JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, the trailblazing warrior-statesman who stunned Arab foes with his dramatic turnarounds, died yesterday aged 85, after eight years in a coma caused by a stroke.
Sharon left historic footprints on the Middle East through military invasion and Jewish settlement-building on occupied land the Palestinians seek for a state but also with a shock decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
The United States and other foreign powers mourned Sharon as a peacemaker, noting his late pursuit of dialogue with the Palestinians. Those negotiations continue under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though differences remain wide.
Sharon died at Sheba Medical Center, near Tel Aviv, where he had been in a coma since being hit by a stroke at the pinnacle of his power as prime minister in January 2006. His condition had declined steeply since the middle of last week.
“Arik was a valorous soldier and a bold statesman who contributed much to the security and building up of the State of Israel,” said President Shimon Peres, a former political ally of Sharon and, with the ex-premier’s death, the last of the Jewish state’s founders still in public life.
“Arik loved his people and his people loved him,” Peres said, using the nickname of Sharon, a famously burly and blunt figure with a prizefighter’s rolling gait.
“He knew no fear and never feared pursuing a vision.”
An Israeli official said Sharon’s remains would lie in state in parliament in Jerusalem today. A memorial service will be held there tomorrow morning, followed by an afternoon funeral near Sycamore Farm, Sharon’s residence in southern Israel. Among foreign dignitaries expected to attend are US Vice President Joe Biden, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and former British prime minister Tony Blair, the official said.
Palestinians accused Sharon of sparking their “Intifada” with a provocative visit to the al Aqsa mosque plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2000, a year before he took power.
He further embittered them with a crushing army sweep of self-rule areas of the West Bank in 2002 after a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and with his siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah compound. But Sharon surprised many by withdrawing soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005 under a policy of “disengagement” from conflict and a pursuit of dialogue with the Palestinians.
The pullout, however, led to Gaza’s takeover by the Palestinian Hamas Islamists who, unlike the West Bank-based President Mahmoud Abbas, spurn co-existence with Israel. As Sharon’s finance minister in 2005, Netanyahu quit in protest at the Gaza plan. Netanyahu now points to Hamas’s rise in balking at similar West Bank withdrawals sought by Abbas.
Mourning Sharon, Netanyahu emphasised his military, rather than political, exploits: “He was first and foremost a brave warrior and great strategist, among the greatest of Israel Defence Force commanders.”
Palestinians in Gaza were handing out sweets to passersby and motorists in celebration of Sharon’s passing. “We have become more confident in victory with the departure of this tyrant (Sharon),” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “Our people today feel extreme happiness at the death and departure of this criminal whose hands were smeared with the blood of our people and the blood of our leaders here and in exile.”
A lifelong rancher renowned for his big appetite, Sharon became known as “the Bulldozer”, in part for his headlong pursuit of hardline policies that included settlement expansion in territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. As a young paratroop officer in the 1950s, he championed night-time reprisals – one of which killed dozens of civilians in the village of Qibya – for cross-border Arab guerrilla raids on the fledgling Israel.
