The name "Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion (ari) of God (El)." It could not have been a more fitting name for Ariel Sharon, who died on Saturday at the age of 85. A tough guy, a brilliant and hard-headed soldier who fought in every Israeli war since 1948, the "Father of the Settlements", the architect of the 1982 war in Lebanon, the fierce counterterrorist, and, ultimately, a politician forced to confront his own principles - this, and so much more, was Ariel Sharon.
Sharon was born to Belorussian immigrants in Kfar Malal, north of Tel Aviv, on February 26, 1928. As a young commander in Israel's War of Independence, Sharon led men in battle several times in 1947 and 1948. He fought in the first (of five) battles for Latrun, a strategically important village. Jewish Jerusalem was besieged and the road from Tel Aviv had to pass through Latrun and other villages inhabited by Arabs. Therefore, the capture of Latrun was necessary to keep the road safe for convoys traveling to Jerusalem. Ultimately, it remained in Jordanian hands and was not part of the Jewish state until 1967. At Latrun, in May 1948 (about two weeks after David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel), Sharon was left for dead before being rescued by a 16-year-old comrade.
Although later in life Sharon was seen as the star representative of Israel's right wing, he was really, in his own words, a "pragmatic" Zionist as opposed to an "ideological" one: he cared more for the clearing of swamps, the building of houses, the raising of animals, and the planting of olive trees than for high-flying intellectual debate about the nature of Zionism and the Jewish state. When one reads his autobiography, one is struck by his dedication to the professionalization of the military and to doing everything in his power to protect the State of Israel. There is no political philosophizing to be found, very little about his views concerning the intense political debates between the Revisionists and Mapai in the 1940s (although he does say that he sympathized with and even envied Irgun militants). The settlements needed to be built to protect Israel, and not for any real ideological reason (more on this below). Israel could not depend on anyone else's charming words; it had to depend on itself, its own hard work and ingenuity. Sharon was more of a doer than a thinker, which is not to strike a blow at his intelligence, which was considerable; rather, it is to illustrate the stunning activeness of the man.
In 1953, Sharon became the leader of Unit 101, a special forces unit within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whose purpose was to conduct raids across the Israeli border in retaliation for attacks by the fedayeen - Palestinian guerrillas who attacked Jewish population centers from bases in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In one such raid on Qibya, in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, dozens of Arab civilians were killed when Israeli soldiers demolished buildings. Sharon would later say that he specifically had his men call into the buildings to make sure no one was in them before setting the charges, but was surprised to discover the next day that 69 Arab civilians had been killed. The raid on Qibya was in retaliation for the murder of a young Jewish mother and her infant children. The killers had infiltrated Israel by way of Qibya. This reprisal was particularly intense because it was intended to be a major deterrent against further fedayeen raids. Instead, however, these forays continued (as did Unit 101's counter-actions) and were ultimately one of the reasons for the Sina Campaign of 1956 (Israel's reasons for fighting that war were: 1) fear of Nasser's new arsenal from the Soviet Union, via the Czech Republic; 2) the fedayeen raids; 3) Egypt's closure of the Straits of Tiran).
During that conflict, Sharon sent a reconnaissance unit into the Mitla Pass, a narrow gorge in the Sinai that was heavily-defended by Egyptian defenders. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. This decision has been heavily criticized to this very day, including by men who fought in the pass, as entirely unnecessary, either from a tactical or strategic point of view. Sharon, for his part, argued that his position at the eastern entrance of the pass was untenable, and he sent the unit into the pass to seek better ground.
During that conflict, Sharon sent a reconnaissance unit into the Mitla Pass, a narrow gorge in the Sinai that was heavily-defended by Egyptian defenders. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. This decision has been heavily criticized to this very day, including by men who fought in the pass, as entirely unnecessary, either from a tactical or strategic point of view. Sharon, for his part, argued that his position at the eastern entrance of the pass was untenable, and he sent the unit into the pass to seek better ground.
Eleven years later, Israel fought in the momentous Six-Day War. Sharon, now a general, made his mark by capturing Egyptian fortifications stretching from Abu Ageila to Um-Shihan in the Sinai Desert. This was a hugely important accomplishment that allowed the Israelis to control the logistical supply routes in Sinai.
