1.Washington Institute (http://www.washingtoninstitute.org)
PolicyWatch 2190
Ariel Sharon: From Warrior to Man of Peace at Last, 10 January 2014
by David Pollock
The Israeli leader showed himself capable of making bold policy reversals when he felt the country's welfare as a democratic Jewish state was at stake.
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, at death's door today at age eighty-five after eight years in a stroke-induced coma, incarnated many of the contradictory dimensions of his entire country: courageous, and so unavoidably controversial; steadfast in his core convictions, yet flexible, impulsive, and even unpredictable in carrying them out; supremely self-confident, yet always acutely concerned about his country's security.
He rose to prominence, as the title of his 1989 autobiography succinctly notes, as a warrior: fighting with great ferocity and distinction in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Suez war, the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and then overseeing the 1982 Lebanon war, with a much murkier outcome, as minister of defense. But in his final years in political office as prime minister, even while ruthlessly and effectively striking back at Palestinian terrorists, Sharon demonstrated a very different side. He agreed to limit Israeli settlements in the West Bank, accepted the idea of an independent Palestinian state, and initiated the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The contradiction, or at least irony, was merely a superficial one; for only a man with Sharon's unrivaled reputation for toughness could have pulled off such switches so successfully. That was when and why President George W. Bush famously, and correctly, called Sharon a "man of peace."
Even much earlier, from his first days as a military commander, Sharon was usually determined to go his own way, at times regardless of higher authorities far from the field. The results were decidedly mixed. He first earned attention as the spearhead of Israel's battle against Palestinian infiltrators, leading the unit that launched the bloody reprisal raid on the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953. He then led a costly and unnecessary commando raid, far into enemy territory, on the Mitla Pass in Sinai during the 1956 war. Yet he also led a brilliant counterattack, again far behind Egyptian lines, across the Suez Canal in the 1973 war. Although little remembered today, Sharon's division actually advanced to within about sixty miles of Cairo to turn the tide of war and contribute to an honorable ceasefire -- and ultimately to Egyptian-Israeli peace.
Yet a decade later on Israel's northern front, as defense minister during the 1982 war against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, Sharon ordered Israeli troops far beyond the initial forty-kilometer objective near the Litani River, all the way to the outskirts of Beirut. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, asked whether Sharon had misled him about the scope of this campaign, reportedly offered this laconic reply: "Well, Arik always tells me about his plans -- sometimes before, and sometimes after." The result was a brutal siege of Lebanon's capital city, which succeeded in expelling Arafat and the PLO but failed to crush their movement, or to reorder Lebanese politics to Israel's advantage. Quite the contrary; this Lebanon war left Israel with a new and more dangerous enemy: Hezbollah.
The Lebanon war also left a large stain on Sharon's reputation, because of the large death toll, culminating in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps around Beirut. All through his career, Sharon was tagged with leading military operations that inflicted civilian casualties, sometimes disproportionately. But this charge was misplaced. It was not Israelis, but Lebanese Phalangist militiamen, who murdered the Palestinians in those camps. An official Israeli commission of inquiry nevertheless found Sharon "indirectly responsible," and he was forced to resign as defense minister, although he remained in the cabinet a while longer. But Time magazine charged that Sharon had actually "encouraged" the massacre -- featuring a cover illustration of a Jewish star dripping with blood -- even though Christian guerrillas had actually committed the crime. Against all the odds, Sharon sued the American magazine for libel -- and won a symbolic judgment in his favor.
Sharon's last military venture was much more successful, with favorable political results that continue to shape the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to this very day. A man who began his political life as a protégé of David Ben-Gurion and then rose to influence under Begin finally achieved the pinnacle goal of sweeping Likud to electoral victory shortly after the failure in late 2000 of the second Camp David summit and the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising. New prime minister Sharon then conceived and led Operation Defensive Shield, a series of large-scale incursions to root out Palestinian terror cells from West Bank cities at the height of the second intifada, in 2002-2003. Once again there were wildly exaggerated media accounts of Israeli responsibility for massacres, most infamously in Jenin. The accusations were false; and despite all the naysayers inside and outside Israel, the military campaign largely succeeded.
This time Sharon followed up, not with a protracted reoccupation of Palestinian cities, but with the security barrier separating these cities from Israel and its own cities and settlements just to the west. The naysayers were proved wrong yet again; the barrier -- sometimes a wall, more often a fence -- has worked to stop terrorists. It literally reinforces the verbal calls to stop terrorism uttered by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who replaced Arafat even as the barrier was being built. And the dramatic decline in Palestinian terrorism produced by the barrier, IDF action, and cooperation with Palestinian security services is what has enabled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, currently promoted by Secretary of State John Kerry, to resume, long after Sharon himself was struck down by the stroke that forced him from the political scene.
On a personal level, I recall the first time I met Ariel Sharon, and the lasting impression it produced of a man who could dream large and act accordingly, triumph over great adversity, and most of all, change course courageously as new circumstances required. In 1985, I sat with Sharon at one of his legendary, lavish private dinners. To my astonishment, he maintained at length that one million or more Jewish olim (immigrants) could quickly be brought to Israel from the Soviet Union -- and this was still at the height of the Cold War, before Gorbachev, and long before the collapse of communism and its notorious walls. I mentioned this prediction to a much more senior colleague, who called it fascinating but wildly implausible. And yet, within less than a decade, Sharon's dream of mass Soviet Jewish immigration came true.
Even more impressive to me, however, is the epilogue to this little story. At the time he made that rash but prescient prediction, Sharon explicitly intended it to rationalize Israel's continued hold over the West Bank and Gaza. Soviet Jewish immigration, he meant, would largely "solve" Israel's "demographic problem" of including so many Arabs within its expanded borders. He was the one, after all, who had driven the creation of Likud in 1973, and invested so heavily in Israeli settlements across the 1967 Green Line.
Yet many years later, when Sharon realized that this part of his dream was unrealistic, he reversed course and decided that for Israel's own sake, he had to uproot the settlements in Gaza -- along with four tiny, isolated West Bank settlements -- as he had at Yamit in Sinai for the sake of peace with Egypt in 1982. And for the sake of peace with the Palestinians, or at least separation from them, he had to build a wall dividing Israel from the West Bank, and concentrate further settlement only in the sliver of land around Jerusalem and Israel's "narrow waist" near the Mediterranean coast -- precisely the area that Palestinians and other Arabs have finally agreed could be swapped to Israel as part of a final peace agreement with a Palestinian state.
