Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician who served as the prime minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006.
Born in Kfar Malal in Palestine to Russian Jewish immigrants, he rose in the ranks of the Israeli Army from its creation in 1948, participating in the 1948 Palestine war as platoon commander of the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in several battles. Sharon became an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101 and the reprisal operations, including the 1953 Qibya massacre, as well as in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. Yitzhak Rabin called Sharon "the greatest field commander in our history". Upon leaving the military, Sharon entered politics, joining the Likud party, and served in a number of ministerial posts in Likud-led governments in 1977–92 and 1996–99. As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. An official enquiry found that he bore "personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees, for which he became known as the "Butcher of Beirut" among Arabs. He was subsequently removed as defense minister.
From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon championed construction of Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He became the leader of the Likud in 1999, and in 2000, amid campaigning for the 2001 prime ministerial election, made a controversial visit to the Al-Aqsa complex on the Temple Mount, triggering the Second Intifada. He subsequently defeated Ehud Barak in the election and served as Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006. As Prime Minister, Sharon orchestrated the construction of the Israeli West Bank barrier in 2002–2003 and Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Facing stiff opposition to the latter policy within the Likud, in November 2005 he left Likud to form a new party, Kadima. He had been expected to win the next election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals. Following a stroke on 4 January 2006, Sharon remained in a permanent vegetative state until his death in 2014.
Sharon remains a highly polarizing figure in Middle Eastern history. Israelis almost universally revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman, whereas Palestinians and Human Rights Watch have criticized him as a war criminal, with the latter lamenting that he was never held accountable.
Early life and education
Ariel Scheinerman was born in Kfar Malal, an agricultural moshav, then in Mandatory Palestine, to Shmuel Scheinerman of Brest-Litovsk and Vera Scheinerman of Mogilev. His parents met while at university in Tiflis, where Sharon's father was studying agronomy and his mother was studying medicine. They immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1922 in the wake of the Russian Communist government's growing persecution of Jews in the region. In Palestine, Vera Scheinerman went by the name Dvora.The family arrived with the Third Aliyah and settled in Kfar Malal, a socialist, secular community. Although his parents were Mapai supporters, they did not always accept communal consensus: "The Scheinermans' eventual ostracism... followed the 1933 Arlozorov murder when Dvora and Shmuel refused to endorse the Labor movement's anti-Revisionist calumny and participate in Bolshevik-style public revilement rallies, then the order of the day. Retribution was quick to come. They were expelled from the local health-fund clinic and village synagogue. The cooperative's truck wouldn't make deliveries to their farm nor collect produce."
Sharon spoke both Hebrew and Russian.
Four years after their arrival at Kfar Malal, the Sheinermans had a daughter, Yehudit. Ariel was born two years later. At age 10, he joined the youth movement HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed. As a teenager, he began to take part in the armed night-patrols of his moshav. In 1942 at the age of 14, Sharon joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later the Haganah, the underground paramilitary force and the Jewish military precursor to the Israel Defense Forces.
Military career
Battle for Jerusalem and 1948 War
Sharon's unit of the Haganah became engaged in serious and continuous combat from the autumn of 1947, with the onset of the Battle for Jerusalem. Without the manpower to hold the roads, his unit took to making offensive hit-and-run raids on Arab forces in the vicinity of Kfar Malal. In units of thirty men, they would hit constantly at Arab villages, bridges and bases, as well as ambush the traffic between Arab villages and bases.Sharon wrote in his autobiography: "We had become skilled at finding our way in the darkest nights and gradually we built up the strength and endurance these kind of operations required. Under the stress of constant combat we drew closer to one another and began to operate not just as a military unit but almost as a family.... e were in combat almost every day. Ambushes and battles followed each other until they all seemed to run together."
For his role in a night-raid on Iraqi forces at Bir Adas, Sharon was made a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade. Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the onset of the War of Independence, his platoon fended off the Iraqi advance at Kalkiya. Sharon was regarded as a hardened and aggressive soldier, swiftly moving up the ranks during the war. He was shot in the groin, stomach and foot by the Jordanian Arab Legion in the First Battle of Latrun, an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the besieged Jewish community of Jerusalem. Sharon wrote of the casualties in the "horrible battle," and his brigade suffered 139 deaths.
