Ariel Sharon, 1928–2014

Ariel Sharon was a warrior-king of Israel. As a soldier, defense minister, and prime minister, he fought or led troops in all of the nation’s wars from independence in 1948 until his stroke 58 years later. As a politician, he spearheaded the building of settlements on Palestinian territory, but later dismantled a crucial part of the project when he thought it could endanger Israel’s Jewish identity. Through it all, Sharon remained adamant that only he knew what was best for his country. When he ordered the forced removal of 7,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his opponents noted that he had previously encouraged them to occupy that land. “I was right then,” the prime minister replied, “and I’m right now.”

Sharon was born north of Tel Aviv “into a family of stubbornly independent pioneer farmers,” said The Independent (U.K.). His Russian-born parents were “anti-socialists in a community of socialists, individualists who built fences to keep their more gregarious neighbors at bay.” He joined the Haganah—the precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces—in 1945 and fought with distinction in Israel’s War of Independence, rising up the ranks and earning a reputation as a no-holds-barred leader. “Forces under his command crushed the Egyptian army in the 1967 Middle East War,” said the Los Angeles Times, and in 1971, he defeated Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza Strip with a series of raids, assassinations, and the bulldozing of homes. But Sharon’s greatest military feat came during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he rolled back Egyptian forces with a daring and bloody push across the Suez Canal.

“His exploits made him a popular swashbuckling figure with many Israelis,” said The Washington Post, and he turned to politics. Appointed agriculture minister by Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, he urged settlers to create a “greater Israel” by seizing Palestinian territory. As defense minister in 1982, Sharon won cabinet approval for a 48-hour military operation to remove Palestinian militant bases along Lebanon’s border with Israel. Instead, Sharon ordered the army to drive all the way to Beirut, where it laid siege to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization for two months. The invasion drove the PLO from Lebanon, but brought international condemnation for the high civilian death toll and almost ended Sharon’s career. He was forced to resign as defense minister in 1983 after an official committee condemned him for failing to stop Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies from massacring some 800 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

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“Sharon survived that humiliation,” said The New York Times, and in 1999 took control of Begin’s Likud Party. He quickly stirred up new controversy. During a 2000 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—holy to both Jews and Muslims—he insisted that Israel would always have sovereignty over the site, sparking a bloody period of Palestinian violence known as the second intifada. After being elected prime minister in 2001 on a promise to restore “security and true peace,” Sharon launched aerial bombings, ground attacks, and targeted assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and oversaw the construction of a barrier cutting off large portions of Palestinian territory on the West Bank from Israeli population centers. Human rights activists condemned the brutal tactics, but Palestinian attacks soon ceased.

Sharon didn’t pursue a solely military solution. Following Arafat’s death in 2004, he launched a unilateral initiative to uproot Jewish settlements from Gaza and parts of the West Bank to make way for a Palestinian nation, said The Wall Street Journal. His motives were pragmatic: Sharon had concluded that the handful of Gaza settlements compromised Israeli security, and that he had no interest in ruling the more than 3.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories. Just months after the historic Gaza pullback was completed in 2006, the prime minister suffered a stroke that left him in a permanent coma. “Sharon’s legacy was to convey to Israelis that holding on to all of the [Palestinian] territories would not last,” said Uzi Benziman, author of Sharon: An Israeli Caesar. “He was the last of the real leaders.”