Read Online Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon by David Landau - Free Book Online Page B

of Central Command, effective immediately.Ze’ev Schiff wrote in
Haaretz
that “there may be reservations about Gen. Sharon’s military methods, but the fact is that this commander has eliminated terror in Gaza … Sharon’s determination, and perhaps, too, his lack of consideration of many things, have immeasurably improved the security situation there. Militarily, he leaves Gaza victorious.” 39
    When ministers andKnesset members would come visiting Gaza, Sharon took them to the sand dunes overlooking the coast and urged the creation of blocs of Jewish settlements—“fingers,” as he called them—between the major centers of Palestinian population. The concept evolved in government and military circles, moreover, that Israel needed to plant a permanent presence in theRafah Salient, westward beyond the Gaza-Sinai border, in order to create a cordon sanitaire between Gaza and Egypt. Sharon claims that he was the progenitor of this strategic theory. It was vital for Israel, in his words, “to create aJewish buffer between Gaza and the Sinai in order to cut off the flow of smuggled weapons and—looking forward to a future settlement with Egypt—to divide the two regions.”
    Progenitor or not, Sharon was the enthusiastic executor of the first stage of the scheme: ejecting the existing tenants. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing if there were no Arabs here,” Dayan mused to Sharon one day as they both flew over the Rafah Salient byhelicopter. “Then we could fence the whole area and turn it into a security zone.” 40 k That was enough for Sharon. Within days, some ten thousand Bedouin, most of them members of the Romeilah tribe and most of them not nomads but sedentary farmers long established in the area, were summarily ousted by soldiers of Southern Command.
    The soldiers arrived unannounced at dawn on January 14, 1972, nine Bedouin sheikhs later recounted in their petition to theHigh Court of Justice. l They ordered the entire community to leave at once. They cited security grounds. That same day, according to the court depositions, the soldiers began physically demolishing the Bedouin’s homes and outhouses. People were pushed around, and property was smashed and ruined. The eviction took several days. Once the Bedouin were all out, the army fenced off an area of some nineteen square miles to prevent them from getting back in.
    The episode might have remained unknown, as Sharon (and Dayan?) apparently intended, had it not been for the protests of a few reservists, members of Mapam kibbutzim along the border who had witnessed the forcible evictions, and for the pointed inquiries of Red Cross officials. In mid-February, David Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as chief of staff on January 1, set up an internal inquiry under GeneralAharon Yariv, the former head of Military Intelligence, to investigate the complaints.
    Yariv focused on the decision to fence off areas of the Rafah Salient. Sharon admitted that he had given that order without explicit authorization from the chief of staff or the minister of defense. Yariv duly submitted his report. Elazar made do with a letter of reprimand to Sharon. A junior officer and a civilian were more severely punished: the officer was transferred; the civilian was dismissed. Themilitary censorship kept a tight lid on the whole affair.
    On the left, nevertheless, the controversy rumbled on for months, replete with demonstrations, counterdemonstrations, and angry articles in the press. The editor of the Labor Party’s weekly,
Ot,
David Shaham, wrote an editorial demanding that the “very senior officer” be dismissed. What would happen in a normal country, Shaham asked, if an army commander went ahead and implemented a contingency plan without getting authorization from his civilian bosses? “Surely he would be appropriately punished.”
    This drew a rare and spirited defense of Sharon—still unnamed—by Moshe Dayan. The article was “wild and irresponsible incitement,” he