Ariel Sharon: A Life - Hardcover

Nir Hefez, a graduate of Tel Aviv University, is editor in chief of Yediot Tikshoret, a nationwide string of weekly newspapers, and a senior editor of the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. He has filled a wide range of posts in journalism, including editor in chief of the weekly Tel Aviv. He serves as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces reserves.

Gadi Bloom, a graduate of the Beit Zvi School of Stage and Cinematic Art, is the managing editor of Yediot Tikshoret. He has written a regular column for the weeklies Tel Aviv and Ha’ir, as well as numerous investigative features.

CHAPTER 1

The Battle of Latrun

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a numbingly dull orator. His tone was nasal and monotonous, he fumbled with his glasses as he spoke, and he always read from the page, his voice bobbing up and down like a distant boat in a soft sea. The hand gestures meant to inflect his words with emotion were frequently a beat late. History, from the lips of Sharon, needed to be listened to carefully, lest it slip by undetected.

On September 23, 2001, Sharon, seventy-three, obese yet agile, climbed onto the podium in the Latrun amphitheater and addressed a group of teachers. They grasped the historical significance of his speech. Sharon had just announced his agreement, in principle, to the founding of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, making him the first prime minister from the right-wing Likud Party to publicly concede the West Bank to the Palestinians. “Israel,” Sharon said as the sun set behind him, “wants to give the Palestinians what no else ever has: the opportunity to establish a state of their own. No one— not the Turks, nor the English, nor the Egyptians, nor the Jordanians— has ever given them this chance before.”

It was no coincidence that Ariel Sharon made this declaration at the tank corps’ monument to the fallen, in Latrun. Sharon chose Latrun as the burial ground for an ideology that he had upheld for thirty years, agreeing, against the wishes of the Likud Central Committee and virtually his entire electoral base, to initiate the founding of a Palestinian state just a few hundred yards from the spot where he had nearly lost his life.

As he spoke, his mind wandered fifty-three years back in time, to one of the Israel Defense Forces’ worst embarrassments—the Battle of Latrun. He recalled how he had lain flat on his back, half a mile from where he now stood in a starched shirt and tie, blood pouring out of his stomach, his will to live ebbing. Pictures from his past flashed through his mind: the bullet slicing his stomach; the armed Palestinian villagers pillaging and murdering his downed soldiers; the oppressive heat; the flies; the clouds of gnats that descended on his open wounds; the evacuation he barely survived.

That battle played a major role in shaping the ideology of a man who would become one of the world’s most influential leaders. In the Battle of Latrun, Sharon emerged as an unflappable and fearless warrior. Over a lifetime of crises—military, political, and personal— he would often recall the moment he was allowed to “rise from the dead” at Latrun. In his darkest moments he could always return there to draw the strength necessary to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes.

The Battle of Latrun began on the night of May 24, 1948, ten days after Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared the establishment of the State of Israel, drawing an all-out attack by seven neighboring nations. During the first days of war, the Jordanian Legion surrounded Jerusalem, cutting the city’s hundred thousand Jewish residents off without food, water, medicine, or weapons. The Jordanian Arab Legion’s 4th Battalion, bolstered by armed Palestinian fighting gangs, had taken control of the Arab city of Latrun, the nearby Trappist monastery, the Crusader fort Le Toron des Chevaliers, and the square stone building that had served the British as police headquarters during their mandate in Palestine. As in the Middle Ages, the Crusader fort dominated the western route to Jerusalem, completing the siege. On May 23, the Jordanians strengthened their forces, adding the 2nd Battalion to the troops already in place. The overpowering force kept Jerusalem beyond Jewish reach. Numerous convoys were destroyed as they rumbled up the first ridge on the way to the capital, nine miles west.

Ben-Gurion was determined to break the blockade. The military maneuver aimed at opening a corridor to Jerusalem was named “Operation Bin-Nun,” after the biblical Joshua, the son of Nun, who led the Jews into Canaan and prevailed in a battle over the Amorites in the same region. The hastily assembled 7th Brigade—a unit that had been put together only a week before and consisted of untrained Holocaust survivors marched straight from the boats to the battlefield —was given the mission. Since many of them had rarely fired a weapon before, their brigade was reinforced by the 32nd

Infantry Battalion, a battle-hardened unit from the Alexandroni Brigade. The commander of Platoon 1, Company B, of the 32nd Battalion was Arik Scheinerman (later and better known to the world as Ariel Sharon), just twenty years old.

