A Warrior's Legacy
Brilliant tactician,indomitable adversary, Ariel Sharon was a lion in defense of his nation
Jerusalem--Except for David Ben-Gurion, who shepherded the State of Israel into being, no one in modern times transformed this country as much as Ariel Sharon did. And no Israeli leader transformed himself as did the legendary fighter once he finally, after a half century of great deeds and misdeeds on the battlefield, became prime minister. Even as Sharon lay in a hospital bed at the edge of the capital, reportedly suffering irreversible brain damage after a massive hemorrhage last week, the historic changes--largely for the better--most recently wrought by this most willful of men were visible in every direction.
The streets and eateries of downtown Jerusalem were filled with unfrightened people. Merchants hustled to keep up with the trade. When Sharon took power nearly five years ago, Israel's cities would empty at dusk for fear of suicide bombers. In the prime minister's office, the new, emergency head of state, veteran politician Ehud Olmert, was taking over the newly dominant political party, Kadima (Forward), that Sharon created single-handedly. Kadima represents a movement that, until Sharon remade the Israeli political spectrum, existed here only in theory and dreams: the center. When Sharon won election on Feb. 6, 2001, the country's political life was, as ever, polarized between right and left, and he headed the then dominant Likud--a party he also brought into being, nearly three decades earlier.
On the Mediterranean coast, in the Gaza Strip, there are no Israeli settlers and no Israeli soldiers present anymore. The hellish occupation, begun with the 1967 Six-Day War, is over; for better or for worse, Gaza is now fully in the hands of its Palestinian population. Five years ago, it was still part of "Greater Israel,"and the last person anybody thought would ever give it up was Ariel Sharon. Slicing along the edges of the West Bank, a concrete and chain-link security barrier is taking rough shape as the border between Israel and a future state of Palestine. Hated by Palestinians as the "apartheid wall," it has taken land and disrupted life for thousands of them. But the wall has prevented suicide bombers from entering Israel, and it points the way to large-scale settlement evacuation and the final end of the occupation. Before Sharon took office, the wall existed only on paper.
Outsize.In a deep coma in the seventh-floor neurosurgery ward of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, his two sons nearby, Sharon, 77, can no longer fasten his iron grip on the country that had come to see him as indispensable, irreplaceable, a benevolent dictator not so much loved as revered. An outsize figure of fierce determination, he was a bold and cunning defender of his tiny nation in a hostile, dangerous part of the world. "We have no one who is strong like him,"said Yosef Zakaim, 67, whose jewelry store windows had to be replaced twice after terrorist bombings a few years ago. "He's been like a grandfather. People trusted him. The country misses him."
Yet Israel without Sharon is not adrift, not facing the abyss, not by any means. It is still fighting with the Palestinians, but the raging guerrilla war that Sharon faced when he took office has ebbed. The economy, flat on its back five years ago, is fairly booming, although the ranks of Israel's poor have grown. Going into the March 28 election, the first opinion polls taken after Sharon's incapacitation show Kadima--even led by Olmert--holding a commanding lead.
Sharon not only changed his country's course; he appears, in the shock of his sudden absence, to have also set it on a fairly secure new one. After a half century of spearheading Israel in its wars and territorial expansions, Sharon cut loose from his former comrades, the settlers, shrank Israel's borders to more realistic dimensions, and carved out a new Israeli consensus--not necessarily for peace but for pragmatism. He melded the right's hawkish policy on security, which he basically authored, with the left's dovish policy on territory, which he had spent decades fighting. He invented a new Israeli political center and, perhaps, a new Israel. Sitting in the prime minister's office, recalling his long first career as a belligerent opponent of compromise, Sharon often said, "What you see from here is not what you see from there."
Sharon had two predecessors as Israeli warriors turned peacemakers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. But Begin, who traded land for peace with Egypt--with then defense minister Sharon overseeing the destruction of Israeli settlements in Sinai--later launched a disastrous war in Lebanon and a misbegotten campaign of settlement-building in the West Bank--with Sharon leading the way on both fronts. Rabin tried to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, but the hopes of the Oslo accords were attended by an upsurge in terrorism, and five years after he was assassinated by an Israeli radical, Rabin's bold attempt was shattered by the intifada. In contrast, Sharon's tenure ends on a high note.
Long before becoming prime minister, Sharon was an Israeli icon. Weighing some 300 pounds, lumbering along with a slight limp from his first war in 1948, speaking in a booming voice with his trademark lisp, a self-satisfied chuckle, and a nervously twitching nose, he was the clich? turn of every Israeli mimic, professional and amateur. Until the past decade, when his style became more statesmanlike, Sharon fairly radiated belligerence. Nationalist hawks had a cultlike admiration for him, while doves and Arabs felt dread and hatred. In private, Sharon had a penchant for "sarcastic humor, and in our meetings we would ridicule the colleagues of our choice, which gave us great mutual enjoyment," said Yossi Sarid, elder statesman of the Israeli peace movement who, as a Knesset opposition leader in Sharon's first term, held mandatory discussions with his longtime nemesis.
For an indication of the sheer sweep of his career, it may be recalled that Sharon's rising political prospects were written off in 1982, when an Israeli judicial commission determined that, as defense minister during the Lebanon War, he bore "indirect responsibility" for the massacre by Israeli-allied Lebanese militias of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.
"Don't trust them!" Sharon first made his reputation in the early 1950s as the headstrong creator of Israel's paratroop corps and field commander of its daring cross-border raids against Palestinian infiltrators. He had his first brush with national and international infamy at age 25, when, in retaliation for the murders of an Israeli woman and her two children by Jordanian terrorists, he ordered the demolition of dozens of homes in the village of Kibya. Afterward, 69 villagers were found dead in the rubble; Sharon and his colleagues protested that the victims had evaded their preliminary searches. Still, nearly three decades before the names Sabra and Shatilla would come to haunt his reputation, there was Kibya.
Nicknamed Arik, he was born Ariel Sheinerman on a north-central moshav,or cooperative farm, named Kfar Malal, where he grew up farming and fighting Arabs. At 20, fighting in the War of Independence, he was left wounded on the battlefield and barely survived. His mother, Vera, instructed him from her deathbed, "Don't trust them!" She may have been thinking of their moshav neighbors, or their Arab neighbors. Whatever, the maternal injunction stuck with the son.
In the Army, Sharon was brilliant, the prot?g? of the similarly constituted Moshe Dayan, and he soon found favor with Ben-Gurion, who appreciated Sharon's talent but didn't entirely trust him. Later, Begin joked that he feared Sharon might "ring the Knesset with tanks." The high point of his military career was the decisive drive to the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The low point was Lebanon.
Sharon's personal life was marred by tragedy. His first wife, Margalit, was killed in a 1962 traffic accident. Five years later, their son, Gur, was killed in a shooting accident with his father's rifle. Sharon remarried, to Margalit's sister, Lily. She died of cancer shortly before his election as prime minister. Sharon, for a time, was dogged by allegations of corruption. With his younger son, Gilad, who runs the family's Sycamore Ranch, in the northern Negev Desert, he barely escaped indictment for accepting multimillion-dollar bribes a couple of years ago. His elder son and political right-hand man, Omri, resigned his Knesset seat and faces a possible prison sentence after admitting perjury and other crimes stemming from the financing of his father's 1999 Likud leadership campaign.
Most Israelis, hungry for security and trusting in military power, have long been willing to forget the troubling aspects of Sharon's record. That was never more evident than since the intifada threatened Israelis with terrorism of a ferocity they had never known. Sharon contributed to the outbreak of the intifada with his provocative visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount in September 2000, just as the Oslo peace process was unraveling, but most Israelis didn't see it that way. Five months later, Sharon won the prime minister's office by a landslide.
His first term was a catastrophe. The country was paralyzed by suicide bombings, and the economy collapsed. Yet Sharon fought on, promising victory over terrorism. And by projecting strength and certainty, he was re-elected. The loser, the Labor Party's Amram Mitzna, said, "I just can't understand the Israeli voter." But newspaper columnist Nahum Barnea did. "The public doesn't support Sharon," Barnea wrote. "It clings to him."
In his second term, Sharon repaid Israelis for their trust. Finally, he brought the intifada down to what passes in Israel as a tolerable level, and this, together with the rebound in the international high-tech industry, recharged the economy. After prevailing over his Palestinian enemies--outliving Yasser Arafat--Sharon next prevailed over his longtime Israeli allies: first the settlers, with "disengagement," then the unreconstituted Likud hawks, with the abandonment of his old party and creation of Kadima.
Betrayal. While Sharon has carved out a new center among Israelis, there are some who still feel the bitterness of betrayal. "While I pray for his health, and I don't wish what he's going through even on my enemies, I can't forget or forgive his destruction of thousands of homes in Gush Katif [the old settlement bloc in Gaza] and Samaria [the biblical name for the upper West Bank]," said Pinchas Wallerstein, chief strategist for the settler movement. And Pat Robertson, one of the matchmakers in the American evangelical movement's embrace of radical right-wing Christian Zionism, made the startling suggestion that Sharon's stroke was divine retribution. "He was dividing God's land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course. .?.?. God says, 'This land belongs to me. You'd better leave it alone,'?" Robertson warned, even while expressing sympathy for the condition of his "good friend."
Ariel Sharon made countless enemies over the course of his long and storied career. At age 75, though, he suddenly summoned the will and vision to reinvent himself as a pragmatist, and one no less daring and singular than the hard-liner he had been for so long. With his remarkable transformation, Sharon won the admiration of the Israeli and western mainstream. "A lot of countries, a lot of people in the world who used to be against us, have changed their minds in the last two years," said Zakaim, the Jerusalem jeweler. This was Sharon's final bequest to his country. He made so much history, and now history is waiting for him.
This story appears in the January 16, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.