Sharon, already proven a tough, even foolhardy, commander of men, earned his major achievement in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In that conflict, Sharon launched a successful counter-attack against Egyptian armored forces and succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal (infuriating his commander, Shmuel Gonen, who wanted to establish a wider corridor on the east bank of the canal before crossing). In doing so, his forces encircled the Egyptian Third Army, which was only saved by the intervention of the United States: Henry Kissinger wanted to take this opportunity to help "flip" Egypt into the U.S. camp of the Cold War (this was ultimately successful). Sharon's accomplishments in this war, and photographs showing his head wrapped in a white bandage, solidified his image in Israel as a military hero. He was now a living legend of the IDF.
Sharon, up to this point associated with the Labor Party, became a co-founder of the center-right Likud Party with Menachem Begin, for whom he served as Minister of Agriculture and later, controversially, as Minister of Defense. This in and of itself was a revolutionary move, because up to this point, something like 99% of all leading military figures in Israel were Labor Party members. As Minister of Agriculture, Sharon was a leader of the settlement movement. While individual settlements had been established in the environs of Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967 under Labor governments, their number astronomically increased under the patronage of Sharon. Sharon told the settlers to "grab every hilltop" in the West Bank to secure Israel's eastern front against potential aggression from Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestinians. It is clear that his motivations in building and populating the settlements lay in security and "creating facts on the ground" - if Jews lived in the West Bank, the land would essentially become part of Israel, significantly broadening the tiny country's waist with hilly terrain. Israel required the West bank's hilly spine to provide it strategic depth. Sharon, a secular man, was certainly not motivated by a messianic fervor: while he respected the Jewish history of the place, he was not one to go on at length about that history and how it gave the Jews the right to be there. Begin was known to speak at length on this topic, as was, interestingly, the fiercely secular Moshe Dayan. Nonetheless, Sharon was highly regarded by many of the fundamentalist religious settlers, who are motivated by such a messianic fervor, until he led Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005.
In 1982, Sharon's most controversial moment arose. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been kicked out of Jordan in September 1970 and had succeeded in creating a state within a state in southern Lebanon. PLO fighters launched rockets at towns and villages in Galilee. Using the pretext of the assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador to Great Britain in June 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon, pushing through the south of that country beyond the Litani River and, ultimately, besieging Beirut. Many speculate that Sharon had kept Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the dark as to his intentions in Lebanon which were, essentially:
1. Destroy the PLO in Lebanon
2. Change the balance of power within the chaotic Lebanese political environment so that the Maronite Christians would take control of the country and, following that, sign a peace treaty with Israel.
While the first goal was achieved, the second goal was hugely ambitious and came to naught. In September 1982, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon's president-elect, a Maronite Christian, and the head of the Phalange group in Lebanon, was assassinated. In retaliation, Elie Hobeika, one of Gemayel's commanders, sent some of his troops into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in West Beirut. The consequences were horrifying: several hundreds of Palestinians, men, women, and children, were slaughtered. An Israeli inquiry later found that, although Sharon was not directly responsible for the massacre, he did allow the Phalangists into the camp and he should have been aware of what would have happened to the Palestinians there. Sharon initially refused to resign from his post, but eventually did so in 1983. This essentially cast a shadow over Sharon for the next two decades - while he served in the Shamir and Netanyahu governments, he was decidedly not in the limelight and was ultimately never able to attain his mission: to become the IDF Chief of Staff. This is the major reason why Sharon is, to this day, considered the main "Israeli butcher" by Palestinians, Lebanese, and many anti-Israel activists and thinkers around the world. TIME magazine even accused him of actively perpetrating the massacre, for which Sharon sued the publication for libel.
In September 2000, Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. He did not enter any of the buildings of the complex. Immediately afterward, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper exploded in the Second Intifada (or "Al Aqsa" Intifada because of Sharon's perceived slight of that Muslim holy site). While at the time many viewed Sharon's visit as needlessly provocative, and considered it the immediate cause of the Second Intifada, it has since come to light that the uprising and terror campaign was something that Yasser Arafat and the head honchos of the PLO had been planning for several months. Sharon's visit was simply a convenient pretext and alibi.
After a rash of suicide bombings in Israel, the country's frustrated and frightened electorate brought Sharon to the premiership in March 2001. While certainly controversial, he was also seen as a man who could be trusted to protect his country. In Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF successfully crushed terrorist centers throughout the West Bank. Also controversially (although not in Israel, where Sharon's hands were forced), it was under Sharon that construction of the West Bank barrier began. It should be noted that the idea of separation between Israel and the Palestinians had originally been a Labor idea, and had been explicitly urged by Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Sharon and others in Likud were opposed to the idea of separation because it implied that Israel did not have sovereignty over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews were just as entitled to live in Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, and Efrat as they were to live in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Netanya. Sharon and others on the right wing of the spectrum did not want to build a barrier because they felt that, in doing so, it would become the de facto border between Israel and the future state of Palestine - and they did not want this to happen, given the reasons mentioned above. However, under relentless public pressure (over 90 percent), Sharon agreed to the construction of the separation barrier. This barrier has been castigated as an "apartheid wall" since its inception, and has been a stick with which to beat the state of Israel. But it is undoubtedly true, as statistics illustrate, that the barrier has been effective in preventing suicide bombings in Israel. The vast majority of suicide bombers, prior to its construction, had originated in the West Bank, easily infiltrated into Israel proper, and then exploded themselves in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The barrier put a stop to all that.
In 2005, Sharon made another decision that caused him to go against long-held principles: namely, the decision to remove not only the IDF, but Israeli civilians, from their homes in Gaza (and four small settlements in the northern West Bank). For the "Father of the Settlements," this assuredly could not have been easy. Because Sharon did not trust his Palestinian interlocutors one whit, and felt that there was no true partner for peace, this move was made entirely unilaterally. He argued that in the final analysis, this meant that Gaza would be under Palestinian sovereignty, so that if rockets continued to be fired into Israel, the IDF would be able to declare war against another sovereign entity and not be seen to be oppressing a subject people. This, however, did not, and does not, prevent many individuals from claiming that Gaza is still, de facto, occupied because it is under siege by Israel. Many settlers and their supporters were concerned that the Gaza disengagement was but a dress rehearsal for withdrawal from the West Bank, which would have involved many more people and many more financial resources. It would be even more difficult emotionally because it is the West Bank, not Gaza (or anywhere in Israel's heavily populated coastal plain) that is the cradle and heart of Jewish civilization. Hebron and Bethel are important locations in the Tanakh, not Ashdod and Hod HaSharon. Ultimately, Sharon bolted Likud and formed a new centrist party, Kadima, whose members supported his push for disengagement.
We will never know the full extent of Sharon's intentions because he suffered a stroke in December 2005 and then a massive follow-up stroke in January 2006, which left him in a vegetative state until his death this past Saturday. But it was the disengagement that made Sharon at least somewhat respectable again in international discourse. It helped to rehabilitate his image as a brutal war criminal, at least in Western eyes (many Arabs, on the other hand, celebrated his death by handing out sweets). I don't necessarily think that it was a 180 degree turn. Sharon was a man dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and he did what he thought he had to do to make that happen. Not trusting his Palestinian counterparts, yet tired of having to protect small Jewish settlements amidst a hostile population, he decided on unilateral disengagement. The intifada proved to him that there could be no peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and, therefore, that Israel's presence in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, was untenable. For this, the settler movement now holds Sharon in considerable contempt - one MK of Jewish Home recently said that it had been the will of God that Sharon went into a coma when he did so that he did not give up the West Bank.
Sharon was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life personality whose nickname "The Bulldozer" was decidedly apropos. When he thought something needed to be done, he did it, even if it meant circumventing orders in the 1956 and 1973 wars, deceiving his own prime minister in 1982 (as many contend), or undoing what he had built up with his own hands (namely, the settlements). He stood up for what he believed in, even in the face of the severest criticism, whether it came from the right or left. He was known to get in fierce debates with his superiors and peers in the IDF, including Dayan, Gonen, Chaim Bar-Lev, Yigal Allon, and David Elazar. He was truly a maverick. Ultimately, Sharon's legacy is that he was, first and foremost, a fierce protector of the Jewish state. He was the shield that absorbed the blows. He loved the people and the land. He did not mince words about his hatred for Israel's enemies and he did what he could to utterly crush them. These principles informed his controversial decisions to build settlements and invade Lebanon up to Beirut. He was not a warmonger: he said once in an interview with The New Yorker that he would much rather labor at his farm than fight Israel's neighbors. While undoubtedly a roughhewn, brusque man, he was, according to many accounts, very charming as well - a perfect example of the legendary Israeli sabra. He was, indeed, the Lion of Israel and lived up to the name "Ariel."
