Perhaps the most galling aspect of the panegyrics that preceded the burial this week of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, eight years after a stroke that can in retrospect be designated fatal, has been the notion that he was a formidable warrior who evolved into a “man of peace.”
Among the first to tag him thus, in the wake of the so-called Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, was the then president of the United States. George W. Bush wasn’t, however, the only person who chose to see that particular maneuver as in some way a positive step on the road to a permanent settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.
And the myth has, to some extent, endured, if obituaries in the western media are anything to go by. It is no doubt true that many on the right-wing of Israeli politics were disconcerted by the gesture, not least because it entailed the drama of illegal settlers forcibly being removed by the Israeli military. Many of these settlers, mind you, had willfully been implanted there by Sharon a couple of decades earlier, following the Israeli pullout from Sinai.
Even some West Bank settlers, who acknowledge their debt to Sharon in his capacity as successively minister for agriculture, infrastructure, housing and defense, and eventually as prime minister, find it hard to overlook his role in the forced depopulation of Israelis from Gaza.
In large part, that’s because they tend to see all of the occupied territories as a basis for Eretz Israel. Sharon, on the other hand, was pragmatic enough to envisage minor and ultimately inconsequential concessions as a means of realizing Israel’s territorial ambitions. Gaza was abandoned, in large part, to facilitate the retention of much of the West Bank.
One does not need to turn to Sharon’s political adversaries to confirm this interpretation. In the wake of the Gaza pullout, his aide Dov Weissglass spilled the beans by describing it as supplying “the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Max Blumenthal, writing in the American periodical The Nation, also cites another adviser, Arnon Sofer, as claiming “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
Given the periodic military attacks on Gaza in the past eight years, the prophecy clearly wasn’t misguided. Several of the post-mortem comments, however, raise the counterfactual possibility that if Sharon had not been incapacitated in 2006, he may have gone on to clear parts of the West Bank as well.
The basis for this claim is extremely weak. Although Sharon did manage to demonstrate that, given the political will, illegal settlers could indeed be removed by force without precipitating a domestic political revolt. True, he had to bow out of the right-wing Likud party he had helped to form in the 1970s and to found the ostensibly less extremist Kadima. But it’s worth recalling that even without Sharon at the helm, Kadima succeeded in initially obtaining a popular mandate (although, in the wake of corruption scandals, it has now been reduced to two seats in the Knesset).
It does not, follow, however, that Sharon had any plan for disengagement, unilateral or otherwise, from the West Bank. There is in fact no evidence that he ever strayed from a plan he reputedly outlined to Winston Churchill’s grandson while serving as agriculture minister under Menachem Begin: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
That strategy appears to have succeeded to a considerable extent. It cannot, though, be described as the brainwave of a man of peace.
The contrary case does not need to rely exclusively on the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which Israel’s own Kahan Commission found Sharon personally responsible, compelling him to resign as defense minister from a Cabinet that apparently had remained in the dark about his exact designs in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. By then, his reputation for ruthlessness ought to have preceded him, as well as his tendency to ignore the orders of his superiors whenever he deemed it convenient.
Ariel Scheinermann, born in 1928, was a warrior by the age of 20. By 1953, when he was chosen by Ben Gurion to head the commando squad known as Unit 101, he was already determined, as the obituary in The Guardian puts it, to treat “civilians who ‘harbored terrorists’ as legitimate targets,” thus pre-empting Bush and the neocons by nearly half a century. Women and children are believed to have featured prominently among the victims of the massacre on Oct. 14, 1953 in the Jordanian village of Qibya, perpetrated by the unit. Some 50 years later, he was a relentless enthusiast for targeted killings — another tactic embraced by the US in its ongoing “war against terror,” notwithstanding the negative repercussions. And his nickname, the Bulldozer, wasn’t a metaphorical epithet.
Sharon became prime minister after calculatedly instigating the Second Intifada. This week, US vice-president Joe Biden described him as “a complex man [who] lived in a complex time in a complex neighborhood.” Tony Blair, sporting a skullcap, called him “a giant of this land.” A Goliath, then, rather than a David.
Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University, says in his 40 years of researching the Arab-Israeli conflict, he has “not come across a scintilla of evidence” to support the view of Sharon as a man of peace. “Sharon was a man of war through and through,” he says, “an Arab hater, and a pugnacious proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict.”
A war hero in 1967 and 1973? To some, perhaps. But then, many of those indicted at Nuremberg would no doubt have been hailed in similar terms, and buried with honors, had the Nazis won the war.
