ARIK: THE LIFE OF ARIEL SHARON
David Landau
Alfred A Knopf; 635 pages; $35
When Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in a landslide 13 years ago, many close to David Landau, a left-leaning British-born Israeli journalist, thought seriously of leaving the country. The future under Sharon, it seemed to them, held only war and bloodshed. Yet when Prime Minister Sharon collapsed from a stroke less than five years later, "We wept," Mr Landau writes. "Not just for him; for ourselves."
It is Sharon's wholly surprising journey from ruthless military commander to what Mr Landau calls "national father figure", from territory-expanding champion to Palestinian state advocate, that most interests Mr Landau in Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon, his fine, comprehensive and readable biography. Five years in the making and published just after Sharon's death last month, the book closely chronicles Sharon's epic military and political battles, serving as a kind of national history.
It also seeks to grapple with "what ifs". If Sharon had not visited the Temple Mount in 2000, would the second Palestinian uprising have occurred anyway? (Very likely, he suggests.) If Sharon had not suffered a stroke just as he was withdrawing Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and a part of the West Bank, would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be in a different place from where it is today, paralysed by timidity and mistrust on both sides? Mr Landau believes Sharon planned to carry out more withdrawals and seems to accept the notion that only a onetime rightist like Sharon could have done so successfully.
Mr Landau, the Israel correspondent for The Economist, who wrote for many years for The Jerusalem Post, was editor of the newspaper Haaretz and the author of a book on the ultra-Orthodox at the time of Sharon's stroke. He does not shy away from the unheroic. Much of his account will be familiar from the obituaries last month - Sharon's attack in 1953 on the Jordanian village of Qibya in which scores of women and children were killed; his bulldozing of Gaza refugee camps in the early 1970s; his sending of Lebanese Phalange troops into Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1982, leading to a massacre of at least 800 civilians.
There are also transgressions that have gone unreported. One, brought to light in this book, occurred in early 1972, when Sharon was the military commander in the Israeli south. He expelled Bedouin tribes from parts of Sinai he wanted reserved for military use, sending elderly tribesmen without warning trudging for up to 30 miles through freezing sands. "Many just slumped down and wept," and more than 40 died, an Israeli expert on the Bedouin, Clinton Bailey, wrote at the time in a complaint to the military chief of staff. The chief of staff, General David Elazar, ordered Sharon to allow the Bedouin back. A few days later Sharon, who was never disciplined for what happened, called Bailey in and, all good cheer, said he too loved the colourful Bedouin. If Bailey ever needed research help, he should not hesitate to ask. Sharon then quietly sent out orders barring Bailey from all Israeli military bases in Sinai.
To Mr Landau, this episode typified a pattern to Sharon's early exploits: he carried out government policy but "with excessive, wanton brutality". He was "the convenient lightning rod to absorb and deflect criticism". And his superiors "covered for him and protected him from serious fallout".
Mr Landau gives other examples. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, admired Sharon for his guts and leadership skills and saved his career despite viewing him as a liar ("Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth?" he asked Sharon in 1958). Menachem Begin, re-elected prime minister in 1981, was repeatedly warned by those around him that if Sharon got the post of defence minister that he coveted, he would push Israel into war in Lebanon. Begin said he was not easily pushed around. He gave Sharon the defence portfolio because the peace treaty he had signed with Egypt required him to relinquish Sinai and only Sharon could evict the Israeli settlers from there.
He was right. Sharon did move out the settlers. But as predicted, he also pushed for military action in Lebanon, a hubristic morass of Vietnam War proportions where Sharon had the illusion that he could remake regional geopolitics to Israel's advantage. Mr Landau also thoroughly goes over allegations of corruption against Sharon and his sons and leaves the impression that many of the accusations had merit, even though few were brought to their conclusion.
Still, Sharon was a brilliant tactician, MacArthur-like in his military planning, leading a daring crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war that turned the conflict in Israel's favour. He was courageous, funny and gallant, attentive to ordinary people, an inspired leader who never left the wounded on the battlefield, a loner in constant need of company, Falstaffian in his appetites.
Nonetheless, capturing and explaining a paradoxical and larger-than-life figure like Sharon, especially when it was no longer possible to interview him (Mr Landau began the book after Sharon's collapse), is no simple task. And while Mr Landau is fair and clear, he does not really unlock the mystery to Sharon's shifts or give a fully coherent picture of his inner self. He also makes no effort to describe how Palestinians or other Arabs experienced Sharon, which is a shame in such a long and serious book. Landau interviews associates and presents others' accounts of competing possibilities.
Whether or not we understand why he changed, we are given a close look at how and when, including Sharon's sudden use of the word "occupation" in 2003 to describe Israel's control over the West Bank and Gaza, anathema to his right-wing base at the time. Sharon never really recognised the importance of the Palestinians to Israel's future as much as he accepted the importance of the Americans and their policy requests. He did see, Mr Landau argues, that unless Israel rid itself of rule over millions of Palestinians, it could not survive as a Jewish and democratic state. His willingness to act boldly on that understanding through withdrawal from Gaza, Mr Landau says, is his most significant legacy. Only if it lasts, he concludes, will Zionism be saved.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