Sharon, up to this point associated with the Labor Party, became a co-founder of the center-right Likud Party with Menachem Begin, for whom he served as Minister of Agriculture and later, controversially, as Minister of Defense. This in and of itself was a revolutionary move, because up to this point, something like 99% of all leading military figures in Israel were Labor Party members. As Minister of Agriculture, Sharon was a leader of the settlement movement. While individual settlements had been established in the environs of Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967 under Labor governments, their number astronomically increased under the patronage of Sharon. Sharon told the settlers to "grab every hilltop" in the West Bank to secure Israel's eastern front against potential aggression from Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestinians. It is clear that his motivations in building and populating the settlements lay in security and "creating facts on the ground" - if Jews lived in the West Bank, the land would essentially become part of Israel, significantly broadening the tiny country's waist with hilly terrain. Israel required the West bank's hilly spine to provide it strategic depth. Sharon, a secular man, was certainly not motivated by a messianic fervor: while he respected the Jewish history of the place, he was not one to go on at length about that history and how it gave the Jews the right to be there. Begin was known to speak at length on this topic, as was, interestingly, the fiercely secular Moshe Dayan. Nonetheless, Sharon was highly regarded by many of the fundamentalist religious settlers, who are motivated by such a messianic fervor, until he led Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005.
In 1982, Sharon's most controversial moment arose. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been kicked out of Jordan in September 1970 and had succeeded in creating a state within a state in southern Lebanon. PLO fighters launched rockets at towns and villages in Galilee. Using the pretext of the assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador to Great Britain in June 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon, pushing through the south of that country beyond the Litani River and, ultimately, besieging Beirut. Many speculate that Sharon had kept Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the dark as to his intentions in Lebanon which were, essentially:
1. Destroy the PLO in Lebanon
2. Change the balance of power within the chaotic Lebanese political environment so that the Maronite Christians would take control of the country and, following that, sign a peace treaty with Israel.
While the first goal was achieved, the second goal was hugely ambitious and came to naught. In September 1982, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon's president-elect, a Maronite Christian, and the head of the Phalange group in Lebanon, was assassinated. In retaliation, Elie Hobeika, one of Gemayel's commanders, sent some of his troops into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in West Beirut. The consequences were horrifying: several hundreds of Palestinians, men, women, and children, were slaughtered. An Israeli inquiry later found that, although Sharon was not directly responsible for the massacre, he did allow the Phalangists into the camp and he should have been aware of what would have happened to the Palestinians there. Sharon initially refused to resign from his post, but eventually did so in 1983. This essentially cast a shadow over Sharon for the next two decades - while he served in the Shamir and Netanyahu governments, he was decidedly not in the limelight and was ultimately never able to attain his mission: to become the IDF Chief of Staff. This is the major reason why Sharon is, to this day, considered the main "Israeli butcher" by Palestinians, Lebanese, and many anti-Israel activists and thinkers around the world. TIME magazine even accused him of actively perpetrating the massacre, for which Sharon sued the publication for libel.
In September 2000, Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. He did not enter any of the buildings of the complex. Immediately afterward, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper exploded in the Second Intifada (or "Al Aqsa" Intifada because of Sharon's perceived slight of that Muslim holy site). While at the time many viewed Sharon's visit as needlessly provocative, and considered it the immediate cause of the Second Intifada, it has since come to light that the uprising and terror campaign was something that Yasser Arafat and the head honchos of the PLO had been planning for several months. Sharon's visit was simply a convenient pretext and alibi.
