Читать книгу Hollow Land - Eyal Weizman - Страница 12

Although the 1949 cease-fire lines became the internationally recognized political borders of Israel, they were seen by many in the Israeli military as indefensible.¹ Since neither Israel nor the Arab states which signed the 1949 cease-fire agreements believed that the new lines would mark a permanent international border and since both had territorial ambitions and military plans beyond them, these lines never hardened into physically fortified borders of substance; in some places they were marked by a shallow ditch, in others by a flimsy fence. After the 1967 war, the new cease-fire lines – marked by the Suez Canal, the Jordan River and the Syrian Golan Heights – were perceived as a completion of sorts: the creation of a territorial form that resonated with the phantasmagorical Zionist dream of the ‘complete land of Israel’.² These new boundaries were also thought to form the strategic enclosure that would buttress the defence of the state. Yet the Occupied Territories, twice the size of pre-war Israel, grew large in the national imagination. A creeping agoraphobia led to frenzied and varied attempts at studying and domesticating these territories from within and efforts to fortify their edges against counter-attack from the outside. The debates around these issues within the Israeli military and government were the first to define the terms, form and the practices of the occupation thereafter. This chapter will follow the debate around the construction (1967–73) and fall (1973) of Israel’s fortification along the Suez Canal. Following military debates and battle analysis, it attempts to trace a process of ‘civilianization’ whereby ideas and organizational systems were transferred from a military to a civilian domain, resulting, in the late 1970s, in the translation of a military occupation into a civilian one.

Shortly after the 1967 war, two Israeli generals of the Labor movement started engaging in attempts to fortify different fronts of the 1967 Occupied Territories. The systems conceived by Yigal Allon (Minister of Agriculture and Director of the government Settlements Committee) and Chief of Staff Chaim Bar Lev, were products of a similar territorial doctrine – one that sought to establish a line of defence along the outermost edge of the territories. The Allon plan, the first draft of which was presented to the government a few weeks after the end of the war, advocated the redrawing of state borders along the main topographical feature of the region, the Great Rift Valley, the deep tectonic crack that formed the eastern edge of the territories occupied by Israel. Allon proposed to annex a strip following the length of the rift, which extended from the Golan Heights in the north, through the Jordan Valley down to the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh. This strip would generate, according to Allon, ‘maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs’.³ The fact that this strip was sparsely populated was due to the fact that during the war, wanting to secure its new borderlines, the Israeli military evacuated and destroyed the Palestinian villages of the Jordan Valley (except the city of Jericho), the Syrian towns and villages of the Golan Heights and all Egyptian citizens but the Bedouin in the Sinai. On this generally arid and now sparsely populated strip, remote from Israeli population centres, Allon proposed to establish a string of agricultural Kibbutz and Moshav settlements, as well as several paramilitary outposts of the NAHAL Corps – the settlements arm of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).⁴ Although never officially endorsed by the government, the Allon plan was gradually put into effect during the first decade of the Israeli occupation under Labor administrations. The settlements in the Jordan Valley in the far eastern edge of the West Bank were to fortify this border along the Jordan River. Their establishment was perceived as the regeneration of Labor Zionism and the revival of its agricultural pioneering spirit. Agriculture in this arid landscape, sustained by over-extraction of water from the mountain aquifer, was seen, according to the common Zionist slogan, as an attempt to ‘make the desert bloom’.⁵ The Jordan Valley was conceived as a hybrid military/civilian defensive zone, split by four parallel roads that strung together military bases and agricultural settlements. In the event of an armoured invasion from the east, the valley’s cultivated fields would be flooded, and the settlements hardened into fortified positions that would allow the military to organize and channel invading forces into designated zones of Israeli fire. Moreover, the inhabitation of the area by a civilian population, rather than military bases, was to demonstrate, according to Allon, Israel’s political resolve to annex this frontier zone.

Construction of the Bar Lev Line, circa 1971. Film stills, IDF film unit, IP.

