Leader and statesman or ‘bulldozer’ and ‘butcher,’ Ariel Sharon’s legacy shapes the politics of Israel today
It has been a decade since the death of Ariel Sharon, and his legacy as a politician and general lives on, analysts say.
Mr Sharon suffered a stroke at the height of his power in 2006 and was comatose until his death in 2014 at the age of 85.
He was credited for bold military tactics and policies that shaped Israel’s viewpoint on several fronts, especially in Gaza, and earned him the nickname “bulldozer”. Mr Sharon was a major general during the 1967 war, which ended with Israel’s capture of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
In 1971, as head of the southern command, he led a campaign to put down Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip.
He was forced to resign as defence minister for Israel’s involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982 – a watershed for Palestinian
and Lebanese perceptions of him that earned him another nickname – “the butcher”.
He was housing minister in the 1990s, and presided over the biggest construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza yet.
The year 2000, when he was foreign minister and leader of Likud, having taken over from Benjamin Netanyahu after the party’s loss in the 1999 election, brought another watershed moment. His visit to Al Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, enraged the Arab world and led to the second intifada.
He succeeded Ehud Barak as prime minister the following year after a landslide election win. In 2002, faced with criticism over attacks by Palestinian militants in Israel, he launched a military operation in the West Bank and began construction of the West Bank barrier. Many observers agree Mr Sharon created policies that keep the status quo between Israelis and Palestinians to this day.
“The tactics that the [Israeli army] uses in Gaza are much more technologically advanced than that of Sharon’s days in the army. But the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians was also a method Sharon used in the 1970s in the Gaza Strip,” Menachem Klein, a professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan
University, told The National. Mr Sharon’s military doctrine can be traced to the 1950s and 1960s, when he founded a “retribution squad”, Unit 101, which sought to deter terrorism in Israel by attacking Arab states.
Today, this is reflected in the Israeli army’s Dahiya doctrine – sending enemies “into the dark ages” through destruction of their infrastructure.
“In the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, when Sharon’s government oversaw the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the utter destruction of virtually all the infrastructure of Palestinian cities, the death of 497 Palestinians and the arrest of 7,000 people, Israel was accused of war crimes but succeeded in foiling a UN investigation,” wrote Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the author of War Against the People: Israel, Palestine, and Global Pacification.
Mr Sharon became known for a more pragmatic approach and would set out a path of contrasting policies, analysts said.
“Sharon was the driving force behind building settlements in the territories seized in the 1967 war and would declare that giving up any territory taken from the Arabs would signal Israeli weakness,” Dennis Ross and David Makovsky wrote in Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped its Destiny.
“Later he would be the leader who dismantled settlements in Sinai and Gaza, and the first Israeli leader to publicly embrace Palestinian statehood.”
For some, Mr Sharon’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip was a reflection of Israeli public opinion at the time.
Other analysts said his withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank was to split the Palestinian leadership, as shown by Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip, while the Palestine Liberation Organisation remained in the West Bank with its Fatah faction.