Israelis say farewell to their maverick warrior-statesman
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Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s body lay in state outside parliament in Jerusalem yesterday, with thousands of Israelis waiting to bid farewell to the maverick warrior-statesman who reshaped the Middle East.
Sharon died on Saturday at the age of 85, after eight years in a coma caused by a stroke he suffered at the peak of his political power. He will be buried today in a military funeral at his farm in southern Israel.
“They say old soldiers do not die, they fade away. Arik Sharon faded away eight years ago, and now we truly say goodbye to him,” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, using Sharon’s nickname, wrote in a tribute.
Sharon was one of Israel’s finest military strategists and most powerful political figures, spearheading military invasion, Jewish settlement-building on land the Palestinians want for a state, and making the shock decision to withdraw from one of those territories, the Gaza Strip. Prime minister from 2001 to 2006, Sharon’s stroke happened shortly after he quit the right-wing Likud party and founded a centrist faction to advance peace with the Palestinians, whose 2000-2005 “Intifada” uprising he had battled as prime minister.
In parliament’s main plaza, Israelis filed past Sharon’s coffin, which was draped in the national flag.
Widely hated
Sharon was widely hated by Arabs over the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel.
But the United States and other foreign powers mourned him as a peacemaker, noting his pursuit of dialogue with the Palestinians. Those negotiations continue under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He was bound to the land. He knew that the land must be protected. And he understood above all else that our existence is predicated on our ability to protect ourselves by ourselves,” Netanyahu told his ministers yesterday.
Many Israelis remember Sharon as a brilliant but unpredictable military leader who fought in the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and went on to earn a reputation for trigger-happy disobedience.
But he was also hailed in Israel for the crucial counter-attack across the Suez Canal that helped to turn the tide of the 1973 Middle East war with Egypt and Syria.
In 1983 an Israeli state inquiry found Sharon, who engineered Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and war against Palestinian guerrillas, indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila killings, and he was forced to resign.
“The Palestinian people remember what Sharon did and tried to do to our people and their dream of forming a state,” said Wael Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
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