The Bar Lev Line was the military counterpart of the Allon plan, attempting to achieve with military strongholds what the Allon plan sought to achieve with a combination of civilian and military ones. Fearing international pressure and a possible replay of the 1956 Suez Crisis, when the US administration forced Israel (as well as France and Britain) to retreat from the areas they had occupied in Egypt, Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan did not want the IDF to reach the Suez Canal at all during the 1967 war. The IDF gained the canal regardless during the third day of the war, out of its own tactical inertia. Immediately after the war, Dayan advocated a retreat from the canal. Following the advice of Allon, however, Dayan’s chief political rival, Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, and later Golda Meir, wanted to keep the canal under Israeli control, and close it to all shipping, in order to pressure the Egyptian government into signing a peace treaty on Israel’s terms. Dayan, on the other hand, did not want an agreement at all, and thought that a tactical retreat from the canal would allow Israel to permanently hold onto the rest of the Sinai Peninsula. Bar Lev was asked to provide a technical solution for fortifying the Canal against Egyptian attack. He set up a team, headed by his loyal divisional commander, Avraham Adan, to design the system of fortifications. Adan approached the design with the enthusiasm of a young architect on his first commission, researching historical examples and building scale models. His main influence, he later claimed in his autobiography, was the architecture of the fortifications of Kibbutz Nirim in the Negev desert, one of the settlements that had become the focus of a Zionist myth after it had successfully resisted the Egyptian army in the war of 1948.⁶ Adan took a month to design the fortification system, after which construction work immediately began.

Ariel Sharon, Chief of Southern Command (last in line, on left); Chaim Bar Lev, Chief of Staff (centre, on left); and David Ben-Gurion, on the Bar Lev Line, Suez Canal, 1971.

However, the Bar Lev Line was not so much a product of planned construction as the result of incremental evolution – a series of ‘solutions’ based upon Adan’s system to protect military forces under constant artillery fire. During the intense skirmishes of 1968–71, later known as the ‘War of Attrition’, the Line gradually became an immense infrastructural undertaking. Huge quantities of sand were shifted across the desert and piled along the eastern bank of the canal to form an artificial landscape 20 metres high, with a 45-degree incline on the side facing the Canal, and 200 kilometres long. Thirty-five Ma’ozim (strongholds), named after the fortification system in Adan’s Kibbutz, each designed for twenty-five to thirty soldiers, were situated on the sand dyke at 10-kilometre intervals, overlooking the Egyptian line a mere 200 metres away. The strongholds had deep underground bunkers, fortified by crushed rocks in nets and a fencing system made from steel lifted from the Cairo–El-Arish railway and other abandoned Egyptian agricultural equipment, and were surrounded by minefields. The entire length of the line contained emplacements for tanks, artillery pieces, mortars and machine guns. Unlike other systems of fortifications that used concrete and so could always be destroyed with enough explosive, the sand ramparts of the Bar Lev Line were designed to absorb and dissipate the impact of bombardment. The fortification thus seemed complete, and the Israeli government consequently did not feel it had to rush to the negotiating table. Since the balance of power was apparently tilted in Israel’s favour, it was generally thought that Egypt would not risk attacking. This assessment was known in the Israeli security circles as ‘the concept’.

Meanwhile, in 1971, on the other side of the Suez Canal, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat appointed Lieutenant-General Sa’ad El Shazly as Chief of the Egyptian Military Staff. Shazly’s task was to mastermind the storming of the Bar Lev Line. In his book, The Crossing of the Canal,⁷ Shazly illustrated the Bar-Lev Line with the pride of a person describing an obstacle successfully breached: ‘the Suez canal was unique. Unique in the difficulties its construction presented to an amphibious assault force. Unique in its scale of defences the enemy had erected on top of those natural obstacles … To all that saw it, the Suez Canal seemed an impassable barrier …’ The first and most difficult obstacle was the water in the canal, ‘the second obstacle was a gigantic sand dune built by the enemy along the length of the eastern bank. For six years, Israeli bulldozers had laboriously piled the sand ever higher – their most sustained effort coming, naturally, at likely crossing points … Above this formidable barrier rose the third obstacle: the 35 forts of the Bar Lev line … Hidden from our view, the enemy could manoeuvre its armour to reinforce any sudden weak point …’⁸

Shazly contended that one of the major aims of the giant earth rampart of the Bar Lev Line was to deny the Egyptian armies a view of Israeli positions in the Sinai, while simultaneously creating the artificial topographical conditions that would allow Israelis to observe Egyptian territory. The rare advantage gained by Soviet anti-aircraft missile technology over Western fighter jets in the early 1970s, led to aerial photography missions becoming precarious, and had the effect of flattening the battlefield into a horizontal, two-dimensional surface in which the ground, eye-level perspective was reinvested with strategic significance. From the Egyptian army’s point of view, the Bar Lev Line was a visual barrier. The dyke created an immediate limit to their observational field, making a ‘blind zone’ that denied them the view of their occupied territories.

