1. Algemeiner（http://www.algemeiner.com）
Reflections on Ariel Sharon’s Leadership and Courage , 13 January 2014
JERUSALEM – I was privileged to know, appreciate, and befriend Ariel Sharon both before and during the years he served as Israel’s 11th prime minister. He became, through the years, a dear friend. In today’s parlance, we were on each other’s “like list.” We frequently spoke on the phone. Whenever I visited Israel, or he visited the United States, we would make time to see each other.
While in Israel this week for Sharon’s funeral, I’ve thought a great deal about our relationship and his legacy.
At the time of his stroke eight years ago, Sharon was at the height of his powers. Not only had he been elected overwhelmingly a few years earlier as prime minister of Israel, but he had brought the U.S.-Israel relationship to unprecedented levels by securing a letter from President George W. Bush. In that historic letter, for the first time the United States indicated that it supported Israel holding on to some territory in the West Bank in any peace arrangement based on changes in history. And the American president made clear that the Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved through the prospective new state of Palestine, not in Israel proper.
The context for this breakthrough was the controversial decision that Sharon made for Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. To this day, particularly because of the subsequent takeover of Gaza by Hamas, that decision has been the subject of much criticism. Whatever one’s views on Sharon’s initiative, and I believe that there is still much to be said for the decision, what must be regarded with esteem were the questions that Sharon posed that led to his decision.
I believe that the way he addressed this issue spoke volumes about Sharon’s whole life: his leadership abilities, his ability to think seriously and responsibly, his talent for looking at the bigger picture and breaking with past thinking if he deemed it necessary. And, of course, his love of Israel and the need to do what one has to do to ensure its future and security.
What Sharon saw in 2005, at the tail end of the Second Intifada, was first that Israel did not have a partner for peace. Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had rejected the generous peace offers at Camp David and launched the brutal campaign of terrorism and suicide bombings. Israel under Sharon had managed to defeat this campaign, but it was clear that there was no Palestinian ready to make peace.
Historically, when Israel had no partner for peace, the response was: we must tough it out, remain strong, and wait for change on the other side. And Sharon had been a key Israeli, both on the military and political levels, to articulate this approach.
In this instance, however, he challenged that way of thinking because he understood that Israel faced a number of threats, not only the rejectionism and terrorism of the Palestinians. He understood that exactly because the Palestinians were not ready for peace, that Israel could not afford to stand still. Time was not working in Israel’s favor. The notion of a one-state solution between the Mediterranean and the Jordan was starting to gain traction. This would be a disaster for the whole enterprise of Jewish independence since taking in the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza would make it impossible for Israel to remain both a Jewish and democratic state.
And he saw that international opinion was turning against Israel and while Israel believed that the absence of peace was strictly due to Palestinian hostility, the world was tired of the seemingly unending conflict and took the easy way out by blaming the “occupier.” Boycotts, isolation, one-state ideas seemed to be the wave of the future for the “occupier” of the territories.
And so Sharon chose to withdraw from Gaza, along the way securing the letter from President Bush.
I highlight Sharon’s thinking on this matter for two reasons: to illuminate what a remarkable leader he was despite some of the controversial actions he took earlier in his career. And to point out how much Israel misses him to this day with all the complexities that face the country.
Sharon’s low moment was the events surrounding Sabra and Shatilla during the first Lebanon War. He paid a price for his role, but he came back. And he came back as a more uniting figure. He was able to speak to both of the public’s fundamental demands: for peace and security. There was great faith in his protecting the country as he did in defeating Palestinian terror. And at the same time, his thinking on Gaza reflected a creativity about Israel’s future and an approach that at the least could lead people to conclude that Israel was ready to act for peace even if the other side was not ready.
Sharon had moved from being a warrior to becoming a statesman. As was true in the case of the late Yitzhak Rabin, so too with Sharon ― the changeover is overstated. In both capacities, Sharon was thinking and acting on behalf of his beloved Israel.
Sometimes this meant strength and toughness. Other times it meant creative non-military decision-making.
Ariel Sharon’s legacy is a more secure State of Israel, safe on its borders and resolved to put an end to the campaign of Palestinian terrorism once and for all. It is not only Israel, but the Jewish people, the U.S., and the international community who have lost a towering figure who offered hope to his people and the region.
・Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.
2.Tablet(http://www.tabletmag.com)
(1) Ariel Sharon’s Legacy
Talking to the former Prime Minister’s longtime advisor, Raanan Gissin, 11 January 2014
by Daniella Cheslow
Former Prime Minister Ariel “Arik” Sharon, who had been on life support since suffering a massive stroke in 2006, died today at the Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv.
Sharon, who was 85, fought in every Israeli war since 1948. Known as “the Bulldozer,” he was notorious for using an iron fist against the Palestinians in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. When he suffered a stroke on January 4, 2006, he was at the height of his power, having removed all Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip the previous summer. He had been in a comatose state for the eight years since.
Raanan Gissin was Sharon’s political advisor and close friend for a decade. We spoke by phone about Sharon’s legacy.
What drew you to work with Sharon?
Before I was Sharon’s political advisor, I was his press advisor when he served as Infrastructure Minister under Netanyahu in 1996. The things he did for Israel’s infrastructure, the water and electricity―they were challenging things that normally a prime minister would do. And I saw that I could contribute as a partner to this.
I am a man of action and so was Sharon. What he believed he did as well.
When did you last see Sharon?
I saw him the day he was brought to hospital eight years ago. Since then, only his sons and the doctors have seen him.
What was Sharon’s personality like?
He had a great sense of humor. He really could relate to people. Contrary to his image in the foreign press―that he would eat Arabs for breakfast―he was actually a very gentle person.
What was his proudest achievement?
The issue of natural gas in Israel really took shape when Sharon was in office as infrastructure minister, and today we see the results―we are producing gas here. The process began in 1996. [The electric company] began to move from oil to gas under Sharon.
Politically, Sharon was proudest of the disengagement from Gaza. He had a clear vision that we had to disconnect from Gaza, and then the political process began to work. The fact that Arafat was not willing to do his part is besides the point. Sharon pushed the government to do things no one thought could be done. Who would have thought that Sharon would dismantle the settlements in Gaza? His vision was long-ranging for the State of Israel.
What did he often wish he could improve or do again?
He would say about the things he did, that he learned the hard way. He admitted that what happened in Lebanon, it was not all his fault but he recognized where he failed and where he succeeded.
Do you mean Sabra and Shatila? [The 1982 massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Maronites during the First Lebanon War, which an Israeli commission held then-Defense Minister Sharon responsible for. He was forced to step down in 1983.]
It’s not only Sabra and Shatila, but the whole Lebanon war, the attempt to create a new rift in Lebanon. He would say later that we did our best, but that he felt he was abandoned in Lebanon by the Lebanese, the Syrians and the U.S.
But you can see that even after Sharon was forced out after Sabra and Shatila, he still became the Prime Minister of Israel. He learned from his successes and failures and tried to change. This is the greatness of leadership.
What is your favorite memory with Ariel Sharon?
With Sharon at his ranch, with the cows. He said his life was not in government, but on the farm. I spent a lot of time there with him.
If he hadn’t had a stroke, where would Israel be today?
If Sharon had not had a stroke and would have continued on his path as prime minister, he could have brought Israel to a much better place. Maybe not to peace, but in the direction of peace with the Palestinians.
I feel a great debt to the man for what he did. I am happy I had the chance to work with someone who did such great things for the State of Israel.
(2)Let’s Remember the Dark Side of Ariel Sharon’s Legacy―and Bury ‘Sharonism’ With Him
As defense minister, he presided over disaster in Beirut, and as prime minister, over disengagement, not peacemaking, 13 January 2014
by Gershom Gorenberg
In his death, Ariel Sharon has suddenly reentered our lives, like a long-repressed memory. Between his final breath and his funeral, on Monday afternoon, politicians of nearly all Israeli camps and the pundits who write as if they speak for the whole country will describe Sharon as fallen giant of Israel’s founding generation. They’ll praise his battlefield courage and extol his accomplishments as prime minister.
This is the strange ritual of nations when they bury leaders – like over-zealous morticians, making them look better in death than in life. I can suggest better ways to mark the passing of Sharon, finally, after so many years.
