Ariel Sharon has died after 8 years of being on coma.
Ariel Sharon, a monumental figure in Israel’s modern history who epitomized the country’s warrior past even as he sought to become the architect of a peaceful future, died Jan. 11 of organ failure eight years after a massive stroke left him in a vegetive state at the height of his political power in 2006.
His death, at 85, was confirmed by a senior official in the Israeli prime minister’s office and Dr. Shlomo Noy of the Shedba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, where Mr. Sharon had spent his last years.
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Ariel Scheinermann was born Feb. 27, 1928, in Palestine, then under British mandatory rule, in a cooperative farming village. In his memoirs, he wrote that he often thought back to “working with my father on that arid slope of land, walking behind him to plant the seeds in the earth he had turned with his hoe. When I felt too exhausted to go on, he would stop for a moment to look backwards, to see how much we had already done. And that would always give me heart for what remained.”
He took the Hebrew name for “plain” (as in the Israeli coastal plain of Sharon) and as a teenager joined the Haganah, the main Jewish underground movement opposed to British rule. During Israel’s war of independence, he commanded an infantry unit and was wounded during the battle to secure the road to besieged Jerusalem.
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He saw Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in Beirut and southern Lebanon, as the supreme obstacle to his geopolitical vision. Using PLO raids on Israel as his justification, he set out to break the movement’s power with an ambitious invasion that took the Israeli army to the gates of Beirut.
Mr. Sharon took personal command of the operation, at times overruling his own generals and ignoring objections from field commanders who argued he was risking too many soldiers’ lives and inflicting needless damage on Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.
The operation eventually succeeded in expelling Arafat and his fighters to Tunis. But critics, including some of Begin’s closest advisers, accused Mr. Sharon of having deceived the prime minister and the cabinet about the extent of his invasion plans — allegations Mr. Sharon always denied.
Rest in peace.
Tags: Ariel Sharon
