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Gershom Gorenberg: Sharonďż˝s Bulldozers, Then and Now

On an overheated afternoon, I drive a country road through the wheat fields and orchards of the northern Negev to Kibbutz Nir Oz, tucked in the corner of Israel that borders the Gaza Strip on one side and Egypt on another. Iďż˝ve come looking for pieces of a 32-year-old story that -- with Ariel Sharon as prime minister -- is not a day out of date. Oded Lifshitz, a thin, 63-year-old man with a gray mustache and muscular hands, invites me into the kitchen of his kibbutz bungalow and spreads photos and documents on the table.

In one picture, a much younger Lifshitz stands with several other kibbutz members in a patch of wheat, talking to a Beduin woman. The womanďż˝s camel is also in the frame. So are the broken pieces of what was once a concrete house -- until it was demolished by soldiers acting on the orders of Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon, then head of the Israel Defense Forceďż˝s Southern Command. The picture was taken in 1972, in the coastal stretch of the northern Sinai just beyond the Gaza Strip. Another picture shows a plate of concrete with an open metal door lying on sand. That, explains Lifshitz, was the cover of a Beduin well, until an army bulldozer knocked it aside and destroyed the well.

"On January 14, 1972, in the early hours of the morning," says a suit that leaders of the Beduin later filed in the Israeli Supreme Court, "Petitioner No. 1 was alerted by members of his tribe... that IDF soldiers had ordered them to leave their homes..." The Beduin sheikh asked the commander if it wasnďż˝t inhumane to force people from their homes in the winter cold. The officer gave them one more night to stay -- and at 6 the next morning, soldiers with megaphones arrived, shouting, "Everyone out! Everyone out!"

Nine Beduin tribes lived in the region that Israeli officials called the Rafiah Plain. Estimates of their numbers run from 5,000 people to 20,000. Most lived in concrete houses or metal shacks, Lifshitz says. On arable land between the dunes, they tended almond and peach orchards and grew wheat. That January, Sharon gave orders to expel the Beduin and to fence an area of 47 square kilometers (18 square miles).

Word of the expulsion reached kibbutzim of the Negev as soldiers returned home from reserve duty. At Nir Oz and other communes linked to the left-wing Mapam party, members began visiting the area, returning with photos and eyewitness reports.

In early March that year, 300 people from Mapam kibbutzim gathered in Nir Ozďż˝s wooden dining hall to protest the treatment of the Beduin and the government settlement plans for the Gaza Strip and Rafiah areas. The link between the two issues was obvious, Lifshitz says. Golda Meirďż˝s Labor-led government had already established Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip. As Laborďż˝s junior partner, Mapam was under pressure to join settlement efforts in the northern Sinai. Headlines about the Nir Oz gathering sparked a national controversy -- with right-wing parties denouncing incitement against the value of settlement by the very kibbutz farmers whoďż˝d turned the northern Negev into a garden.

The public storm led to a military inquiry. The published conclusions were that "several officers" had "exceeded authority." The most senior officer was Sharon. Instead of a court martial, he received a reprimand. In contrast to the Sabra and Shatilla massacre a decade later in Lebanon, in Sinai there was nothing indirect about Sharonďż˝s responsibility. Perhaps if heďż˝d been appropriately punished in 1972, Sharonďż˝s dangerous career would have ended then.

As for the Beduin, they lost their Supreme Court suit to return to their land. The government successfully defended the expropriation as a security measure creating a buffer between Gaza and Sinai. In that buffer, settlements sprouted, including the town of Yamit. In his kitchen, Lifshitz shows me a picture of a Beduin almond orchard bulldozed, the earth scarred with treads, to make room for a farming settlement.

Sharon wasnďż˝t alone in 1972 in believing that annexing a piece of the Sinai, fencing it, settling it, was essential to Israeli security. That was policy. Yehiel Admoni, who was director general of the Jewish Agencyďż˝s Settlement Department in those days, confirms that plans already existed to settle Israelis in the area -- "but thereďż˝d been no decision to expropriate land." Normal practice, he insists, would have been to negotiate with the owners. Sharon was reprimanded for deciding to seize the land with the clumsy brutality, the demonstrative indifference to human beings, that has marked his career. When I asked Admoni why Sharon acted on his own, the former official looked at me as one does at a slow pupil. "Because he was a wild man," Admoni said. "Simply a wild man."

By 1982, the Yom Kippur War and Sadatďż˝s diplomatic initiative had shown Israel that peace was a better way to protect the countryďż˝s southern flank. As defense minister that year, Sharon embellished the withdrawal from Sinai by razing Yamit in an orgy of destruction that no one has ever made sense of.

Driving home from the Negev, I think about today. Having survived all his reprimands, Sharon became prime minister. Todayďż˝s consensus is that a security fence between Israel and the West Bank will stop terror. After initial resistance, Sharon adopted the idea -- and proceeded to draw a line for that fence that slashes through Palestinian farm lands, divides communities, annexes occupied land. Too slowly, defenders of the fence are beginning to see that it truly matters who builds it, and where.

After years of implementing the concept that putting Israelis in Gaza will make Israel safer, Sharon declares heďż˝ll dismantle the settlements -- unilaterally, as a fact imposed on the landscape, without negotiation with the Palestinians except as afterthought. Even the settlers, those who did his work for him and supported him, begin to remember that there is more consistency to his heavy-handedness than to his principles.

The one thing Sharon remains incapable of today, as in 1972, is to recognize that the relations between people are as crucial to Israelďż˝s security as the lines drawn on maps. He is the same man, now as then.