What is Ariel Sharon’s legacy?
Few people's reputations can have changed as much as they lie on their death bed as Ariel Sharon's. When he was first struck down by his stroke, there was a widespread belief that, tragically, the man who could have delivered peace had been removed from the stage. Then, as the problems with disengagement began to ...
Few people's reputations can have changed as much as they lie on their death bed as Ariel Sharon's. When he was first struck down by his stroke, there was a widespread belief that, tragically, the man who could have delivered peace had been removed from the stage. Then, as the problems with disengagement began to become more and more apparent, Sharon's reputation took a tumble. When it became clear how Hezbollah had reached an unparalleled level of military preparedness on his watch, it got dented even further. So, it is intriguing to see what veteran Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross makes of the Sharon legacy.
Few people's reputations can have changed as much as they lie on their death bed as Ariel Sharon's. When he was first struck down by his stroke, there was a widespread belief that, tragically, the man who could have delivered peace had been removed from the stage. Then, as the problems with disengagement began to become more and more apparent, Sharon's reputation took a tumble. When it became clear how Hezbollah had reached an unparalleled level of military preparedness on his watch, it got dented even further. So, it is intriguing to see what veteran Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross makes of the Sharon legacy.
In a wide-ranging review of the latest Sharon bio in the hot new DC journal Democracy, Ross concludes that Sharon's ultimate mistake was to remove any sense of obligation on the Palestinians' part:
Sharon had little faith in the Arabs, and that is why he favored unilateralism. However, unilateralism can provide only outcomes, not solutions. It may be that solutions are far away, but the starting point for producing them is making it clear that Arabs, in general, and Palestinians, in particular, at some point have to be responsible."
Ross argues that, by its very nature, unilateral withdrawal undercut the Palestinian moderates, empowering Hamas:
Abbas got the worst of both worlds: As president of the Palestinian Authority, he got no credit for Israel’s departure, and he was blamed for the economic problems afterward."
The essay is worth reading for this telling anecdote alone:
On the moshav–a cooperative community of farms–where Sharon grew up, his mother slept with a rifle. When the decision was made to require all the members of the cooperative to give up a portion of their land to create a new village, Sharon’s mother alone rejected the decision of the majority, traveling two miles in the dark to cut the wire that would have partitioned the family’s land."
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