Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Read Free

agricultural science. Instead, he did neither but enrolled in the Jewish Settlement Police. This was a legitimate branch of the Mandatory security forces, designated to protect the Jewish settlements and patrol the roads between them. But it was also a convenient cover under which military-minded youngsters like Arik could continue their own weapons training, and train other Jewish youth, without harassment from the authorities.
    It also allowed him plenty of spare time to work on the family farm. “One day,” he writes, “as we were working together in the orange groves…[Samuil] said, ‘Arik, I want to tell you, anything you decide to do with your life is all right with me. But you have to promise me one thing. Never, never take part in turning Jews over to non-Jews. You must promise me that you will never do that.’ ” 5
    In fact, though, the second
saison,
in 1947, did not entail collaboration with the British forces. These, still vigorously enforcing their blockade of Palestine’s shores against Jewish refugee-immigrants from post-Holocaust Europe, were by this time seen as outright enemies by David Ben-Gurion, leader of theYishuv, and the mainstream Zionist leadership. The Haganah made do with beatings and incarceration of Etzel activists. In the area around Kfar Malal, known Etzel recruiters were warned away, and when the warnings went unheeded, one of them had his arms thrust in an irrigation pipe and deliberately broken. Another was locked in a refrigeration plant for twenty-four hours. Arik, attached now to the Haganah’s fledgling intelligence branch, issaid to have gathered the information that led to these brutal assaults. In another incident, Arik tracked five Etzel men carrying tommy guns and engineered their ambush by a Haganah unit. But they opened fire and escaped, leaving a Haganah man shot through the buttocks.
    Periodically over the years, people would come forward with vivid recollections of these activities that the adult Arik would have preferred to forget. “He was very, very active in everything we did against the Etzel,” said Dedi Zalmanson, one of Arik’s Haganah comrades, in 1983. 6 “He chased after me with a pickax handle,” said Yosef Menkes, an old-time Etzelnik, in 1990. 7 “He smashed up my coffee shop,” said Ben-Ami Zamir, another ex-Etzel man, in 1995. 8 Arik, he recalled, arrived by truck at the head of a Haganah posse. “He asked me for a soda, pointing to a crate on the floor. As I bent over to fetch it, he whacked me over the head with the wooden club he was carrying. I was covered in blood. Unluckily for him, my brother, who was in the Palmach, happened to be around, and he fought back. My sister, who’d been boiling up water for coffee, poured it all over them.” Arik, prime minister by this time, issued a categorical denial. “I never took part in the first
saison
nor in the second
saison,
and I never hit a Jew with a pickax handle.” 9
    In
Warrior,
Sharon wrote that he was attracted to the militants, jealous of “their actions and their heroism. But I was also in the Haganah, and I believe that people did not have the right to go off and do whatever they wanted, no matter how courageous they might be.” 10 It was a delicate balancing act by a general whose own subsequent military career was stained by acts of excessive and wanton retribution and who now, as a politician, aspired to lead the party that still adulated the Etzel. Sharon often claimed that his military career was in fact stymied—he was held back for years and was never appointed chief of staff—because he wasn’t “one of us,” in other words, a reliably anti-Revisionist Laborite. “What do you mean ‘not one of them’?” one lifelong Revisionist,Mordechai Zippori, snorted contemptuously. “ ‘Not one of them’?! He took part in the
saison
and beat up Etzel men.” 11
    L ife was not all cudgels and plowshares. Arik was in love. “She was not exactly my first love,” he wrote