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
