Ariel Sharon biography

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Profile

(born Feb. 26, 1928, Kefar Malal, Palestine [now in Israel]) Israeli general and politician, whose public life was marked by brilliant but controversial military achievements and political policies. He was one of the chief participants in the Arab-Israeli wars and was elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, a position he held until he was incapacitated by a stroke in 2006.

Early life and military career

Born Ariel Scheinerman—like many Israelis, he Hebraized his name in the early years of the state—Sharon grew up in a family of Russian immigrants in then British-ruled Palestine. His early years were marked by experiences in the secular, socialist Labour Zionist movement and in the Haganah, the underground Zionist militia, which he joined at age 14. In December 1947 he became a full-time soldier. In 1948, Sharon fought as a junior officer in the battle of Larn; when Israeli forces there were routed by Jordanian troops, Sharon's platoon was destroyed, and he was seriously injured. He later said that he was “eaten up by despair and the shame of the defeat.” After the war he remained in uniform and served as an intelligence officer while studying Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In July 1953 Sharon was appointed the head of Unit 101, a commando group charged with conducting reprisal raids against Jordanian border villages in response to incursions by Arab irregulars. Sharon was accorded considerable independence of action, to which he added a natural impetuosity and recklessness. In October one such operation, a retaliatory attack against the village of Qiby (in the West Bank), left 69 civilians dead, many of them women and children. The episode evoked criticism both in Israel and abroad. Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett, who had opposed any such retaliation, decried the raid as having exposed Israel before the world “as a gang of bloodsuckers, capable of mass murder.” But Sharon was protected by the country's combative first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who described the young Sharon as original and visionary. In his diary Ben-Gurion also noted, “Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional military leader.”

In 1955 Sharon led another raid, this time directed at the Egyptian forces that were occupying the Gaza Strip. The incident, in which 38 Egyptians and 8 Israelis were killed, heightened tensions between Israel and Egypt. In late October 1956 the crisis culminated in the invasion of Egypt