Ariel Sharon rarely worried about all the controversy. The left called him a murderer for his military exploits. The right called him a traitor for pulling out of Gaza. Yet it was a feature of his outsized personality that people reacted to him, not the other way around.
Once I was with him for breakfast at his farm in the Negev when the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann showed up.
When he got out of his car, he remarked on the absence of fences. “Yes,” Sharon said, “I like to make the other guy build the fences.”
Yet Sharon was prime minister when Israel built much of its West Bank barrier.
It established what amounts to a border even while diplomats feuded in an effort to start negotiations as to where the border should be.
During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sharon astounded the world by outrunning his own orders, crossing the Suez Canal, and trapping an Egyptian army in the Sinai.
Sharon, a neophyte to politics, engineered the creation of Likud, which in 1977 brought the right wing to power in Israel.
With national elections looming after the second Camp David summit, Sharon took a walk on the holiest ground in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount.
The riots that followed, known as the Second Intifada, had already been planned by the Arabs. But everyone liked to blame Sharon.
Sharon was a military man, not an economist. Yet he liberated Israel’s economy by elevating his political rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, to the finance ministry.
This led to historic free-market reforms that ignited Israel’s economic boom.
A hawk, Sharon is nonetheless the only Israeli leader who actually uprooted Jewish settlements in an attempt at peace. When he forcibly expelled religious Jews from Gaza, the right revolted. Sharon formed a new political party, Kadina, in a bid to claim center ground — then was felled by his stroke.
What a zest for life — and food. After devouring a platter of pastrami sandwiches on a visit to The Wall Street Journal, he got in his armored limo and started uptown, only to order his driver to halt so he could grab half a dozen hot dogs from a cart on the corner.
Sharon loved to tell of meeting Pope John Paul II. When Sharon started listing Israeli places, the pope joined in. Sharon must have looked impressed.
“I would like you to remember that the land of Israel is holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews,” Sharon quoted the pope as saying, “but it was only to the Jews that it was promised.”
“That,” said the pope, turning to Sharon’s wife Lily, “is the difference between terra sancta and terra promissa.”
Seth Lipsky, a longtime friend of Sharon, is editor of the New York Sun.