Scheinerman’s arm was in a cast. He had broken it in a car accident a short time before, but had decided nonetheless to lead Platoon 1. His decision to participate in the battle may have been influenced by rumors floating through the ranks that the battle for Latrun would be won with ease. Men under the command of Chaim Weizmann, later the president of Israel, issued intelligence reports stating that Latrun was being held by several hundred armed but unorganized Palestinian villagers. But beyond the view of the Israeli troops, one thousand Bedouin soldiers from the Arab Legion, armed with mortars, artillery, armored vehicles, hundreds of heavy machine guns, and thousands of rifles, lay in wait. The intelligence failure would lead to one of the bloodiest battles of the War of Independence.

Toward evening on May 24, four companies, two from the 7th Brigade and two from the 32nd Battalion, organized their gear in the Hulda “Forest,” a small patch of eucalyptus trees next to Kibbutz Hulda. Ya’akov Bugin, a young soldier from Kfar Pinnes who had been transferred to Arik’s platoon a few days before the battle, remembers their morale-boosting trip to Hulda from their permanent base in Pardaisiya via the newly conquered Arab city of Jaffa. “Arik sat down on the bus and I remember looking at him admiringly,” recalls Bugin, who had not yet even been introduced to his new commanding officer. “I was seventeen years old at the time, an age when I was looking for heroes and role models, and Arik definitely had a heroic look to him. His body was sturdy and healthy, his face was childlike; I remember sitting behind him on the bus and thinking, ‘He reminds me of a Roman emperor.’ ”

The Israeli force’s communications officer, Ted Arison, later the owner of Carnival Cruise Lines and the wealthiest Jew in the world, scurried through the troops looking for spare transceiver batteries. He was not alone in his search for vital gear. Many soldiers lacked canteens, uniforms, and boots. There were not enough rifles and ammunition to go around. The engineering and artillery corps were nowhere to be found. At the last minute, the operations chief of the IDF general staff, Yigal Allon, tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to delay the battle, telling him that the 7th Brigade was ill suited to the task of liberating Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion, fearing for the lives of the capital’s Jewish citizens and dreading the possibility of the holy city’s falling in its entirety, refused to delay for more than twenty-four hours.

Arik Scheinerman spent the hours leading up to the battle lying on his stomach in an olive grove, storing energy for what was sure to be a sleepless night. He was already an accomplished military leader, brave, conscientious, and sincere beyond his years, with a habit of collecting himself in solitude. He watched as the 7th Brigade’s new recruits hopped off the backs of a convoy of trucks. Ram Oren, in his book Latrun, published a letter Arik Scheinerman wrote to his parents:

My platoon and I are lazing in an olive grove, passing the heat of the day, thinking pre-battle thoughts, blending with the water- smoothed stones and the earth, feeling part and parcel of the land: a rooted feeling, a feeling of a homeland, of belonging, of ownership. Suddenly a convoy of trucks stopped next to us and unloaded new, foreign-looking recruits. They looked slightly pale, and were wearing sleeveless sweaters, gray pants, and striped shirts. A stream of languages filled the air, names like Herschel and Yazek, Jan and Maitek were thrown around. They stuck out against the backdrop of olives, rocks, and yellowing grains. They’d come to us through blocked borders, from Europe’s death camps. I watched them. Watched them strip, watched their white bodies. They tried to find fitting uniforms, and fought the straps on their battle jackets as their new commanders helped them get suited up. They did this in silence, as though they had made their peace with fate. Not one of them cried out: “Let us at least breathe the free air after the years of terrible suffering.” It is as if they’d come to the conclusion that this is one final battle for the future of the Jewish people.

As Arik Scheinerman and his men filled canteens and magazines, the commanders of Operation Bin-Nun huddled together in a nearby cabin and reviewed their battle plans. The 32nd Battalion’s two companies were to take the Trappist monastery, the Crusader fort, the British police building, the Arab village of Latrun, and the nearby Hill 315. The 72nd Battalion of the 7th Brigade was to take the fortified ridge to the east of the village. The two-pronged attack would ensure total control of the route to Jerusalem.

It was a simple plan in theory, but on the ground, problems began to multiply: The bus scheduled to take the soldiers to the drop-off point was late; a backup platoon of infantrymen and an artillery unit of 155mm guns were no-shows; the 32nd’s battalion commander, hobbled by a chronic lack of sleep and food and general war-weariness, fainted on the spot. He was replaced by future chief of the general staff Chaim Laskov.

Ya’akov Bugin recalls:

As evening came they brought our company, Company B, together and told us that the goal of the m...