The strong man

Sharon saw himself as a man who makes history, not one who yields to circumstance

David Grossman

· Read Karma Nabulsi’s view of Ariel Sharon here

Ariel Sharon is a man of potent primal urges, of violence, of combat, cunning and brilliance. He is a sharp manipulator, brave and corrupt. He has swung like a mighty pendulum between construction and destruction. He has blatantly ignored limits, whether international boundaries or the boundaries of the law. Clearly he has seen himself as a man destined to make history, not one who yields to circumstances. Time after time he instigated large-scale political and military manoeuvres meant to change the world utterly, to make it fit his own vision. And he always did so with determination, sometimes with brutality, without regard for what means he used to achieve his ends.

Yet even his sworn opponents are concerned as Sharon - as I write - lies in a hospital bed, fighting for his life. They hope, of course, that he will recover from his illness. But they are also worried about the huge vacuum that has suddenly opened in the Israeli leadership.

Because Sharon, in an amazingly short time, has metamorphosed from being one of the men most hated and feared by most Israelis into a respected leader, accepted and even much loved by his people. He has become a kind of big, powerful father-figure, whom Israelis are willing to follow, with their eyes closed, wherever he may lead them. Their faith in him is so great that they do not even demand that he tell them which direction he plans to go, and what his foreign policy will be, and what state of affairs he intends to create for them. Not a man, not even the government ministers closest to him, knew on Wednesday night - less than 90 days before the upcoming elections - whether Sharon intended after his re-election to commence peace negotiations with the Palestinians or to conduct another large, unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank. Suspending their right to know, Israelis have preferred to put their future in Sharon’s hands, to suspend their personal judgment and their right to receive information and to criticise their country’s policies. With the huge swell of support that the public has given Sharon’s new political party, the Israeli majority has said to Sharon: "We trust you to do the right thing, and we don’t even want to know the details."

It’s astonishing the way Israelis have changed their attitudes towards Sharon. The person who can figure it out will comprehend the Israeli psyche’s strengths and weaknesses. He will understand the profound Jewish fears that Sharon knew so cleverly how to inflame, as well as to quell. Israelis longed for power, they wanted to break free of the enduring humiliation that was the lot of the powerless diaspora Jew, always at the mercy of strangers.

Here are a few events and statements about Sharon that have been etched in the Israeli consciousness. They offer one possible portrayal (just one, because his personality is complex enough to allow several). David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s mythological first prime minister, said in the 1950s of the young, bold and brilliant officer Ariel Sharon: "If he could overcome his bad habit of not telling the truth, he could be an exemplary military leader." Menachem Begin, prime minister in the 1980s, said: "Sharon is liable to surround the prime minister’s office with tanks."

In the 1950s, when he wielded no little influence on the Israeli army’s way of thinking and missions, he was an officer in the elite Unit 101. Then he was known for his violent, brutal and extreme treatment of Arabs, both combatants and innocent citizens. His commanders, such as Moshe Dayan, warned him about his disdain for human life, including the lives of his own soldiers. Time after time his advancement in the military hierarchy was blocked because of reservations and severe criticism of his behaviour by his superior officers. He took pride in the fact that, from his days as a second lieutenant, he knew how to oust his superiors.

In 1972, as general of the southern command, he conducted a campaign to expel Palestinians from Gaza in order to make room for Israeli settlements. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were cruelly, violently displaced. Their homes were destroyed and their wells filled in. That was the beginning of Sharon’s career as the architect and contractor of Israel’s settlement enterprise.

It is difficult to imagine how the hundreds of flourishing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories could have been built without his determination, his questionable methods and his ideological fervour. As a politician, he used the army and the budgets of the ministries he headed to build more and more settlements, making sure to locate them so that they would sever Arab population centres from one another, and serve as obstacles to any accommodation with the Palestinians.

One of the most famous images of the war of 1973 is of Sharon with a white blood-stained bandage wrapped around his forehead. In that conflict he commanded the division that crossed the Suez Canal, a move that turned the war around into an Israeli victory. But he was severely criticised for his conduct. Twice during the course of the war, the army general staff debated whether to strip him of his command, because of his refusal to obey the orders of his superiors.

After that war Sharon entered politics. He consistently opposed all negotiations with the Arabs. As a member of the Knesset and as a cabinet minister, he opposed the peace treaty with Egypt, virulently opposed the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians, even opposed the peace treaty with Jordan. In 1982, when he served as minister of defence, he took advantage of the confidence of his prime minister, Menachem Begin, and entangled Israel in the Lebanon war. Thousands died, on both sides, and the Israel Defence Forces spent the next 18 years deep in the Lebanese mire.

