Arik The life of Ariel Sharon

Review by Choice Review

Israeli journalist Landau's biography of Ariel Sharon captures the general's political and military life in detail. It is an even-handed portrayal of Arik, and because Sharon was pivotal in so much of Israel's history, the book is also a study of Israeli power. Sharon polarized Israel, and Landau provides interesting detail about the alliances and drama behind the scenes. He describes Sharon's culpability in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, juxtaposing Sharon's version of the events with other sources. In the end, Landau agrees with the Kahan Commission that Sharon should have known that the massacre would have occurred. Landau relies on Sharon's autobiography and points out the many places that Sharon's recollection of the past deviates from other sources. His chapter on Sharon's fateful walk on the Temple Mount and the Intifada that followed is well researched and reasoned. The book focuses heavily on the political and military parts of the general's life and less on his personal relationships or his ideology. Landau really covers more than just Ariel Sharon, and readers interested in the political machinations of Israel or in the military will find much on offer. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. G. R. Sharfman Manchester University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

WHEN ARIEL SHARON was elected prime minister of Israel in a landslide 13 years ago, many close to David Landau, a left-leaning British-born Israeli journalist, thought seriously of leaving the country. The future under Sharon, it seemed to them, held only war and bloodshed. Yet when Prime Minister Sharon collapsed from a stroke less than five years later, "We wept," Landau writes. "Not just for him; for ourselves." It is Sharon's wholly surprising journey from ruthless military commander to what Landau calls "national father figure," from territory-expanding champion to Palestinian state advocate, that most interests Landau in "Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon," his fine, comprehensive and readable biography. Five years in the making and published just after Sharon's death last month, the book closely chronicles Sharon's epic military and political battles, serving as a kind of national history. It also seeks to grapple with "what ifs." If Sharon had not visited the Temple Mount in 2000, would the second Palestinian uprising have occurred anyway? (Very likely, he suggests.) If Sharon had not suffered a stroke just as he was withdrawing Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and a part of the West Bank, would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be in a different place from where it is today, paralyzed by timidity and mistrust on both sides? Landau believes Sharon planned to carry out more withdrawals and seems to accept the notion that only a onetime rightist like Sharon could have done so successfully. He quotes one of Sharon's closest aides as saying the stroke was like "watching a film in which there was a power outage halfway through." Landau, the Israel correspondent for The Economist, who wrote for many years for The Jerusalem Post, was editor of the newspaper Haaretz and the author of a book on the ultra-Orthodox at the time of Sharon's stroke. He does not shy away from the unheroic. Much of his account will be familiar from the obituaries last month - Sharon's attack in 1953 on the Jordanian village of Qibya in which scores of women and children were killed; his bulldozing of Gaza refugee camps in the early 1970s; his sending of Lebanese Phalange troops into Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1982, leading to a massacre of at least 800 civilians. There are also transgressions that have gone unreported. One, brought to light in this book, occurred in early 1972, when Sharon was the military commander in the Israeli south. He expelled Bedouin tribes from parts of Sinai he wanted reserved for military use, sending elderly tribesmen without warning trudging for up to 30 miles through freezing sands. "Many just slumped down and wept," and more than 40 died, an Israeli expert on the Bedouin, Clinton Bailey, wrote at the time in a complaint to the military chief of staff. The chief of staff, Gen. David Elazar, ordered Sharon to allow the Bedouin back. A few days later Sharon, who was never disciplined for what happened, called Bailey in and, all good cheer, said he too loved the colorful Bedouin. If Bailey ever needed research help he should not hesitate to ask. Sharon then quietly sent out orders barring Bailey from all Israeli military bases in Sinai. To Landau, this episode typified a pattern to Sharon's early exploits: He carried out government policy but "with excessive, wanton brutality." He was "the convenient lightning rod to absorb and deflect criticism." And his superiors "covered for him and protected him from serious fallout." Landau gives other examples. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, admired Sharon for his guts and leadership skills and saved his career despite viewing him as a liar ("Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth?" he asked Sharon in 1958). Menachem Begin, reelected prime minister in 1981, was repeatedly warned by those around him that if Sharon got the post of defense minister that he coveted, he would push Israel into war in Lebanon. Begin said he was not easily pushed around. He gave Sharon the defense portfolio because the peace treaty he had signed with Egypt required him to relinquish Sinai and only Sharon could evict the Israeli settlers from there. He was right. Sharon did move out the settlers. But as predicted, he also pushed for military action in Lebanon, a hubristic morass of Vietnam War proportions where Sharon had the illusion that he could remake regional geopolitics to Israel's advantage. Landau also thoroughly goes over allegations of corruption against Sharon and his sons and leaves the impression that many of the accusations had merit, even though few were brought to their conclusion. Still, Sharon was a brilliant tactician, MacArthur-like in his military planning, leading a daring crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war that turned the conflict in Israel's favor. He was courageous, funny and gallant, attentive to ordinary people, an inspired leader who never left the wounded on the battlefield, a loner in constant need of company, Falstaffian in his appetites. During the 1973 war, even before his famous Suez crossing, soldiers rejoiced when they heard his voice over the army frequency; they knew they could count on him. Landau recounts an amusing story of how Sharon, who defeated Ehud Barak for prime minister in 2001, had been directly responsible for Barak's promotion to general years earlier. It began in 1962 when Barak, who was an officer in a secret commando unit, broke into Sharon's office. Such break-ins were part of commando training, and Barak recalls that he cleared out Sharon's safe, leaving a handwritten note. The next morning a stunned Sharon said he wanted to meet the guy who did it. That is how the two became acquainted. Israel is not a big country, and the frat-house quality of the interactions among its male leaders is well elucidated in this book, along with the frat-like nicknames (Arik, Dado, Bibi) and foxhole origins. Nonetheless, capturing and explaining a paradoxical and larger-than-life figure like Sharon, especially when it was no longer possible to interview him (Landau began the book after Sharon's collapse), is no simple task. And while Landau is fair and clear, he does not really unlock the mystery to Sharon's shifts or give a fully coherent picture of his inner self. He also makes no effort to describe how Palestinians or other Arabs experienced Sharon, which is a shame in such a long and serious book. Landau interviews associates and presents others' accounts of competing possibilities. But often we feel that he just accepts the contradictions. It may well be, of course, that a man of such uncontrolled energy and appetite, the Bulldozer, as he was known to some - or bitzuist, as the Israelis call a doer - did not have a deep inner life to explore. Whether or not we understand why he changed, we are given a close look at how and when, including Sharon's sudden use of the word "occupation" in 2003 to describe Israel's control over the West Bank and Gaza, anathema to his right-wing base at the time. Sharon never really recognized the importance of the Palestinians to Israel's future as much as he accepted the importance of the Americans and their policy requests. He did see, Landau argues, that unless Israel rid itself of rule over millions of Palestinians, it could not survive as a Jewish and democratic state. His willingness to act boldly on that understanding through withdrawal from Gaza, Landau says, is his most significant legacy. Only if it fasts, he concludes, will Zionism be saved. ETHAN BRONNER is the deputy national editor and a former Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 23, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Since his massive stroke in January 2006, Ariel Sharon has remained in a persistent vegetative state. Given the strong passions and controversy he engendered as both a military and political leader, it is perhaps surprising that many Israelis from each side of the political divide look back on his career and personality favorably. Landau has written for both Right and Left newspapers in Israel and is currently the Israel correspondent for the Economist. His thorough, balanced, and scrupulously fair biography makes clear why Sharon was capable of winning respect and admiration, even from his staunch political opponents. In recounting Sharon's youth, Landau reveals Sharon as always prepared to swim against the tide, as he and his family resisted the pressures of nearby kibbutzim to maintain the independence of their farm. As a military leader, he was rash, occasionally brutal, and sometimes defiant of superiors, but at critical moments, especially during the Yom Kippur War, he was decisive and brilliant. As prime minister, despite his earlier promotion of settlement activity, he dismantled settlements and withdrew from Gaza. This is an outstanding, warts-and-all portrait of an arguably great, if not a particularly likable, Israeli leader.