Ariel Sharon, the Israeli warrior and former prime minister as famous for his ferocity in battling Arabs as for his turnaround decision to evacuate settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, died Saturday. He was 85.
Sharon, who had been in a coma since suffering a stroke in January 2006, died from multiple organ failure at Chaim Sheba Medical Center, near Tel Aviv.
Sharon’s coffin will sit in state today at the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, the Knesset, and he will be buried Monday at his family’s farm in southern Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
His death was met with the same strong feelings he evoked in life. Israelis called him a war hero. His enemies called him a war criminal.
“Ariel Sharon played a key role in Israel’s struggle for security during all of its years,” Netanyahu said in a text message.
President Barack Obama extended his condolences to Sharon’s family and the country, calling the former prime minister a “leader who dedicated his life to the State of Israel.”
“We reaffirm our unshakable commitment to Israel’s security and our appreciation for the enduring friendship between our two countries,” Obama said in a statement.
“It was an honor to work with him, argue with him, and watch him always trying to find the right path for his beloved country,” former President Bill Clinton said.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a statement, said he would lead the U.S. delegation to Sharon’s memorial service.
The man Israel knew simply by his nickname “Arik” fought in most of Israel’s wars, gained a reputation as an adroit soldier and was the godfather of Israel’s settlement campaign in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He detested the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, his lifelong adversary, as an “obstacle to peace” and was in turn detested in the Arab world.
Sharon was distrusted for defying commanders and criticized for his deadly raids against militants. A government panel found he bore indirect responsibility for the 1982 slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
In 2001, Israeli voters, yearning for a tough response to a Palestinian uprising, elected Sharon prime minister by a landslide.
Faced with a succession of suicide bombings, the new prime minister waged a multipronged campaign of aerial bombings, ground attacks, targeted assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders, temporary reoccupation of major West Bank cities and, ultimately, the construction of a barrier around and through the West Bank to cut off large portions of Palestinian territory from Israeli population centers.
The campaign wreaked enormous physical damage on the West Bank and Gaza and deepened the area’s poverty and despair, but succeeded in suffocating the uprising.
Critics said the old militaristic Sharon was back. But defense analyst Yosef Alpher noted some subtle distinctions. Sharon, he said, had learned two important lessons from the Lebanon debacle: “Don’t alienate the United States and don’t get too far out in front of Israeli public opinion.”
Sharon, who parlayed Cabinet positions to send tens of thousands of Jews to live on land the Palestinians want for a state, stunned Israelis in 2005 by announcing his plan to evacuate Gaza after almost four decades. Withdrawal from four small West Bank settlements was also part of the proposal.
His motives were pragmatic. He said he had reluctantly concluded that the handful of small Jewish settlements in Gaza were a detriment to Israeli security. Some critics said he was disengaging from Gaza to shore up Israel’s hold on the West Bank, while others argued that he had set off a process that would inevitably lead to withdrawal from other Palestinian territory.
Sharon said Israel had no interest in ruling the more than 3.5 million Palestinians in the territories, but remained unclear about the size and powers of a future Palestinian state.
“The withdrawal from Gaza wasn’t to buy peace, but to resolve a security situation,” said Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s chief of staff. “Someone had to say, ‘the buck stops here.’ This was Sharon.”
Sharon ordered soldiers and 8,500 settlers to unilaterally leave the Gaza Strip and handed over the territory to Palestinian rule. The pullout freed 1.3 million Palestinians from Israeli military rule and left his successors the vague outline of his proposal for a final peace settlement with Israel’s Arab foes.
The decision to leave Gaza won Sharon international accolades while causing an uproar among his power base. President George W. Bush hailed him at the time as “a man of peace” for being willing to make what Sharon called “painful concessions” to the Palestinians.
Bush said in a statement Saturday that he was “honored to know this man of courage and call him friend. He was a warrior for the ages and a partner in seeking security for the Holy Land and a better, peaceful Middle East.”
“Ariel Sharon is one of the most significant figures in Israeli history, and as prime minister he took brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace, before he was so tragically incapacitated,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said.
Detractors accused Sharon of betraying the settlement cause, and the withdrawal is still debated in Israel because it allowed Gaza militants greater freedom to attack its southern border.
After the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon shattered Israel’s long-standing political divisions by leaving Likud, the hard-line party he had helped found three decades earlier. He created a new centrist party, called Kadima, or Forward, to support his efforts to reach a deal with the Palestinians and draw Israel’s permanent borders.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is overseeing peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, said “it is no secret that there were times the United States had differences with” Sharon.
