The Struggle to Leave Gaza

Ariel Sharon's dramatic defeat of Ehud Barak in the election for prime minister in 2001 was a remarkable turnaround for the bête noir of Israeli politics. Sharon's military career and political odyssey had been characterised by controversy since the early 1950s.

Ben-Gurion, who had protected Sharon from his critics, asked him in November 1958, ‘Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivities for not telling the truth?’ A sheepish Sharon assured Ben-Gurion that he had been cured of his addiction. When Rabin took over as head of the IDF in 1964, at the behest of Ben-Gurion, he brought Sharon in from the cold. Rabin told him:

Your trouble is, though, that people tend to believe you're not a decent human being. I don't know you well enough to say, I want to promote you, but I've got to be sure that your accusers aren't right.

Many recognised Sharon's abundant talents, but were perturbed by his deviousness. He had at various times been accused of insubordination, recklessness, manipulation, and disobedience, yet he was also a courageous commander on the battlefield who led by example. He was credited with having turned the tide during the Yom Kippur War. On the other hand, despite instructions not to enter the Mitla Pass during the Suez campaign in 1956, he did so, resulting in a quarter of all Israeli casualties taking place there. An official account of the 1973 Yom Kippur War by the IDF's History Department in 2002 pointed to Sharon's violation of orders as the commander of the 143rd Division, and discussions were held to remove him.

His tarnished reputation in the 1960s emanated from a raid which took place on the village of Qibya on the night of 14–15 October 1953 and resulted in the deaths of scores of men, women and children. The acting prime minister, Moshe Sharett, was given a version of Sharon's orders from which a sentence had apparently been deleted. Upon discovering this, Sharett committed to the intimacy of his diary the words ‘The forgery of the Qibya order: To kill and destroy – all know that he deceives the prime minister’. It was surmised that Sharon had been instructed to kill as many Arabs as possible without distinction between combatants and non-combatants.