From the moment that construction started on the Bar Lev Line, barely three months after the 1967 war, Ariel Sharon, then director of military training, began challenging the strategy of defence it embodied. This initiated the first major debate within the Israeli General Staff concerning Israel’s concept of defence. It was seen as a crucial issue over which Sharon, together with a handful of other officers – Israel Tal, Rafael Eitan and Matitiyahu Peled – were to clash repeatedly with the rest of the General Staff. The argument was polarized in increasingly geometrical terms, until the defence proposals became fully embodied within two spatial models, both derived from existing military vocabulary: linear fortification and a dynamic defence nested in a network of strongpoints in depth.⁹ Sharon publicly accused his superiors of ignorance and stupidity, blaming them for the mounting war casualties along the construction site of the Line, and demanded that the static defence embodied in what he called ‘the Israeli Maginot Line’ be abandoned and replaced with a flexible system of ‘defence in depth’ comprising independent strongpoints located on hilltops in an area stretching far back from the frontline, in a way that would allow military units to travel between these strongpoints, and, in case of invasion, attack the enemy’s flank and surround it.

This debate, and Sharon’s role in it, corroborated in later accounts of the 1973 war, was to become one of the most controversial chapters in Israeli military history, so much so that the IDF has not yet published an official account of the war – partly because Sharon mobilized all his political weight to suppress it. Among the other reasons for the ambiguous and incomplete historical record is that most of the war’s leading protagonists, Israeli and Egyptian, who physically and politically survived it, continued in political life. Their military autobiographies, as well as other oral and written accounts, contain widely differing interpretations of events that were mobilized in support for or in resistance to the dramatic political transformations of the post-1973 war period. During these processes the military achievements of the various generals as well as the performance of different units acquired immense political significance, with the constantly changing historiographies of the 1973 war tied to the political fates and fortunes of its main players. In the Israeli popular imagination, the linear, static, Bar Lev Line embodied the failing Labor Party, whereas the dynamic, flexible network promoted by Sharon, and especially the concept of ‘depth’ on which it relied, was later associated with a rejuvenated Israeli right and with the opening of Israel’s state frontiers. Accounts that foregrounded Sharon’s role in the war were generally associated with political attacks on the Labour government. After 1973, the decline of the Labour administration and the rise to power four years later of the right-wing Likud retrospectively gave more prominence to Sharon’s military role in 1973, projecting him as a national hero. The US military has itself contributed to the creation of the myth of Sharon as a ‘military genius’, finding in him a model of command according to which they could inspire military transformation after the failures of their armies in Vietnam. Ariel Sharon’s rapid, albeit not untypical, transformation from a popular military general to minister in charge of settlement activity in the first Likud government of 1977 allowed him to translate military doctrine and the principles of a dynamic battlefield into planning practices of civilian settlements and the creation of political ‘facts on the ground’.

Transgressive unit

Throughout his military career, Sharon has become the personification of the Israeli ‘myth of the frontier’,¹⁰ which celebrated the transgression of lines and borders of all kinds. Like its American predecessor, the Israeli frontier was understood as a mythical space that shaped the character and institutions of the nation. It was also a laboratory for the emergence of and experimentation with new spatial strategies and territorial forms. According to the Israeli sociologist Adriana Kemp, between 1948 and 1967 the Israeli state created a series of ‘rhetorical and institutional mechanisms’ that presented the frontier region as the symbolic centre of the nation, ‘a laboratory for the creation of a “new Jew”’.¹¹