“But whether you agreed or disagreed with his positions - and Arik was always crystal clear about where he stood - you admired the man who was determined to ensure the security and survival of the Jewish State,” Kerry said in a statement.
“In his final years as prime minister, he surprised many in his pursuit of peace and, today, we all recognize, as he did, that Israel must be strong to make peace, and that peace will also make Israel stronger,” Kerry said.
In a later statement, U.S. State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said Kerry won’t join the U.S. delegation at Sharon’s funeral because of previously scheduled meetings in Paris on the civil war in Syria and the Mideast peace process.
Sharon was born Feb. 26, 1928, in Kfar Malal, a farming village north of Tel Aviv that was then part of British-ruled Palestine. There, he developed a love of farming that lasted throughout his life, and the large sheep and cattle ranch he later acquired in the southern Negev desert became a beloved retreat.
Sharon’s military career could have ended before it began, after he was badly wounded leading troops in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation. In his 1989 autobiography, Warrior, he described himself as “oppressed by feelings of frustration and disappointment” that Arab nations held on to east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. He was convinced Israel’s military leaders could have done a better job.
In the 1967 war in which Israel captured the three territories, Sharon’s armored division helped seize the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. He retired from the army in 1973, only to be recalled months later after Egyptian forces caught Israel by surprise and crossed the Suez Canal into Sinai.
Taking charge of an armored division again, Sharon used attack-when-surrounded tactics that changed the course of the war when his forces broke through Egyptian lines to reach the canal. Even as his troops poured across the waterway, Sharon argued with Israeli generals who tried to hold him back.
His accomplishments as a strategist were offset by questions about his tactics. When he headed a commando unit that launched what Israel called reprisal raids in the 1950s, his men killed 69 civilians by blowing up houses in a village in the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan. He said he thought the buildings had been vacated.
He was reprimanded in 1956 for engaging with Egyptian forces in a battle that commanders deemed unnecessary. Dozens of suspected militants were killed in the 1970s when he was assigned to curb terrorism in Gaza. And as defense minister during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he changed the aims of a strike to root out Palestinian militants from southern Lebanon and sent Israeli troops charging as far north as Beirut.
While Sharon achieved his aim of evicting the Palestine Liberation Organization from its base in Lebanon, the massacres in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps sparked an uproar that ultimately forced him out of the Defense Ministry. He said he couldn’t have anticipated the slaughter.
Four years after the Lenanon massacres, Sharon found his political calling, when Menachem Begin’s Likud party was catapulted to power. As agriculture minister in Begin’s government, he began building dozens of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that he called essential for Israel’s security, defying international opposition to the settling of occupied land. Today, more than 550,000 Jews live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem among 2.6 million Palestinians.
Sharon’s death elicited a range of responses from Palestinians on Saturday, but sadness wasn’t one. Some cheered and distributed sweets while others prayed for divine punishment for the former Israeli leader or recalled his central role in some of the bloodiest episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The Palestinian people remember today what this former prime minister did in battles and war to uproot us from our land, in particular what took place in Lebanon,” said Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee.
The news of Sharon’s death traveled quickly in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Beirut.
“Sharon is dead!” a 63-yearold Palestinian woman in Sabra who only gave her first name, Samia. “We should celebrate. We should be firing in the air.”
In the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a few dozen supporters of two militant groups, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, gathered in the main street, chanting anti-Sharon slogans. Some burned Sharon pictures or stepped on them, while others distributed sweets to motorists and passers-by.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sharon’s legacy was far more complicated than critics say.
“Arik was not a warmonger. When it was necessary to fight, he stood at the forefront of the divisions in the most sensitive and painful places, but he was a smart and realistic person and understood well that there is a limit in our ability to conduct wars,” he said.
David Landau, author of Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon, said the former Israeli leader’s recognition of Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinians, and his willingness to cede occupied territory, set the stage for Kerry’s current peace efforts in the region.
“That is a hugely important part of his legacy as it is still valid and active now in today’s negotiations, and it harks back to Sharon,” Landau said.
Information for this article was contributed by Gwen Ackerman, Calev Ben-David, Amy Teibel, Riad Hamade and Fadwa Hodali of Bloomberg News; by Diaa Hadid, Mohammed Daraghmeh, Hatem Moussa, Dalia Nammari, Josef Federman, Ian Deitch and Ibrahim Barzak of The Associated Press; and by Glenn Frankel, William Booth and Ruth Eglash of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/12/2014