No wresting peace
Ariel Sharon was laid to rest on Monday in his family farm in the Negev valley with honours the State of Israel laid out for him as the last of the iconic founding figures of the Jewish homeland who served as a military general, defence minister and prime minister. But in death, which came on Saturday after he lay motionless for eight years from a stroke, his memory still stoked controversy in the country he risked his life for all his life as a soldier and war strategist, as it did across Arab nations of the region for the death and destruction he wrought trying to make Israel safer in his view. Political figures and newspaper commentators in Israel voiced differing views about his legacy, unlike polite eulogies one expects on the passing of a national figure elsewhere. He was as divisive as he was influential.
Sharon was Israel’s great statesman to some and an unpunished war criminal to others. At the funeral, President Shimon Peres called Sharon a military legend who defended this land like a lion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted, “I did not always agree with Arik, nor did he always agree with me,” but he referred to Sharon as one of the greatest military commanders the Jewish people have had. US Vice President Joe Biden called Sharon a complex man whose actions earned him controversy and even condemnation, but said that “like all historic leaders, all real leaders, he had a north star that guided him.” That was the paradox Sharon was, because no Israeli politician managed simultaneously to become the bête noire of the Palestinians, the Jewish settlers as well as the hardliners on the Israeli Right and the liberal Left as he. Defying an Israeli military alert and appeal for restraint, militants from Gaza fired two rockets that didn’t reach anywhere close to cause damage, moments after the funeral, which saw not only limited world representation but also absence of leaders from Africa and Latin America and expectedly the entire swathe of Arab West Asia.
However, one notable diplomatic move that goes to Sharon’s credit, but remains unheralded, is Israel’s relationship with India reaching over a chessboard of hostile countries which he forged by a pathbreaking visit in 2003. Although the two countries formalised diplomatic ties in 1992, its expression was muted and veiled because of India’s traditional support to Palestine and sensitivity to Arab/Islamic opinion. The Kargil war in May-July 1999 occasioned a change when Israel let India draw on strategic satellite intelligence assistance. That led to the first visit by an Indian foreign minister (Jaswant Singh) to Israel in 2002 and a joint anti-terror commission was set up against the backdrop of the September 2001 al-Qaeda terror attack in New York. This counter-terrorism cooperation drew in the US and resulted in India getting the Israeli Phalcon airborne warning and control system (AWACS) by overcoming US objections and saw Israel become the second largest defence supplier to India after Russia since 2009. Israel-India partnership in the war against terrorism that Ariel Sharon underlined, also had a salutary effect on US perception of India’s value as a strategic partner and in the lifting of nuclear sanctions against India by the end of the last decade.
Israeli air sorties responding to rockets as Sharon was laid to rest was perhaps an unintended reminder that peace can’t be wrested by laying waste entire tracts of habitation as leaders in that region seem to fancy when in and out of military or religious uniform.
Sharon was Israel’s great statesman to some and an unpunished war criminal to others
