Dubai: Ariel Sharon, known among Arabs for his gory history against the Palestinians in particular, died on Saturday after several years of being in a coma, the Sheba Medical Centre announced.
The death of the 85-year-old former Israeli prime minister and retired general came exactly a week after 8 years of being in a coma, after Sharon suffered on January 4, 2006 a stroke that left him on a hospital bed since then. The death came after his health conditions deteriorated in the past few days including a failure of kidney functions, according to doctors. He was also treated with antibiotics due to numerous infections, they added.
While Israeli press carried articles praising the man who was the second in line of the founders of Israel, Palestinian media was not that interested.
“They [Palestinian media] is reporting the news, but not very interested because the man [Sharon] is finished long ago,” said Palestinian analyst Hani Al Masri in reference to the political end of Sharon.
“But, surely he [Sharon] is an important figure because of the Palestinian blood on his hands and his aggressive colonisation policies,” Al Masri told Gulf News.
“Definitely, if the Palestinians will remember him, they will do as a bad person.”
Sharon had a “indelible stains on his record,” wrote one of the western journalists, referring to many tasks Sharon led, including the “Unit 101”, which was a special force in charge of retaliating for attacks on Israeli targets.
In late 1953, a mother and her two children were killed by Palestinian infiltrators at an Israel Kibbutz. Sharon responded with a raid on the Palestinian West Bank of Qibya, which was then under the Jordanian rule. Forty five houses were razed, sixty nine people were killed, most of them were women and children.
He also played an important role in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel occupied the West Bank from Jordan, Sinai from Egypt and Golan Heights from Syria. He was named in Israel as the “King of Israel”. Sharon was also named “Bulldozer”.
And when he was a defence minister, he masterminded the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and besieged late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Sharon’s picture on a tank in one of Beirut’s streets shocked Arabs. Arafat died in 2004 after Sharon besieged his compound in the west Bank for few years. When Sharon was in a coma with no change in his health conditions, many Arabs joked that “Sharon doesn’t want to die to meet Arafat”.
The massacres that followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon were even more shocking. Hundreds of Palestinians in both Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in south Beirut — their number ranged between 800 and 3,500 — were massacred then by the Phalangist Party.
An official Israeli inquiry found that he carried “personal responsibility” for the massacre of the Palestinians, after the commission found out that Sharon knew about the massacre, which happened in an area under the de facto control of Israel forces.
Many Arabs dub Sharon as a “war criminal” and “terrorist”.
“God willing, he dies,” Rauf Ramia, a labourer from the Qalandiya refugee camp, north of Occupied Jerusalem, was quoted as saying by Reuters while Sharon was dying. “He’s a terrible person.”
In Gaza, which Sharon planned the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, the feelings were similar.
“Ariel Sharon is going the same direction as other tyrants and criminals whose hands were covered in Palestinian blood,” Khalil Al Hayya, a Hamas leader, was quoted by a press report.
“True, he was an enemy,” said Masri, “but we have to admit that he was a cunning person.”
His disengagement plan in Gaza Strip in 2005 and the evacuation of 21 colonies there brought Sharon the wrath of many Israelis, including his right-wing Likud party. but according to Palestinian analysts, the move showed the strategic cunning of the Israeli leader.
“One step backwards in Gaza, but 10 steps forward in the West Bank” said Al Masri, referring to the following rapid Israeli expansion of colony building in the West Bank and the occupied East Jerusalem, which “cut the road in the face of other options and solutions.”
In the late 2005, Sharon formed “Kadima” political party with both Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, which is being considered a “centrist” party between the Labour and the Likud.
Livni wrote on her Facebook, “I can’t stop thinking about Arik (Sharon) tonight.”
some Palestinians don’t rule out the possibility that Sharon was put to death through mercy killing. Israeli press reports said Sharon preferred to be buried at his Negev home — Sycamore Ranch — next to his late wife Lily and not in the traditional grave-site for former prime ministers on Mount Herzl in the occupied West Jerusalem.
