Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon was born Ariel Scheinerman on February 26, 1928, in Kfar Malal, a cooperative farming village north of Tel Aviv in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine ^[1]. His parents, Shmuel and Vera Scheinerman, had emigrated from the Russian Empire, and they raised their son amid the hard physical labor and frequent isolation of moshav life. The family held views that set them apart from many of their socialist neighbors, and Sharon later described a childhood marked by self-reliance and a certain distance from the surrounding community ^[2].

At fourteen he joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth organization, and soon afterward the Haganah, the main underground Jewish defense force in Palestine ^[1]. The farming village where he grew up sat close to Arab communities, and disputes over land and security shaped his earliest political instincts. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, the twenty-year-old was already serving as an infantry commander.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he led a platoon in the Alexandroni Brigade and was severely wounded in the stomach at the battle of Latrun, a failed attempt to open the road to besieged Jerusalem ^[2]. He recovered and continued serving, and around this period he adopted the Hebrew surname Sharon. The war left him with lasting convictions about the cost of military failure and the value of initiative on the battlefield, ideas that would define the rest of his career.

Anyone asking who was Ariel Sharon before politics finds the answer in the Israeli army of the 1950s. In 1953 he was chosen to form and command Unit 101, a small commando force created to carry out reprisal raids after attacks on Israeli civilians ^[1]. That October the unit, operating with paratroopers, attacked the West Bank village of Qibya, where sixty-nine people were killed, most of them civilians. The raid drew international condemnation, including from the United Nations Security Council, and attached a controversy to Sharon's name that never fully faded ^[3]. Unit 101 was soon merged into the Paratroopers Brigade, which Sharon came to command.

In the 1956 Sinai campaign his paratroopers seized the approaches to the Mitla Pass, where a battle Sharon ordered against instructions cost dozens of Israeli lives and brought accusations of insubordination from superiors ^[2]. His career slowed for several years, but the pattern was set: commanders valued his boldness even as they distrusted his willingness to bend orders.

The 1967 Six-Day War restored his standing. As a division commander in the Sinai he directed a complex night assault on fortified Egyptian positions at Abu Ageila, an operation later studied in military academies for its coordination of infantry, armor, artillery, and heliborne troops ^[1]. His most celebrated moment came in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Recalled from early retirement, Major General Sharon led the division that crossed the Suez Canal on the night of October 15 to 16, driving into Egypt proper and helping to encircle the Egyptian Third Army ^[3]. Photographs of Sharon with a bandaged head on the canal's west bank made him a national hero, and admirers began calling him Arik, King of Israel.

Sharon left the army for politics and helped assemble the Likud, the alliance of right-wing and liberal parties that ended decades of Labor dominance when Menachem Begin won the 1977 election ^[1]. He entered the Knesset in 1973, served briefly as security adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and then joined Begin's government as agriculture minister. In that post he pushed hard to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, becoming the movement's most effective patron inside the cabinet ^[4].

Appointed defense minister in 1981, Sharon planned and directed Israel's June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an operation aimed at destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization's base there. Israeli forces advanced far beyond the limited zone the cabinet had approved and besieged Beirut for weeks ^[3]. In September 1982, after the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, Christian Phalangist militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which were under Israeli control, and massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

An Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found in 1983 that Sharon bore personal responsibility for ignoring the danger of allowing the militia into the camps and recommended his removal as defense minister ^[4]. He resigned the defense portfolio but stayed in the cabinet, and many observers assumed his ambitions for the top office were finished. Through the 1980s and 1990s he rebuilt his position patiently, holding the trade, housing, infrastructure, and foreign ministries, and continuing to sponsor settlement growth wherever his authority allowed ^[1].

In September 2000 Sharon, then Likud opposition leader, made a heavily guarded visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims. Palestinian protests erupted the next day and escalated into the second intifada, a years-long wave of violence, though scholars continue to debate how much the visit caused rather than triggered the uprising ^[3]. With Israelis demanding security, Sharon defeated Ehud Barak by a landslide in the February 2001 election for prime minister ^[1].

