Ariel Sharon, Israeli Hawk Who Sought Peace on His Terms, Dies at 85
Ariel
Sharon, one of the most influential figures in Israel’s history, a
military commander and political leader who at the height of his power
redrew the country’s electoral map, only to suffer a severe stroke from
which he never recovered, died Saturday in a hospital near Tel Aviv. He
was 85.
Gilad
Sharon, one of his two surviving sons, told reporters at the hospital
where the former prime minister spent most of the last eight years that
his father “went when he decided to go.”
A
cunning and unforgiving general who went on to hold nearly every top
government post, including prime minister at the time he was struck ill,
Mr. Sharon spent his final years in what doctors defined as a state of
minimal consciousness in a sterile suite at the hospital, Sheba Medical
Center. Visits were restricted for fear of infection.
Timeline: Sharon, Through the Years
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the nation bowed its head to a man he
described as “first and foremost a brave soldier and an outstanding
military commander” who “had a central role in the battle for Israel’s
security from the very beginning.”
In
many ways, Mr. Sharon’s story was that of his country. A champion of an
iron-fisted, territory-expanding Zionism for most of his life, he
stunned Israel and the world in 2005 with a Nixon-to-China reversal and withdrew all Israeli settlers
and troops from Gaza. He then abandoned his Likud Party and formed a
centrist movement called Kadima focused on further territorial
withdrawal and a Palestinian state next door.
Mr. Sharon was incapacitated
eight years ago, in January 2006, and in elections that followed,
Kadima still won the most votes. His former deputy, Ehud Olmert, became
prime minister. But the impact of Mr. Sharon’s political shift went
beyond Kadima. The hawkish Likud Party, led by his rival, Mr. Netanyahu,
was returned to power in 2009, and Mr. Netanyahu, too, said then that
he favored a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
An
architect of Israeli settlements in the occupied lands, Mr. Sharon
gained infamy for his harsh tactics against the Palestinians over whom
Israel ruled. That reputation began to soften after his election as
prime minister in 2001, when he first talked about the inevitability of
Palestinian statehood.
Israeli
settlers, who had seen him as their patron, considered him an enemy
after he won re-election in 2003. In addition to withdrawing from Gaza
and a small portion of the West Bank, he completed part of a 450-mile
barrier along and through parts of the West Bank — a barrier he had
originally opposed. It not only reduced infiltration by militants into
Israel but also provided the outline of a border with a future
Palestinian state, albeit one he envisioned as having limited
sovereignty.
Before
becoming ill, Mr. Sharon was said to have been planning further
withdrawals of Jewish settlers and troops from Palestinian lands in
hopes of fulfilling the central goal of his life: ensuring a viable and
strong state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland.
But
even if he had stayed healthy, his plans might have been interrupted by
the rise of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the 2006 conflict
with the militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and increased
concerns over Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr.
Sharon viewed negotiating with Palestinian leaders as pointless; he
felt they had neither the will nor the power to live up to their
promises. Mr. Sharon said he believed that by carrying out the
withdrawal unilaterally and building the barrier to include large
Israeli settlement blocks, he was ensuring a Jewish state with
defensible borders. Critics argued that by redeploying without handing
responsibility to the Palestinian Authority, he had increased the power
of Hamas.
Mr.
Sharon’s final years in power contained surprises beyond the settlement
reversal. He had long shown disdain for diplomacy, yet calculated his
new path directly in line with what he thought the United States would
accept and support. And though he had forced Yasir Arafat, the
Palestinian leader, to remain a prisoner in his Ramallah compound, Mr.
Sharon built a cordial relationship with his successor, Mahmoud Abbas,
after Mr. Arafat died in 2004.
Despite
years of antagonism, Hosni Mubarak, then president of Egypt, and King
Abdullah II of Jordan gave Mr. Sharon public support in pursuing a
solution to the conflict. Those close to him said he had always been
more pragmatic than most people realized.
Pragmatism and Resilience
Thick-limbed
and heavyset, with blue eyes, a ready smile and a shock of blond hair
that whitened as he aged, Mr. Sharon was the archetypal Zionist
farmer-soldier. He was not religiously observant, but he was deeply
attached to Jewish history and culture and to the land where much of
that history had occurred. He believed unshakably that reliance on
others had brought his people disaster, and that Jews must assert and
defend their collective needs without embarrassment or fear of censure.
As
he put it in “Warrior,” his 1989 autobiography, “The great question of
our day is whether we, the Jewish people of Israel, can find within us
the will to survive as a nation.”
