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