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Compiling the life of a man who was a commander, officer, and major general in the Israeli Army in addition to a statesman, party leader, and prime minister in the Israeli government is an intimidating undertaking, particularly when that man, now at age 85, is struggling to stay alive while in the comatose state he's been in since 2006. However, journalist Landau, who previously collaborated with Israeli president Shimon Peres on his memoir, succeeds dutifully in bringing this multi-faceted life to the page. With great research and noticeable interest, Landau depicts Ariel Sharon as a man who is more complex than any one of his multitude of titles and the subsequent criticism he endured as a public servant. Landau's portrait is primarily career-focused examining Sharon's lengthy service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War, and his equal tenure as minister of portfolios including defense, foreign affairs, and concluding as prime minister over the disengagement of the Gaza Strip. All the while, Landau depicts Israeli societal welfare through the same wars and political unrest-sometimes caused, sometimes curbed by Sharon. Although Landau's portrait is primarily career-focused, he explores the toll of personal tragedy on Sharon's life including the loss of his first and second wife and the untimely death of his young son, Gur, as well as the societal impact of the many soldiers and civilian casualties. Ariel Sharon has come to represent Israel during its modern changes and he continues to as they both fight on. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

British/Israeli journalist Landau (former editor in chief, Haaretz; Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism) seeks to elucidate the military, political, and social history of Israel by focusing on the life and impact of Ariel Sharon (b. 1928). Having interviewed a wide range of people who knew Sharon and offer their opinions of his actions, military and political, Landau presents a veritable Who's Who of Israel over the last several decades. He succeeds in giving the reader a truly human portrait of one of Israel's greatest and most controversial leaders. Most fascinating is Landau's analysis of Sharon's transition from being the "father of the settlements" to being the leader most responsible for removing Jewish settlements from Sinai, Gaza, and (before his disabling stroke in 2006) some of the West Bank. The results are a better balanced assessment of Sharon-with quotations from his admirers and detractors-than, for example, Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel or even Ari Shavit's My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, in which Sharon figures significantly. Replete with both footnote explanations of everything from Hebrew terms and acronyms to the past affiliations of political players and endnote source citations, the book also has an appendix containing the full text of significant documents pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict since 1967. VERDICT Very much of interest to anyone concerned with the past, present, and future of modern Israel.-Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Economist Israel correspondent and former Haaretz editor in chief Landau (Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism, 1992, etc.) offers a thorough, extremely candid description and assessment of the military and political lives of the controversial Sharon, who has been in a vegetative state since a massive stroke in 2006. The author, who has also collaborated with Shimon Peres on his memoir (Battling for Peace, 1995) and on a biography of David Ben-Gurion (2012), displays a deep familiarity with the details and contexts of Sharon's career. Throughout, he prepares us for the stroke in 2006: He calls Sharon "corpulent" in the preface, titles the first chapter "Poor Little Fat Boy" and describes Sharon's considerable appetite and girth. The early chapters are full of military lore. Landau describes battles and strategy in great detail, clearly examining Sharon's roles and unafraid to judge. He mentions, for example, a "heinous act of violence" involving some Bedouin in 1972. The author continues to hold Sharon's feet to the fire right to very end, suggesting things the fallen leader might have accomplished had he been less, well, Sharon-ian. Landau is also adept in the descriptions of the labyrinthine political world of Israel during Sharon's era. We see, as well, his questionable financial dealings (prosecutors took hard looks at his behavior more than once), his gifts as a politician and his failures as a human being. The author does not focus so much on his personal life, though we learn about the accidental death of his son and his wife's succumbing to cancer. We also see the softening, leftish moves he made late in his career--moves that pleased many and infuriated others--especially the decision to close 21 settlements in Gaza in 2005. Splendid reporting, comprehensive research and probing analysis inform this unblinking view of a complicated man and a sanguinary geography.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Preface · Land of Hope My grandfather was a Hebrew teacher in Rehovot at the beginning of the last century." Ariel Sharon, corpulent, white-haired, looked up over his reading glasses at the half-full Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Members were listening politely or quietly reading. "I have a deep love for the Hebrew language," he read on in his incongruously high-pitched voice. "For the miracle of its revival, for the historical wellsprings from which it draws its words and phrases." There was no tension in the chamber that afternoon in January 2005. No catcalls, no heckling. A parliamentary moment without politics. Sharon could have asked one of his two deputy prime ministers to represent the government at the largely ceremonial debate marking Hebrew Language Day. But he wanted to speak himself. He had a point to make. Mordechai Scheinerman, Sharon's grandfather, came to