The establishment of Special Commando Unit 101 for the purpose of frontier raids, under the command of Ariel Sharon, became central to the blurring of state borders and for the distinction it created between the idea of what constituted ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the political state. Throughout its several-month independent lifespan in the second half of 1953, the unit transgressed, breached and distorted borders of different kinds: geopolitical – its operations crossed the borders of the state; hierarchical – its members did not fully obey orders and operational outlines and often acted on their own initiatives; disciplinary – they wore no uniforms, and expressed an arrogant intolerance, encouraged by and embodied in Sharon himself, of all formalities perceived as urbane and outmoded ‘military procedures and bureaucracy’; and legal – the nature of their operations and their flagrant disregard for civilian life broke both the law of the Israeli state as well as international law. Although Unit 101’s activities mostly constituted the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian civilians in villages and refugee camps, and its most infamous ‘attack’ was the killing of 60 unprotected civilians in the West Bank village of Qibia, it quickly cultivated a mythic status that greatly appealed to the imagination of Israeli youth. According to Moshe Dayan, who acted as a mentor to both the unit and Sharon personally, Unit 101 was ‘a workshop for the creation of a new generation of [Hebrew] warriors’. Dayan also believed that it served a national purpose beyond the narrow military one. By turning the frontier into a mythical space and ‘border transgression … into a symbolic practice and a spatial ritual’, it signified the fact that the borders of the Israeli state were liquid and permeable, presenting its territoriality as a still incomplete project.¹²

Unit 101 also short-circuited hierarchies within the IDF and between it and the political system, connecting Sharon, then still in his twenties, in a close strategic triangle with Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Although this triumvirate made many of the strategic decisions during 1953, Dayan and Sharon often conspired together to mislead the ‘old man’, while Sharon himself became accustomed to misleading Dayan as to the real extent of Unit 101’s operations. But these lies were in fact a central facet of the triumvirate’s relationship. Sharon was selected for his post because, from the outset, he never asked for written orders, thereby giving Dayan and Ben-Gurion the option to deny responsibility for or knowledge of operations whenever they chose. The command style of the two men was oblique, implicit; they were accustomed to giving orders in a tangential manner: ‘would it not be good if [this or that] had taken place …’¹³ Dayan’s orders were always oral and ambiguous: Shlomo Gazit, one of his deputies, once observed of his commander that ‘he doesn’t know how to write’.¹⁴ This tendency for the need to interpret Dayan’s speech rather than follow his orders gradually became common knowledge in the military to the degree that it could help explain how Israeli soldiers got to the canal despite Dayan’s orders. During the 1967 war, when Dayan ordered forces to stop short of reaching the Suez Canal, his subordinate officers were wondering ‘what does he mean when he says “stop”?’ According to Sharon’s biographer, Uzi Benziman, throughout his career Sharon was continuously promoted by Dayan because he understood the logic and potential in Dayan’s ambiguity and because he was willing to perform ‘every bad thing that Israel needed to carry out but didn’t want to be associated with – there were no orders needed, only a wink … and Sharon would carry out the dirty job’.¹⁵ Dayan, however, never stopped seeing Sharon as a political rival. At the end of December 1953, upon Dayan becoming chief of staff, he adopted 101 as the model for the transformation of the rest of the IDF, merging the unit with the paratroopers, and placing Sharon in charge of both. In the following twenty years, until the 1973 war, the IDF was central to the formation of Israeli identity. Most Israelis accordingly saw ‘patriotism’ in military terms. Sharon had a central role in this process.

The military matrix

Sharon’s view of the static linear fortification of the Bar Lev Line after the 1967 war was typically forthright. As he later wrote: ‘from the beginning I felt that such a line of fortifications would be a disastrous error … we would be committing ourselves to static defence. We would be making fixed targets of ourselves … our positions and movements would be under constant surveillance. Our procedures would become common knowledge. Our patrols and supply convoys would be vulnerable to ambushes, mining, and shelling.’ The IDF, Sharon claimed, ‘cannot win a defensive battle on an outer [canal] line …’ He proposed instead that it should ‘fight a defensive battle the way it should be fought – not on a forward line but in depth …’¹⁶ Sharon’s alternative military strategy had the advantage of providing weight to Dayan’s politically sensitive argument that the Suez Canal be abandoned; in developing it, Sharon was most likely encouraged by Dayan off the record – but officially, Dayan chose not to intervene.

‘Plan Sirius’, marking Israeli fortifications in the Suez Canal zone before October 1973. The strong-points, organized in depth, are marked as brown ‘eggs’.

Militarily speaking, Sharon’s system was a flexible adaptation of the traditional doctrine of defence in depth. It was based upon a series of strongpoints, which Sharon called Ta’ozim to differentiate them from Adan’s Ma’ozim (strongholds), spread out on a series of hilltops at tactically important locations, overlooking the canal from a distance of about a dozen kilometres. Between these strongpoints, Sharon proposed to run unscheduled and unpredictable mobile patrols. The rationale behind this arrangement was to deny the Egyptian army an obvious target, a fixed layout against which they could plan their attack. Unlike Bar Lev, Sharon believed an attack on the Israeli defensive line on the Suez Canal was unavoidable and inevitable; accordingly, he sought to disguise the IDF’s defensive organization.

