Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon (1928 to 2014) was an Israeli general who fought in five of Israel’s wars and its eleventh prime minister, a man whose record contains both a state commission’s censure, for failing to prevent a massacre that Lebanese Phalangist militiamen carried out, and the most dramatic territorial withdrawal in Israel’s history, the 2005 removal of every Israeli soldier and settler from Gaza. Wikipedia’s article leads with the epithet his enemies coined, “Butcher of Beirut,” while opening its article on Yasser Arafat with “political leader.” An honest article gives the whole man: the brilliant and insubordinate soldier, the Qibya raid, the Kahan Commission’s findings in their actual words, the intifada he did not start, and the disengagement he forced through against his own political base.

The soldier, 1948 to 1973

Sharon was born Ariel Scheinerman on 26 February 1928 in Kfar Malal, a farming village in Mandatory Palestine. At twenty he commanded an infantry unit in the 1948 War of Independence and was shot through the abdomen at Latrun in May 1948. In 1953 he founded Unit 101, the commando force created to answer the fedayeen infiltrations that were killing Israeli civilians by the hundreds. Its raid on Qibya on 14 October 1953 killed about 69 Jordanian villagers, most of them civilians who died inside demolished houses; it drew UN Security Council condemnation and remains the genuine stain on his early record, and an honest article says so plainly.

The rest of the military record is the one Israelis remember. He led the paratroop brigade at the Mitla Pass in the 1956 Suez war, where he was criticized for pushing beyond orders at the cost of 38 Israeli dead. He commanded the division that cracked the fortified Egyptian position at Abu Ageila in the Six-Day War of 1967, a battle still taught in war colleges. And in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, recalled from civilian life, he led the counterattack that crossed the Suez Canal on the night of 15 to 16 October and encircled Egypt’s Third Army, the stroke that turned the war. Soldiers spray-painted “Arik, King of Israel” on his half-tracks.

Sabra and Shatila: what the Kahan Commission actually found

As defense minister, Sharon was the architect of the 1982 Lebanon War, launched after years of PLO rocket fire and cross-border murder and pushed by Sharon far beyond the 40-kilometer operation the cabinet had approved, all the way to Beirut. On 14 September 1982 Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated. Two days later Israel allowed Phalangist militiamen, Gemayel’s own Christian militia, into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to root out remaining PLO fighters. Over roughly 36 hours the Phalangists massacred the inhabitants: Israeli intelligence put the dead at 700 to 800, other counts run higher.

Israel did what no other state in the region has ever done about a massacre committed by its allies: it convened a state commission of inquiry under Supreme Court president Yitzhak Kahan. The commission’s February 1983 report found that the massacre “was carried out by a Phalangist unit acting on its own,” that no Israeli soldier took part, and that Israel’s responsibility was indirect. Within that indirect responsibility it found Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for disregarding the danger of bloodshed when he approved the Phalangists’ entry, and recommended his removal as defense minister. He resigned the portfolio. Wikipedia’s lead quotes the two words “personal responsibility” stripped of the sentence around them, letting readers infer he ordered the killing; the report says the opposite. In 1985 a New York federal jury in Sharon’s libel suit against Time magazine found the magazine’s core allegation, that he had discussed revenge with the Gemayel family, false and defamatory, though not published with actual malice.

The Temple Mount visit and the intifada myth

On 28 September 2000, as opposition leader, Sharon walked on the Temple Mount for 34 minutes, coordinated in advance with Palestinian security officials, entering no mosque. The claim that this visit ignited the Second Intifada is one of the conflict’s most durable myths. The timing tells the real story: Arafat had walked away from statehood at the Camp David summit two months earlier, and senior Palestinian Authority figures later stated openly that the uprising was planned from the moment the summit failed; PA communications minister Imad Falouji said in March 2001 that the intifada had been prepared since Arafat’s return from Camp David. See who started the intifadas. The suicide-bombing war that followed killed over 1,000 Israelis.

Prime minister: the fence, Defensive Shield, and Gaza

Israelis elected Sharon prime minister in February 2001 by the largest margin in the country’s history, 62 percent, precisely because the peace process had collapsed into bus bombings. After March 2002, the bloodiest month of the intifada, ending with the Passover massacre of 30 seder guests in Netanya, he launched Operation Defensive Shield, retaking the West Bank cities the bombers operated from, and began the security barrier. Suicide attacks from the northern West Bank subsequently collapsed to near zero.

Then the career’s great reversal. The father of the settlement movement announced in December 2003 that Israel would leave Gaza unilaterally. In August 2005 he executed it: all 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza and 4 in the northern West Bank dismantled, some 8,000 settlers removed by Israeli soldiers, the last soldier out on 12 September 2005. Nothing tests the “occupied Gaza” claim like this record; see has Israel occupied Gaza for decades. The withdrawal split his party; he left Likud in November 2005 to found Kadima. Weeks later, on 4 January 2006, a massive stroke ended his public life. He died on 11 January 2014 after eight years in a coma. Gaza’s answer to the withdrawal was the Hamas election victory of January 2006, the 2007 coup, and two decades of rockets.

Why he is in the audit

Sharon appears in our Wikipedia audit not because his record needs whitewashing, Qibya and the Kahan censure are real and belong in any honest biography, but because of the asymmetry. The Israeli general is introduced by his enemies’ epithet and a decontextualized quote; the Palestinian leaders across the table are introduced by their offices, their terrorism and Holocaust denial deferred or footnoted. Same conflict, same encyclopedia, opposite words.

Yasser Arafat · Second Intifada · 2000 Camp David Summit · Who attacked first in the 1982 Lebanon War · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit · Who attacked first, every war

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison