Ariel Sharon lived much of his life like a farmer-soldier. He was like one of the Old Testament judges of Israel. First defending his own village from attackers and marauders, then chasing his enemies, conquering and destroying their villages, then building new villages, then defending the new ones, then chasing the enemies again, in a vicious circle.
Back in his youth, it began with armed skirmishes of shepherd boys that evolved over the years into huge battles with thousands of tanks on each side. Yet, the man Sharon remained the same throughout the war of independence in 1948, and the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and the war in Lebanon in 1982, and in the project of building settle-ments. Throughout his life he maintained that that which cannot be done with force can be done with extra force. He was the man of muscle.
We remember him in the blood-stained white bandage in the Suez Canal threatening to unleash the wrath of the legions against the politicians if they dared make even one small concession to the Arabs.
We remember him in Beirut during his ruthless crusade into Lebanon, trying to install by force a new order in the old Middle East.
And we remember him planting hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in Sinai, in the Golan Heights. Always the man of muscle.
For all those decades, I resented him. He symbolised everything I could not stand about my country: violent self-righteousness, a mixture of brutality and self-pity, an insatiable greed for land and a mystical religious phraseology that, coming from a secular hedonistic soldier, always struck me as hypocritical.
I have never met him or been in the same room with him. People say that, in a small circle, Sharon is a warm-hearted, generous, entertaining man; a charmer with a lively sense of humour, a lover of good food and luxury. I always refused to be impressed by such impressions. I loathed him for being the enemy of peace.
And then, two years ago, a sudden change occurred. A mysterious metamorphosis. Sharon’s rhetoric changed overnight. His vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals. When Sharon said for the first time, about two years ago, that the occupation is a disaster for the occupied and the occupiers, I could not believe my ears. When he started to speak about two states for the two nations, I thought he must be joking. When he mentioned the rights of the Palestinians, I thought he was mocking the slogans of the peace movement. And when he first announced that he was going to evacuate the Jewish settlers and the Israeli army from Gaza, I thought it was no more than a cunning strategy.
Nevertheless, he did it. They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements and he acted like one when he uprooted them. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he had won his many wars. Not a single building was left intact.
But, what he did in 35 years, he only had two years to begin to undo. All the settlements in the West Bank and on the Golan Heights still stand as monuments to the old Sharon. He is leaving us, taking with him the answers to two great mysteries: Why, in the autumn of his life, did he suddenly convert so radically, and what else was he going to do in the direction of peace and reconciliation?
One thing Sharon never succeeded in doing, not even when he evacuated Gaza to the last inch. He never really sat down with the Palestinians to try to talk with them the way one neighbour speaks to another. He is leaving us, even as he is signalling to us, ”I understand my mistakes. I finally tried to mend them, but life was just too short.” — Â