In order to accomplish this historic reversal, Sharon had to make one last military-style surprise maneuver, but in the political arena. That was his bold decision to break from Likud and form his own party, Kadima, to oversee the planned withdrawal from Gaza and the further concessions to come. Critics of some of these steps, including myself, fault Sharon not for pulling out of Gaza but for doing so unilaterally instead of by agreement with the Palestinian Authority. This arguably gave Hamas an advantage there that it has retained ever since, albeit more precariously now. Perhaps Sharon did not fully realize, back in 2005, that he could try to make a deal with the newly installed and untested Abbas, rather than with the tested-and-proved-untrustworthy Arafat. For his part, Sharon argued that he could not let any Palestinian leader determine whether Israel would remain both Jewish and democratic.
That is an important detail, but a detail nonetheless. The larger point is that Sharon, and almost certainly only Sharon, could get Israel out of Gaza. The Israeli public trusted him to take care of all that, giving Kadima a solid vote of confidence in what turned out to be Sharon's last electoral campaign. It is a measure of Sharon's personal political power and credibility that, without him, Kadima has virtually disappeared from the Israeli political map.
And so, to the last, Sharon was decisive -- and therefore also divisive. With leadership, of course, comes controversy. Given all these seemingly contradictory twists and turns, what really is Sharon's legacy? His own career trajectory sums it up well: first be a fearsome warrior, in order to turn later to the work of peace. Because of this legacy, Israel today can contemplate its future more confidently, even as the region all around it implodes, or explodes. Whether that national confidence produces a new paragon of personal courage and political decisiveness in the spirit of Ariel Sharon is still an open question.
・David Pollock is the Kaufman Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of Fikra Forum.
© 2014 All rights reserved.
2.CNN (http://edition.cnn.com)
Ariel Sharon: Israeli soldier, statesmanAriel Sharon: Israeli soldier, statesman
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a decorated warrior who also took steps for peace, died Saturday, January 11, after eight years in a coma. Sharon was 85. The former general had been hospitalized since suffering a stroke in January 2006. Here, he meets with Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv a month before the stroke.
Editor's note: Michael Oren is the former Israeli ambassador to the United States. His books include "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present."
(CNN) -- Written on every page of Israel's history, in ink and in blood, is the name Ariel Sharon. His life, which ended today after an eight-year coma, deeply influenced Israel's past. But even in death, Sharon will influence the future, as Israelis consider their options if the two-state solution fails.
During Israel's 1948 War of Independence, the handsome blond officer, known as "Arik," was shot and left for dead. He recovered and founded Israel's first commando unit, which conducted raids beyond Israel's borders. In the 1956 Sinai campaign, he led Israel's legendary paratroopers into clashes behind enemy lines.
A successful general in the 1967 Six Day War, he achieved world fame six years later by spurring Israeli troops across the Suez Canal to encircle the Egyptian army in the Yom Kippur War. The image of Sharon, still blond but now stout, his head wrapped in a bloodied bandage, became iconic. His heroism was uniquely Israeli, built by breaking rules as well as orders, and by surrounding himself with controversy and myth.
But Sharon's real legacy was made in politics. Here, too, he ignored the norms and forged his own often-tortuous path. He traversed the political spectrum, from the labor farm in which he grew up to the rightist Likud that he established with Menachem Begin. As agriculture minister in the late 1970s, he constructed dozens of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, gaining a reputation as an opponent of peace.
But then, as defense minister, he evicted thousands of Israelis from settlements in Sinai to fulfill Israel's treaty with Egypt. In 1982, Sharon masterminded the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, by some accounts deceiving Prime Minister Begin, and besieged Beirut. An Israeli investigation implicated Sharon in the massacre of 800 Palestinian civilians by Lebanese militiamen and compelled him to resign.
I saw the two sides of Sharon, the bullheaded warrior and man of the people. I saw how Israelis were alternately repelled and captivated by him. I was stationed with the Israeli paratroopers in Beirut when we learned that Sharon wanted to visit the troops. Furious over what they regarded as a reckless war, my buddies indicated that the defense minister was unwelcome. Sharon never arrived.
But weeks later, while hosting Sharon at a base inside Israel, I watched amazed as he left the table to chat with the cook, about whom he remembered every detail.
Known even in Hebrew as the Bulldozer ― as much for perseverance as girth ― Sharon in 2000 burst into the political forefront. The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's offer of independence in all of Gaza, most of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, and blamed Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount for igniting the Second Intifada.
Through the havoc wrought by Palestinian suicide bombers, Sharon pressed into the prime minister's office with Labor's Shimon Peres as his deputy. The once-impetuous soldier became the prudent statesman as Sharon waited through months of bombings before finally striking back. In April 2002, he ordered Israeli forces to eradicate terror and restore peace to Israeli neighborhoods.
Then Sharon, with characteristic audacity, pivoted toward peace. But failing to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, he decided to act unilaterally. The former champion of the settlements now proposed "disengagement" -- to uproot them, along with Israeli forces, from Gaza. This divided the Israeli public and drove Sharon to create his own party, which gained wide support.
In 2005, the residents of all 21 Gaza settlements were evacuated. Hamas subsequently took over Gaza and fired thousands of rockets at Israel. Still, an unapologetic Sharon was about to apply his unilateralist strategy to the West Bank when he suffered a massive stroke.
Today, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pursues a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Sharon's approach is once again being discussed. A growing number Israelis are asking, "What happens if the process fails?"
One solution could be a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian population centers in the West Bank. As in the disengagement from Gaza, the United States would endorse this move, but unlike in Gaza, most Israeli settlements would remain within Israel, and Israeli troops would still patrol strategic borders. Of course, the preferable solution is two states for two peoples. But if that proves unattainable, then Israel can still end the occupation of the Palestinians, preserve its security, and perhaps lay new foundations for peace.
