His greatest battle

As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lay gravely ill last week in Hadassah Hospital, many Israelis were hoping for a miracle. Miracles, after all, were Sharon’s stock in trade: From the victories he helped engineer in Israel’s many wars, to the personal transformation he underwent in his later years, to the consensus he managed to forge in his fractious country, Sharon seemed a secular man in touch with the supernatural.

Of course, Sharon’s secret was his unwavering, even brutal, realism. As a military commander, he broke rules and heads if it meant victory for his troops. As a politician and cabinet minister, it meant plowing ahead, often quite literally, in securing land and building settlements that he considered necessary for Israel’s security. And as a prime minister, it meant changing course on that policy and withdrawing settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip.

Often that realism led him into adventures that crossed a line. He plunged his nation into the cauldron of Lebanon in 1982, and, as a state commission later held, was at least indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese allies in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

For many on the Israeli Left, he also crossed a line when, as agriculture minister in the first Likud government, he vastly expanded Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They warned that an expanded Jewish presence in the territories was a demographic and political time bomb, and would entangle the two peoples in ways that would make peace impossible.

Those who remember his walk on the Temple Mount — inaccurately described as the catalyst for the Second Intifada but provocative nonetheless — would be amazed by his stunning conclusion that those critics had a point. Ever the realist, he emerged from that vicious Intifada and the ashes of Oslo to decide that, once again, Israel’s security was at stake. And this time security called for a disengagement from the Palestinians and support for an independent Palestinian state.

Perhaps the biggest miracle of Sharon’s career — bigger than his political comeback following the humiliation of Sabra and Shatila, bigger than his managing to survive a series of political scandals — was his ability to forge and embody Israel’s political consensus in recent years. The Bulldozer became the Unifier, treading a path between a Right that refused to face Israel’s demographic and political realities and a Left that was betrayed by Palestinian intransigence.

Whoever leads the country after Sharon will have a difficult time maintaining that consensus. But Sharon — blunt and warm, brave and reckless, dashing in his youth and grandfatherly in his later years — showed that it could be done. We’re confident that Israel hasn’t run out of miracles.

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