Ariel Sharon

Editorial of The New York Sun | January 11, 2014

The death today of Ariel Sharon is a moment of excruciating sadness here at the Sun. We began covering him more than 30 years ago, met with him countless times in Israel, America, and Europe, and came to love him for his enormous heart, his good humor, and his capacious spirit. Our friendship endured even on those occasions, and there were some, when we disagreed. It was a part of his political genius that our world leaders could study to their advantage. Sharon just had an astonishing ability to make contact with those with whom he disagreed.

The editor of the Sun likes to tell, as he did last week in Haaretz, of the day Sharon visited the Jewish Forward. Some of the left-wing figures on the paper were so upset that they exited the building rather than risk having to shake hands with the ex-general. But the Forward’s associate editor, David Twersky, later foreign editor of the Sun, stayed to meet with the man he had so often criticized. It happened to be Hanukah. So after an hour of palaver in the editor’s office, the group repaired to the library to light candles.

Twersky discovered a Sharon that he hadn’t imagined. Before lighting lighting the candles, Sharon insisted on donning his own yarmulke. He tucked into the latkes with gusto. “While I remained critical of many of his policies until his recent turn to seize the latent center of Israeli political life, the rancor was gone,” Twersky wrote in the Sun, after Sharon was felled by a stroke. “I am beside myself with sadness.” Sharon’s ability to connect was, as much as his tactical skill as a military commander and his strategic sagacity, a defining feature of his outsize personality.

Everyone knows about Sharon’s successes on the battlefield and of his deeds when he held high political office. Where his strength really shone, though, was when he was in the political wilderness. He had been effectively driven from power after the massacre of Palestinian Arab refugees at Sabra, part of Beirut, and the neighboring refugee camp known as Shatila. It was a terrible crime, with estimates as high as two or three thousand dead. Sharon, Israel’s defense minister at the time, was innocent, and the perpetrators ended up in the embrace of the Assad regime in Damascus.

Sharon took the political fall. He ended up on his farm, and accepted a reduced role in government. We once asked him why he would accept any role in the government that had failed to stand by him. He felt the crisis facing the Jewish state was too dangerous to stand on ceremony. So he fell back but never retreated. He warned of dangers but was never a defeatist. He would talk to visitors to his farm for hours, breaking to receive neighbors and dignitaries for lunch at his capacious table and returning to his living room to discourse for hours more.

The last time we saw him in Israel itself was in 1989, when we went for a picnic in hills of Samaria. Sharon and his friend Uri Dan, who served as his kind of Boswell, picked a lunch spot among the olive trees. Body guards fanned out. At a rock outcropping, Sharon paused to gesture off into the haze. The next event in the Middle East would come, he predicted, from Iraq. He discoursed on the order of battle, meaning the array and balance of forces. He was extraordinarily worried about Saddam’s build-up of armor. Saddam invaded Kuwait, just as he’d warned.

Sharon was the guest at the first editorial dinner of the New York Sun. It was held jointly with the Wall Street Journal in November 2000. The Sun hadn’t yet launched its print edition and Sharon wasn’t yet premier. The managing editor of the Sun, Ira Stoll, pressed him repeatedly on whether he wanted to voice support for the exiled Iraqi democrats known as the Iraqi National Congress. Sharon was cool. Karen Elliott House, then publisher of the Wall Street Journal, asked him to name the country that was most hostile to Israel.

That stopped the conversation, and we all waited for Sharon to answer. He startled us at least by naming not Iraq or Iran or Yemen or Syria or the Sudan but Egypt, the one Arab country with which Israel had executed a peace agreement. He was worried not only about the Islamic Brotherhood that had slain the signer of that peace agreement, Anwar el-Sadat, but also about — again — the order of battle. It was not just the size of the Egyptian military, far bigger than what it needed, that worried Sharon but the fact that it was now trained — and armed — by America.

Uri Dan famously said that those who would not have Sharon as chief of staff of the Army would have him as defense minister and those who would not have him as defense minister would have him as prime minister. It is typical of Sharon that he once received in Israel a young governor of Texas named George W. Bush. America is lucky that the two of them found one another again in a time of war. The years they overlapped remind of what it was like when an American president and an Israeli premier got along so well.

We understand, we have already written about, all the controversy during Sharon’s years as premier — the break with the Likud he did so much to found, the establishment of Kadima, the retreat from Gaza — but are not in a mood to rehearse it here. Save to observe that it was a feature of Sharon’s life that the others reacted to him more than he did to others. It was one of the things that causes Sharon to loom, during a generation of inaction, so large.