Even when comatose, Ariel Sharon was a constant presence for Israelis. Whether as the dashing commando, the farmer, the builder, the contrarian, and belated seeker of peace, he reflected them and embodied their story. And after his death, his brazen Israeli way of action lives on.
3. Foreign Policy (http://www.foreignpolicy.com)
Warrior, Farmer, Leader
Reflections on the flawed-but-unmatched legacy of Israel’s Ariel Sharon, 11 January 2014
by Aaron David Miller
Love him or hate him, Ariel Sharon was a stunningly consequential, larger than life, and historic figure the likes of whom we will not see again. For those Palestinians, Arabs, and even Israelis who will never forget or forgive his transgressions, that's just as well. Still, Sharon's passing highlights the troubling reality of a region without leaders. This isn't so much reflected in the comparison of what Sharon accomplished to what little has been achieved by current politicians in the Middle East; Sharon was far too controversial for greatness. Rather, it is reflected in the thought of what leaders of Sharon's stature, authority, and power might be able to do for the Middle East today if they had the necessary skill, strategy, and partnerships.
• We face a regional leadership vacuum: In Israel, younger leaders lack the credibility of their predecessors. Among the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas may have the desire to make peace, but he does not have the power. He's also 78, and it is not evident what figure of national prominence could succeed him and unite a divided Palestinian polity. And in the Arab world, you would be hard-pressed to identify a single leader of vision and capacity.
• You might say that we're rudderless. In contrast, Sharon -- for all his flaws -- could steer the ship that was his country, and particularly as prime minister, he did so boldly.
• I met Ariel Sharon for the first time at a Druze wedding feast outside of Haifa in the summer of 1973, a few months before the October war. He was much thinner and more agile then and bounded out of his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jeep bantering in Arabic, plunging into the crowd of Druze and Israeli Arabs who had gathered to greet him. The bride's family was honored he had come, and Sharon seemed as comfortable there as he might have been at a Jewish wedding in Tel Aviv.
• His appetite was already legendary. My wife Lindsay and I watched him devour the heaping platters of rice and steaming lamb -- including the brains, of course, which we and Sharon, as guests, were offered. Years later, at meetings with various prime ministers, I'd watch Sharon consume hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches with such abandon that I wondered even then about his life expectancy.
• Even more legendary at that time was Sharon's image as a bold, courageous, and somewhat reckless warrior. His battlefield exploits in crossing the Suez Canal in October 1973 were well-known, as were his grand schemes to use the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to push the Syrians out, make the Lebanese Christians allies of Israel, and force the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into Jordan, and convert the Hashemite Kingdom into a Palestinian state.
• These schemes were as nutty as they were dangerous; certainly, the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis who died in the course of them paid dearly.
• As it turned out, an Israeli State Commission charged Sharon with indirect responsibility for allowing Christian militias to massacre hundreds of Palestinian innocents in Sabra and Shatila. He resigned as minister of defense. As for his schemes, the Palestinians didn't end up in Amman but instead went to Tunis. Sharon, it turns out, produced the very circumstances he had sought to avoid. Stripped of a military option and stunned by the First Intifada, Yasser Arafat ended up in a political process that brought him to where Sharon didn't want him: the West Bank and Gaza.
• There may not be second acts in American politics. But Sharon's rise to prime minister -- a move few thought imaginable, given his role in the 1982 war and his bulldozing personality -- revealed that there are in Israel. His election in February 2001 over Ehud Barak -- the largest electoral landslide in Israel's history -- reflected Barak's unpopularity and the public's fear and anger at Palestinian suicide attacks during the Second Intifada. It also demonstrated the desire for strong, experienced, and tough leadership from a man much of the public believed might break the back of Palestinian terrorism. And through security measures, the wall/security barrier (which he initially opposed), and targeted killings, he delivered.
• In addition to being a warrior, Sharon was also a farmer, with a deep knowledge of and connection to the land -- both its agricultural and biblical dimensions. He was proud of this fact and loved to talk animals, or about them. This was on display at the 1998 Wye River Summit, hosted by President Bill Clinton in the United States. Sharon refused to shake Arafat's hand, and he talked about the Palestinians in the third person even though they were sitting at the same table. Indeed, Sharon seemed more interested in the herd of prize Angus cows that the University of Maryland maintained at the Wye River plantation than in the negotiations themselves. Also, on more than one occasion at his farm at Shikmim in southern Israel, Sharon insisted on talking flowers and livestock before business. In 2002, on the helicopter tour he gave Gen. Anthony Zinni, then the Bush administration's special envoy on the peace process, Sharon narrated with the authority of a man who had walked or driven every kilometer from the Lebanese border to the Negev. Watching Sharon explain the real estate, I thought of the poet's line about individuals being monarchs of all they survey. Sharon was certainly that.
• As prime minister, Sharon matured. I think he learned at least two critical things about his own politics: First, that he had to read the public correctly and not overreach; and second, that if it was possible to do and didn't cost much, he should keep the Americans happy. Sharon's decision to disengage from Gaza -- and essentially take down the settlement enterprise he had created -- did both these things. However imperfect the disengagement turned out to be, it was an act of boldness and brilliance that no other Israeli politician of his day could have implemented. Hamas or no Hamas, few Israelis would still want the IDF in Gaza today, even with Hezbollah's rockets in southern Lebanon.
• Just as Sharon learned two things as prime minister, upon his passing, I now have two takeaways on his legacy.
• First, with Sharon gone, Israel faces a significant leadership transition. Only the extraordinary and indefatigable Shimon Peres -- now 90 -- remains from the cast of Israeli characters who shepherded the state through its early years. At a breakfast once at Sharon's farm with Peres, I watched the two interact. Despite their political differences, there was a real affection and a shared sense of history between them. Indeed, they had both seen just about everything. At one point, Peres actually said that there were few surprises left for the two of them.
• The Israeli prime ministers who have followed that generation -- Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu -- are incredibly smart, able leaders. But they don't have the same authority, legitimacy, and authenticity as their predecessors. Despite their flaws and mistakes, Israel's previous leaders had tremendous will and skill to keep a challenging enterprise afloat and prosperous during very tough times. Who now will make the difficult but important decisions? Sharon presided over the evacuation of 8,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza -- deeply traumatic but without serious or sustained violence. Who will deal with the evacuation of tens of thousands of ideologically motivated and well-armed Israelis living on the West Bank? The answer just isn't clear.