Defiant
and brusque, Mr. Sharon had many enemies, who denounced him as
self-promoting, self-righteous and unyielding. But he was also courtly
to his political rivals and had a surprising sense of humor. His popular
appeal was consistently underestimated.
He
was dismissed as washed up in 1983 when he was forced to resign as
defense minister after an official committee charged him with “indirect
responsibility” for a Lebanese massacre of hundreds of Palestinians the
previous year.
Mr.
Sharon survived that humiliation and remained politically active enough
to take command of his rudderless Likud Party after a 1999 rout by
Labor. Even then, he was viewed as a seat warmer for younger leaders,
yet he surprised everyone again when, in 2001, he was elected prime
minister in the biggest landslide in Israel’s history.
He
entered office four months into a violent Palestinian uprising. Israeli
voters selected him over Ehud Barak, his predecessor, in the hope that
Mr. Sharon would restore security.
Given
how he had crushed the Palestinian guerrilla infrastructure in Gaza in
the early 1970s, there was logic to his election. But there was a
paradox, too. It was Mr. Sharon’s visit, in September 2000, accompanied
by hundreds of Israeli police officers, to the holy site in Jerusalem
known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary,
that helped set off the riots that became the second Palestinian
uprising.
Once
elected, he brought dovish members of Labor into his cabinet to form a
government of national unity to contend with growing Palestinian and
Arab hostility after the collapse of a seven-year Middle East peace
effort begun at Oslo, under the Labor-led government of Yitzhak Rabin.
Mr.
Sharon faced clashes between, on one side, Israeli soldiers and
settlers in the West Bank and Gaza and, on the other, Palestinian
militiamen and guerrillas. And there were many episodes of Palestinian
terrorism inside Israel.
He
responded by sending envoys to the Palestinian leadership and calling
for an end to the violence. But when that proved fruitless, he proceeded
with force, moving tanks and heavy equipment into areas that Israel had
previously turned over to Palestinian control.
The
border with Lebanon also grew tense, and previously cordial relations
with Jordan and Egypt, more moderate governments, froze. Hopes for amity
between Israel and its neighbors seemed the dimmest in a decade.
But
Mr. Sharon said that if peace could be forged out of the century-long
conflict, he would be its blacksmith. He had, he said, a firm grasp on
Israel’s security needs and understood his adversaries.
In
the years before Mr. Sharon’s election, it was often said that the
Middle East had entered a new era of coexistence fostered by the Oslo
peace negotiations and increased global interdependence. This struck Mr.
Sharon as dangerously naïve, and most of his fellow Israelis came to
agree with him.
“The
war of independence has not ended,” he told the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz in April 2001. “No, 1948 was just one chapter.” He added: “The
end of the conflict will come only when the Arab world recognizes the
innate right of the Jewish people to establish an independent Jewish
state in the Middle East. And that recognition has not yet come.”
It was a theme taken up later by Mr. Netanyahu as well.
A Zionist Vision
Mr.
Sharon was born Ariel Scheinerman on Feb. 27, 1928, on a semicollective
farm, or moshav, named Kfar Malal, about 15 miles northeast of Tel
Aviv. His parents, Samuel Scheinerman and the former Vera Schneirov, had
emigrated from Russia. His mother, from a wealthy Belarussian family,
was forced to interrupt her studies in medicine by the Russian
Revolution. His father was a Zionist youth leader and agronomy student
in Russia and a farmer in Palestine.
The
isolation and mistrust of others that characterized Mr. Sharon’s
relationships throughout his life had familial roots. His parents, who
brought him up to treasure classical music and Russian literature,
disdained their fellow moshav dwellers as unlettered and uncouth. Theirs
was the only farm on the moshav with a fence around it.
In
his autobiography, Mr. Sharon described his father as cantankerous and
stingy with love. As a child, he reported, he felt lonely. Known from
boyhood by the nickname Arik, Mr. Sharon began his military career in
the Gadna, a paramilitary high school organization.
After
graduation and a special course, he became a Gadna instructor at an
agricultural school. His own instructor, Micah Almog, told biographers
that even then Mr. Sharon refused to follow any script given to him and
insisted on teaching his own way. He also joined the Haganah, the main
underground Zionist fighting brigade, which became the Israel Defense
Forces after independence.
In
1947, Mr. Sharon worked for the Haganah in the vast, flat stretch north
of Tel Aviv that is called the Sharon Plain. It was from there that he
took his new Israeli family name in the emerging Zionist tradition of
Hebraizing the names brought from the diaspora. This was part of the
plan to create a “new Jew” rooted in the homeland and no longer tied to
the Old World.
