Profile: Ex-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon
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E-mail Xinhua, January 11, 2014
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Saturday died at a hospital near Tel Aviv at the age of 85 from a multi-organ failure after eight years in a coma.
Sharon has been a controversial figure in the Israeli society, whose life's course had intertwined with the history of the state of Israel.
Sharon was born on Feb. 26, 1928 in Kfar Malal in central Israel, where he grew up. He started his long-lasting military career in 1945, when he joined the paramilitary organization known as the Haganah, which later transformed into the Israeli Defense Forces, once the Israeli state was established in 1948.
He was injured from several shot wounds in the war of Independence. However, his injuries did not prevent him from continuing to go up the ranks and at the end of the war he was appointed as the commander of the Golani commando unit.
In 1953 Sharon established a Special Forces unit called the 101 Unit, which aimed at dealing with sporadic attacks by the Arab militants engaged in guerilla war. The unit gradually assimilated into the paratroopers battalion, which Sharon took charge of during the Suez crisis of 1956.
At the beginning of the 1970's, Sharon was appointed as the Southern Command chief. In July 1973 he retired from the army and left it.
Only three months after his retirement, though, in October 1973 the Yom Kippur war broke out and Sharon was called back to the front to command a reserve soldiers division.
As a politician, Sharon was one of the founders of the Likud movement and in 1973 he was chosen to be a parliament member on its behalf. In 1977, he established the "Shlomzion" (the wellbeing of Zion in Hebrew), looking for his way inside Israeli politics.
He served as the minister of agriculture at the end of the 1970 's, a time in which he cultivated the establishment of the settlements in the West Bank.
He was appointed as Defense Minister, one of the most pivotal roles he had filled in his lifetime, in 1981. He was in charge of evicting the settlements off Sinai amid the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
In 1982, he initiated the "Operation for the Peace of the Galilee" which developed into the Lebanon War. Under his authority, he authorized the entry of the Lebanese Christian militia into the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian refugees.
Sharon was highly criticized for his role in the war, with critics charging that he had misled then Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the public while giving away false information about the true scope and objectives of the operation.
An inquiry committee was determined that Sharon was no long eligible to serve as the Defense Minister as he overlooked the danger of the slaughter in the refugee camps. He had to resign his post shortly thereafter.
However, this was not the end of Sharon's political career. In 1984 he served as the Minister of Industry and Commerce and in 1990 he became the Housing Minister, further pushing the construction in the settlements.
In 1996 he was appointed to be the Infrastructure Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's first government and later served as a Foreign minister at the same government. Three years later, Sharon was elected to be the leader of the Likud Party.
In 2000 Sharon went on a controversial visit to the highly sensitive Temple Mount, which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and declared that every Jew has a right to visit the mountain. The Palestinians charge that this was the trigger for the outbreak of the second intifada (uprising).
Sharon became prime minister in 2001. A wave of deadly Palestinian militant attacks, including a 2002 attack in a hotel killing 30 Israelis, led Sharon to orchestrate a military operation to conquer the West Bank territories under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, in operation "Defensive Shield" of that year.
In the 2003 elections Sharon and the Likud won by a landslide and he began his second term as prime minister. He had then seemingly changed his attitude toward the Palestinians and peace negotiations, as in that same year he endorsed the "Road Map" outline for peace put forth by the United States, the European Union and Russia.
In the summer of 2005, Sharon orchestrated the "Disengagement Plan" from the Gaza Strip, evacuating Israeli settlers and military camps.
This change of course heightened tensions in his right-wing party and in November 2005 he withdrew from the Likud and established the "Kadima" party, trying to offer a center-left alternative.
In December 2005, Sharon underwent a minor stroke and on Jan. 4, 2006 he suffered another stroke and slipped into a coma. He was replaced by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Sharon had experienced several personal tragedies throughout his life time: his first wife, Margalit, was killed in a car accident in 1962. In 1968, his 11 year-old son Gur was killed after he played with a gun which accidentally fired. His second wife, Lily, died of cancer in 2000.
Sharon, who died in the hospital after his condition deteriorated in the past week, leaves behind two sons, Gilad and Omri. Endi
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