• Second, Sharon was not a peacemaker. Suspicious and mistrustful, he believed deeply that Israel was engaged in a hundred-year war with the Arabs and had profound doubts about the viability of a Palestinian state. He asked me once whether it was true that I wanted to become the first ambassador to the state of Palestine. When I said no, he laughed and said that was a good thing because there would never be one.
• Could Sharon -- a man with the power to make big decisions -- have changed his tune while prime minister, had he not been felled by a stroke? I doubt it. But we'll never know.
• Had he changed his mind while in office, it would have confirmed the reality that, on the Israeli side, the history of peacemaking isn't the purview of the left, the doves, or even the moderate right. Instead, it's a history of transformed hawks -- Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and perhaps Netanyahu, still the only Likud prime minister to have actually withdrawn from any West Bank territory. By and large tough guys who, for any number of reasons, believed -- as Sharon did in calling for disengagement from Gaza -- that the situation (and Israel's interests) demanded a change.
• Yet the equation of peace requires many parts to reach a conflict-ending solution. Even if U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry succeeds in getting a framework agreement on peace, anything remotely resembling the creation of a Palestinian state, let alone a true end to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, will require heroic leaders on both sides willing and able to make big decisions. And in the wake of Sharon's passing, I'm reminded, sadly, that even will and capacity aren't enough. Such leaders must also have the desire to get the job done.
4. Tablet (http://www.tabletmag.com)
Ariel Sharon: 1928-2014
One of Israel’s legendary military commanders and most influential politicians leaves a legacy that was nearly great, 11 January 2014
by Benny Morris
Some years ago, a cameraman proposed to Ariel Sharon that he photograph him holding a sheep. As the photographer later told it, one of Sharon’s sons, Gilad, who was on hand, advised against it. But Sharon, then about 70, thought about it for a moment and then agreed. The picture became iconic: the politician, flanked by animals, standing on hay in rough brown boots, a sheep slung over his shoulders.
Sharon agreed because he liked the image of farmer-general, �・ la Cincinnatus, the fifth-century B.C.E. Roman who abandoned the plow to lead the legions in defense of the republic and then returned to his humble plow. (Sharon’s plow, incidentally, was not so humble―a thousand-acre farm, Havat Shikmim, in Israel’s south, practically the only such spread in Israel.) Also because David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister and great leader, had once, famously, been photographed holding a lamb. And, of course, because Sharon was something of a showman. During his now-legendary military exploits, he took care to be photographed from every angle. (Photographs of Gen. Sharon in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, with a white bandage wound around his head, are also iconic.)
But while Sharon grew up in the agricultural village of Kfar Malal, northeast of Tel Aviv, and loved running Havat Shikmim, which he bought in 1972, sheep-farming was really a pastime, as was Ben-Gurion’s sojourn in rural Sdeh Boker. The passions that consumed Sharon throughout his 85 years were the army, in which he served more or less continuously from 1947 until 1973, and politics, where he starred from 1973 until 2006, when he suffered a brain hemorrhage and fell into a coma while serving as prime minister.
Sharon, perhaps, had hoped to follow Ben Gurion into the ranks of “great”―and he might have made it had illness not cut his career short. To be sure, he manifested military greatness during his years in the Israel Defense Forces. True, in the early 1970s, political, disciplinary, and personal calculations had blocked his appointment as chief of the general staff of the IDF; he was always seen as uncontrollable and something of a maverick and distrusted by the powers that be. But in his decades of service, he clearly demonstrated his mettle as the IDF’s best field commander. From 1953 to 1955, as the leader of Unit 101 and then of Paratroop Battalion 890, Sharon fashioned the ethos and tactics of IDF commando operations. In the 1967 Six Day War, Sharon, by then a divisional commander, brilliantly conquered the Umm Katef-Abu Agheila Egyptian fortification complex in the Sinai. In 1970 and 1971, as OC Southern Command, he successfully uprooted Palestinian guerrillas―terrorists―from the Gaza Strip, a campaign that often involved brutal tactics. (A retired Israeli police chief once told me that he had witnessed Sharon personally executing a captured terrorist in Gaza prison’s courtyard.) In 1973, overcoming some hesitancy among his superiors, Sharon led the game-changing assault across the Suez Canal that forced Egypt, which had launched the Yom Kippur War together with Syria, to beg for a ceasefire.
In politics, too, he had repeatedly exhibited both his maverick streak and his bulldozer credentials. He got things done, whatever the legal and practical impediments, and often he got them done in his own way. But his political legacy remains ambiguous on a number of levels.
A product of the Labor movement, Sharon was a Mapainik at heart: Mapai was the pragmatic socialist party, led by Ben Gurion, that had led the Zionist enterprise to statehood and ruled Israel between 1948 and 1977. But in 1973, Sharon jumped ship and helped bring Menachem Begin’s Likud―then called Gahal―to power. From the late 1970s into the 1990s he was instrumental in expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza―though in 1982, as Begin’s defense minister, he efficiently oversaw Israel’s uprooting of the Sinai settlements as part of the Israeli commitments in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.
But 1982 was decisive to Sharon’s political career in another way. He planned and then carried out Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, culminating in the siege of Beirut and eviction of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon―and the massacre, by Lebanese Christian militiamen, of several hundred Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon was held partially responsible for the massacre by an Israeli commission of inquiry and ousted from the defense ministry and was demonized by both the press and the public in the West, as well as by many Israelis.
Nevertheless, through the 1980s and 1990s, Sharon inched his way back into political respectability. By 2001, when he was elected prime minister at the head of the Likud, he had recast his image, emerging as a responsible elder statesman with a security-defense background that most Israelis could trust. Like the ex-Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, with whom Sharon enjoyed very good relations through the decades, here was a man who could―cautiously―advance toward peace but also be depended upon to safeguard Israeli security. His appearance―a smiling, overweight, white-haired teddy bear, a man who was photographed with his sheep―certainly helped. So did the occasional leaks by former aides and secretaries about his abundant sense of humor, warmth, and many personal kindnesses.