Sharon’s defensive plan aimed to maximize visual synergy, lines of fire and movement across the terrain. The isolated, semi-autonomous strongpoints were to be located so that each could be seen from those adjacent to it, and spaced apart at the distance of artillery fire so that they could cover each other. The strongholds were essentially command and logistic centres from where what Sharon called ‘armoured fists’ – tank battalions – could be mobilized against the enemy’s main effort in crossing the canal. Moreover, equipped with command, control and long-range surveillance facilities, underground bunkers, anti-aircraft positions and emplacements for tanks and artillery, each strongpoint had a semi-independent battle capacity.¹⁷ An expanding network of roads and signal stations was to weave the strongpoints together. Towards the rear, the emplacements gave way to military training bases, airfields, camps, depots, maintenance facilities and headquarters.

While unable to convince the IDF General Staff of his plans for the Sinai, Sharon, in his role as director of training, dispersed the various training schools under his command throughout the depth of the West Bank. Moreover, Sharon saw military installations as a first stage in the domestication and naturalization of the vast Occupied Territories: the layout and infrastructure of the camps were to become the blueprint for their civilian colonization by settlements.¹⁸ Beyond that, it was an innovative geographical time/space arrangement with the system of defence in depth requiring a different form of military organization.¹⁹ Linear fortifications rely on the ability of central command to control all areas of the extended linear battlefield equally; in contrast, defence in depth seeks the relative dispersal of military authority and the increased autonomy of each semi-independent battle unit.²⁰

Although nested in traditional military hierarchies, the system’s diffusion of the command structure allows independent units to develop what the military calls ‘flexible responsiveness’, according to which local commanders can act independently, on their own initiative, and in response to emergent necessities and opportunities without referring to central command. Diffused command has been a standard component part of a military response to the chaotic nature of battles in which chains of command and communication are often severed and the overall picture of battle is often blurred. Sharon’s command style was well suited to such a situation. It was encapsulated in his oft-repeated statement ‘tell me what to do but don’t tell me how to do it’. Although this was indicative of the command style of the IDF, Sharon took it further, seeking to break as much as possible with standard command structures and organizational forms. Equally, he often avoided – or pretended to avoid – intervening in his subordinates’ actions, providing them only with general guidelines and making them believe that they themselves had planned their own missions.

If the principle of linear defence is to prohibit (or inhibit) the enemy from gaining a foothold beyond it, when the line is breached at a single location – much like a leaking bucket of water – it is rendered useless. A network defence, on the other hand, is flexible. If one or more of its stongpoints are attacked and captured, the system can adapt itself by forming new connections across its depth. The category of ‘depth’ is thus not only spatial but conceptual, and is used to describe the level of synergy between various elements that compose a military system. The degree of a system’s depth lies in its distributed capacity to reorganize connections, and the degree to which these connections can permit, regulate and respond to information flow from strongpoints positioned in other areas in the battlefield. The relation between the system’s components is a relative figure defined by the speed and security of travel across its depth, between the different strongpoints.²¹

While the rationale of the Bar Lev Line was to stop the Egyptians from disturbing the geopolitical status quo that the line delineated, Sharon’s plan conversely encouraged an Egyptian attack; Israeli forces would then counterattack the moment the enemy’s supply lines became overextended:²² ‘If the Egyptians did try to cross [the canal], we could afford to let them get a mile or two inside the Sinai. Then we would be able to harass them and probe for their weak points at our convenience … [after which] we would be in a position to launch the kind of free-flowing mobile attack we were really good at.’²³

Therefore, while the line is a military-geometrical instrument that seeks to separate two distinct hostile realms, the spatial–organizational model of the network creates a more diffused and dynamic geography. Following this logic, the system of defence in depth has the capacity to exchange space and time alternately. At the beginning of an attack it trades space for time – the attacker is allowed to gain space while the defender gains organizational time; later, it exchanges time for space as the trapping of the attacker within the web of the network enables the defender later to progress into and attack the latter’s unprotected rear.