Palestine in 1910 and settled with his wife and children in the still-tiny Jewish village of Rehovot, southeast of the barely existent Jewish town of Tel Aviv. That made him sort of aristocracy. Not quite a Mayflower man of the First Aliya (1882-1902), but still an early Zionist pioneer of pre-World War I days. Palestine was a derelict corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire then. The dream of the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl (d. 1904), that it would one day become a Jewish state, seemed just that: a dream. In his native town, Brest Litovsk in White Russia, Mordechai was an early convert to Zionism. He became a Hebrew teacher. That was a career choice reflecting real commitment. Hebrew, the ancient language of the Bible and the rabbis, was struggling to reincarnate itself as a modern vernacular. The Zionists promoted it as the language of the new-old Jewish nationalism. But the Zionists themselves were a struggling minority within the Jewish people. Millions of Jews, fleeing czarist oppression, set sail for the New World rather than for sandy, sweaty Palestine. Mordechai Scheinerman endured the heat and mosquitoes of Rehovot for two years, then packed up, as did so many of the early pioneers, and headed back to Brest Litovsk. When war broke out, the family fled east, ending up in Tbilisi, Georgia. His faith in Zionism never wavered, though, and he instilled it in his son Samuil. Samuil Scheinerman taught Hebrew too, but, chastened by his father's experience, he studied agronomy at the local university as a practical prepa- ration for his own eventual aliya.* (* Literally, "ascent"; the Hebrew term for immigration to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.) This came more quickly than planned. Walking toward the Tbilisi Zionist club, where he held his Hebrew classes, one night in 1921, he found the area swarming with security police of the newly formed communist government. He veered away, hastened to the home of his girlfriend, Vera Schneeroff, and offered her two peremptory proposals: marriage and aliya. She was a fourth-year medical student, the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish family, also from Belarus, and, by her own admission, not much of a Zionist. But she accepted Samuil's plan. They were married forthwith and fled to the Black Sea port of Baku, from where, some months later, they embarked for Palestine. Samuil had completed his studies in Tbilisi; Vera nursed the hope that she would graduate someday too, perhaps at the University of Beirut since there were no universities or medical schools in Palestine. On a bleak February day in 1922 they arrived in Jaffa. Vera, to her consternation, was lifted bodily from boat to shore by a gigantic Arab stevedore. The experience confirmed her general impression of Pales- tine as a backward and uncouth place. By then, the Zionist dream had advanced a little closer to reality, at least on paper. The wartime British government issued its Balfour Declaration in November 1917, favoring "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." In 1920, the San Remo Conference of principal Allied powers granted a mandate over Palestine to Great Britain, specifically enjoining it to "put into effect" the Balfour Declaration.+ (+The San Remo resolution, like the Balfour Declaration itself, contained the following caveat: "It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Pales- tine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.") But beyond emotional rhetoric, the response among Diaspora Jewish communities was disappointing from the Zionist standpoint. The Zionist movement campaigned hard to persuade young Jewish people to make aliya. It achieved only modest success. His son's aliya, and his own subsequent return to Eretz Yisrael-- Mordechai Scheinerman lived out his last years in Tel Aviv--restored the old Hebrew teacher's right to a place of honor in the annals of the Zionist enterprise. A century later, his grandson pointedly read the family narrative into the record of the Zionist state's parliament. His Zionist credentials, Sharon was signaling, were unimpeachable. The point was not superfluous. The momentary calm in the Knesset was deceptive. Parliament and the country were seething with disaffection. It was spearheaded by the Jewish settlers in the occupied* (* Occupied, that is, since the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israeli army took over the West Bank, previously held by Jordan.) Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, who defined them- selves as today's true Zionists. It was directed against Sharon, who for long years had been their champion but whom they now portrayed as a traitor. To many, the atmosphere was reminiscent of 1995, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was decried by the national-religious Right as a traitor and eventually felled by an assassin's bullets. Rabin died for signing a peace accord with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That agreement held out the prospect of a Palestinian state eventually arising alongside Israel, thus bringing the century-old conflict over Palestine to an equitable end. But Arafat, once Rabin had gone, proved incapable of leading his people to peace. A decade later, the two-state solution was foundering in a welter of bloodshed and failed diplomacy. Ariel Sharon, the hard-line ex-general who had been elected prime minister in 2001 to crush the Palestinians' intifada, now