From the moment he assumed the premiership, in 2001, Sharon showed the promise of political greatness. Starting in 2002, he orchestrated the Israeli military’s efficient suppression of the Palestinian Second Intifada―a rebellion against Israel’s occupation of the territories, but also a terrorist war against Israel itself, that began in September 2000. And he did this at a relatively low cost in terms of Arab civilian life―most Israelis killed in the Second Intifada were civilians, but most Arabs killed in the Second Intifada were gunmen.
But Sharon then proceeded―somewhat belatedly, left-wingers would say―to veer toward conciliation, apparently under the influence of the Intifada and out of recognition that continued Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip would, inexorably, lead to the emergence of a single state with an Arab majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, an outcome that would necessarily spell an end to the Zionist dream of a democratic Jewish state.
In the summer of 2005, he orchestrated the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which meant not just the pullout of all troops but also the politically challenging and psychologically traumatic uprooting of a dozen or so Jewish settlements. (Four settlements from the northern West Bank were evacuated besides.) Sharon abruptly lost his Likud base of support―so in November that year, while still prime minister, he set up a new centrist political party, Kadima. Most observers, and his rightist opponents, believed that Sharon intended, in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians, to affect a complete separation from the Palestinians by unilaterally withdrawing from the bulk of the West Bank as well.
Sharon grew up with an instinctive, essential distrust of his Arab neighbors in Kfar Malal; after all, in 1921, a few years before Sharon was born, they burned the moshav to the ground. As an adult, Sharon gradually extended this distrust to encompass “the Arabs” in general. Indeed, in 1978, he voted in Cabinet against the evolving Israel-Egypt peace agreement negotiated between Prime Minister Menachem Begin―aided by ex-generals Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizmann―and President Anwar Sadat. (In the decisive vote, in the Knesset in 1979, Sharon voted “aye.”) And in the early 2000s he had had little hope that the Palestinian Arabs under Yasser Arafat, and then Mahmoud Abbas, would ever acquiesce in Israel’s existence or sign a definitive peace treaty with the Jewish state.
So, as part of his “separation” policy, he proceeded to build a security fence between “old” Israel―that is, pre-1967 Israel―and the West Bank. Such a pullback to the fence would have left the Palestinians in possession of about 90 percent of the West Bank―though it also would have left the problem of dozens of Israeli settlements “stranded” inside Palestinian territory. It is unclear how Sharon intended to deal with this or how he thought he would overcome the inevitable resistance of the right wing. In any event, his stroke put paid to this possibility.
When Sharon disappeared from the political arena, in January 2006, both Palestinian and Jewish extremists rejoiced. But there was a real sense of shock, sadness, and loss among most Israelis, who felt―probably correctly―that the only political figure willing and able to extricate―liberate―Israel from the West Bank and thus able to change the course of the country’s history, was gone. His actual passing, after eight years in a coma, is anti-climactic. What comes next, for Israelis and Arabs―and for everyone else, including the Americans―is anyone’s guess.
・Benny Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author, most recently, of One State, Two States
5.The Tower (http://www.thetower.org)
Ariel Sharon, the Last Lion of Judaea
by Benjamin Kerstein, Associate Editor, The Tower Magazine
A leader who embodied Israel’s contradictions as well as its dreams, Sharon absorbed the slings and arrows and gained a nation’s reverence.
I am Auda Abu-Tayi! I carry 23 great wounds, all got in battle. Seventy-five men have I killed with my own hands in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents. I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure. Yet I am poor, because I am a river to my people!
―Anthony Quinn as Auda Abu-Tayi, Lawrence of Arabia
“Tell us something people don’t know about you.”
“I love romantic movies.”
― Ariel Sharon in an interview with Yair Lapid, TV personality and now Minister of Finance
The passage of Ariel Sharon―soldier, general, politician, and former Prime Minister of Israel―is upon us at long last. Israelis are saying their final goodbye to one of their country’s most enigmatic, controversial, and ultimately beloved leaders.
The end of Ariel Sharon is the symbolic end of a generation. A generation of men and women who knew a world without a Jewish state, and fought on the battlefield and in the political arena to establish it; who in its service endured the love and hatred of many; and are now swiftly passing, as they must, from the world. A generation of lions for a people who had for so long been lambs.
Yet, in many ways, Sharon was the most unlikely of all Israel’s leaders.
For most of his career, Sharon seemed to be Israel’s blunt instrument. He lacked Ben-Gurion’s fervor, Begin’s charismatic eloquence, Golda’s feminist appeal, and Rabin’s coldly incisive mind. Sharon represented the stubborn strength of a people unbowed; the unstoppable force and the immovable object; a sturdy, rumpled bear of a man with a knife between his teeth.
In his final years, however, as he rose to power during one of Israel’s greatest crises, he became something altogether different: A protective elder, a wise tribal chief, and a wise, sentimental grandfather, again ready to make tough sacrifices to protect the Jewish people.
The rough-and-tumble warrior transformed into protector, sympathetic, even lovable; and almost all agreed that, in the hour of trouble, there was no one better to turn to.
Sharon’s long career embodied the contradictions of his public image. Throughout his life, he was a hero, a tragic villain, and then a hero; electable, unelectable, and then electable; triumphant, defeated, and then triumphant. Loved, reviled and then loved again, ultimately leaving a legacy of peace making girded by strength, and ushering in an unprecedented era of prosperity and security for the people of Israel.
He earned all of it over the course of his life. Ariel Sharon was born in 1928 on a moshav to a taciturn and stoic father he later said he never really knew. He fought in the War of Independence, coming out of the famed Battle of Latrun badly wounded. Following the war, he became something like the man-at-arms to then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion―a fearless, unpredictable, and headstrong soldier, who cared deeply for his men but did not always follow orders to the letter. He founded Israel’s famed Unit 101, which fought against Palestinian terrorism during the 1950s and would set the operational standard for Israel’s legendary paratrooper units. He was also, at times, more than a bit of a headache. After one particularly bloody engagement, Ben-Gurion asked him how the operation had gone. “OK,” said the young commando. “Too OK,” Ben-Gurion replied.
