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Former Israeli leader Ariel Sharon has passed away at the age of 85. The former prime minister, defense minister, and general had been comatose since Jan. 2006, when he suffered a series of strokes that resulted in his permanent hospitalization. Sharon was among the last surviving members of the generation that founded, and fought for, the State of Israel in 1948. His ideological foe, President Shimon Peres, is another.
For much of his career, Sharon was known as a military and political hard-liner. He was a lieutenant in the 1948 war, which began after Palestinian Arabs and surrounding Arab states attacked the fledgling Jewish state rather than accept the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries. Sharon was seriously wounded at the Battle of Latrun–one of the Arab forces’ few victories, thanks to Jordan’s British-trained Arab Legion.
Following the armistice, Sharon led an elite Israeli guerrilla unit that conducted cross-border reprisals and raids to deter Palestinian fedayeen from carrying out terror attacks inside Israel. His aggressive tactics drew criticism from fellow Israeli leaders–and cultivated a fearsome reputation in the Arab world. He continued to cause controversy with his preference for offensive rather than defensive tactics in Israel’s subsequent wars.
Sharon’s vindication, both militarily and politically, came in the Yom Kippur War, when Israeli forces were taken by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces attacking on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar across the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights, respectively. Israel’s defensive strategy against Egypt had depended on a string of lightly-guarded forts along the canal, almost all of which fell within hours of the Egyptian assault.
As Israel’s military leadership shuddered, and Prime Minister Golda Meir scrambled to secure U.S. arms, Sharon emerged from retirement to lead troops in the Sinai. He led a daring crossing of the Suez Canal, eventually penetrating behind Egyptian lines, encircling Egypt’s entire Third Army and destroying the Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that had kept the overwhelming power of the Israel Air Force in check.
Soldiers hailed Sharon as a hero, and his performance–amplified by the fact that he had suffered a head wound during the war and kept fighting regradless–boosted his political ambitions within Israel’s conservative Likud Party, which came to power in 1977 after 29 years of dominance by the left-wing Labor Party. Sharon served the government of Menachem Begin, first as Minister of Agriculture and then as Minister of Defense.