Sharon's Political Heritage Lies Dormant
Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli premier who died on Saturday at 85, leaves behind a controversial political heritage that has yet to be embraced by any of Israel's ideological camps.
Sharon was despised by the left for his unstinting support for the settlement enterprise and for masterminding Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He also fell foul of the right for his evacuation in 2005 of all troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.
Long considered a pariah for his personal but "indirect" responsibility for the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Sharon was elected premier in 2001.
The Palestinians were quick to welcome the news, with a senior official labeling Sharon a criminal and accusing him of being responsible for the mysterious death in 2004 of the veteran Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
"Sharon was a criminal, responsible for the assassination of Arafat, and we would have hoped to see him appear before the International Criminal Court as a war criminal," said Jibril Rajub, a senior official of the Fatah party.
The Islamist movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, hailed Sharon's death as a "historic moment" marking the "disappearance of a criminal whose hands were covered with Palestinian blood."
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, also regretted that Sharon never faced justice, particularly over his role in the Beirut camp killings.
"It's a shame that Sharon has gone to his grave without facing justice for his role in Sabra and Shatila and other abuses," she said in a statement.
"His passing is another grim reminder that years of virtual impunity for rights abuses have done nothing to bring Israeli-Palestinian peace any closer. For the thousands of victims of abuses, Sharon's passing without facing justice magnifies their tragedy."
The settler community, both the extreme right and their more mainstream counterparts in the ruling rightwing Likud party, once headed by Sharon, never forgave him for having "betrayed" them.
"Certainly there are many of us (myself included) with great anger about the expulsion of 8,000 Gush Katif residents from their homes and the disastrous results for the citizens of Israel," Economy Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on Facebook last week.
"Something like that just can't ever happen again, ever," wrote Bennett, who heads the far-right Jewish Home, a bastion of support for the settlers.
Without pointing directly at Sharon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly cited the takeover of Gaza by the Islamist movement Hamas in 2007 as reason enough to avoid a similar pullout from the West Bank.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Labor and the leftwing Meretz party hailed Sharon's bold move, known as the disengagement plan, but also criticized it for being unilateral.
They claim that by refusing to negotiate the move with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Sharon effectively weakened his hand and ultimately strengthened Hamas.
On the political front, the hope sparked by Kadima, the centrist party founded by Sharon in November 2005, just six weeks before his collapse, has long since dissipated.
Following Sharon's stroke on January 4, 2006, general elections were held and Kadima won a spectacular victory. It took 29 of parliament's 120 seats, becoming overnight the country's largest political party.
For Likud, now headed by Netanyahu, the election was an unprecedented disaster, with the party securing just 12 seats.
But Kadima's soaring success only made its fall harder.
As Sharon's overwhelming presence faded quickly from public memory, so too his party. It barely scraped across the electoral threshold in the elections of January 2013, winning just two seats.
Several months before the election, Tzipi Livni, who left Likud with Sharon to found Kadima, then left it to set up her own centrist faction, HaTnuah, which won six seats.
Now justice minister and chief negotiator with the Palestinians, Livni today espouses a more dovish position over territorial concessions.
Shaul Mofaz, another Likud veteran who also jumped ship to Kadima, remains at the head of the party but never speaks of the Gaza pullout.
Since Sharon's health took a turn for the worse on January 1, most Israeli commentators have been quick to compare his leadership with that of Netanyahu.
They presented him as a statesman who, while not infallible, never failed to take risks he believed were necessary. In contrast, Netanyahu has been repeatedly criticized for his leadership, with commentators characterizing him as hesitant and indecisive.
"The question now is how Sharon's legacy will be interpreted by those remaining: whether they shall seek to honour it, challe
Source: Agence France Presse
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