The first is a collective viewing of the 2008 film Waltz With Bashir, which portrays how writer-director Ari Folman set out to regain his own repressed memory of the summer of 1982, the summer of the First Lebanon War, when he was a young soldier – and especially his memory of the days he spent deployed outside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps while Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies were massacring Palestinians inside. Through Folman’s search, the film attacks Israel’s collective amnesia about the war, the massacre and then-defense minister Ariel Sharon.
In 1983, the Kahan Commission of Inquiry concluded that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for ignoring the clear danger of sending the Phalangist militia into the camps. In consequence, it recommended that he be dismissed from his position as defense minister. Prime Minister Menachem Begin carried out the letter of the recommendation, not the spirit: Sharon lost the defense post, but remained in the cabinet. That was the opening that allowed him to stay in politics and, eventually, to become prime minister.
But as Waltz shows, the massacre was only ― if one can possibly say “only” here ― the most blatant horror of an unnecessary war. And it was Ariel Sharon’s war. It was his idea that Israel could use military power to rearrange the Middle East, that in a single stroke it could invade Lebanon, put the Phalange in government, and destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The war expressed the qualities that made Ariel Sharon who he was: recklessness, trust in force, and certainty that Israel could impose its will unilaterally. Other Israeli politicians – Ehud Barak comes to mind – have operated under the simplistic conception that Israel is involved in a chess game with its opponents. Sharon behaved as if he were playing alone, solving a chess problem, rather than playing a match. He was a solipsist with power.
Sharon showed these dangerous traits from the first years of his long military career. In the early 1950s, he began his ascent in the Israel Defense Forces as commander of cross-border raids in retaliation for Arab terror attacks in Israel. Sometimes he carried out orders; sometimes he exceeded them; historians still debate which he was doing in which case. He led the infamous October 1953 raid on the village of Qibya, in which his troops killed some 60 civilians. Sharon was the perfect man to implement the policy: The rationale was that force would deter further attacks. Instead, the result was escalation on the Jordanian and Egyptian borders, eventually leading to the 1956 Sinai war. Sharon did not learn the lesson.
Instead, he showed in that war that he could be reckless with his own soldiers’ lives. As commander of the paratroops, Sharon ignored orders and sent a battalion into the Mitla Pass – and into withering Egyptian fire. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers paid with their lives for his impatience to glory.
So it went. In late May 1967, as the standoff with Egypt dragged on, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol insisted on giving more time to reach a diplomatic solution while his generals pressed him to go to war. Twice, after meetings with Eshkol, Sharon suggested to Yitzhak Rabin, then chief of staff, that the army seize power. (The source for this is Sharon’s own account to army’s history department, uncovered in 2004 by historian Ami Gloska.) Yet proposing to overthrow the elected government didn’t end Sharon’s military career.
Instead, he rose to become head of the IDF’s Southern Command. In January 1972, he expelled thousands of Bedouin from the northeast Sinai. The land was intended for Jewish settlement but again, it seems, Sharon was overeager. Following a secret IDF inquiry, he was reprimanded for “exceeding authority.” Those words could have been Sharon’s middle name. His last chapter as a general, the one eulogists will cite most, came during the Yom Kippur War. You can check the honesty of a eulogy by whether it also cites the constant clashes with commanders as he flouted orders.
All this turned out to be training for Sharon the politician. In his first Knesset term, as a member of the Likud opposition, he advised the nascent Gush Emunim movement on where to make illegal settlement bids in the West Bank. The first attempt ended with troops removing the settlers. Sharon, exploiting his parliamentary immunity, stormed through the mel�・e, shouting at soldiers, “Refuse orders! Refuse orders!”
When the Likud took power, Sharon became its settlement czar. He was still thinking like a general, seizing hilltops, placing new settlements as forward positions between Arab communities. Tendrils of settlement would divide the West Bank and block creation of a Palestinian state. This was of a piece with his plan for remaking Lebanon once he became defense minister: He would simply move his pawns on the board and establish a new order. The ruinous success of his settlement strategy emerged in the Oslo process that he totally opposed: The fragmented bits of land under Palestinian autonomy were what was left between his tendrils.
When he became prime minister, in 2001, Sharon shocked Israel, and the world, by deciding to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The man who had insisted on holding the whole Land of Israel decided to build a security fence through the West Bank, and declared he would carry out a withdrawal from parts of that territory as well. The warrior had changed direction, had accepted the need for compromise and peace, many people said.
