Read Online Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon by David Landau - Free Book Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: Historical, History, Biography & Autobiography, Ebook, Political, middle east, Israel & Palestine
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States, U.S.S.R., Britain, andFrance) and Two Power (United States and U.S.S.R.) talks. These had failed to cut through Cold War rivalry, but in December 1969 Secretary of StateWilliam Rogers had announced a comprehensive American peace plan based on Israeli withdrawal from all Egyptian and Jordanian territory barring “minor adjustments” in the framework of a peace settlement.Golda Meir’s government, still a unity coalition with Begin’sGahal in it, had rejected the proposal. Now, with the war at a global danger point, Rogers came back with a more modest plan, designed to achieve an immediate cease-fire in Sinai.
The American proposal had three parts: a ninety-day cease-fire and “standstill” in place for thirty miles on either side of the canal; a statement by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan that they accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and specifically its call for withdrawal from occupied territories; and an undertaking to resume peace talks through the UN peace envoy, Sweden’sGunnar Jarring, which had been conducted on and off since 1967 without registering any progress.
Golda Meir was under heavy international and domestic pressure to accept. Casualty figures mounted relentlessly. Since the end of theSix-Day War, 367 IDF soldiers had been killed on the canal front and 1,366 injured. 38 Almost daily, the black-bordered death notices appeared in the newspapers. The fact that Egyptian casualties weremuch higher was of no comfort and little strategic significance. As Nasser and his generals had rightly discerned at the outset, a war of attrition for a small, tightly knit society was much more damaging than for a country of tens of millions.
For the first time since the waiting period before the 1967 war, searching questions began to be aired not just on the leftist margin but in the political mainstream. In late July–early August, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all announced their acceptance of the U.S. proposal. The cease-fire on the canal went into effect on August 7, 1970. Begin pulled hisGahal bloc out of the government, ending three years of unity rule.
Egypt, with Soviet connivance, immediately began advancing its SAM anti-aircraft batteries toward the canal bank, in brazen violation of the “standstill.” The Egyptian push began on the very night of the cease-fire and continued in the days and weeks ahead. Israel strenuously protested to Washington, but the administration was reluctant to upend the cease-fire. Nixon preferred to step up the supply of advanced warplanes to Israel as a means of mollifying the anger and anxiety in Jerusalem.
E gypt’s War of Attrition was supported by its Six-Day War allies, Syria and Jordan, through the activities from their soil of Palestinian guerrilla groups. Immediately after the war, the Palestinian nationalist groupFatah, underYasser Arafat, tried to establish itself inside the occupied West Bank and lead resistance there. But it was eventually pushed out and forced to conduct its operations against Israel on a hit-and-run basis from over the border. Soon, Arafat was acting in defiance of Jordanian constraints. Increasingly, the armed Palestinian presence on the East Bank began to pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.
In September 1970, after two attempts on his life, King Hussein of Jordan lashed out at the armed PLO units that were running the border areas and the Palestinianrefugee camps inside the kingdom as a veritable state within a state. TheArab Legion, comprisingBedouin tribesmen loyal to the royal house, crushed the PLO men and took a bloody toll of civilian camp dwellers, too. Hundreds of the armed Palestinians fled across the river, where IDF troops were ordered not to shoot them or send them back but to disarm and arrest them, “although,” Sharon writes with evident disapproval, “these were the very terrorists who had carried out who knew how many murderous raids into Israel.”
He voiced strident disapproval when Israel
The American proposal had three parts: a ninety-day cease-fire and “standstill” in place for thirty miles on either side of the canal; a statement by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan that they accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and specifically its call for withdrawal from occupied territories; and an undertaking to resume peace talks through the UN peace envoy, Sweden’sGunnar Jarring, which had been conducted on and off since 1967 without registering any progress.
Golda Meir was under heavy international and domestic pressure to accept. Casualty figures mounted relentlessly. Since the end of theSix-Day War, 367 IDF soldiers had been killed on the canal front and 1,366 injured. 38 Almost daily, the black-bordered death notices appeared in the newspapers. The fact that Egyptian casualties weremuch higher was of no comfort and little strategic significance. As Nasser and his generals had rightly discerned at the outset, a war of attrition for a small, tightly knit society was much more damaging than for a country of tens of millions.
For the first time since the waiting period before the 1967 war, searching questions began to be aired not just on the leftist margin but in the political mainstream. In late July–early August, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all announced their acceptance of the U.S. proposal. The cease-fire on the canal went into effect on August 7, 1970. Begin pulled hisGahal bloc out of the government, ending three years of unity rule.
Egypt, with Soviet connivance, immediately began advancing its SAM anti-aircraft batteries toward the canal bank, in brazen violation of the “standstill.” The Egyptian push began on the very night of the cease-fire and continued in the days and weeks ahead. Israel strenuously protested to Washington, but the administration was reluctant to upend the cease-fire. Nixon preferred to step up the supply of advanced warplanes to Israel as a means of mollifying the anger and anxiety in Jerusalem.
E gypt’s War of Attrition was supported by its Six-Day War allies, Syria and Jordan, through the activities from their soil of Palestinian guerrilla groups. Immediately after the war, the Palestinian nationalist groupFatah, underYasser Arafat, tried to establish itself inside the occupied West Bank and lead resistance there. But it was eventually pushed out and forced to conduct its operations against Israel on a hit-and-run basis from over the border. Soon, Arafat was acting in defiance of Jordanian constraints. Increasingly, the armed Palestinian presence on the East Bank began to pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.
In September 1970, after two attempts on his life, King Hussein of Jordan lashed out at the armed PLO units that were running the border areas and the Palestinianrefugee camps inside the kingdom as a veritable state within a state. TheArab Legion, comprisingBedouin tribesmen loyal to the royal house, crushed the PLO men and took a bloody toll of civilian camp dwellers, too. Hundreds of the armed Palestinians fled across the river, where IDF troops were ordered not to shoot them or send them back but to disarm and arrest them, “although,” Sharon writes with evident disapproval, “these were the very terrorists who had carried out who knew how many murderous raids into Israel.”
He voiced strident disapproval when Israel
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