At
the height of the independence war, in May 1948, Mr. Sharon’s unit was
sent to take part in the battle of Latrun against the Jordanian Army, at
the foot of the hilly entrance to Jerusalem. It was a disastrous battle
for the Zionists, and Mr. Sharon was badly wounded in the abdomen.
Despite initial rescue efforts, he lay abandoned and bleeding for hours,
and nearly died. It was an early and influential encounter with what he
considered incompetence above him.
When
he was 20, Mr. Sharon married a young Romanian immigrant named Margalit
Zimmerman, who had been his student in Gadna and who went by the
nickname Gali. After the 1948 war, he remained in the army and served in
a number of posts around the country. In 1952, he took a leave from the
army, and the couple moved to Jerusalem, where Mr. Sharon began Middle
Eastern studies at the Hebrew University and his wife became a
psychiatric nurse.
A Reputation for Boldness
Mr.
Sharon had already earned a reputation as an effective battalion
commander who believed that Israel had been timid in the face of Arab
border provocation. Many of his superiors were wary of him, but others,
including David Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding prime minister, admired his boldness.
In
1953, Mr. Sharon was asked to form and lead the first elite commando
force for special operations behind enemy lines. It was named Unit 101,
and although it operated as an independent unit for less than a year, it
became legendary in Israel. The aim of the unit was to retaliate for
cross-border raids, Arab violations of the 1949 armistice agreements and
attacks against Israeli civilian targets.
The
unit’s first major operation came in October 1953, after an Israeli
woman and her two children were killed while sleeping in their home in
the town of Yehud. Mr. Sharon led a reprisal raid on the Jordanian town
of Qibya, which was said to be harboring Palestinian guerrillas.
The
battle of Qibya, in which 69 people were killed, more than half of them
women and children, and 45 houses were demolished, brought Israel its
first condemnation by the United Nations Security Council and became a
Palestinian rallying cry for a generation.
A
furor erupted in Israel over the civilian deaths, but the government
did not investigate and covered up for the commando unit by saying that
no Israeli soldiers had been involved. The raid, Ben-Gurion said at the
time, must have been by people around Jerusalem, “refugees from Arab
countries and survivors of Nazi concentration camps, who had suffered
terribly at the hands of their tormentors and had shown great restraint
until now.”
Unit
101 cultivated a sense among its members of being above rules and able
to operate under the most severe conditions, an attitude that later
permeated all elite Israeli military units.
In
the 1956 Sinai campaign, Mr. Sharon commanded a paratroop brigade and
violated orders by driving his men deep into Sinai to the Mitla Pass,
where they were ambushed by Egyptian forces and sustained dozens of
deaths, with scores of soldiers wounded. He had been unaware of a deal
among Britain, France and Israel regarding the Mitla Pass. He was not
shy with his complaints or sense of betrayal, and when the war ended his
career suffered.
It
was a period of personal loss as well. In May 1962, his wife, Gali, was
killed when the car she was driving veered out of its lane and was hit
by a truck. Mr. Sharon later married Gali’s younger sister, Lily, who
had followed her to Israel. Lily became a mother to his son Gur, and
together she and Mr. Sharon had two more sons, Omri and Gilad.
In
1964, Mr. Sharon’s flagging military career was revived by Mr. Rabin,
then the chief of staff, who made him chief of the northern command.
When the 1967 war broke out in June, Mr. Sharon was sent south to his
old command area and played a crucial role on the Egyptian front.
When
the war ended in a stunning victory for Israel — which had tripled its
land mass and defeated the combined armies of Jordan, Syria and Egypt —
Mr. Sharon felt a euphoria nearly unmatched in his life, he wrote in his
autobiography.
Personal
tragedy struck again soon. In October 1967, Gur, 11, his eldest son,
was playing with friends with an old hunting rifle, stuffing it with
gunpowder. A neighbor boy playfully aimed it at Gur’s head and pulled
the trigger. Mr. Sharon, who was alone in the house at the time, ran out
at the sound of the blast, scooped his son off the ground and flagged
down a passing car to go to a hospital. The boy died en route.
His
wife, Lily, remained Mr. Sharon’s fiercely loyal companion until her
death from cancer in 2000. His two sons survive him, as do a number of
grandchildren.
A Turn to Politics
Mr.
Sharon’s relations with his military superiors remained tense as the
country faced intermittent Palestinian guerrilla attacks in what became
known as the War of Attrition. He was nearly thrown out of the army in
1969.
