Ariel Sharon’s legacy still inspires Israel’s policies 10 years after death

Known as the 'bulldozer', the general turned prime minister's bold tactics and policies have shaped Israel’s viewpoint on several fronts, especially in Gaza

Shimon Peres, left, and Ariel Sharon visit Ras-Sudar in Egypt in 1975, an important site in the 1967 war. Getty Images

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It has been 10 years since the death of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, but his legacy as a far-right politician and army general lives on, analysts say, as Israel’s war on Gaza nears the 100-day mark.

Mr Sharon suffered a stroke at the height of his power and was in a coma for eight years before his death on January 11, 2014, at the age of 85.

He was one of Israel’s most famous generals, credited for bold tactics and policies that shaped Israel’s viewpoint on several fronts, especially in Gaza, and earned him the nickname "bulldozer".

Mr Sharon was a major general by the time of the 1967 Middle East war, which ended with Israel’s capture of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In 1971, as head of the Israeli military's southern command, he led a campaign to crush Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip.

Military tactician

Sharon was forced to resign as defence minister over Israel’s involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982 – a watershed moment in his perception by Palestinians and Lebanese and which earned him the nickname "the butcher".

Despite this, he was an important political figure in Israel. After returning to government as housing minister in the early 1990s, Sharon presided over the biggest construction yet seen of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, eventually coming to be known as the “godfather of settlements”.

The year 2000, when he was foreign minister as well as the leader of Likud, having taking over from Benjamin Netanyahu after the party's loss in the 1999 election, brought another watershed moment. His provocative visit to Al Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, sparked outrage in the Arab world and led to the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Sharon took over as prime minister from Ehud Barak the following year, after a landslide election victory. In 2002, faced with mounting criticism over a string of attacks by Palestinian militants in Israel, he launched a military operation in the West Bank and began construction of the West Bank barrier.

Whether he was a “bulldozer”, “butcher”, or the “godfather of settlements”, observers all agree Sharon was the architect of policies that have maintained the status quo between Israelis and Palestinians to this day.

“The tactics that the [Israeli army] uses in Gaza are much more technologically advanced than that of Sharon's days in the army. But the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians was also a method Sharon used in the 1970s in the Gaza Strip when he was the general commander of the south,” Menachem Klein, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, told The National.

Ariel Sharon flanked by security guards on a visit to Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City in 2000. AFP

Sharon’s military policies can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s when he created Israel’s modern “military norms” through his founding of a secretive “retribution squad”, named Unit 101, which sought to deter terrorism in Israel by carrying out controversial attacks in Arab states.

Today, this is reflected in the Israeli army’s Dahiya doctrine – sending enemies “into the dark ages” through massive destruction of their physical infrastructure.

“In the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, when Sharon’s government oversaw the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the utter destruction of virtually all the infrastructure of Palestinian cities, the death of 497 Palestinians and the arrest of 7,000 people, Israel was accused of war crimes but succeeded in foiling a UN investigation,” wrote Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the author of War Against the People: Israel, Palestine, and Global Pacification.

Career politician

But towards the end of his career, Sharon became known for a more pragmatic approach and would lay out a path of contrasting policies, analysts say.

“Sharon was the driving force behind building settlements in the territories seized in the 1967 war and would declare that giving up any territory taken from the Arabs would signal Israeli weakness. Yet later he would be the Israeli leader who actually dismantled settlements in the Sinai and Gaza, and the first Israeli leader to publicly embrace Palestinian statehood there and in the West Bank,” Dennis Ross and David Makovsky wrote in their book Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel's Most Important Leaders Shaped its Destiny.

For some, Sharon’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip was a reflection of Israeli public opinion at the time.

Mahmoud Abbas, then a Palestinian negotiator better known as Abu Mazen, with Ariel Sharon at a meeting in the Israeli foreign minister's office in 1998. Reuters

“Sharon is the prime minister of the State of Israel who actually was proactively leading the disengagement and pulling out from the Gaza Strip. And this dramatic change is within 20 years of his previous position, which I think mostly reflected his understanding that the Israeli public opinion back then very clearly stated it did not want any more to do with the settlements in the Gaza Strip. It stopped seeing it as an asset and basically viewed it as a burden,” Avi Melamed, former Israeli intelligence officer and former senior government official analysing Arab affairs, told The National.

Other analysts say Sharon’s decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank was purposeful in creating a state of disunity among the Palestinian political leadership, as evidenced years later by the Islamist political group Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip while the Palestine Liberation Organisation remained in the West Bank via its Fatah faction led by Mahmoud Abbas.