By
Rabbi Anson Laytner
,
Special to JTNews
It has been said in many recent articles that the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who died Jan. 11 after being in a coma for many years, was either loved or loathed. I, however, am clear in my feelings: I come not to praise Israel’s Caesar, but to bury him.
Although Sharon was a brilliant military leader, he was also known as a maverick, as when in the 1973 Yom Kippur war he defied his superiors’ orders, crossed the Suez Canal, and isolated the Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula. His quick thinking helped turn the tide of that war in its most challenging time.
But on two other occasions his military instincts were just plain criminal.
In 1953, Sharon was a young colonel who led “Unit 101″ in retaliatory cross-border raids into Jordan. That October, his unit attacked the West Bank town of Qibya, then a part of Jordan. The attack killed 69 Palestinian villagers, many of them women and children, and destroyed 45 houses, a school, and a mosque.
In the 1982 war in Lebanon, Defense Minister Sharon exceeded Prime Minister Begin’s mandate and launched a full-scale invasion of that country, leading to the ousting of the PLO from Beirut. During this action, the Phalangist Maronite Christian militia took advantage of Israel’s presence to massacre Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila. Between 800 and 3,000 people were killed.
Subsequently, the Israeli Kahan Commission, appointed to investigate the incident, found that Israeli military personnel had failed to take serious steps to stop the massacre it knew was in progress, and that Sharon bore personal responsibility “for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge.” He was forced to resign.
Israeli settlers and their supporters lionized him when he built infrastructure and helped West Bank settlements sprout, often cutting legal corners to make this happen. But, following the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Sharon not only removed settlers from Yamit in the Sinai, but also decided the settlement had to be bulldozed, thus magnifying the trauma of the withdrawal and hardening the hearts of many Israelis against future withdrawals.
More than 30 years later, Sharon shocked the nation by unilaterally withdrawing the Israeli presence from Gaza and evicting almost 10,000 Jewish inhabitants from their homes. Once again Israelis were traumatized by the images of Israeli soldiers fighting Israeli civilians during the evacuation.
Sharon’s rationalized for this move through his belief that Israel had no viable negotiating partner; however, by unilaterally withdrawing, he all but guaranteed chaos would ensue in Gaza following Israel’s pullout. And indeed, Israelis — and Jews everywhere — were horrified as Palestinian mobs celebrated the Israeli pull-back by burning synagogues and farms, even when they might have been used to their own advantage. Sharon further exacerbated prospects for future withdrawals by not keeping his promise to provide new housing for the evicted settlers in Israel proper. Is it any wonder that so many Israelis are skeptical of attempting further endeavors along these lines?
So while many laud Sharon for his military victories, for providing housing for Jews from the former Soviet Union, for driving the PLO from Beirut, for championing Jewish settlement in the West Bank or, contrariwise, for blazing a trail in terms of withdrawal from occupied territories, I can only see Sharon as the enabler of massacres of Palestinians, as one of the fathers of the wrong-headed settlement movement, and as the initiator of the failed unilateral “peace” option. Still: “May he rest in peace, and may his family be comforted among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Rabbi Anson Laytner is program manager of the Interreligious Initiative at Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry.