Ariel Sharon was only 25 when he first attracted attention and controversy — and at the very highest level. It was October 1953, and the young army officer was summoned by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s then prime minister.
Lieutenant Sharon had just commanded a raid against a West Bank village called Qibya, a reprisal for the murder of an Israeli woman and two children. Uproar had broken out after his men dynamited 45 houses and killed 67 Palestinian men, women and children, many of them buried under the rubble.
The operation bore the hallmarks of a distinctive and brutal style. Qibya was one of many bloody episodes in Sharon’s lifelong war with the Arabs. Elevated to the status of national hero, he spent his formative years fighting, disobeying orders and attracting admirers and enemies.
He saw action in Sinai in 1956 and again in 1967, when Israel’s victory changed the face of the Middle East. By 1971 he was crushing Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip, clearing patrol roads through the refugee camps and using hooded informers to hunt down armed Fatah cells. Thirty years later, as prime minister, Sharon deployed F16 fighters and Hellfire missiles over the same camps, targeting a new breed of Islamist militants who brought suicide bombings to the streets of Tel Aviv — and then astonishingly broke with the past by withdrawing from the entire Gaza Strip. That first ever Israeli pull-out of settlers and troops from occupied Palestinian land triggered a chain of events whose end is now shrouded in uncertainty.
Sharon has long been a demonic figure to Palestinians, Arabs and others. But he has also been a hero to many of his own people. In the 1973 war, when Israel faced possible defeat for the first time since 1948, he led a counter-attack across the Suez canal: dramatic photographs of him with his head bandaged burnished his aura. ”Arik, king of Israel,” the crowds chanted when he left the army to pursue a career in the nationalist Likud party.
But politics and security always go hand in hand in Israel, and he returned to the front lines in 1982, when, as defence minster he masterminded the disastrous invasion of Lebanon. Sharon’s idea was to crush Yasser Arafat’s PLO and force the Palestinians to accept Israeli hegemony and a homeland in Jordan.
The reality was that the siege of Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians by Israel’s Christian allies created new and bitter enemies among Shia Muslims from Lebanon to revolutionary Iran, and blackened Israel’s reputation.
Lebanon almost proved Sharon’s undoing. Cabinet colleagues accused him of lying about plans which entangled Israel in a dangerous clash with Syria. Forced to resign — though held only ”indirectly responsible” for the camp killings — he spent the following years in and out of power.
The constant was his tireless promotion of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, with giant maps in the boot of his ministerial limousine as he bulldozed aside critics, plundered government budgets and helped nationalist zealots seize barren West Bank hilltops as strategic assets in an unending war.
Characteristically, it was violence that brought him back to office after the first intifada and Yitzhak Rabin’s Oslo peace deal with the PLO collapsed. Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in October 2000 was a trigger for a second, deadlier Palestinian uprising.
Sharon masterminded a tough response to Palestinian suicide bombings, including the notorious incursion into Jenin and the construction of a ”security wall” that seemed as much about grabbing land as defending its shopping malls. Palestinian areas saw prolonged closures while Arafat, in declining health, was besieged in his Ramallah headquarters.
The change began when Sharon announced the ”disengagement” from Gaza. Ever the soldier, and determined to avoid the impression of a retreat under fire, he continued ”targeted assassinations” of Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives.
Ironically, he found himself being applauded by what remained of the demoralised Israeli peace camp — and much of the rest of the world. Rightwingers accused him of treachery. Palestinians, who lost three times as many dead as Israelis, were sceptical of his intentions.
Sharon’s journey is no simple story of a hawk transformed into a peace-loving dove. Like Rabin he recognised the limits of force. The big imponderable was always going to be what happened next: was it to be Gaza first and last, or the start of a process that would lead to withdrawal from the West Bank? Would more unilateral moves leave the big settlement blocs intact, East Jerusalem encircled and Palestinians confined to disconnected bantustans instead of an independent state?
By abandoning Likud and using his popularity to form a new party for March’s elections, Sharon might have provided answers to these questions. Whoever succeeds him is going to find it a lot harder. – Guardian Unlimited Â