This combination of military prowess and a self-confidence some saw as insubordination would haunt Sharon all his life. Though he did not share in the heroic status generals like Dayan and Rabin enjoyed after the Six Day War of 1967, he came out of the 1973 Yom Kippur War as both a national hero and a fierce critic of the political and military establishment. The tank battles he led in the Sinai―sometimes exceeding his orders―are now studied as tactical masterpieces. And it was he who, sporting a bandage wrapped around his head, saw a gap between the two Egyptian armies in the Sinai, made a bee-line to the Suez Canal with tanks and pontoon bridges, crossed the Canal, and then cut off the entire Egyptian Third Army, effectively winning the Egyptian front. And it was this same Sharon who later oversaw Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai desert, and the removal of Jewish communities built there, in return for peace with Egypt under the Camp David Accords.
But following the 1973 war, Sharon also broke the taboo on criticizing the army and the Labor establishment when he denounced the conduct of the early days of the conflict as a disgrace that needlessly sacrificed lives and equipment. Others such as Rabin―with whom Sharon maintained a fraught but lasting friendship―emerged relatively unscathed from the war’s failures, but Sharon was nearly alone in becoming an object of adoration. For a moment, he was almost universally loved.
It didn’t last. Sharon’s entrance into politics following his retirement from the IDF marked the moment he was cast as a polarizing figure. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he left the dominant Labor party, helped Menachem Begin form the Likud, left and formed his own party, then rejoined the Likud when the 1977 elections broke Labor’s decades-long hold on power. It was here that Sharon began to emerge as a major political voice, eventually becoming defense minister, and ultimately presiding over the First Lebanon War.
That war proved a turning point in Sharon’s career, shattering his authority and leaving him in the political wilderness. As defense minister, he was the war’s primary author and its guiding force as the Jewish state sought to secure its northern border from unremitting terrorism. Yet in carrying out his plans, he exceeded his authority and―according to some―manipulated Menachem Begin into expanding the war well beyond its initial parameters. But it was the massacre of over 800 Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Christian Phalangists that proved Sharon’s undoing. The slaughter was the work of a Lebanese militia allied with Israel; a horrifying act of vengeance that defined the sectarian tit-for-tat slaughter of Lebanon’s civil war. A national commission of inquiry, headed by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan, concluded that Sharon should have known a massacre was possible, and thus bore indirect responsibility for it. He was unceremoniously removed from office. For years, Sharon blamed the outcome on Begin; who had, he believed, thrown him to the proverbial wolves.
For nearly two decades after, Sharon was consigned to the political wilderness. Despised by the international community, and considered unelectable to higher office by Israelis across the political spectrum, Sharon appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, finished; a lumbering dinosaur no longer suited to the modern landscape.
Then came the Oslo Accords, their ultimate collapse, and the Palestinian terror campaign of the second intifada. Sharon was initially blamed for the explosion of bloodshed because of his visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, but today we know that Arafat had long been stockpiling weapons, training terrorists, and seeking a pretext for a campaign of mass murder. Having rejected peace at Camp David, and later at Taba, Arafat turned to violence and mass murder as a response to Israel’s extended hand and sweeping offers for peace. To many Israelis, it seemed clear that the Palestinian leadership had deliberately chosen war over peace, once again.
Indeed, for the most part, it was the second intifada that re-made Sharon, not Sharon who made the intifada. Faced with Arafat’s “no” to peace and the horrors of a wave of suicide bombings, and unable to stop the incessant terror attacks under the government of Ehud Barak, Israelis turned to the most reliable security authority they knew, and in 2001, elected Sharon prime minister in a landslide.
It was another decisive turning point. Over the next six years, Sharon would distinguish himself as a tough but also surprisingly moderate leader, showing little of the hardheaded, hard-line nature that had marked earlier stages of his career. He waited a few months before launching Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, carefully maintaining both the alliance with the United States and Israeli national unity. He showed a deftness of political tactics no less impressive than as a military leader. Ultimately he broke with his own party, founding the Kadima party in order to effect a withdrawal from the Gaza settlements he helped construct.
He also became, for the second time in his career, a consensus figure. In the wake of the failures of Oslo and the Second Intifada, on the one hand, and the settlement movement’s loss of appeal after the Rabin assassination, on the other, Israelis had begun abandoning the extremes and looking for a trustworthy leader in the middle of the map; Sharon’s new party fit perfectly. To many Israelis, he was becoming comforting and parental; a grandfatherly patriarch whose one concern was the protection of his clan; an old man who had suffered deep tragedy―the death of a son and then a wife―and borne it with quiet stoicism; a relic, in many ways, of the old moshavnik Israel that had somehow survived into the new. And indeed, as the man once again in charge, Sharon deserves due credit for defeating the second intifada, bringing terror to heel, and giving Israelis a sense of stability and security unlike any leader after Ben-Gurion.
Sharon was also, of course, throughout his life widely criticized, often harshly so. Indeed, few recent politicians have been as ferociously assailed by so many. The opprobrium directed his way was sometimes fair, but just as often based on lies, and notable for its sputtering venom, which at times bordered on the unhinged.
The hatred came from both inside and outside Israel. Certainly, the Israeli Left despised Sharon early and often. To them, he was both a political and aesthetic nightmare: Patron of the settlements the Labor party had initiated, traitor to the Labor establishment of which he was once a fixture, private landowner and capitalist, and a partisan of military force, he seemed the personification of the new, post-utopian Israel less focused on the kibbutznik dream of collectivism, rooted more in the survival of the Jewish State in the modern Middle East. Even his enormous girth appeared to indicate a man of vast and vulgar appetites, indifferent to the ideas of austerity and equality that had defined Israel’s early years. It was only at the end of Sharon’s career, when his more moderate image and dovish withdrawal from Gaza forced a reconsideration, that the ire finally subsided.
In the international realm, it never receded. They hated him, openly and freely; and they still hate him. He was, in effect, a totem, an effigy, a symbol of the Israel that the European and American political and media establishments felt entitled to demonize. And indeed, to them, Sharon was little less than the devil: A warmonger, a war criminal, a thug, a mass murderer, and―in one transcendently racist cartoon in Britain’s Independent―an eater of babies. The outrageous, often anti-Semitic, attacks knew few bounds.
