Israel’s masterof survival
HOPEFULLY IT will be seen as reasonable and not ghoulish to compare Ariel Sharon’s long death struggle to his long life. In both, he fought with notable strength and determination. In both, his legion, loving supporters hoped and prayed for his victory. And during both, his enemies levelled accusations of financial finagling against him and his sons.
As he lay in a coma, the charge was that the family was not “pulling the plug” because, by the regulations, they were getting benefits from the state, like a car, a driver and secretarial services, as long as the former prime minister lived.
As in many of the allegations against him, there was no proof, not even circumstantial, of such sordid motivation. There was no proof, moreover, that the family could have “pulled the plug”.
The two sons, Omri and Gilad, were unwavering in their demand of the hospital staff that they keep treating and keep trying to elicit cognitive and physical responses from the patient. They insisted that in their round-the-clock vigils they had sometimes seen or felt responses that the doctors did not perceive.
They could hardly deny the charge that they had designs on the taxpayer’s enforced sustenance for ex-prime ministers. After all, they were taking the benefits. “Pulling the plug,” at any rate, by whomever, would probably have involved a crime under Israeli law.
The purpose here is not to “whitewash” Sharon, nor his sons. It is to maintain that many of the allegations that triggered controversy over the years, including this last one, failed to take account of the broader picture in which Sharon operated.
As he lay there, coma-stricken and effectively paralysed for eight years, the latest elements of his life’s legacy coagulated in Israel’s national ethos. The “disengagement” of settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, sad to suffer or even to witness, but smoothly carried out, transmitted unmistakable lessons for the future of the country. First, that settlements can be removed by a determined government. Second, the extra-parliamentary power and naked threats of the settlers (“It will never happen”, “We will prevent it”, “Civil war will break out”), which created a countrywide atmosphere of apprehension, were swept aside by an impressive show of force.
Sharon was accused of betraying his longtime ideological followers; but there was another, non-ideological message broadcast into the future from this act of determined leadership. It concerned the very governance, or indeed governability, of democratic Israel. Sharon felt more and more strongly, and said privately, that as prime minister his legitimate powers were ebbing away because of