Ariel Sharon: legacy of division

Listening to the Ozie ABC news about the funeral, I was more than just a bit surprised. Sharon's confirmed war crimes were being palmed off as " mistakes" he made.  The hold the Israeli lobby has  around the world is hard to believe. 

Ariel Sharon: legacy of division

It is tantalising to speculate that the illness of a man who had spent so much of his life at war may have robbed the region of its greatest chance for peace

Editorial

The Guardian, 

For Palestinians living in the West Bank, Ariel Sharon's legacy is clear. They can see it from their windows: the monument of grey, graffitoed slabs topped with barbed wire and dotted with watchtowers that make up parts of the West Bank separation barrier. This aggressive line of control, which when complete will extend 700km, is the prime physical reminder of the life of a divisive leader whose affiliations and policies shifted dramatically but who could claim to have influenced the shape of Israel more than anyone except David Ben-Gurion.

Mr Sharon's biography is rich in symbolism: for his fifth birthday, his father gave him a dagger. (He gave him a violin the following year, but by all accounts young Ariel did not much take to it.) The weapon was prescient for the boy who became the embodiment of the Israeli soldier-hero and called his autobiography Warrior. In 1948, aged just 20, he fought alongside his godfather, Ben-Gurion, in the war for independence; in 1967 he won a tactically complex victory during the six-day war; and in 1973 he brought about what many regard as the turning point in the Yom Kippur war by leading his unit across the Suez canal.

Mr Sharon was adored by his troops, but a reputation for brutality was never far behind. In 1982, serving as defence minister, he allowed Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred more than 700 men, women and children. An Israeli government inquiry concluded that Mr Sharon bore personal responsibility for the incident. But it was Mr Sharon's promotion of settlements that would produce the most vitriolic reaction against him in the wider world. He was an early enthusiast for building Jewish homes in occupied territory and, for almost three decades, from the mid-1970s, he used a number of cabinet roles to push more than 100 developments into the West Bank and Gaza.

There is a twist in the tail of Mr Sharon's political career, which came during his final period as prime minister. Like much in his life, the circumstances of his election in 2001 are controversial: in September 2000 he made a deeply provocative visit to the holy Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif with 1,000 police officers, sparking a riot that coincided with the start of the second intifada. In the climate of spiralling violence that followed, Israelis turned to the strongman of Suez, who was elected prime minister the following February. It was during this term that Mr Sharon took the substantial leap of moving to a strategy of "disengagement", unilaterally withdrawing troops from the Gaza strip and bulldozing Israeli settlements there. The Israeli right, including members of the Likud party he had helped found, were furious. Soon after, Mr Sharon left the party and set up the more centrist Kadima.

The stroke that felled him in January 2006 left his newfound policy to crumble, and created one of the enduring mysteries of recent Middle Eastern politics. At the end of his life, was the great war leader determined to secure peace by withdrawing from the West Bank? In the optimist's view, the point of Mr Sharon creating Kadima was to make the second, much more difficult, withdrawal. Pessimists say the Gaza pullout was a ruse to hold on to the West Bank, or that it traumatised Israeli politics so deeply that even he would not have had the capital to bulldoze Jewish homes there. All we know for sure is that in the subsequent eight years in which Mr Sharon lay in a coma, the settlements only grew.

It is tantalising to speculate that the illness of a man who had spent so much of his life at war may have robbed the region of its greatest chance for peace, but in the end Mr Sharon must be judged on what he did, rather than what he did not do. There may be nostalgia for his decisiveness and strength, and we may applaud the withdrawal from Gaza, but we cannot cheer his role in creating the settlements, or his long-held belief that the fight against "terror" can be waged only with bullets and bombs.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/12/ariel-sharon-legacy-of-division