But this also constituted some of his appeal to Israeli voters. Indeed, Sharon seemed, at times, to be Israel’s iron wall, absorbing the entire world’s loathing on his country’s behalf; bearing it all without complaint, noting only that the thing he most feared was sinat hinam, the “baseless hatred” that the Sages claimed destroyed the Second Temple. “The whole world is against us,” Israelis often say, and they could not help noticing that, more than anyone else, it was against Sharon. He was hated, in effect, for all of us.
At this moment, however, it is difficult to think of anything other than the missed opportunity his passing represents. At the time of his stroke in early 2006, Sharon was headed for another landslide victory as leader of his own Kadima party. He had already carried out the withdrawal from Gaza, and there were indications that another withdrawal from portions of the West Bank was in the works. He had divested himself of the far-Right and pro-settlement elements in the Likud, and his enormous electoral support ensured that he was beholden to very few.
What he could have accomplished had he remained with us is painful to contemplate. He could well have completed the political realignment that began with his election, and forged a new consensus behind the kind of powerful centrist party Israelis have long sought to create without success. It seemed at the time that Sharon was indeed Israel’s De Gaulle, and something like that other aging general’s Gaullist movement―a synthesis of the best elements of both Left and Right―might be in the offing. But it was not to be.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is secure in office, but commands nothing like the consensus enjoyed by Sharon. The old Left-Right divide is indeed over, but Israel remains bitterly split between political and ideological camps. Indeed, with Sharon’s passing, it seems that Israel’s politics did not so much re-divide as shatter into a thousand pieces.
Perhaps all this is wishful thinking. Perhaps even if Sharon had not collapsed, the divisions and disagreements in both Israeli and Palestinian society would have proven too great to overcome to produce a lasting peace. But as the man fades at long last, one is forced to recollect the eight years he spent in a fathomless state, clinging to life, and perhaps even to a shred of his consciousness.
If Arik Sharon was anything, he was strong and he was survivor; and in this sense, he was indeed the personification of his people: Our stubborn insistence, our seemingly infinite capacity to endure, and the strength we may find inside ourselves even in the face of enemies seemingly so much larger and stronger than us.
“Man,” the Greek poet Pindar once wrote, “is but a shadow’s dream.” Ariel Sharon casts a long shadow indeed, and Israel will long live under it, dreaming of what might have been and what can still be.
6. Forward (http://forward.com)
The Sharon They Loved, the Sharon We Hated, 11 January 2014
A Leader Seen Differently By Israelis and Diaspora Jews
by David Hazony
issue of January 17, 2014.
Ariel Sharon in death, as in life, presents a challenge for us.
By advocating a bold, self-asserting Jewish settlement movement, with or without a peace agreement, Sharon shattered the image of Israel as a country that places the achievement of peace with its neighbors above all other national goals. This triggered a long-term rift with Diaspora Jewry, especially in the United States, where the cause of peace had become the core not only of Jewish Zionism, but even of Judaism itself.
For the Jews of Israel, however, Sharon represented an ideal no less impressive ― even vital for the survival and success of the country they had shed so much blood to build. He represented independence, in its deepest sense.
Deep down inside, Israelis still see their own national survival as somehow miraculous, defying the laws of gravity. And that survival is owed to a founding generation of larger-than-life figures ― David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin ― who created something from nothing, saw possibility through a veil of blood and devastation, acted boldly and in defiance of international demands, and handed a whole country to the next generation on a platter.
Of those founders, the only two who remained active a decade ago were Sharon and Shimon Peres, archrivals in politics until, in 2005, they joined together under the banner of Sharon’s new Kadima party, for the purpose of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza. The move, known as “disengagement,” was a stroke of political genius, embodying everything desired by the newly emergent Israeli center: the bold, security-minded unilateralism of the right, combined with the territorial sacrifice of the left.
There would be no presumption of peace this time ― disengagement was, if nothing else, a glaring repudiation of the Oslo Accords ― but there could be a reversal of the vilified settlement movement nonetheless.
I visited Kfar Darom, the largest settlement in Gaza, on Independence Day 2005, just a few months before it became rubble. I had spent much of my adult life supporting the settlements, but by that point, Kfar Darom had become a magnet for the movement’s most outlandish fruitcakes. The folks who had taken over the town in the months before disengagement were old-fashioned messianists, radicals with bullhorns in their beards and demonic sunshine in their eyes.
I knew they were but a sliver of the settlement movement, but I also knew that their refusal to grant the world some nuance, their divine arrogance, had taken the entire idea of settlement outside the borders not just of geographical Israel, but of cultural and political Israel, as well.
So when Sharon, so long the movement’s most potent advocate, decided to drive a stake into their hearts, a clear majority of Israelis supported him.
Today, thousands of rockets and many lost lives later, a clear majority thinks disengagement was a mistake.
It doesn’t matter, really. What counts is that Israel, led by Sharon, took action in a situation that seemed impossible, where most Israelis had felt a sense of collective impotence and defeat for a generation. Through disengagement, Sharon told Israel that independence ― the freedom to live and act without asking the permission of the powers of the world ― was still possible.
Israeli politicians, it seems, must have a final act in which they turn the tables on all expectations, showing that the Jew is never at home unless he is defiantly reinventing himself, no matter how late the hour. The hesitant and shtetl-evoking Levi Eshkol led his country in 1967 to the boldest, most stunning military victory in modern history. Begin made peace with Egypt; Yitzhak Shamir initiated the Madrid peace conference; Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords after a career of “breaking the arms and legs” of Palestinian terrorists.
And Shimon Peres has abandoned his post as the nation’s most divisive peace advocate to spend the past decade as its greatest unifier, saving the presidency itself and, with it, an important piece of Israel’s self-image. It is almost as though the Israeli politician’s old age triggers a need to prove that his inner soul is still vibrant, that the creative fire has not gone out. That he is as eternally young as the nation he represents.
Sharon, too, needed a last act, and the disengagement from Gaza, along with the dramatic political realignment it necessitated, was it.
Israelis came to revere him in his final years. But it has been harder for Diaspora Jews.
It is infuriating to love someone unpredictable. Israel as a whole has become, for many American Jews, a “high-maintenance” lover: forever insecure, forever impassioned, forever reinventing and on the move. And yet we do not let go, because we know that in such people are the potentialities of humanity forever on display. We need them to remind us who we can be, even when such a reminder is the last thing we want.
