Ariel Sharon was ‘essentially a fighting machine’.
Illustration: Andrzej Krauze
Ariel Sharon, who died on
Saturday after eight years in a coma, was one of Israel’s most iconic and
controversial figures. His long and chequered career as a soldier and
politician largely revolved around one issue: the conflict between Israel and
its Arab neighbours. As a soldier he was involved at the sharp end of this
bitter conflict. As a politician he became known as “the Bulldozer” on account
of his contempt for his critics and his ruthless drive to get things done.
Sharon was a deeply flawed character, renowned for his brutality, mendacity,
and corruption. Yet despite
these flaws he holds a special place in the annals of his country’s history.
Sharon was an ardent Jewish nationalist, a
dyed-in-the-wool hardliner, and a ferocious rightwing hawk. He also displayed a
consistent preference for force over diplomacy in dealing with the Arabs.
Reversing Clausewitz‘s
famous dictum, he treated diplomacy as the extension of war by other means.
The title he chose for his biography aptly summed him
up in one word – Warrior. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Sharon was essentially a fighting machine. His
critics denounced him as a practitioner of “gun Zionism”, as a perversion
of the Zionist idea of the strong, fair-minded, and fearless Jew. To the
Palestinians Sharon represented the cold, cruel, militaristic face of the
Zionist occupation.
In 1953 Major Sharon committed his first war crime:
the massacre of 69
civilians in the Jordanian village of Qibya. In 1982, as minister of
defence, he led Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon in a war of deception that failed to achieve any of its
grandiose geopolitical objectives. A commission of inquiry found Sharon
responsible for failing to prevent the massacre by Christian Phalangists of
Palestinian refugees in Beirut’s Sabra and
Shatila camps. This verdict was etched on his forehead like a mark of Cain.
But who foresaw that the man who was declared unfit to be minister of defence
would bounce back as prime minister?
During the 2001 elections campaign Sharon tried to
reinvent himself as a man of peace. His spin doctors cultivated the notion that
old age was accompanied by a personal transformation from a sanguinary soldier
into a genuine peace-seeker. President George W Bush famously described Sharon
as “a man of peace”. For the last 40 years the Arab-Israeli conflict has been
my main research interest, and I have not come across a scintilla of evidence
to support this view. Sharon was a man of war through and through, an
Arab-hater, and a pugnacious proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict.
Following his rise to power Sharon therefore remained what he had always been –
the champion of violent solutions.
The dominant preoccupation of Sharon’s premiership
was the “war on terror” against militant Palestinian groups. No peace
negotiations with the Palestinian Authority took place between 2001 and 2006,
and Sharon regarded this as something to be proud of. To his way of thinking
negotiations necessarily involve compromise, and he consequently avoided them
like the plague.
For this reason he also rejected all international
plans aimed at a two-state solution. One was the 2002 Arab peace
initiative, which offered Israel peace and normalisation with all 22
members of the Arab League in return for agreeing to an independent Palestinian
state on the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital city in East Jerusalem. Another
was the 2003 Quartet road map,
which envisaged the emergence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel by the
end of 2005.
Sharon was the unilateralist par excellence. His
ultimate aim was to redraw unilaterally Israel’s borders, incorporating large
swaths of occupied territory. Stage one was to build on the West Bank the so-called
security barrier which the Palestinians call the apartheid wall. The
international court of justice condemned this wall
as illegal. It is three times as long as the pre-1967 border, and its
primary purpose is not security but land-grabbing. Good fences may make good
neighbours, but not when they are erected in the neighbour’s garden.
Stage two consisted of the unilateral disengagement
of Gaza in August 2005. This involved the uprooting of 8,000
Jews and the dismantling of many settlements − a shocking turnaround by a
man who used to be called the godfather of the settlers. Withdrawal from Gaza
was presented as a contribution to the Quartet’s road map but it was nothing of
the sort. The road map called for negotiations; Sharon refused to negotiate.
His unilateral move was designed to freeze the political process, thereby
preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and maintaining the
geopolitical status quo in the West Bank.
The legal term “depraved indifference“
refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so reckless,
so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the
lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability. Sharon
personified this kind of indifference in his approach to the Palestinians.
Towards the very end of his active life he bolted
from the Likud to create the centrist
party Kadima, but Kadima did not survive his demise. Today it has only two seats in the 120-member
Knesset. So Sharon’s last-minute attempt to bring about a realignment in
Israeli politics ended in failure.
His enduring legacy has been to empower and embolden
some of the most racist, xenophobic, expansionist, and intransigent elements in
Israel’s dysfunctional political system.
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