Ariel Sharon, who died Saturday after lingering for eight years in a vegetative state after a massive stroke, was a monumental figure in Israel’s modern history who epitomized the country’s warrior past even as he sought to become the architect of a peaceful future.
His death, at 85, was confirmed by a senior official in the Israeli prime minister’s office and Dr. Shlomo Noy of the Shedba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, where Sharon had spent his last years.
As a soldier, defense minister and prime minister, Sharon fought or commanded forces in every one of Israel’s military conflicts for more than half a century, beginning with its 1948 independence war, and was author of the ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. As a politician, he built the infrastructure of the country’s controversial settlement campaign in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, then stunned friend and foe alike by dismantling part of the project he had long championed.
Through it all, Sharon commanded center stage, insisting at times that he alone knew what was best for the state of Israel and persevering over six decades to finally emerge as prime minister in 2001. At the time of his stroke in January 2006, he was in the process of seeking to extend his time in office by forging a new centrist political movement based upon his personal popularity.
The man who chose the title “Warrior” for his autobiography was for much of his career the darling of the Israeli right, which chanted “Arik, King of Israel!” invoking his nickname and comparing him to the legendary biblical King David.
For decades, he used that support to undermine governments of both the rival Labor and his own Likud parties and advance his own political agenda. But in later years, as he first organized Israel’s withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza and made plans for pullbacks from parts of the West Bank, the right denounced him as a traitor.
The more dovish left, which had long feared and despised him, had begun to re-evaluate his motives and policies and accord him a grudging respect. Meanwhile, for moderates on both sides of Israel’s bitter political divide, wary and exhausted after years of conflict and false dawns, Sharon came to embody the country’s eternal quest for security. While he did not always share their hopes, he understood and spoke to their fears.
Ariel Scheinermann was born Feb. 26, 1928, in Palestine, then under British mandatory rule, in a cooperative farming village.
In his memoirs, he wrote that he often thought back to “working with my father on that arid slope of land, walking behind him to plant the seeds in the earth he had turned with his hoe. When I felt too exhausted to go on, he would stop for a moment to look backwards, to see how much we had already done. And that would always give me heart for what remained.”
He took the Hebrew name for “plain” (as in the Israeli coastal plain of Sharon) and as a teenager joined the Haganah, the main Jewish underground movement opposed to British rule.
Sharon fought with distinction during the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, and earned the title “The Bulldozer” in the early 1970s for rooting out Palestinian resistance in the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip in part by plowing open lanes to allow Israeli armored vehicles to move through densely populated civilian zones.
In his later years, many Israelis trusted Sharon as a political leader because of his long-standing experience as a soldier and strategist and because they thought he would move only as far and as fast as he felt absolutely necessary.
He was a leader who had shed blood, yet who had also known personal tragedy. His first wife, the former Margalit Zimmerman, died in a car accident in 1962, and their son, Gur, died in a shooting accident five years later.
Soon after Zimmerman’s death, Sharon wed her younger sister, Lily, and they were married until her death from cancer in 2000.
Survivors include two sons from his second marriage, Gilad and Omri, and six grandchildren.