Supporters of Israel who have spent so many years reacting emotionally to the tectonic shifts in Israeli politics ― detesting Sharon, being embarrassed by Avigdor Lieberman, loathing Benjamin Netanyahu, wishing only that Golda and Rabin and Peres were still running the country ― have always preferred a flattened image to a more complicated truth. They presume their ideology should trump the actual experiences of a nation, and they have never given proper credit to the inner Israeli soul that refuses under any circumstances to give up on itself, that fights until death for the right to just live, that will always choose a contentious reality over a peaceable illusion, that will never, ever place the world’s callow and fickle morals above its own truth.
As a politician, Ariel Sharon swerved and maneuvered, at times blunt and at others masterfully deft, never fearing the small or great gambit in order to keep the advantage to himself. He did not care about the stereotyped images, the caricatures that distorted him across Europe and in the hearts of Diaspora Jews. He was not always right, but he never projected weakness of spirit.
In this, he captured an important part of what Israel is really about. And what too many of us, living at a comfortable distance, still can’t handle.
・David Hazony is the editor of The Tower Magazine and is a contributing editor to the Forward.
7.The Globe and Mail（http://www.theglobeandmail.com）
Ariel Sharon the builder, Ariel Sharon the destroyer: A man of many incarnations, 11 January 2014
by Yossi Klein Halevi
JERUSALEM ― Contributed to The Globe and Mail
No Israeli leader left behind such a paradoxical legacy as did Ariel Sharon. When Israel expands settlements, it continues the path set by Sharon in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when, as minister of agriculture in the first Likud government of Menachem Begin, he built dozens of new West Bank communities. Yet as Israel negotiates an agreement with Palestinians that would inevitably involve uprooting settlements, it is likewise faithful to the legacy of Sharon, the only Israeli leader to dismantle settlements – twice, in Sinai in 1982 and then in Gaza in 2005.
His life, in all its phases, was defined by a single mission: to teach the Jews how to survive in the Middle East. For Mr. Sharon, that often meant fighting on the Middle East’s own harsh terms.
Beginning in the early 1950s, when as a younger officer he established the Israeli army's first commando unit, known as “101,” Ariel Sharon shaped Israel’s strategic doctrine, taking the battle to enemy territory. His daring retaliatory raids against Arab terrorism penetrated into Gaza and Jordan, and became the model for a demoralized Israeli army that hadn’t recovered from its devastating losses in the 1948 War. The army’s self-confidence, culminating in the 1967 Six-Day War, owed much to the spirit of 101.
But Mr. Sharon’s critics noted that his missions tended to leave behind too many bodies – of Arab civilians and also of Israeli soldiers. His advance through the ranks was repeatedly blocked.
Ariel Sharon’s greatest moment as commander occurred during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he led Israeli paratroopers across the Suez Canal and brought the war onto Egyptian territory, surrounding Egypt’s Third Army and turning an initial Israeli defeat into a victory still studied in military academies around the world. Mr. Sharon’s status as one of Israel’s greatest heroes seemed inviolate.
But less than a decade later, as Defense Minister, Mr. Sharon initiated the invasion of Lebanon, misleading the Israeli cabinet about the extent of the war’s reach and in the process shattering the consensus on which Israel’s citizen army depends. No one had infused the Israeli army with greater motivation to fight than had Ariel Sharon, and no one undermined its morale more than Ariel Sharon.
The Lebanon war, which lasted 18 years before the last Israeli soldiers were withdrawn in 2000, became the first war that Israel effectively lost. Mr. Sharon’s own career almost ended in Lebanon: After Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies massacred hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps, an Israeli government commission of inquiry in 1983 found Mr. Sharon guilty of criminal negligence. The Israeli cabinet dismissed him.
The story of Ariel Sharon could have ended then – and many Israelis believed that it had. Yet when the Second Intifada erupted in 2000 and a desperate nation felt unable to cope with overwhelming threat, it turned to Mr. Sharon. Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister in 2001 was not only the story of a political comeback, but of an elder statesman internalizing the failures of his past.
Ariel Sharon’s great challenge as prime minister was to save Israel from its worst wave of terrorism, which brought the war from Israel’s borders into its streets. Reeling from almost daily and at times hourly terror assault, Israelis were becoming a nation of shut-ins, ceding their public space and fearful of congregating with their fellow citizens.
Initially, though, Mr. Sharon confounded expectations. Rather than order an assault on the West Bank cities and villages from where suicide bombers were emerging, he largely held his fire, waiting until he was certain that the public – including the opposition Labour Party – would support another Sharon-led war. As terror atrocities increased, Israelis – even many on the left – grew increasingly frustrated with the newly passive Ariel Sharon and demanded action.
That moment finally came on Passover 2002, when terrorists attacked a seder celebration at a hotel in the coastal town of Netanya. Mr. Sharon mobilized the army. Reservist units were inundated with volunteers who hadn’t been called up but were insisting on joining their friends in battle. Within two years, a united Israel had defeated the Intifada. It was Ariel Sharon’s ultimate victory, and it was won in large part thanks to a combination of restraint and force, a hard-won understanding of the relationship between national unity and power.
Even as Mr. Sharon was consolidating a consensus around the war against terrorism, he was articulating a new political ground. He was the first Israeli politician to understand that the old left-right schism was being replaced by a centrist majority that agreed with the left about the need for a two-state solution and an end to occupation, but agreed with the right about the absence of a credible Palestinian partner for peace.
Mr. Sharon’s operative conclusion was that, if Israel couldn’t continue the occupation indefinitely but also couldn't negotiate a trustworthy peace, its only option was to unilaterally redraw its borders, without waiting for a Palestinian partner. The result was Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza a year after the end of the Intifada. For settlers, Sharon the builder became Sharon the destroyer.
In his various incarnations, Sharon managed to enrage Israelis on the left and the right. Now, though, Israelis across the spectrum mourn a man who devoted his life to defending Israel, and who had the courage to discard his own most cherished policies when those proved ineffective in keeping the Jews safe.
・Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is author of the recently published book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (Harper, 2013).
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