The Measure of a Man

"The idea that he changed from the man of war to the man of peace misses that which defined him. Actually, he never changed. His strategic objective never wavered. The state, which from the age of fourteen he fought to bring into being, had to be protected for future generations. When that meant fighting, he fought. When that meant making peace, he sought peace."
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair

President Shimon Perez eulogizes former prime minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem on January 13, 2014 - photo credit Amos Ben Gershom/GPO/Flash 90

"You were the shoulder on which Israel's security rested. The story of your life is bound to the story of this country. And your life was dedicated to the life of this country. Your footprints are imprinted on every hill and in every valley."
Israeli President Shimon Peres

U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden pauses after laying a wreath on the grave of former prime minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday, January 13, 2014 - screen capture Channel 2

"The man had a command and presence. He filled the room ... he was indomitable ... Like all historic leaders, all real leaders, he had a north star that guided him. A north star from which he never, in my observation, never deviated. His north star was the survival of the state of Israel and the Jewish people wherever they resided."
U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden

Israel's history, its existence and its travails are treated differently than any other country's of the world. Israel is viewed with the lens of fine critique; everything minutely parsed, the country and its leaders held to standards of human behaviour and moral and legal heights to which no other country is demanded to be exemplars of. Its creation signalled the potential of two side-by-side nations, a situation its Arab neighbours couldn't begin to contemplate much less tolerate.

When a succession of wars was imposed on Israel, a tiny state with a small population threatened by the combined armies of its far larger neighbours, Israel proved its unwillingness to vanish from the geography. It was home, and it meant to stay there. From the Middle East came the ancient Jewish tribes and to the Middle East they returned from their vast dispersal, to join those of their brethren who had never left. The geography that had once expelled them would never do it again.

And the singular individual most involved in aiding one Israeli governing administration after another to prove just that on the self-protective battlefield of response to invasions died with the state honours that he had earned over his lifetime of being a Jew, an Israeli, a patriot, a soldier, a Prime Minister of Israel.

Ariel Sharon - photo credit Eyal Yitsah/Flash 90

Ariel Sharon's tactical genius, his imaginative strategies, his understanding of people and their impulses served to inform him on how best to reach his objectives to secure an end to hostilities between Jew and Arab. Even his imagination failed, however, to conjure up the future. When the future was yet dim and he envisioned emptying Gaza of its Jewish presence to leave it to Palestinians to demonstrate their capability in making for themselves a future state, his gamble with the possibilities of the future morphed into a wasteland of terror. That terror responded immediately Israel vacated Gaza, with deadly attacks and rockets.

In view of that experience which he never gained consciousness to meditate upon and plan an alternate strategy in response to the compellingly clear Arab Palestinian love affair with victimhood, blame and vengeance, one can only now hypothesize what he would have done about the West Bank. Entirely leaving the West Bank to the auspices of the aspirational Palestinian state would similarly on past evidence, leave Israel vulnerable to ongoing rocket and suicide-bomb attacks infiltrating over the border. Israel would forever be dependent on intercepting the attacks.

Would he, after viewing the collapse of Gaza into a terror state administered by an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and recouping all the territory now occupied by the state to themselves, consider seriously the Palestinian Authority demands? He lent himself to a defensive war when it was required, to ensure the longevity of the State of Israel, and he turned himself to overtures leading to peace, hoping an agreement would result from his unilateral gesture, and Arab Palestinians rose to the challenge by refusing peace and incinerating all hope for the future.

He rests now, on his farm in southern Israel.  Hamas and its followers gloat at his death, the warrior laid to rest, their enemy destroyed by age, time and the ravages of ill health. In celebration as in their ordinary morbid celebration of violence, rockets were lobbed into Israel, several of which fell just short of Ariel Sharon's farm. Resignation to peace and stability, good governance and a robust economy to enhance the future of the Palestinian Arabs appears beyond the vision of their leaders.