Jordanian field marshal Habis Majali said that Sharon was among 6 Israeli soldiers captured by the Jordanian 4th battalion during the battle, and that Majali took them to a camp in Mafraq and the 6 were later traded back. Sharon denied the claims, but Majali was adamant. "Sharon is like a grizzly bear," he assured. "I captured him for 9 days, I healed his wounds and released him due to his insignificance." A few fellow high-ranking Jordanian officers testified in favour of his account." In 1994 and during the peace treaty signing ceremony with Jordan, Sharon wanted to get in touch with his former captor, but the latter determinedly refused to discuss the incident publicly.
After recovering from the wounds received at Latrun, he resumed command of his patrol unit. On 28 December 1948, his platoon attempted to break through an Egyptian stronghold in Iraq-El-Manshia. At about this time, Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion gave him the Hebraized name "Sharon". In September 1949, Sharon was promoted to company commander and in 1950 to intelligence officer for Central Command. He then took leave to begin studies in history and Middle Eastern culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sharon's subsequent military career would be characterized by insubordination, aggression and disobedience, but also brilliance as a commander.
Unit 101
A year and a half later, on the direct orders of the Prime Minister, Sharon returned to active service in the rank of major, as the founder and commander of the new Unit 101, a special forces unit tasked with reprisal operations in response to Palestinian fedayeen attacks. The first Israeli commando unit, Unit 101 specialized in offensive guerrilla warfare in enemy countries. The unit consisted of 50 men, mostly former paratroopers and Unit 30 personnel. They were armed with non-standard weapons and tasked with carrying out special reprisals across the state's borders—mainly establishing small unit maneuvers, activation and insertion tactics. Training included engaging enemy forces across Israel's borders. Israeli historian Benny Morris describes Unit 101:Unit 101 undertook a series of raids against Jordan, which then held the West Bank. The raids also helped bolster Israeli morale and convince Arab states that the fledgling nation was capable of long-range military action. Known for raids against Arab civilians and military targets, the unit is held responsible for the widely condemned Qibya massacre in October 1953. After a group of Palestinians used Qibya as a staging point for a fedayeen attack in Yehud that killed a Jewish woman and her two children in Israel, Unit 101 retaliated on the village. By various accounts of the ensuing attack, 65 to 70 Palestinian civilians, half of them women and children, were killed when Sharon's troops dynamited 45 houses and a school.
Facing international condemnation for the attack, Ben-Gurion denied that the Israeli military was involved. In his memoir, Sharon wrote that the unit had checked all the houses before detonating the explosives and that he thought the houses were empty. Although he admitted the results were tragic, Sharon defended the attack, however: "Now people could feel that the terrorist gangs would think twice before striking, now that they knew for sure they would be hit back. Kibbya also put the Jordanian and Egyptian governments on notice that if Israel was vulnerable, so were they."
File:Dayan w Kuntila Raid comm.jpg|thumb|right|220px|Sharon, top second from left, with members of Unit 101 after Operation Egged. Standing l to r: Lt. Meir Har-Zion, Maj. Arik Sharon, Lt. Gen Moshe Dayan, Capt. Dani Matt, Lt. Moshe Efron, Maj. Gen Asaf Simchoni; on ground, l to r: Capt. Aharon Davidi, Lt. Ya'akov Ya'akov, Capt. Raful Eitan
A few months after its founding, Unit 101 was merged with the 890 Paratroopers Battalion to create the Paratroopers Brigade, of which Sharon would also later become commander. Like Unit 101, it continued raids into Arab territory, culminating with the attack on the Qalqilyah police station in the autumn of 1956.
Leading up to the Suez War, the missions Sharon took part in included:
- Operation Shoshana
- Operation Black Arrow
- Operation Elkayam
- Operation Egged
- Operation Olive Leaves
- Operation Volcano
- Operation Gulliver
- Operation Lulav