Israel and World Grapple With Sharon’s Mixed Legacy
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Version 0 of 1. SDEROT, Israel — When the Mark family heard the news about the death of Ariel Sharon on the radio on Saturday afternoon, they immediately turned their car around and headed to his sprawling sheep farm here in the Negev desert, where he is expected to be buried on a hill next to his wife, Lily. “I want our kids to remember this moment,” said Sharon Mark, 35, a mother of two from the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, “when the last of the giants and fighters died.” Ms. Mark was one of dozens of Israelis who flocked to the ranch in the hours after the former prime minister died at 85, as the nation — and the world — grappled with the mixed legacy of one of Israel’s most influential leaders. It was a mourning long in the making: Mr. Sharon had been in a state of minimal consciousness since a stroke felled him eight years ago, and on Jan. 1 his organs began to fail. On Saturday, statements poured in from Israeli politicians, foreign diplomats, American Jewish leaders, Palestinian opponents and critical human rights groups. The admirers, almost as a mantra, described him as a “brave soldier and military commander”; detractors accused him of long-ago war crimes. Many noted that his life and career had paralleled and been enmeshed with the development of his country, for better or worse. “There are very few people whose actions have shaped and developed the state of Israel up until now in the way that Ariel Sharon did,” said Dov Weissglas, his former lawyer and close adviser. “Today is the end of an era, the era of the first, the era of the giants, the era of the generation of leaders who fought in the war of independence.” Tzipi Livni, Israel’s centrist justice minister and a Sharon protégé, described him as “a farmer, a fighter and a prime minister who became a father of a nation.” “But more than anything he was a man I loved,” Ms. Livni said in a statement. “We had eight years to say goodbye, and yet we couldn’t. We say goodbye to him now.” Mr. Sharon was expected to lie in state on Sunday at Israel’s Parliament building in Jerusalem, where an official memorial is scheduled for Monday morning. Burial is planned for Monday afternoon here on Anemone Hill, overlooking the Sharons’ Sycamore Ranch, where his sons were expected to eulogize him in a smaller, private service. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Saturday in a statement that he would lead the American delegation to the memorial. While Israeli politicians of all stripes found something to praise Mr. Sharon for, Palestinians and others were blunt in their criticism. Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that leads the Gaza Strip, called the death “a sign of God’s punishment and a lesson to all tyrants.” Mustafa Barghouti, a moderate member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s central council, told the BBC that Mr. Sharon had left “no good memories with Palestinians.” “Unfortunately, he had a path of war and aggression and a great failure in making peace with the Palestinian people,” Mr. Barghouti said. Some Lebanese remembered Mr. Sharon as a scourge to their country, saying he was responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 when he was defense minister. “Perhaps the souls of the martyrs from the Sabra and Shatila massacres can get a bit of comfort,” Lebanon’s social affairs minister, Wael Abu Faour, said Saturday in a statement reported by the Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. “There is now less evil in this world.” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, called it a “shame that Sharon has gone to his grave without facing justice” for, among other things, his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. She called his death “another grim reminder that years of virtual impunity for rights abuses have done nothing to bring Israeli-Palestinian peace any closer.” But most commentators and foreign leaders focused on the last chapter of Mr. Sharon’s active life, when he evacuated Israel’s settlements in Gaza and a small portion of the West Bank; started building a separation barrier that both helped block terrorist attacks and hinted at a future division of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; and appeared to be preparing for the possibility of a Palestinian state, albeit one of limited sovereignty. “As prime minister he took brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace, before he was so tragically incapacitated,” said Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. President François Hollande of France, too, noted in a statement that Mr. Sharon “made the choice to turn towards dialogue with the Palestinians.” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the New York-based Union for Reform Judaism, said the decisions that Mr. Sharon made in Lebanon “were terribly misguided,” but he praised his turnaround from being a proponent of Jewish settlement in occupied Palestinian territories to being the architect of the Gaza withdrawal. Rabbi Jacobs offered a quotation from Mr. Sharon himself: “We are required to take difficult and controversial steps, but we must not miss the opportunity to try to achieve what we have wished for, for so many years: security, tranquillity and peace.” |