The Israeli public was exposed to the classified disputes between Sharon, Bar Lev, and the other members of the General Staff that reached their peak in 1969. Sharon was leaking them to the press, which in turn used his anonymously delivered comments to portray the military and political elites as reactionary ‘slow thinkers’, a tactic that had particular impact on Bar Lev, whom the Israeli public loved to mock for his slow, ponderous manner of speaking. The disagreement was also presented as a conflict between the tank officers with their heavy-handed, technical way of thinking and the pioneering maverick frontiersman/commando-soldier embodied by Sharon.²⁴

By the summer of 1969, when Bar Lev realized he could no longer contain Sharon’s ability to mobilize the media against the rest of the General Staff, he dismissed him from military service on a technicality: Sharon had forgotten to sign routine documents for the renewal of his military contract. Bar Lev’s action was supported by Prime Minister Golda Meir who, remembering the days of Unit 101 and Sharon’s rumoured threats to lock the entire Israeli government in a room and force it to order the start of the 1967 war, saw Sharon as a liar and a ‘threat to Israel’s democracy ’, a man ‘capable of surrounding the Knesset with tanks’.²⁵ In response, Sharon revoked his membership of the Labor Party, which all officers over the rank of colonel were expected to hold at the time. He scheduled a meeting with Menachem Begin, then head of the right-wing opposition, at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, whose lobby was generally well frequented by journalists, ensuring that the meeting was widely noted and reported. The meeting was a political masterstroke. The Labor Party was apprehensive of the possible swing in public opinion that Sharon could provoke before a general election scheduled for October 1969. Party officials forced Bar Lev to reinstate Sharon – landing him where Bar Lev needed him least and feared him most, on the banks of the Suez Canal as Chief of Southern Command. There, between 1969 and July 1973, Sharon immediately set about implementing his defensive network behind the Bar Lev Line, which was by then almost complete. After the end of the War of Attrition in 1970, Sharon started evacuating parts of the line, cutting the number of strongholds from thirty-five to twenty-two.

The canal zone was enveloped in a frenzy of construction. Hundreds of trucks and bulldozers were assembled, and hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of crushed stone were again hauled into the desert. Mountain outposts were constructed and fortified, and a network of high-volume military roads were paved to connect them. The western Sinai Desert was fashioned by Sharon into a future battlefield, and the desert seemed to Sharon to be perfect for this; it contained only military installations, bases, roads and minefields, with no civilians to disturb the wargame. However, Sharon’s sphere of operations was soon shifted elsewhere: shortly after entering into his new post received orders from Dayan to crush Palestinian resistance entrenched within the densely populated urban areas of Gaza, where IDF units were losing control. This was the real reason Sharon was given the Southern Command: it was another of the dirty jobs no other officer wanted to – and at the time very probably could not – undertake.

The ‘Haussmanization’ of Gaza

Since his time with Unit 101, Sharon had grown to view the armed conflict with the Palestinians as an urban problem, and the rapid expansion of the refugee camps as something that Israeli occupation forces would later call the ‘Jihad of Building’. The IDF sought to address this problem by physically transforming and redesigning the very ‘habitat of terror’ whose centre was in the refugee camps.²⁶ In the years to follow, regional and urban planning was to merge into a militarized campaign against the Gaza-based resistance.

New roads carved through the Jebalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip. Israeli Defence Force, 1972.

After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian groups began to establish armed cells around a loose network of local command headquarters. Without the thick jungles of Vietnam, the Fatah, PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and other armed groups that belonged to or splintered from the PLO, based their command within the dense, winding fabric of the refugee camps, which they themselves developed into an extra-territorial network of armed enclaves. From there they engaged in military operations against the occupying forces, as well as in terror attacks against Israeli civilians and against Palestinians suspected of collaboration. The grid of roads along which UN agencies laid out prefabricated sheds to house the 1948 refugees grew into a chaotic agglomeration of structures and ad hoc extensions, forming a shifting maze of alleyways, no more than a metre or so wide. Although they came under Israeli control, the occupation forces could rarely enter the camps, make arrests, collect taxes or impose regulations.

The counter-insurgency campaign in Gaza started in July 1971 and lasted until resistance was suppressed in February the following year. Sharon ordered extended curfews and a shoot-to-kill policy of suspected insurgents, and established assassination squads who worked their way through lists of names. Sharon was trying to break the resistance by killing anyone involved in its organization. Over a thousand Palestinians were killed. The campaign also acquired a different dimension: that of design undertaken by destruction. Writing the latest and most brutal chapter in the urban history of the grid, Sharon ordered military bulldozers to carve wide roads through the fabric of three of Gaza’s largest refugee camps – Jabalya, Rafah and Shati. The new routes divided these camps into smaller neighbourhoods, each of which could be accessed or isolated by infantry units. Sharon also ordered the clearing of all buildings and groves in an area he defined as a ‘security perimeter’ around the camps, effectively isolating the built-up area from its surroundings and making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave the camps without being noticed. Other activities such as the paving of roads and the introduction of street lighting, were meant to enable the occupation forces to drive into the camps rapidly and without fear of land mines.²⁷ Together, these actions caused the destruction or the damaging of about 6,000 homes in a seven-month period.²⁸ It was not the first – nor the last – time that the single-mindedness of Sharon’s military planning was transferred to the ground without mediation, adaptation or friction, giving the execution of his plans the functional clarity of a diagram.

The urban destruction of the Gaza camps was complemented by proposals for two types of construction; both demonstrated Sharon’s ability to mobilize planning as a tactical tool. The first was for Jewish settlements to be built along what he called ‘the five-finger plan’, which positioned settlements as deep wedges into Gaza in order to separate its towns and break the area into manageable sections. The southernmost ‘finger’ was to be built in the Rafah Salient, beyond the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on occupied Egyptian Sinai, and was meant to sever Gaza from the arms-smuggling routes in the Sinai Desert. The other project that Sharon enthusiastically promoted was considered more ‘experimental’ and involved the construction of new neighbourhoods for the refugees. It was designed to bring about the undoing of the refugee camps altogether, and so remove the reasons for dissent that Israel believed was bred there through the immizeration of their Palestinian populations. When, in February 1972, Palestinian resistance appeared to have been suppressed, Dayan, reacting to homegrown and international outrage at Sharon’s excessive military measures, transferred responsibility of the Gaza Strip from Southern to Central Command, taking it out of Sharon’s hands. Sharon had done his job and now Dayan wanted to dissociate him from it. In the summer of 1973 Sharon finally resigned from the military when he realized he had no chance of being awarded the top job.

Egyptian military engineers making openings in the Bar Lev Line and moving across it, October 1973.

Breaking the Line

In 1973 the Bar Lev Line looked so firm that it seemed to justify Dayan’s boast, probably for propaganda purposes, that it ‘would take the American and Soviet engineer corps together to break through [it]’.²⁹ The Egyptian daily Al-Ahram claimed, some thirty years after the war, that some Soviet military experts, themselves wanting to make a point, had argued in 1973 that nothing less than a tactical nuclear explosion would breach it. But, on 6 October 1973, on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, in a surprise Syrian–Egyptian two-front attack, it took only a few hours to break through Israeli fortifications using conventional military strategy. General Shazly recounted the clockwork operation that led to the breaching of Israeli lines on the Egyptian front:

At precisely 1400 hours 200 of our aircraft skimmed low over the canal, their shadows flickering across enemy lines as they headed deep into the Sinai … their overflight was the signal our artillery had been waiting for … The 4,000 men of the first assault group poured over [the Egyptian] ramparts and slithered in disciplined lines down to the water’s edge … a few minutes after 1420 hours, as the canisters began to belch clouds of covering smoke, our first assault wave was paddling furiously across the canal.³⁰

The breached Bar Lev Line, circa 1974. Film stills, IDF film unit (Images courtesy of IP).

Because the attack started with an artillery barrage, the 450 Israeli soldiers manning the strongholds on the canal at the time of the attack were forced to dive into bunkers beneath the surface of the artificial landscape, thereby losing eye-contact with the Egyptian soldiers who were scaling the ramparts. By the time the bombardment stopped and the Israelis were able to resume their battle positions, the line had already been stormed and its strongholds encircled. The ramparts of sand, which had withstood two years of Egyptian artillery fire during the War of Attrition, succumbed to water. Using the Suez Canal, special units of the Egyptian engineering corps used high-pressure water cannons to dissolve the hardened packed sand and open more than seventy breaches within the artificial landscape.³¹ The water cannons were similar to those that, throughout the late 1960s, had helped clear the banks of the upper Nile in preparation for the Aswan Dam whose construction was inaugurated in 1970; indeed, the idea for breaching the Bar Lev Line came from an Egyptian engineer employed on the Aswan Dam project.³²