In
1970, as commander of the south, Mr. Sharon crushed Palestinian
guerrilla units in the Gaza Strip. He bulldozed homes and groves,
imposed collective punishment, set up intelligence units of Israelis who
could pass for Palestinians and established the first Jewish
settlements to hamper travel and communication of Palestinians.
In
1973, Mr. Sharon felt drawn to politics. With help from American
friends, he also bought a large farm in the Negev Desert — it remains
the largest privately owned farm in the country — and talked about
retirement from the military. But that October, a shocking invasion by
Egypt and Syria, a war that Israel nearly lost, delayed his plans.
He
pulled off his most extraordinary feat of combat when he waged a daring
crossing of the Suez Canal behind Egyptian lines, a move often
described as either brilliant or foolhardy, and a turning point in the
war.
Mr.
Sharon had been hit in the head by a shifting tank turret, and
photographs of him with his head bandaged appeared in many newspapers
and remain a symbol of that war. After that, Mr. Sharon did retire and
helped engineer the birth of the Likud bloc, a political union between
the Liberal Party and the more right-wing Herut Party of Menachem Begin.
Mr.
Begin, who was in many ways more Polish than Israeli, admired Mr.
Sharon for his gruffness, courage and energy, and as a native-born
symbol of the emancipated Jew. Mr. Sharon won his first election to
Parliament, on the Likud ticket, in December 1973. But he quickly found
the confines of Parliament, with its wheeling and dealing and endless
committee meetings, not to his liking. He fought with his political
allies, grew impatient and thirsted for more decisive action.
In
the spring, he led a group of Israelis into the West Bank near the city
of Nablus and, using the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by members
of Parliament, helped them establish an illegal settlement. He then quit
Parliament and returned to the army. Mr. Rabin had become prime
minister and brought Mr. Sharon into the prime minister’s office as a
special adviser. He held the job for about a year, and Mr. Sharon later
wrote that this first exposure to central political power was extremely
instructive.
In
1977, Mr. Begin’s Likud bloc beat Labor in the general elections, the
first time in Israeli history that Labor was ousted from power. Its loss
was the result of several factors: the 1973 military debacle, rampant
party corruption, and the feeling of neglect and injury of Jewish
immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world, the Sephardim, who had
become a majority of the population.
Mr.
Sharon, who had struck out on his own with an independent party that
failed to take off, joined the Begin cabinet as agriculture minister and
set about constructing Jewish settlements in the West Bank to prevent
Israel from relinquishing the territory. The plan worked well, forcing
future Israeli governments to care for and protect the settlers, who now
number more than 350,000 in the West Bank, with an additional 200,000
in annexed areas of East Jerusalem.
Shortly
after Mr. Begin’s election, the Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat,
offered to come to Jerusalem and negotiate a peace treaty in exchange
for a full return to Egypt of the Sinai Peninsula, lost in the 1967 war,
and autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It was a
historic offer, and many Israelis did not know whether the Egyptians
could be trusted. Mr. Sharon was among the doubters and voted against
the deal as a cabinet member, although he then voted for it in the full
Parliament. The offer led to the Camp David accords and the 1979
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which returned Sinai to Egypt.
Mr.
Sharon made no secret of his ambition to be defense minister, but he
had to wait until the 1981 re-election of Mr. Begin. He made clear that
his biggest concern was southern Lebanon, where Palestinian guerrilla
groups had taken advantage of that country’s chaos and set up a
ministate, with militias and weapons, using it as a launching pad for
attacks on Israel’s north.
Lebanon and Beyond
In
June 1982, after Palestinian guerrillas tried to assassinate the
Israeli ambassador in London, leaving him critically wounded, Mr. Sharon
began the invasion of Lebanon, saying it would last 48 hours. He saw it
as an opportunity not only to remove the Palestinian threat but also to
form a strategic alliance with Lebanon’s Christian elite by helping
install its members in a new government and signing a peace treaty with a
second neighbor.
Things
went well at first. The Israeli military rooted out the Palestinian
groups and built an alliance with the Phalangist Party, led by the
Gemayel family. Mr. Sharon’s popularity in Israel soared.
But
the Reagan administration and others grew wary and then angry as the
Israeli invasion seemed not to end but rather to take on an increasingly
punishing nature, including the saturation bombing of Beirut
neighborhoods and delaying agreed-upon cease-fires. Some historians have
accused Mr. Sharon of deceiving Mr. Begin and the rest of the cabinet
on his broader intent for the war as it progressed.
