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Remembering Ariel Sharon

Sunday, 12. January 2014 - 12:32

Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel, died today, at the age of eighty-five. In January of 2006, while he was still in office, Sharon suffered a devastating stroke from which he never recovered. A few weeks later, Ari Shavit published “The General,” his Profile of Sharon, in The New Yorker. “The General” was based on six years’ worth of conversation with Sharon, and it tracks, from year to year, Sharon’s changing mind. When Shavit and Sharon first met, in 1999, Sharon was a hard-liner. But by 2003, Sharon had “decided to divert history from its course”. “I don’t think that we need to rule over another people and run its life”, he told Shavit. “I don’t think that we have the strength for that”. It was a shift that astonished Shavit, along with the citizens of Israel and observers around the world.

Ariel Sharon in 1966, when he was an Army colonel.
Photograph by STR New/Reuters.

“As far back as I can remember,” Shavit begins, “I remember Arik Sharon”:

First, he was Arik of the Paratroopers, whose brutal acts of retaliation in the nineteen-fifties, after the War of Independence, exemplified the young Israeli state’s reply to attacks by Palestinian infiltrators. Then he was Arik of Sinai, whose military wits in the battle of Abu Ageila, a strategic crossroads in the eastern Sinai, played an important part in the intoxicating Israeli victory of 1967. Then, in 1971, Sharon was Arik the Terrible, who temporarily eliminated Palestinian terror in the Gaza Strip by using collective punishment, threatening civilians, and applying a shoot-to-kill policy against suspected terrorists. In 1973, he was Arik, King of Israel, who confounded the Egyptians by crossing the Suez Canal, cutting off the Third Army, and turning what could easily have been a terrible defeat into victory. In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, as a civilian minister, he was Arik the Settler, who established more than a hundred Israeli outposts in the West Bank and Gaza, in a hubristic attempt to seize permanent control of large swaths of Palestinian-held territory. “Grab as many hilltops as you can,” he later told the settlers. Finally, he was for us, the young liberals of Israel, Arik the Leper, who, in 1982, led the country into a catastrophic war in Lebanon and bore a great measure of responsibility for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

“More than any other single figure in Israel,” Shavit concludes, “Sharon led the transformation of a relatively modest and ascetic state into an occupying bully”. So how was it possible to understand his about-face? What stood out most in his conversations with Sharon, Shavit writes, was his emotional consistency, his fixed beliefs. Even when he was absorbed in the work of uprooting settlements, he spoke emotionally about their value. His policy changed dramatically, but his inner self did not change at all.

In 2006, after Sharon suffered the stroke, Shavit went home to review the tape-recorded conversations. “All night”, Shavit writes, “I sat in my study, listening to his voice and thinking about what he had left as a political legacy and as a direction for the future”. Israelis voted for Sharon, Shavit writes, “because they felt that he knew that their world, like the world of the Balkans, was about a tribal war. In the midst of this conflict, Sharon, unlike his younger self, tried to calm tempers and reassure his people. And the great majority of Israelis endorsed this”.

Sharon was the least messianic of all of Israel’s Prime Ministers…. Under his governance, Israel was weaned of the hope for an ideal end. It even came to realize that there would be no absolute peace or victory. Fundamentally, Sharon was a man of process. If he has left a legacy, it is the need for time—lots of time—because there is no way to reach peace with one abrupt act.

In his cumbersome way, he said to the Israelis: I will withdraw. But he also said, I will withdraw very slowly. Shweiyeh shweiyeh, without haste, as an Arabic phrase used in Hebrew slang has it. And I’ll rip them to shreds if they understand my withdrawal incorrectly and abuse it. Because I am not a liberal romantic. I am from here, and I will not be Mahmoud Abbas’s sucker or Kofi Annan’s sucker. I will do only what is good for us. And, just as in the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties I conquered land for us, now I will withdraw for us. And, just as in the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties I settled the territories on our behalf, now I will evacuate for us.

“Israel was somehow fortunate”, Shavit suggests, “to have the person who made the mess try to clean it up”. “The General” is available, in its entirety, in our archive.

Source: 
www.newyorker.com
Tags: 
Ariel Sharon
Israel