Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon by David Landau

Author:David Landau [Landau, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: eBook
ISBN: 9780385351096
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-10T08:00:00+00:00

MINGLING

For Ariel Sharon, it was to be time well spent. Few people today, even inside Israeli politics, remember that he served as foreign minister; he left no lasting mark on this prestigious but often overrated portfolio. He hardly could, given that for his entire tenure he represented a government collapsing or collapsed. But it left its mark on him.

Eytan Bentsur, a long-serving professional diplomat whom Sharon kept on as director general of the ministry, was subsequently to develop deep reservations over Sharon’s policies as prime minister and profound distaste for his ethical conduct and for the coterie of friends and advisers who surrounded him.b Nevertheless, Bentsur was full of praise for Sharon’s performance at the Foreign Ministry. “He was a man you could talk to. He would encourage everyone to speak freely. There was no dogmatism about him. And he was really easy, pleasant actually, to work with. He didn’t throw his weight around.”

According to his chief of bureau, Tomer Orni, Sharon took his appointment as foreign minister with great seriousness and embarked on a round of briefings and conversations with policy experts from across the spectrum, scribbling furiously in his little orange notebooks as though their analyses of the conflict and the region were all new to him. “He saw the Foreign Ministry as his preparation for the prime ministership—regardless of the slender political prospects, as he and everyone knew, that he would ever actually make it to prime minister.”

Despite the diplomatic chill, Sharon did manage to set up one lengthy, unpublicized meeting with Abu Ala, the senior PA official who negotiated the Oslo Accords. It took place at his ranch in late January 1999. Abu Ala drove down from Jerusalem incognito. Sharon had a log fire blazing in the hearth, Lily served cookies, and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. The host let the guest into a home truth. “For making war,” Sharon explained, “Israel needs a left-wing government. But for making peace, there has to be a nationalist government.” The election campaign was by no means over, he said, and the shape of the new government was unpredictable. Abu Ala said the PA had resolved to do nothing that could be perceived as intervening against the Likud. That was his message from Arafat. The rais, he said, respected Sharon as a man of his word.

What they should do, Sharon continued, was to forget the elections and get on with the peace process. Let’s take a specific issue, he suggested, and work on it. For instance, the “safe passage” route that was to link Gaza and the West Bank. Abu Ala said the Palestinians wanted that to be extraterritorial. Sharon said Israel would never agree. Abu Ala recounted his own humiliating experiences at Israeli army roadblocks. Sharon voiced anger at the soldiers’ behavior and sympathy for the Palestinians. He spoke of the danger of terrorism triggering a cycle of violence that could engulf the region. Abu Ala said he, Abu Mazen, and Arafat himself were potential terror targets. The dialogue flowed back and forth with ease.

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