After a rash of suicide bombings in Israel, the country's frustrated and frightened electorate brought Sharon to the premiership in March 2001. While certainly controversial, he was also seen as a man who could be trusted to protect his country. In Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF successfully crushed terrorist centers throughout the West Bank. Also controversially (although not in Israel, where Sharon's hands were forced), it was under Sharon that construction of the West Bank barrier began. It should be noted that the idea of separation between Israel and the Palestinians had originally been a Labor idea, and had been explicitly urged by Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Sharon and others in Likud were opposed to the idea of separation because it implied that Israel did not have sovereignty over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews were just as entitled to live in Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, and Efrat as they were to live in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Netanya. Sharon and others on the right wing of the spectrum did not want to build a barrier because they felt that, in doing so, it would become the de facto border between Israel and the future state of Palestine - and they did not want this to happen, given the reasons mentioned above. However, under relentless public pressure (over 90 percent), Sharon agreed to the construction of the separation barrier. This barrier has been castigated as an "apartheid wall" since its inception, and has been a stick with which to beat the state of Israel. But it is undoubtedly true, as statistics illustrate, that the barrier has been effective in preventing suicide bombings in Israel. The vast majority of suicide bombers, prior to its construction, had originated in the West Bank, easily infiltrated into Israel proper, and then exploded themselves in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The barrier put a stop to all that.
In 2005, Sharon made another decision that caused him to go against long-held principles: namely, the decision to remove not only the IDF, but Israeli civilians, from their homes in Gaza (and four small settlements in the northern West Bank). For the "Father of the Settlements," this assuredly could not have been easy. Because Sharon did not trust his Palestinian interlocutors one whit, and felt that there was no true partner for peace, this move was made entirely unilaterally. He argued that in the final analysis, this meant that Gaza would be under Palestinian sovereignty, so that if rockets continued to be fired into Israel, the IDF would be able to declare war against another sovereign entity and not be seen to be oppressing a subject people. This, however, did not, and does not, prevent many individuals from claiming that Gaza is still, de facto, occupied because it is under siege by Israel. Many settlers and their supporters were concerned that the Gaza disengagement was but a dress rehearsal for withdrawal from the West Bank, which would have involved many more people and many more financial resources. It would be even more difficult emotionally because it is the West Bank, not Gaza (or anywhere in Israel's heavily populated coastal plain) that is the cradle and heart of Jewish civilization. Hebron and Bethel are important locations in the Tanakh, not Ashdod and Hod HaSharon. Ultimately, Sharon bolted Likud and formed a new centrist party, Kadima, whose members supported his push for disengagement.
We will never know the full extent of Sharon's intentions because he suffered a stroke in December 2005 and then a massive follow-up stroke in January 2006, which left him in a vegetative state until his death this past Saturday. But it was the disengagement that made Sharon at least somewhat respectable again in international discourse. It helped to rehabilitate his image as a brutal war criminal, at least in Western eyes (many Arabs, on the other hand, celebrated his death by handing out sweets). I don't necessarily think that it was a 180 degree turn. Sharon was a man dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and he did what he thought he had to do to make that happen. Not trusting his Palestinian counterparts, yet tired of having to protect small Jewish settlements amidst a hostile population, he decided on unilateral disengagement. The intifada proved to him that there could be no peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and, therefore, that Israel's presence in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, was untenable. For this, the settler movement now holds Sharon in considerable contempt - one MK of Jewish Home recently said that it had been the will of God that Sharon went into a coma when he did so that he did not give up the West Bank.
Sharon was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life personality whose nickname "The Bulldozer" was decidedly apropos. When he thought something needed to be done, he did it, even if it meant circumventing orders in the 1956 and 1973 wars, deceiving his own prime minister in 1982 (as many contend), or undoing what he had built up with his own hands (namely, the settlements). He stood up for what he believed in, even in the face of the severest criticism, whether it came from the right or left. He was known to get in fierce debates with his superiors and peers in the IDF, including Dayan, Gonen, Chaim Bar-Lev, Yigal Allon, and David Elazar. He was truly a maverick. Ultimately, Sharon's legacy is that he was, first and foremost, a fierce protector of the Jewish state. He was the shield that absorbed the blows. He loved the people and the land. He did not mince words about his hatred for Israel's enemies and he did what he could to utterly crush them. These principles informed his controversial decisions to build settlements and invade Lebanon up to Beirut. He was not a warmonger: he said once in an interview with The New Yorker that he would much rather labor at his farm than fight Israel's neighbors. While undoubtedly a roughhewn, brusque man, he was, according to many accounts, very charming as well - a perfect example of the legendary Israeli sabra. He was, indeed, the Lion of Israel and lived up to the name "Ariel."
