To Israelis, Sharon Bears Weight of Past

JERUSALEM —  The man who seems poised to win election Tuesday as Israel’s prime minister has amassed one of the most controversial records of any figure in the Jewish state today.

Ariel Sharon’s personal history is intertwined with that of his nation. He fought in three wars and masterminded Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its aggressive policy of settling Jews on West Bank land claimed by the Palestinians. The 72-year-old former general and veteran right-wing politician is to some a hero who was instrumental in Israel’s evolution as the region’s dominant force, and to others an extremist who flouts the rules in a quest for power.

Sharon sees his likely election as vindication, a chance to cleanse the black marks on his career: If polls prove correct, he will arrive by a landslide at the pinnacle of Israeli power. It is the one post he never achieved, and many thought he never would.

Aside from a right-wing core that fervently supports Sharon, Israelis who will vote for the Likud Party candidate include those who believe his campaign claims that he has mellowed with the passage of years; those who believe he is still tough and that’s what the country needs at this time of escalating violence with the Palestinians; and those who, as recent immigrants or young people, know little about him but bitterly oppose his rival.

Efforts by supporters of Sharon’s opponent, caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, to publicize the most negative elements of the Likud candidate’s background have failed to provoke much furor among voters.

Some Israelis hold to the myth that only the right can make peace, noting that the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin entered into the most enduring of Israel’s treaties, the 1979 pact with Egypt. They also note that Sharon evacuated Jewish settlements in the Sinai Peninsula to enforce that agreement and later helped negotiate the 1998 Wye Plantation accord that ceded land to the Palestinians.

But others cite events in Sharon’s past that mirrored Israel’s own bloody history. In the early years of the besieged Jewish state, he led secret anti-terrorist raids on Arab villages in which women and children were killed, and earned a reputation as a zealous and flamboyant commander. In 1982, he sank Israel into a deadly, traumatic and ultimately disastrous two-decade occupation of Lebanon.

Sharon’s visit last September to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem’s most disputed holy site, is blamed by some people for helping to trigger the bloodshed that has engulfed this land ever since. He blames the Palestinians.

“He was always on the front line and at the most critical junctures, military or political, in Israeli history,” said longtime associate Raanan Gissin, “and he always drew fire.”

Sharon declined requests for an interview, but he told an Israeli newspaper that he has been unfairly demonized as someone who “eats Arabs for breakfast.”

As minister of transportation and, later, infrastructure, Sharon sowed the West Bank with Jewish settlements and bypass roads to thwart eventual Palestinian control. As foreign minister two years ago, he sided with Russia and the Serbs against Kosovo’s mainly Muslim ethnic Albanians, even as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization embarked on an air war against Yugoslavia. He still regards Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as a murderer with whom he will not shake hands.

Sharon was born in British-ruled Palestine in 1928 to Russian immigrants. He inherited from them a love for the land and a view of Arabs, who surrounded Jewish farms in those days, as a threat.

The family was isolated and seen as belligerent within the Jewish community. According to the 1985 biography “Sharon: An Israeli Caesar,” by Uzi Benziman, the future general’s strict, hot-tempered father armed his 6-year-old son with an oversized club that the boy was to use on children who bothered him. At age 10, Ariel was using the club at youth group meetings to keep other boys quiet.

Sharon joined the Haganah, an underground paramilitary force, in his teens. He became a tough and respected fighter during the 1948 War of Independence. In 1953, he was appointed commander of Unit 101, a special force that carried out retaliatory raids against Arab fighters who staged cross-border incursions into Israel.

“He taught [his men] that Jews must not remain passive targets and that Arab aggression must be returned tenfold,” Benziman wrote.

In reprisal for the slayings of a Jewish woman and her two children, Sharon led a 1953 incursion into the village of Kibya in the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule. His troops blew up 45 houses; and 69 villagers, about half of them women and children, were killed. Sharon said at the time that he believed the homes were empty. The episode earned Israel its first U.N. condemnation.

During the Sinai campaign of 1956, Sharon’s paratroopers landed at the strategic Mitla Pass. The operation cost Israel 38 dead and 120 wounded, and Sharon narrowly avoided court-martial. His superiors accused him of breaching discipline in a nonessential maneuver, and his promotion to general was delayed for years.

He finally made brigadier general in 1967, and his reputation as a masterful field marshal grew during that year’s Middle East War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. During the latter conflict, he was credited with turning the tide by crossing the Suez Canal into Egypt.

Between the two wars, Sharon led an anti-terrorist campaign to “clean up” the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinian homes in refugee camps were demolished, hundreds of Palestinian men were arrested, and the relatives of suspected terrorists were put in detention camps.

The methods were condemned at the time, inside and outside Israel, but Sharon says today that he was able to differentiate between terrorists and civilians.

After the 1973 war, Sharon quit the army, helped form the Likud Party and was elected to the Knesset, or parliament. He held various posts until being appointed Begin’s defense minister in 1981.

Sharon immediately began planning the invasion of Lebanon. The stated goals were to defend Israel’s northern communities from shelling by guerrillas in Lebanon and to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization.

On June 6, 1982, the government launched what it said would be a lightning operation that would penetrate no farther than 25 miles into Lebanon. Members of the government later said that Sharon had deceived them and intended all along to wage a broader battle. Sharon claims officials were aware of the plans and claimed to have been tricked only after large antiwar protests erupted.

Naftali Raz, a peace activist who is volunteering for Barak’s campaign, was a paratrooper sent to Lebanon in June 1982. He remembers, four days into the mission, walking with his unit through the streets of East Beirut, more than 50 miles inside the country.

“I was in the middle of Beirut, and on my transistor radio I heard Sharon at the Knesset saying that Israel is not and will not get anywhere near the city of Beirut,” Raz, 53, recalled this week. “I looked at one of the other paratroopers, and we didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh. Not only had he lied to us, his soldiers, he lied to the parliament and to the government. He lied to everyone because his aims were different.”

Sharon believes that the Lebanon operation was a success because it eliminated the PLO presence in Lebanon. But many Israelis say Sharon plunged them into the nation’s first “war of choice”--one that could have been avoided. About 1,000 Israelis and thousands of Arabs died during the long occupation, which exacted a traumatic psychological toll on Israeli society.

Several months after the initial invasion, a Maronite Christian, Bashir Gemayel, was elected president of Lebanon and then assassinated before taking office. Two days later, Sharon allowed Christian Falangist militiamen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut, an area under Israeli control.

The Falangists rampaged for three days, slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians in supposed revenge for Gemeyal’s assassination. International outrage was swift. The Israeli government ordered an inquiry, and Sharon was held indirectly responsible for failing to anticipate and prevent the atrocity.

“These blunders constitute the nonfulfillment of a duty with which the defense minister was charged,” the government’s Kahan Commission concluded.

Sharon was eventually forced to resign, though he continued in other government posts. But he underwent a sort of rehabilitation, received increasingly important portfolios in right-wing administrations and gained control of the Likud leadership after the 1999 electoral fall of then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since then, he has steered the opposition toward its expected return to power in Tuesday’s election.

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5 Decades of Controversy

Major events during Ariel Sharon’s career:

1953: Headed a force that blew up 45 houses in reprisal for the killing of three Israelis. Sixty-nine Arabs died.

1956: Was rebuked after troops took part in what his commanders regarded as an unnecessary battle with Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula.

1971: Was placed in charge of curbing terrorism in the Gaza Strip. More than 100 suspected militants were killed.

1970s-’90s: As government minister, and despite protests, led the push to build dozens of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Settlements remain a contentious issue.

1982: As defense minister, engineered Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. It was portrayed as a limited strike, but the war escalated.