your children there. Antisemitism is spreading like fire around the world. And until you get there, back Israel politically. Invest in Israel.
“I came to America to strengthen the small Jewish community that lives within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. When you walk in the narrow streets and see the holes where the mezuzahs once were, and you see the places where they have changed the doorposts so you can see that they’re hiding Jewish places, you will understand the fragility of our security. We need to be strong within the walls and in the City of David, the place where all our stories began, more than 3,000 years ago. We need to survive.”
Ariel Sharon thought he was a lone warrior. But he was not alone. His words were prophetic. And his voice was heard. May he rest in the peace of the next world, as he was never able to find peace in this one.
By Jeanette Friedman
