Ariel Sharon - #65

He was number 65 on the list

Ariel Sharon - obituary

Ariel Sharon was an Israeli leader famed for bold, brash, ruthless manoeuvres both in politics and on the battlefield

  

Ariel Sharon, who has died aged 85, was Prime Minister of Israel from March 2001 and one of the Middle East’s most formidable politicians. He was number 65 on the list.

Always controversial, Sharon’s skill and ruthlessness in his earlier years as a professional soldier were equally evident in his career in politics. In both spheres he exhibited an almost limitless capacity to surprise — never more so than when, in 2005, he unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank, a move which outraged many of his people; or when, in November 2005, he announced that he was leaving the Likud party to establish a new centrist party, Kadima, which also included figures such as the former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who resigned from the Labour party to join Kadima.


But Sharon’s leadership came to an abrupt end on January 4 2006, when he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered; his deputy, Ehud Olmert, was confirmed as the acting prime minister in his place.

Sharon had come to power five years earlier. He decisively defeated the incumbent prime minister, Ehud Barak, and formed a Likud-Labour coalition government. He then embarked on a remorseless campaign to crush the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, declaring Yasser Arafat “irrelevant”, bombing the Palestinian leader’s private helicopter and sending tanks to surround his headquarters at Ramallah, effectively putting Arafat under house arrest.


Prime Minister Menachem Begin once said of Sharon: “He’s a brilliant general, but a vicious man.” Sharon had been defence minister in Begin’s Likud government from 1981 to 1983 and the architect of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. This invasion, triggered by an attempt on the life of Israel’s ambassador in London, was aimed at crushing Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon and pushing Syrian forces out of Beirut.


Sharon assured ministers that the operation would be short — between 24 and 48 hours — and that there would be no confrontation with the Syrian forces in Lebanon. But when Operation “Peace for Galilee” started, Sharon expanded it into a fully-fledged war, instructing his forces to go deeper into Lebanon and to provoke the Syrians into a conflict.

Having secured the departure of the PLO and the Syrians from Beirut, Sharon set out to install the Maronite leader, Bashir Gemayel, as the President of Lebanon. But with hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed, and following the assassination of Gemayel, Sharon lost the support of many of his soldiers and of ministers.

When, in September, the Christian Phalange massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, 400,000 Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv to protest.

The Israeli president, Yitzhak Navon, went on television demanding that the government investigate the tragic events in the camps, and hinted that he would resign if his demands were not met; Prime Minister Begin conceded, appointing a commission of inquiry under Yitzhak Kahan, the Chief Supreme Court judge, which published a report blaming Sharon for culpable negligence and advising Begin to consider removing him, which the prime minister duly did.

The youngest of two children, Sharon was born Ariel Sheinerman at Moshav Kfar Malal, a cooperative farming village in Palestine, on February 27 1928. His parents, Russian immigrants, did not get on well with their neighbours, and the other children kept their distance from “Arik”, as he was known. “I felt isolated, lonely,” he later recalled. “The slights hurt deeply.” His upbringing was strict, and he was an average student at the Geula high school in Tel Aviv.

At 14 he joined Hagana, the largest underground organisation in Palestine (then under the British Mandate). After being trained to use pistols and knives he was transferred to an elite platoon called the Signallers.

In June 1945, after graduating from high school, Sharon went to Kibbutz Ruhama, on the edge of the Negev desert, to take a secret Hagana squad leaders’ course, but he did not impress his superiors. He returned to Kfar Malal to help his father on the farm and in 1947 enrolled in the Jewish Settlement Police, which patrolled roads and provided guards for isolated Jewish encampments.