Ariel Sharon

Prime Minister of Israel

• Born: February 26, 2028
• Birthplace: Kfar Mallah, Palestine (now in Israel)
• Died: January 11, 2014
• Place of death: Tel HaShomer, Ramat Gan, Israel

Background & Early Career

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) served as prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, after serving in numerous cabinet positions over the prior twenty-five years, including defense minister and foreign minister. As prime minister he gained a reputation both within Israel and internationally as a soldier and politician who relied on confrontation rather than diplomacy. His career, which began with the founding of Israel in 1948, was marked by repeated charges of war crimes. However, his policies made him popular among many in Israel who valued security over accommodation in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sharon left politics in 2006 after suffering a stroke that left him in a vegetative state.

Ariel Sharon was born in Kfar Malal, Palestine, in 1928. At this time, Palestine was a center of conflict between Arabs and Jews. At the age of fourteen, Sharon joined the Haganah, the Jewish military group that would later become the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

As the United Nations decided to carve the state of Israel out of British Palestine, violence between Jews and Arabs increased. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49, Sharon fought against the Arab armies as a platoon commander and later as a company commander.

Beginning in 1952, Sharon spent five years as commander of the 101 Brigade (also known as Unit 101), a special forces unit of the Israeli military. This unit was nicknamed "the Avengers," and its purpose was to attack Palestinian targets. At this time, Sharon solidified his reputation as a ruthless military leader while creating controversy both around the world and within Israel itself.

The 101 Brigade carried out attacks against civilian targets with the stated goal of retaliation for Arab attacks against Israelis. However, these operations often had little or no connection to the actual guilty parties. The attacks were random retaliations against nonmilitary targets, usually civilians. In its first operation, the 101 Brigade reportedly killed fifty Palestinian refugees at the El-Burieg refugee camp near Gaza.

However, the most notorious of the 101 Brigade attacks was the 1953 massacre at a Palestinian refugee camp in Qibya, in neighboring Jordan. United Nations diplomats determined that seventy Palestinian civilians were killed, many of them women and children, and forty-five houses were destroyed. There was no evidence that any attacks on Israeli targets had been carried out by Palestinians living in the camp. It is a violation of international law to carry out collective punishment against civilian targets. Later that year, the UN Security Council censured this act of violence, and the United States Department of State issued a statement condemning the attack and declaring that those responsible should be brought to justice.

Defense Minister

In 1955, Sharon was admonished by the Israeli military for giving aid to four Israelis who had been accused of attacking Bedouin tribes in random acts of vengeance that mirrored the operations of the 101 Brigade. The following year, during the Sinai campaign, the military disciplined Sharon again after several officers accused him of unnecessarily sending Israeli soldiers to their deaths. He was later implicated by several of those who had served under him, including a retired general, for participating in the murder of 270 Egyptian prisoners of war.

During the Six-Day War in 1967, Sharon commanded an armored division. For the next five years he was in charge of the "pacification" of the Gaza Strip, in the Palestinian territories. During this time he was reprimanded again for his inhumane treatment of Palestinians, including the destruction of more than two thousand homes and the expulsion of fifteen thousand Palestinians from the area.

Assuming his military career was permanently damaged by the sanctions against him, Sharon resigned from the military, only to be recalled to service in 1973. That year, his career turned to politics. He was elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in 1973, and in 1975 he worked as a political adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1981, Sharon became defense minister of Israel. In 1982, he oversaw the invasion of Lebanon. During this invasion, Lebanese Phalangist forces entered refugee camps housing Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and killed several thousand people in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The area was under the control of the IDF. The Israeli military had the camps surrounded and let no one in or out except for the Phalange militia. Sharon was again widely criticized. Soon thereafter, the UN passed a resolution condemning this atrocity. An official Israeli government investigation was led by the head of the Israeli Supreme Court. In 1983, Sharon was found responsible for not fulfilling his duty to protect the civilians in the camps, but he was not held directly responsible for the massacres.

The Israeli attack on Beirut, Lebanon, left nearly twenty thousand dead. It has since been estimated that at least 90 percent of these were civilians, and 40 percent children, as can be expected when a densely populated city is shelled from the sea and air. The weeks of bombardment left hundreds of thousands of people from the area homeless.

Prime Minister

Between 1990 and 1992, Sharon served as Israel's minister of construction and housing. He became notorious for the huge increase in illegal settlement construction initiated through his efforts. He carried out the largest settlement increase since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, almost doubling the number of settlements in those regions. Within Israel, Sharon earned the nickname "the Bulldozer" for his reputation of razing Palestinian villages and establishing Israeli colonies in the occupied territories. Such illegal settlements made an eventual two-state settlement increasingly improbable, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis settled Palestinian land with Israeli government funding. Sharon's feelings on this subject were revealed in a 1998 speech at a political meeting: "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to [the Palestinians]."

Sharon was elected chairman of the Likud party in 1999. During this period, he made his now-infamous visit to the religious site of al-Aqsa. This inflammatory gesture set off the second Palestinian intifada (or "uprising") that began in 2000, immediately after Sharon's visit.

Soon after his visit to al-Aqsa, Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel, having used the divisive nature of the visit as a political tool. However, his personal ambition came at the possible cost of an eventual negotiated settlement regarding the occupied territories.

During the first eighteen months of his administration, Sharon authorized the construction of forty-four West Bank settlements. He oversaw the construction of a fortified wall, primarily built inside the West Bank rather than along the UN-defined border between Israel and the occupied territories. A World Bank study determined that the wall would eventually cut off more than a quarter-million Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank, as it encroached deep into Palestinian territory, towns, and agricultural land.

On the other hand, Sharon oversaw Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, evacuating Israeli settlers and soldiers from the territory and turning it over to its Palestinian inhabitants (while retaining Israeli control of its coastline and airspace).

In 2004, Sharon suffered political setbacks due to the continued violence in both Israel and the occupied territories. In addition, Sharon faced calls for his resignation amid a bribery scandal. However, the support he received from US president George W. Bush, who called Sharon a "man of peace," gave the prime minister a free hand to move further away from reconciliation and toward escalating confrontation.

In November 2005, Sharon resigned as head of Likud and founded a new political party, known as Kadima (Forward). His health was impacted in December of that year after he suffered a minor stroke. In January 2006, Sharon suffered a massive stroke. Although surgery helped save his life, the incident left him in a vegetative state. Sharon's seat as prime minister was transferred to Ehud Olmert. He remained in a vegetative state until his death on January 11, 2014.

Bibliography

"Ariel Sharon (1928–2014)." Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ariel-sharon. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020.

Avishai, Bernard. "Ariel Sharon's Dark Greatness." The New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2014, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ariel-sharons-dark-greatness. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020.

Bronner, Ethan. "Ariel Sharon, Israeli Hawk Who Sought Peace on His Terms, Dies at 85." New York Times, 11 Jan. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/world/middleeast/ariel-sharon-fierce-defender-of-a-strong-israel-dies-at-85.html. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020.

Indyk, Martin. "Why They Mattered: Ariel Sharon." Politico, 29 Dec. 2014, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/why-they-mattered-ariel-sharon-113840‗full.html. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020.

Landau, David. Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon. Knopf, 2014.

Ross, Dennis, and David Makovsky. "What Israel Still Needs to Learn from Ariel Sharon." The Times of Israel, 5 Sept. 2019, www.timesofisrael.com/what-israel-still-needs-to-learn-from-ariel-sharon/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020.