proposed to dismantle Jewish settlements and withdraw Israeli troops from parts of the occupied territories. To the settlers and their supporters--his erstwhile political constituency--that was heresy, a denial both of Judaism and of Zionism. To the peace camp at home and to governments and public opinion around the world, Sharon's dramatic turn- about was a hugely hopeful change. It meant the beginning, at last, of a repartition of Palestine between the two nations vying for it. Sharon found himself suddenly praised where he had previously been loathed and feared. He looked back to his text. "Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who revived the Hebrew language, said: 'There are two things without which the Jews will not be a nation--their land and their language.' " The subtext was clear. He, the old warrior turned statesman, the true-blue Zionist, could be depended on to protect and defend both of those pillars of Jewish nationhood. The imminent withdrawal from parts of Palestine would strengthen, not weaken, the future of the Jewish state. Half a year later, in August 2005, the withdrawal took place. Israel evacuated its settlers and its army from the Gaza Strip and from a small area of the northern West Bank. Sharon called it "disengagement." The settlers called it "uprooting" and "expulsion," terms taken from the most macabre chapters in Jewish history. But the settlers' threats of violent resistance, of massive civil strife, and of rebellion in the army melted away in the face of Sharon's iron will. He deployed forty thousand soldiers and policemen around the doomed settlements and won the day without a battle. Not a shot was fired. Resistance was almost all passive. In one settlement a few young militants hurled paint balls from a rooftop. It was all over in hardly more than a week, and the country resumed its interrupted summer vacation. The anticlimactic absence of trauma raised Sharon's stock even higher both at home and abroad. Israel's misguided colonization of the Palestinian territories, which Sharon himself had done more than any man to put in place, was neither immutable nor irrevocable, as many had feared. Sharon had shown it could be undone with relative ease, if only there was the political will to undo it. The Palestinians could still have their state. Israel could still save itself from the morally and politically crippling sickness of occupation. It could recover its identity and its cohesion as a Jewish and democratic state. That destiny had been receding over the long years of occupation and settlement building. Yet the majority of people in both nations still supported the two-state solution, as poll after poll attested. The majority of Israelis supported Sharon's disengagement from Gaza and believed it would lead to disengagement from the West Bank, too. That bright moment of hope that Ariel Sharon created in the summer of 2005 still shines, though the powerful forces in both nations who oppose the two-state solution have conspired to obscure it. Sharon's collapse in January 2006 into a stroke-induced coma has forced Israeli history into the subjunctive mode: Had he survived in power, would he have been able to complete the decolonization process that he boldly began? What he began, during the dramatic years of his prime ministership (2001-2006), contradicting a lifetime of military extremism and political obduracy, entitles him, like his grandfather, to a place of honor in Israel's annals. What might have been--what could still be, despite the intervening years of setbacks and disappointment--makes him the worthy subject of this effort to understand his life and times. When he was elected prime minister, many proud and patriotic Israelis talked seriously of leaving the country. His accession to power was the stuff of night- mares. The future seemed to hold only war and bloodshed. When he collapsed, less than five years later, we wept. Not just for him; for ourselves. In the Knesset that January, he read on monotonously, now deploring the pervasive infiltration of foreign words and phrases into Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's pristine Hebrew. "I don't understand, for instance, how that anomalous alloy 'Yallah, bye' has supplanted our own beautiful 'Shalom' for saying farewell." His secretary, Marit Danon, who served five previous prime minis- ters, recalled years later her double surprise when, days after he took over in 2001, he sent out for a falafel for his lunch from a popular Jerusalem street stand. She duly served up the plebeian fare and was leaving the room when Sharon invited her to share the meal. "Marit," he asked, "does not your soul yearn for the falafel?" On another occasion, hungry as always but never willing to admit it, he lifted the phone to tell her, "Uri [his aide] is assailed by famine."1 For "famine," Sharon used the word kafan, a rare term unknown to many Hebrew speakers. Danon would have a two-volume Hebrew dictionary always at hand on her trolley when she took dictation from the prime minister.2 "Almost daily I was on the phone to the Hebrew Language Academy," she recalled, "asking for the correct pointing of a particular word in a speech, because of his obsession to get every word perfectly right."* The language, like the land, was his responsibility. Excerpted from Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon by David Landau All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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