Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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,