This was a misreading. He called the pullout from Gaza “disengagement” ― as in disengaging from the enemy to better lines. His design for the fence left the major tendrils in place. Sharon remained Sharon. He saw that even under George W. Bush, the U.S. government was pressing him to negotiate a final two-state agreement. His answer, as always, was unilateral action: He would evade negotiations and set Israel’s borders himself.
Sharon’s magnetism radiated from his assertion of Jewish power. One element of Zionism involved bringing Jews back into the political world, to make us actors in our own collective fate. Sharon took this element to the extreme: He embodied the fantasy of a historically weak people of being the only actors in their fate.
As a result, his gambits ended in political and moral disaster. Lebanon is just one example. His settlement tendrils, rather than protecting Israel, have entangled it in occupation. By leaving Gaza unilaterally, without negotiated security arrangements or a stable government to take Israel’s place, he created the vacuum that Hamas filled. Afterward, while Sharon lay comatose, his former lieutenants Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni abandoned Sharonism and came to terms with the reality of other actors, the limits of force, and the need to negotiate.
Which brings us to the second way to mark the passing of Ariel Sharon, after we restore our memory of who he really was. Secretary of State John Kerry has been shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah, trying to shape the agreement that Israel and the Palestinians each desperately need for their future. Israel needs to cast aside the fantasy of being able to act alone that Sharon offered. It should seize this opportunity to negotiate seriously, and bury Sharonism with Sharon.
・Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Unmaking of Israel and The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. His Twitter feed is @GershomG.
(3) A Divider by Nature, Sharon Tried to Unite Israelis Behind Ending the Occupation
A stalwart of the right, Sharon was a pragmatist whose mission was to teach Jews how to survive in the Middle East, 13 January 2014
by Yossi Klein Halevi
In the plaza before the Knesset, a thin line of mourners slowly passed the flag-covered coffin of Ariel Sharon. An old man in a long white beard and big black kippah saluted. Another old man brought a single rose. Yet another came wrapped in a giant Israeli flag. Among them were veterans of Sharon’s commando Unit 101 from the 1950s, the armored and infantry units he commanded in Sinai in 1967, the paratrooper brigade he led across the Suez Canal in 1973 to win the Yom Kippur War. The cold, depleted Jerusalem afternoon belonged to them.
I had expected multitudes. But Israelis had gotten used to Sharon’s absence; if anything, his release from the body after eight years of coma came as relief. Still, some of us felt the need to personally say goodbye and thank the man who had devoted his life to trying to keep the Jews safe. That I would join a mourning procession for Ariel Sharon would have once seemed to me inconceivable. Yet there I was, honoring the memory of a man whose impact on Israel I had once regarded as devastating.
The Israel that I moved to as a new immigrant in the summer of 1982 was the Israel of Ariel Sharon. As defense minister, he had just led Israel in the invasion of Lebanon, the first war Israel had initiated without a sense of impending existential threat. It was a summer of firsts. For the first time, Israel was besieging and bombing an Arab capital – Beirut. For the first time, Israel was fighting an asymmetrical war against terrorists embedded in urban neighborhoods, and the civilian casualty rates were rising.
And for the first time, Israelis were failing to unite behind a military operation; in fact, it was actually inciting the deepening divisions between them. Entire reservist units would return their equipment after coming back from stints in Lebanon and proceed directly to demonstrations in Jerusalem. Israelis shouted at each other on the streets, denouncing political opponents as enemies of the Jews, betrayers of Jewish history. In Sharon’s Israel, existential fears, rather than being directed at external enemies, were now directed against one’s fellow Israelis. Left and right agreed: The greatest danger facing the country came from the rival camp.
And then – Sabra and Shatila, the massacre by Israel’s Phalangist Christian allies of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps. No, Israel wasn’t directly responsible, and Sharon wasn’t the murderer that left-wing Israelis accused him of being. Yet somehow the massacre seemed a fitting culmination of Israel’s most sordid war. But it didn’t end there. On February 10, 1983, the Kahan Commission, appointed by the government to investigate Sabra and Shatila, found Sharon guilty of negligence and recommended removing him as defense minister.