Whether
he was acting alone or in concert, Mr. Sharon saw his plans for Lebanon
derail. Less than three weeks after his ally Bashir Gemayel was elected
president in late August with the Israeli military’s help, he was assassinated in an explosion at his party headquarters.
The
Israelis, in violation of a cease-fire agreement with the United
States, sent troops into several West Beirut neighborhoods. These
included Sabra and Shatila, Palestinian refugee camps where, the
Israelis asserted, the Palestine Liberation Organization had residual
bases and arms and thousands of fighters. That claim was disputed by
American diplomats who said that Palestinian fighters had already been
moved out of the area. The Israelis nonetheless sent in the Phalangists,
who killed hundreds of civilians.
The
massacre provoked international outrage, and many Israelis, already
despondent that the “48-hour” Lebanon incursion had turned into a
lengthy military and geopolitical adventure, were outraged. There were
furious calls for Mr. Sharon’s resignation.
Mr.
Sharon and Mr. Begin said this was intolerable slander. As Mr. Begin
said, using the Hebrew word for non-Jews, “Goyim kill goyim, and they
blame the Jews.” Nonetheless, even Mr. Begin started to distance himself
from Mr. Sharon, whose political demise began to seem inevitable.
The
government established an official investigation of the massacre, led
by Israel’s chief justice, Yitzhak Kahan. The investigating committee
absolved Mr. Sharon of direct responsibility, but said he should have
anticipated that sending enraged militiamen of the Phalange into
Palestinian neighborhoods right after the assassination of the group’s
leader amounted to an invitation to carnage. The committee recommended his resignation.
Time magazine reported that
Mr. Sharon had actually urged the Gemayel family to have its troops
take revenge on the Palestinians for the death of Mr. Gemayel. The
magazine said Mr. Sharon made this point during his condolence visit to
the family. It claimed further that a secret appendix to the Kahan
Commission report made this clear.
Mr. Sharon sued Time for libel and won a partial victory
in Federal District Court in New York. The court found that the secret
appendix, which contained names of Israeli intelligence officers,
included no assertion by Mr. Sharon of the need for Phalangist revenge.
But it ruled that Mr. Sharon had not been libeled because he could not
prove “malice” on the magazine’s part.
In
February 1983, the Israeli cabinet voted 16 to 1 to remove Mr. Sharon
as defense minister. He remained as a minister without portfolio. His
was the sole dissenting vote.
Depressed
over the war and his wife’s recent death, Mr. Begin resigned as prime
minister in September 1983 and was succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir. The 1984
election was a tie between Labor and Likud, and Mr. Sharon played a
crucial role in negotiating a unity government with Mr. Peres of Labor
whereby each party occupied the premiership for two years. Mr. Sharon
remained active in politics throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
After
Mr. Netanyahu defeated Mr. Peres in 1996 to become prime minister, Mr.
Sharon joined Mr. Netanyahu at the Wye Plantation in Maryland to
negotiate a continuation of the peace process with Mr. Arafat and the
Palestinians.
But
Mr. Sharon remained aloof from the talks, and pointedly refused to
shake Mr. Arafat’s hand, as Mr. Rabin had done on the White House lawn
in 1993. Mr. Sharon said that he had spent years trying to kill Mr.
Arafat, and that he was not about to shake his hand.
Mr.
Barak, of the Labor Party, defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999, but after
the collapse of his peace talks with the Palestinians, Mr. Barak called
for new elections for early 2001. It was widely expected that Mr.
Netanyahu would run for the Likud Party. When he decided not to, Mr.
Sharon, the stand-in party chief, became the unexpected candidate and
surprise winner.
He
brought Mr. Peres in as foreign minister, and the two septuagenarians,
who as young men had sat at the elbows of Ben-Gurion when he ran the
newly formed country, found themselves back together. Their partnership
continued to thrive, and Mr. Peres left the Labor Party, which had been
his political home his entire life, to join Mr. Sharon’s Kadima Party.
Mr. Peres was later elected the country’s president.
Raanan
Gissin, a close aide, said the main reason Mr. Sharon went from a
champion of the settlements to an advocate of territorial withdrawal was
growing international pressure for a Palestinian state.
“He
was not an ideologue; he was a political architect,” Mr. Gissin said.
“As a military man he knew one thing from the battlefield — you have to
seize the initiative, you have to be the one driving the action. Even if
peace was impossible, he wanted the process seeking it to be on his
terms. And while he was in power, it was.”
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