Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon by David Landau Page A

Peering through his thick glasses, his eyes seemed to bore into me. I began to picture myself as Pinocchio when he got involved with the cat who wasn’t blind and the fox who wasn’t lame. But despite my growing if intangible misgivings, the discussion proceeded, and eventually we agreed to go ahead together. With that, Mr. Begin in his gallant way called room service and had a good brandy sent up. Then we drank to our understanding. But even as we raised our glasses, I felt that I was locked in and that I was locked in with someone about whom I had inexplicable feelings of apprehension.
    The date was July 3, 1969. Election Day was October 28, and by law the parties’ lists of candidates had to be submitted a hundred days ahead, by mid-July. As Sharon tells it, the understanding with Begin did not survive his drive back to Tel Aviv. He picked up a soldier-hitchhiker, who, “without paying the slightest deference to my rank or reputation … began telling me that I was making a terrible mistake, that I shouldn’t do it, that I had to stay in the army … Lily was waiting for me, in bed already. I got in and covered myself up with the blanket. ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘I feel as if I need to be protected.’ I had already decided that I was not going to go through with it.”
    The next morning’s headlines trumpeted the Begin-Sharon understanding. Sharon writes that he was in the act of composing embarrassing letters of withdrawal to Sapir and Begin when “fate intervened in my personal affairs…Pinchas Sapir was visiting theUnited States. When he heard about the newspaper headlines, he was livid. Calling Bar-Lev, Sapir asked the military’s most prominentLaborite h what he thought he was doing (as Sapir himself told me later)…Sapir told Bar-Lev to get busy and find some way of keeping me in the army and out of the hands of the ‘enemy.’ ”
    A way was duly, and quickly, found. He would be appointed to the hitherto nonexistent post of “lecturer for the IDF” and sent on an extended speaking tour to the United States, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. He would meet, too, with military and diplomatic officials in the various capitals. This eight-week foreign odyssey would end, by happy coincidence, the day before the election. He would thus be conveniently out of the country during the campaign, and everyone could forget his high-profile but now felicitously truncated tryst with the opposition.
    He wrote a formal, pompous letter to Begin and Sapir explaining that after long and hard consideration he had decided that “in these difficult days, when the IDF is at war along the borders and its soldiers are shedding their blood in defense of Israel’s freedom and independence,” his place was “alongside them, and in the front line.” To Josef Sapir he wrote a separate note, apologizing for the embarrassment and hinting at the unfavorable impact Begin had made on him. He was determined, he confided, not to enter political life “in a state of dependence on [Begin].” 36
    After the election, with Golda and Dayan and Sapir all safely back in their jobs, Bar-Lev obediently deposited the country’s most fateful front, Southern Command, in the hands of the man he had wanted to fire. “In December,” Sharon writes, “I received orders to take over Gavish’s command.”
    Sharon seems to have persuaded Bar-Lev that whatever his past objections he would abide by the strategy that the High Command had decided upon, and to a large extent had already implemented, with the rapid fortification of the forward positions along the canal. Most of the fortification work had been finished before theWar of Attrition began in earnest, in March 1969. Sharon did not abandon the fortress system and based the defense of Sinai on mobile forces, as Tal and he had advocated. i As CO of Southern Command, he tinkeredwith theBar-Lev Line and ended up, in the words ofChaim Herzog, with “a form of compromise … which no