That night, Peace Now demonstrators marched to the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, where the cabinet was meeting in emergency session. I heard a bulletin on the radio: A grenade had just been thrown at Peace Now demonstrators, and one protester was dead. I rushed to the scene. There was still blood on the pavement. Though the Peace Now protesters had dispersed, several right-wing counter-demonstrators lingered, chanting slogans in support of Sharon, as if nothing had happened.
A Jew was killed here tonight, I said. Who sent you here, one of them replied, Shimon Peres? His friends laughed. What demons, I wondered, were being unleashed ― however inadvertently ― by Ariel Sharon?
Today, though, I mourn Sharon as one of our greatest leaders. I voted for him as prime minister and came to see him as the leader of my camp: the Israeli center. However improbably, Sharon, stalwart of the right, was the first Israeli politician to intuit the end of the country’s left-right schism and its replacement with a new centrist majority that agrees with the left about a two-state solution, but also agrees with the right about the absence of a credible Palestinian partner for peace.
In early 2001, when Sharon took over as prime minister, terror attacks were happening on an almost daily basis; for the first time since 1948, the home front had become the actual front. Israelis avoided congregating with fellow citizens, fearful of attracting suicide bombers. The experts insisted there was no military solution to this level of terror. Sharon insisted otherwise.
As an elder statesman, Sharon had learned the lessons of his failures in the Lebanon War. He understood that a democracy cannot win against terrorists unless its people are united. And so Sharon set about ensuring that, this time, the entire country, from left to right, would support him in war. He did so, initially at least, by holding his fire. As atrocity followed atrocity, Sharon remained oddly, maddeningly, restrained. A suicide bomber killed close to two dozen young Russian immigrants in a Tel Aviv discoth�・que, and still Sharon failed to act decisively.
What’s happened to the old Arik, frustrated Israelis wondered. Restraint can also be a form of strength, Sharon replied enigmatically. Even left-wing Israelis began demanding that Sharon respond – and that was precisely what he was waiting for. He found his moment with the Passover Massacre – the terror attack on a Seder in the Park Hotel in April 2002 that left 30 dead and injured 140 more. Sharon mobilized the army, and the response was overwhelming: many reservists who weren’t called up appeared anyway, demanding to fight. Within two years the Intifada was over. It was arguably Sharon’s greatest victory. And he won it by recognizing that effective use of power depends on forging national consensus.
Sharon’s life is the story of the Jewish return to power. Born before World War Two, he was the child created by Jewish extremity. His excesses, and his correctives, reflect our collective struggles in search of balance, as we moved from the Holocaust to sovereignty and, then, to seemingly endless siege. Sharon divided and united, built and destroyed – and he sometimes destroyed what he himself built. The father of the settlements was the only Israeli leader to dismantle settlements – twice, in Sinai in 1982 and then in Gaza in 2005, thereby proving that only the pragmatic right could effectively challenge the ideological right. He initiated the founding of the Likud in 1973, convincing disparate rightwing parties to join together in a coalition that eventually unseated the Labor Party. And then, as prime minister, when the Likud failed to support his planned withdrawal from Gaza, he turned against the party he had created and formed a new rival, the centrist party Kadima ― Forward.
In fact there was a pattern behind those seeming contradictions. Sharon was not a peacemaker; his mission was to teach the Jews how to survive in the Middle East. He was the leader who showed us a way out of Israel’s dilemma ― an inability to maintain the occupation and an inability to find a worthy partner for peace. That was the real significance of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza: Israel would determine its own borders, without waiting for an illusory partner. What left and right never quite understood about Sharon was his essential pragmatism. Whatever he believed would make Israel safer, better able to survive as the lone non-Arab state in the region, became absorbed into his worldview.
I asked my friend Arik Achmon, a lifelong member of the Labor Party who served with Sharon in the paratroopers beginning in the 1950s and whose story I told in my recent book Like Dreamers, what he most admired about his former commander. Achmon executed Sharon’s daring and successful plan to cross the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, bitterly opposed Sharon’s settlement-building, and finally advocated for the idea of unilateral withdrawal from the territories that Sharon himself implemented. “The louder people around him talked, the quieter his tone became,” Achmon replied. “His very presence in battle calmed the atmosphere.”
・Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation. He is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
4. National Review（http://www.nationalreview.com）
The Corner The one and only.
Ariel Sharon: Larger than Life, 11 January 2014
by Caroline Glick
Ariel Sharon, who died today at age 85, after being suspended comatose, between life and death for the past eight years, was the final Israeli prime minister from the generation that fought in the 1948 War of Independence.
And as with others of his generation, the growth and development of the country were reflected in his career.
Sharon was a dazzling military commander. He was one of the original authors of Israel’s trailblazing counter-terror strategies. The large battles against regular armies that he commanded in the 1956 Suez campaign, the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War are still taught in military academies around the world for their tactical brilliance.
Sharon was a risk-taker. The most prominent shared quality of his military battles and his political ones was that they were always over high stakes. As a general, Sharon’s gutsiness paid off in spades more often than not. As a politician, the results were less impressive.
His two big gambles as a political leader were the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Although the results of both actions were mixed, Israel could have won the gains it made in both at far less cost, if it had not gone along with Sharon’s plans.
Perhaps the most notable way in which Sharon’s life is a reflection of his country, at least outside of Israel, is that the blood libels published against him in the Western media are of a piece with the overall slander of Israel in the European and U.S. mainstream media.
Like Israel as a whole, Sharon saw his good name dragged through the mud by the Western media with tales published about him against which he had no means of defending himself. Sharon’s powerlessness was exposed in the libel suit he filed against Time magazine for a 1982 article in which the media alleged that Sharon had planned the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian militiamen. When the jury rendered its ruling, it declared that although the story was false, Sharon had no right to monetary damages, because the lie was not actionable.
As prime minister, Sharon was caricatured as a baby eater, as a Nazi, the murderer of Jesus, and a hook nosed, greedy Jew. In the hours following the announcement of his passing, he was libeled repeatedly by such outlets as the BBC. And as was the case throughout his life, and throughout the life of Israel, so now after he has died, the libelers will pay no price for their misdeeds.
Sharon was one of the warmest, most engaging political leaders Israel has ever seen. He had an infectious sense of humor, a true love of life, of Israel, and of Israelis that made even his greatest Israeli critics like him.
Sharon was larger than life. His accomplishments and failures were similarly outsized. And while much of what happened to him, particularly at the hands of the media, reflects the larger predicament of all of Israel, there can be no doubt that Ariel Sharon was one of a kind.
・Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post and the director of the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Her new book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East will be released on March 4.
5. Israel Documents (http://israelsdocuments.blogspot.jp)
Ariel Sharon, 1928-2014, Israel's Eleventh Prime Minister: Three Recordings from his Military Career, 12 January 2014
On January 11, 2014, Ariel "Arik" Sharon passed away, after being in a coma for eight years. Sharon was Israel's eleventh prime minister, a government minister, a Knesset member representing the Likud, and the founder and leader of the Kadima party, Before entering politics he was a general in the IDF, one of the commanders of the paratroopers unit, founder of the 101 special unit and OC Southern Command.
In memory of Sharon, the Israel State Archives presents here two video clips and one audio recording from the period of his service in the Southern Command. In December 1969, Sharon was appointed to command Israel's southern front, at the height of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt on the Suez Canal. Sharon introduced more dynamic defensive methods, rather than the static approach represented by the Bar Lev line of outposts along the Canal. In August 1970, a ceasefire was reached between Israel and Egypt. In 1971, Sharon carried out a major operation against terrorism in the Gaza Strip, using aggressive methods and harsh measures which aroused considerable criticism. He succeeded in almost entirely eradicating the terrorists and bringing peace and quiet to the Strip. Sharon remained in Southern Command until July 1973, when he was replaced by Shmuel Gorodish Gonen.
The first films shows a visit to an outpost on the Suez Canal by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan accompanied by Maj. General Sharon in August 1971:
The second clip is an audio recording in Hebrew of commanders in the Six Day War talking about their experiences and the reasons for the victory, among them Arik Sharon, then a division commander (June 1967):
The final recording shows OC Southern Command Sharon visiting a Bedouin encampment, accompanied by Gorodish and other officers, and awarding a war ribbon to one of the inhabitants (November 1972):
（End）