His conduct during the Lebanon war, and his responsibility for the massacre that Lebanese Christians carried out against Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, led an official commission of inquiry to disqualify him from serving as defence minister. His visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, when tension between Israel and the Palestinians was combustible, was the match that set off the bloody al-Aqsa Intifada.

But, a short time after he was elected prime minister, a change came over him. No one predicted it. At this particular point in his life, Sharon seems to have reached the conclusion that Israel could not achieve any further territorial or diplomatic gains, and that he had to concentrate on securing what the country had achieved so far. We can only presume that, when he viewed events in Israel, he saw that the country seemed to be losing its way, that its people were in despair about the conflict. The Geneva Initiative, a process of informal negotiations between leading Israelis and Palestinians outside their respective governments, produced a peace plan that was received warmly by the Israeli public. This, along with sharp criticism of Sharon’s failure to move on the diplomatic front, coming from a former head of army intelligence and Israel’s secret security service, pressured Sharon to set out on the most surprising and bold gambit of his life. He realised that the land had to be partitioned between its two peoples, that the occupation could not continue, that the Palestinians would have their own state, and that thousands of Israeli settlers would have to be evacuated from the Gaza Strip.

Just as he had done every other time he tried to change the world, Sharon carried out the Gaza disengagement with his signature determination and brutality, with virtuoso political manipulation. He established facts unilaterally, displaying personal and public courage that can only be admired.

What will happen now? Israel is a democracy, but we are now witnessing a phenomenon that recalls what happens in totalitarian states when a leader leaves the stage. Sharon’s rule was so centralised and total that it seems as if there is no man who could take his place. The clear will of the majority - expressed time and again in opinion polls - is to end the conflict with the Palestinians and establish, finally, Israel’s permanent borders. Yet the initial impression was that no other Israeli leader would have the political backing to take the difficult and painful steps necessary to reach this goal. It is difficult to believe that Sharon’s replacement will be able to evacuate more settlements, in any number, without dragging Israel into civil bloodletting. That was avoided during the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, to a large measure because most Israeli citizens accepted obediently the authority and will of Ariel Sharon.

What did Sharon have that made Israelis love him so? Certainly his impressive military record (even though, as I’ve noted, his behaviour as a soldier and commander was harshly criticised). There was his disdainful intransigence towards the Arabs, his unbridled use of force in the fight against them, and his cunning, which was perceived as a mandatory weapon in Israel’s war for survival. In recent years, Sharon managed to achieve a public standing equalled only by David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. The people saw Sharon as their unchallenged, natural leader, mature and wise, a man who in his elder days was able to integrate all the forces, internal contradictions and potent passions of his life. He became a kind of "democratic monarch" who protected his country, radiated confidence, a man who would not surrender in the face of danger, who trusted only in himself and his strength.

Was it his physical presence, his huge farm in the Negev, his profound, almost erotic connection to the land, the aura of agricultural nobility that surrounded him and his family, his tales of heroism as a soldier and a commander? Something about him said power, confidence and stability. It linked him to Jewish warriors and heroes of past ages. Israelis compared him to Bar-Kochba, to Judah Maccabee. His masses of admirers replaced King David’s name with Sharon’s nickname in a familiar folksong and sang "Arik king of Israel". As a result, the public accepted his astonishing ideological reversal on the settlements and the occupation as a deliberate, inevitable development in a level-headed, experienced leader. It granted legitimacy to the secret wish that most Israelis kept inside. The people seem to have needed Sharon in order to understand what they really wanted.

No less fascinating is the reversal of Sharon’s international image, especially in the west. Sharon was the man that the European and American press abhorred, whom they slandered indefatigably. He was the man that world leaders refused to meet, whom the European and Arab media compared to history’s worst dictators and committers of genocide. He was to be hauled before the International Court in the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. But in the last year, since the disengagement from Gaza, Sharon became the favourite of foreign leaders and of the world press, not to mention of public opinion in many countries. It wasn’t only George Bush who thought he was an exemplary leader to be emulated in wartime. Even President Husni Mubarak of Egypt praised him to the skies and declared that "only with Sharon is it possible to make peace in the Middle East."

Israel now faces a period of political instability. There is no way of knowing who will be its next leader, but we can certainly lament that we will probably miss, or put off for an uncertain period of time, the great opportunity that Sharon created when he set Israel on the road to the end of the occupation. Even if he did so while completely ignoring the Palestinians, and even if he did nothing to shore up the other side, which must be our partners in peace, we cannot but admire his courage and determination. He did what he thought necessary, in complete contradiction of his previous ideology. For now, we can only wish him recovery, and mourn the fact that only in their eighth decades do Israeli leaders realize that force is not a solution, that concessions and compromises are necessary, and that we must walk the painful but inevitable road to peace.

· Translated by Haim Watzman

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1680520,00.html