The strong man - Democratic Underground

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Fri Jan-06-06 01:57 AM
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The strong man

For years he was a man of war, idolised and demonised in equal measure. But in recent years, Ariel Sharon has seemed the man most likely to deliver peace to the Middle East. Israeli novelist David Grossman and Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi assess his legacy.

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David Grossman

Sharon saw himself as a man who makes history, not one who yields to circumstance

Ariel Sharon is a man of potent primal urges, of violence, of combat, cunning and brilliance. He is a sharp manipulator, brave and corrupt. He has swung like a mighty pendulum between construction and destruction. He has blatantly ignored limits, whether international boundaries or the boundaries of the law. Clearly he has seen himself as a man destined to make history, not one who yields to circumstances. Time after time he instigated large-scale political and military manoeuvres meant to change the world utterly, to make it fit his own vision. And he always did so with determination, sometimes with brutality, without regard for what means he used to achieve his ends.

Yet even his sworn opponents are concerned as Sharon - as I write - lies in a hospital bed, fighting for his life. They hope, of course, that he will recover from his illness. But they are also worried about the huge vacuum that has suddenly opened in the Israeli leadership.

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Karma Nabulsi

He is no statesman and his motives have never been opaque - conquest by military means

Everybody knows that Ariel Sharon had a dark past. For us Palestinians, for me as a Palestinian, he is our dark present. The entire destruction of the fabric of our civic and political society over the past five years has had the looming presence of Sharon at its black heart. That single moment when in the year 2000 Sharon went to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) to light the chaotic, atavistic fuse of his return to political power - the moment that sparked our revolt against everything that he represented, and which began his rise to power - that single moment was the essence of his persona, the uniquely ruthless, relentless dynamic of his role as conqueror.

With the return of this man, we were lost, again, and one could not let his return be witnessed without an active daily resistance to it, and the fate he had in store for us. It was this single fact that mobilised me to work again in the political realm. Having lived in Beirut with my family and friends, and having worked, and fought, and stayed alive throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Sharon engineered in the spring and summer of 1982, I had no doubt what he had in store for us when he began his final climb back to power. And just so: in February of 2001, within three days of being elected prime minister, he was replaying across the West Bank and Gaza his dark arts, a mad echo of his practices of 20 years before in Lebanon: the assassination and destruction of the fighters, the local defence committees, the refugee camps. Women and children and young men killed, our buildings demolished, our institutional infrastructure, our records, our art, broken, gone. And, of course, our leadership encircled and besieged.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1680520,00.html