Tuesday, September 17, 2002

'Sharon': First in War
Sharon is not a religious Jew, but he is a fierce Jewish nationalist. He believes, as he wrote in his autobiography, that Jews everywhere can remain Jews only if Israel survives and prospers. In his view, that demands maintaining a society strong and vigorous enough to attract steady Jewish immigration and then settling those newcomers throughout the historic land of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In his autobiography, Sharon confessed his fears that the new generation of Israelis, having grown up in relative comfort and security, was dangerously soft and weak. It has always been his obsession to demonstrate that Israelis are fighters.

As this new biography makes clear, Sharon has lived his life as a ferocious fighter, sometimes at great cost to innocent Arab civilians. The pattern was set as early as 1953, when, as a 25-year-old leader of a special commando force, he led a reprisal raid into a Jordanian village following an attack that had killed three Israelis. Major Sharon's troops blew up 42 buildings in the village and left a reported 69 Jordanians dead, the majority of them women and children. It should be noted that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion approved of the attack. (This was an early instance of an important feature of Sharon's public life: though known for his hawkishness, he has received crucial support and protection from several of the Labor Party politicians admired by doves, most notably Yitzhak Rabin.)

As a wartime battle commander against Arab armies, Sharon never hesitated to disobey orders that he considered too cautious. In the 1956 Sinai campaign, his impetuous thrust into the Mitla Pass sent Israeli troops into an ambush that left 38 of them dead and 120 wounded. Yet his audacious crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War helped turn near defeat into stunning victory.

''Sharon'' dutifully recounts case after case of military muscle-flexing that foreshadows his present-day approach as prime minister, but the authors fail to draw out the obvious connections. General Sharon's 1971-72 military crackdown in Gaza, authorized by Moshe Dayan in response to intimidation of Arab civilians by the Palestine Liberation Organization, provided an early model for this year's operations in the West Bank. The book describes residents being subjected to 24-hour curfews, and all the male inhabitants being paraded into public squares for questioning, many of them deliberately humiliated by being forced to stand waist deep for hours in the waters of the Mediterranean.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/books/review/15UNGERT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

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