“Arik”, Ariel Scheinermann has died.
He is also known by the name Ariel Sharon, his last name meaning ‘plain’ as in a land mass… He took the name Sharon for he was born in 1926 in the British occupied territory of Palestine and he and his father worked the fields there.
Sharon became a war-hardened soldier for Israel, then eventually became the defense minister of Israel, and then became the prime minister of Israel. Sharon was embattled or led all of Israel’s military conflicts for fifty-plus years, including Israel’s 1948 independence war, down to the strategies and more in the ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
As WaPo reports “As a politician, he built the infrastructure of the country’s controversial settlement campaign in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, then stunned friend and foe alike by dismantling part of the project he had long championed.”
In his home country, for several decades, Sharon was idolized in an ‘old king’ cult of personality by some, despised by others. The law and order citizens kept Sharon in office, touting his bloodshedding advances. The peace and justice groups did not. Though pitting one against the other often, regarding political parties in Israel, including his own party the Likud, Sharon eventually late in life, also began to withdraw Jewish settlements from Gaza and had plans to withdraw from parts of the West Bank–
in opposition to his own ‘taking’ of those lands from others domiciled there for long and long before. Then ‘the king-makers’ who had once idolized Sharon, now given Sharon’s idea of withdrawal and dropping of certain plans to take ever more more more, perceived Sharon as a traitor.
Oddly, I think, his bloody interventions and murderous defenses and offensives unleashed by him, also caused a huge eruption in peace initiatives within Israel that thrive still to this day.
ALso from WaPo: “Mr. Sharon, who saw himself as a master strategist, argued that possession of the West Bank was crucial to Israel’s security and that the nearly 1 million Palestinians who lived there should look to neighboring Jordan as their future state…He saw Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in Beirut and southern Lebanon, as the supreme obstacle to his geopolitical vision. Using PLO raids on Israel as his justification, he set out to break the movement’s power with an ambitious invasion that took the Israeli army to the gates of Beirut… Mr. Sharon took personal command of the operation, at times overruling his own generals and ignoring objections from field commanders who argued he was risking too many soldiers’ lives and inflicting needless damage on Lebanese and Palestinian civilians… The operation eventually succeeded in expelling Arafat and his fighters to Tunis. But critics, including some of Begin’s closest advisers, accused Mr. Sharon of having deceived the prime minister and the cabinet about the extent of his invasion plans — allegations Mr. Sharon always denied… The Lebanon campaign eventually alienated the Reagan administration and a large swath of the Israeli public, and helped give birth to a new peace movement inside the country.”
There is much to Sharon’s life that is a clear study in grand ambition and also grandiose sense of self. There is much much bloodshed of combatants, his own, and those combatants of other groups in opposition. As in a ‘no careful containment enforcement’ of commander’s unleashing in any war, there is also much bloodshed of the innocents. So much.
In 2006, at the pinnacle of his power, Ariel Sharon suffered a devastating attack to his health. As Ariel Sharon was speaking about and planning for strategic purposes withdrawing some settlement plans for West Bank and Gaza [for instance he not wanting ‘to rule the 3.5 million Arabic people who were time-honored residents on the ground of what had become in a shift of war in 1948, independent Israel], as he was being vilified by the far right in Israel for this idea of withdrawal, those same who once ‘darlingized’ him, now condemning him– he suffered a mild stroke, and then a few days later, a major and global stroke.
The strokes left him in what some in medicine call ‘a vegetative state’, meaning in actuality, in an coma, in an unconscious state and unable to communicate as usual, and unable to do the simple tasks of self care for oneself…
Sharon remained bedridden in this condition, until today, Jan. 11, 2014, when he died of organ failures.
Sharon will be remembered for many things, and by many persons. In his memoir book entitled “Warrior” meaning himself, he wrote, however, about a much simpler time, before he was a blood fighter, before he became a ladder climbing power monger, a politico, a person driven. Sharon wrote this about working the fields and sowing the fields with his father: “…working with my father on that arid slope of land, walking behind him to plant the seeds in the earth he had turned with his hoe. When I felt too exhausted to go on, he would stop for a moment to look backwards, to see how much we had already done. And that would always give me heart for what remained.”
You can read more about the labyrinthine ambitions and acts of the militaristic and politico Ariel Sharon here.
THen just this to end, not as eulogy, but as elegy:
SEMBRADOR [The Sower]
For any and all who have lived,
may that part of themselves, the sower,
who has walked any water-starved land,
sowing goodness and peace into the ground,
carry the water from afar
to nourish that goodness and peace…
may any and all who have done so
be held in blessed memory forever.
And let us in loving kindness,
once the sembrador has passed,
re-enact the best
of their sowing of goodness and peace,
the best of their bringing the water
to the dry land, let us do likewise,
in any way we can, during
our own time on this earth.
“Sembrador,” from The Contemplari unpublished manuscript of prayer, by cp estés ©1965, 2014, a.r.r.