The Defense Ministry is preparing to seize military documents that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon kept in violation of the law, and that his family has for years refused to hand over to the Israel Defense Forces Archives.

At a meeting this week convened by the head of the Defense Ministry’s security department, known by its Hebrew acronym Malmab, participants discussed the legal options should Sharon’s sons continue refusing to hand over the documents. One possibility raised was having police raid the family’s Sycamore Ranch to confiscate the documents.

Meanwhile, State Comptroller Joseph Shapira is investigating a complaint about the Defense Ministry’s failure to retrieve the papers.

Malmab, which is responsible for securing sensitive information, has ordered similar raids in the past. In the 1990s, for instance, it ordered a raid on the office of former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s widow to seize documents that apparently related to Israel’s nuclear program. It also raided the Yitzhak Rabin Center after discovering that interviews with former senior IDF officers stored at the center dealt with sensitive subjects.

During his many years as a Knesset member and minister, Sharon enjoyed immunity from police raids. But even during the eight years he spent in a coma before his death on January 11, his family refused to hand over the documents, and no action was taken to seize them.

Sharon took various military documents with him when he resigned from the army in summer 1973, as well as taking others from his reserve service in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and his term as defense minister in 1981-83. By law, no army officer or minister is allowed to retain classified documents after retiring, yet Sharon consistently refused to return the material.

He never explained this refusal, but apparently he sought to use these documents in his various legal and political battles, and also to bolster his own version of events when the IDF wrote its official histories of the Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War.

If the state finally does take action to retrieve these documents, it will thereby end four decades of contempt for the law that first came to light during Sharon’s 1974 testimony to the Agranat Commission, which investigated the Yom Kippur War. Sharon, who commanded Division 143 during the war, was questioned about this material by commission members Shimon Agranat, Moshe Landau, Yitzhak Nebenzahl and Yigal Yadin.

Agranat: “One thing I want to ask you. I understand that you have the division’s logbook. If so, I want you to show it to the commission, because we don’t have the log. We’ve been looking for it.”

Sharon acknowledged that “when the division’s staff officers left, they indeed stored some locked boxes in one of my rooms.” But he said repeatedly that he didn’t know what was in them, because he had never opened them, and didn’t even have the keys. He promised to try to get the keys and give the commission whatever was inside.

Landau: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. This isn’t someone’s private property. When you left the division, it should have remained in the division’s office or somewhere else.”

Sharon: “I’ll explain. The issue is like this: The division has to submit a report. It hasn’t yet submitted a report. We worked on parts of the report for the [internal] inquiries that were held. Now all the people in the division have been replaced. There’s no one, aside from the [divisional] chief of staff, no one who served, let’s say, during that period. When the people left, they took the boxes from there. ... In my view, [they were taken] to write the divisional report, because had this material been left behind, there’s no continuity of command there, the entire command during the war no longer exists there. To be able to write the divisional report, that’s apparently the material that remains ...”

Landau found this explanation “inconceivable,” asking, “Wouldn’t it have been much simpler for you to speak with your successor in the job and tell him, ‘Look, make sure this material is kept together in some corner of the office?’ After all, there ought to be that degree of trust between senior IDF officers.”

Sharon: “I’ll tell you, I think if the hand-over of command had been done in an orderly fashion, that’s what might have happened. But the situation was otherwise. I left my post when the division was sitting west of the [Suez] Canal. I didn’t hand over my post to anyone. ... There was no replacement. ...

“It wasn’t the kind of situation, I would say, in which I could come after I’d left – not because of any bad relations in the place I left – in which I could come to that place to obtain the material. ... I certainly accept your view that if this had been done in an orderly fashion, that means I would have told someone. I, incidentally, didn’t take any material with me when I left. Not a file, not a box, not a map, nothing.”

Nebenzahl: “But the material in which it is stored, it’s in the army’s possession or in private hands?”

Sharon: “In private hands.”

Nebenzahl: “That’s completely forbidden. With all due respect, in my opinion, it should have been returned to the army immediately. Imagine, for example, that something in this material were needed for a criminal trial. This could be key material in a serious case – or in a civil suit, or in some other public matter. ... There’s no justification for keeping such material in private hands.”

Sharon: “It’s several iron boxes, locked with locks, that are currently in a closed room on my ranch. In a locked room, a room with bars. ... It was left there for the sake of writing the divisional report. ...”

Agranat: “But I think that proper procedure, as my colleague suggested, mandates giving this to the divisional commander or to whoever is responsible for technical matters.”

Sharon: “I could give it to the history branch.”

Agranat: “You need to give it to whoever’s responsible for these things, so that you’ll have access in order to write the report. Meanwhile, we want to receive your logbook.”

Yadin complained that letting Sharon hold onto this material while others are forbidden to do so was discriminatory, regardless of his reasons. “Everyone who does something has an explanation,” said Yadin. “Orders say a person isn’t allowed – a person is forbidden to hold onto a classified army document. ... This violates military law. Here you are knowingly – no matter what for what end, the end is sacred – violating military law.”

Sharon agreed, and said the army should deal with such violations “with an iron fist.”

This testimony was published 35 years after the war, when Sharon was already in a coma. Yet the military documents remain in the Sharon family’s hands.