His government answered suicide bombings with large military operations, most prominently Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, which reoccupied Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and with the construction of a separation barrier that drew international criticism while sharply reducing attacks inside Israel ^[4]. In 2002 Israeli forces confined Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to his Ramallah compound, where he remained until shortly before his death in 2004.

Then came the reversal that defines any Ariel Sharon biography. The man who had built settlements for thirty years announced a plan to dismantle them in Gaza. In August 2005 Israel evacuated all twenty-one Gaza settlements and four in the northern West Bank, removing roughly 8,000 settlers, some by force ^[5]. The disengagement split Likud so deeply that in November 2005 Sharon left the party he had helped found and created a new centrist party, Kadima, taking senior figures from both Likud and Labor with him ^[1]. Polls showed Kadima heading for a comfortable election victory under his leadership.

Sharon married Margalit Zimmerman, known as Gali, in 1953, and the couple had a son, Gur. Margalit died in a road accident in 1962, and Sharon later married her younger sister, Lily, with whom he had two sons, Omri and Gilad ^[2]. Tragedy struck again in 1967 when eleven-year-old Gur was killed in an accident with an old rifle at the family home. Lily Sharon, his closest confidante through decades of public life, died of cancer in 2000, months before he became prime minister ^[1].

From the early 1970s the family lived at Sycamore Ranch, a large farm in the northern Negev that became Sharon's refuge and a fixture of his public image as a farmer-soldier ^[2]. He was famous for his heavy build, his appetite, and a personal warmth that surprised political opponents who knew only his combative reputation.

His later years were shadowed by corruption investigations involving campaign financing, including the so-called Greek island affair. Prosecutors declined to indict him in 2004 for lack of evidence, though his son Omri, a Knesset member, was later convicted in a related financing case ^[4]. Sharon's memoir, Warrior, written with David Chanoff and published in 1989, presented his own account of the battles and controversies of his first six decades ^[6].

In December 2005 Sharon suffered a mild stroke, and physicians scheduled a procedure to close a small hole in his heart. On January 4, 2006, before that procedure could take place, he suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at his ranch and underwent hours of emergency brain surgery in Jerusalem ^[5]. He never regained consciousness. Ehud Olmert assumed his powers, led Kadima to victory in the March 2006 election, and succeeded him formally in April.

Sharon remained in a persistent vegetative state for eight years, cared for first at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and later at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in Ramat Gan ^[5]. Occasional reports of minimal brain activity raised brief public attention but no recovery followed.

He died on January 11, 2014, at the age of eighty-five, after his organs failed ^[1]. His body lay in state at the Knesset, world leaders including United States Vice President Joe Biden attended a memorial ceremony in Jerusalem, and he was buried beside his wife Lily on a hill at Sycamore Ranch with full military honors ^[5].

Few careers divide opinion as sharply. Among Ariel Sharon achievements, admirers count the canal crossing of 1973, decades of settlement building, the crushing of the second intifada, and the Gaza disengagement, which he cast as a means of securing Israel's future by its own hand ^[3]. To Israelis he was the bulldozer, a leader who acted while others deliberated. Many Palestinians and Lebanese remember him instead for Qibya, for the 1982 invasion, and above all for Sabra and Shatila, and human rights groups sought unsuccessfully to prosecute him abroad, including a case filed in Belgium in 2001 ^[4].

The basic Ariel Sharon facts capture a paradox: the field commander censured for exceeding orders became the prime minister who imposed a withdrawal his own movement hated. Historians still argue over whether disengagement was the first step of a wider territorial strategy or a tactical move to freeze diplomacy, a question his silence after January 2006 left permanently open ^[3].

His institutional legacy proved mixed. Kadima won power in 2006 but dissolved within a decade, while the separation barrier, the Gaza withdrawal, and the settlement blocs he entrenched continue to shape the conflict's geography ^[1]. Whatever the verdict, no account of Israel's first six decades can be written without him: soldier at twenty, general at forty, outcast at fifty-five, prime minister at seventy-two.