Once the Bar Lev Line had been breached, two Egyptian armies, about 100,000 soldiers, were transported over pontoon bridges and through the breaches in the earth dyke and onto the eastern, Asian, previously Israeli-controlled bank.³³ They advanced through the ravaged landscape a few kilometres into the Sinai. Then, wary of the fortified depth of Israeli defences and at the limit of their anti-aircraft umbrella, they halted and dug themselves in, facing east.³⁴

The dawning of 8 October 1973, two days after the Egyptian army had breached the Israeli line, heralded the most bitter military defeat in IDF history, when, in a counter-offensive, waves of bewildered Israeli tank units broke against an entrenched Egyptian army equipped with the previously little-known Sager anti-tank missiles. The Israeli counter-attack was defeated, and with it Israeli military and civilian moral. The perception that the breaching of the Bar Lev Line was akin to breaching the city walls and storming the homeland was more imaginary than real, considering the hundreds of kilometres Egyptian troops would have had to cross before reaching any Israeli settlement. But this sensation was nevertheless evoked in Dayan’s famous hysterical statement that the ‘Third Temple was falling’. The trauma of the breached line, resonant with a sense of divine punishment, began a shift in national consciousness that helped liberate Israeli religious and messianic sentiment and in four years was to force Labor out of government.

In Israel the political significance of the 1973 war was amplified by the fact that it had started only weeks before the general elections scheduled for 31 October 1973, and a few months after both Sharon and Bar Lev had retired from military service. Both were busy campaigning for opposing political parties but when war broke out they were both called back to service. Since all senior positions were manned, each had to accept a single step down the command ladder. Sharon received command of the 143 armoured division (later known as the Likud Division) and Bar Lev the overall command of the entire southern front. As the war unfolded over the following weeks, old rivalries resurfaced when the glory-hungry generals used the military campaign as an extension of their electoral one. Sharon realized that whoever first crossed the canal to its African side would be crowned the war’s hero. Bar Lev and the other generals associated with Labor understood that if Sharon was allowed to achieve personal success he would ‘turn into a major political headache’ after the war. Sharon himself undoubtedly turned the war to personal political advantage. He used open radio communications so that many of his division’s soldiers could hear him, and he continued to leak secret military information to his large embedded entourage of admiring reporters.³⁵ The battles of 1973 demonstrated that war could be more than simply the continuation of politics by other means; it could itself become electoral politics, conducted within the resonating chamber of mediatized military manoeuvre. It also established different military officers as independent political players.

In his relentless drive towards the canal, Sharon allowed himself a large measure of autonomy, ignoring the desperate restraining orders of Bar Lev, again his direct military superior. The latter complained to Chief of Staff David Elazar that Sharon was ‘out of control’, and was disrupting the entire command hierarchy at the front: ‘I have a divisional commander here who is a politician … who wants to [get the political credit for] crossing the canal.’ Elazar asked Dayan for his opinion on dismissing Sharon. Dayan agreed that ‘Arik can only think “how will this war make [him] look, what can [he] gain from all this” … He is trying to do a Rommel-type breakthrough – if it works, good; if not, the People of Israel lose 200 tanks …’³⁶ Fearful of the impact on army morale that Sharon’s removal might have, they decided for the meantime to leave him in command of his division.

Sharon was indeed deliberately out of control – and out of communication. At times he switched off his radio altogether. When he was available on the radio, it was hard to talk to him because of his wilful misunderstanding of orders; at other times, he was heard snoring into the microphone. Sharon’s attitude to military communications both concealed and emphasized his scramble to achieve those ends that he deemed politically important.

The following is a transcript of one of the rare occasions when contact was made successfully with Sharon. On the night of 17 October Sharon was called to the radio to take orders from Southern Command. The communications officer tried to remind Sharon of a plan for which he had received orders the previous day. Because it was a non-encoded radio connection, the officer dropped hints – which Sharon resolutely refused to take:

Southern Command: A second thing, you were asked to carry out a manoeuvre in the manner of Wingate – do you understand what this is?

Sharon: No …

SC: It is what the ‘chopped-finger’ did in Burma in the manner of Wingate.

Sharon: I don’t understand what he [Bar Lev] wants …

SC: You remember a wooden structure, a line of soldiers?