WARRIOR: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ARIEL SHARON
Ariel Sharon, with David Chanoff
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989
548 pp., $24.95
On Sunday, June 6, 1982, Israeli tank columns moved into Lebanon, beginning the most divisive war in Israel's history. The next day PLO fighters entrenched in civilian neighborhoods delayed the advance of the Israeli army along the coastal plain, illegally using local inhabitants as hostages and cover - even putting civilians in the windows and open doorways of buildings from which they were fighting. Israeli units, reluctant to endanger civilians by using their full firepower, suffered increased casualties and fell behind their strategic timetables.
That night this problem was considered at a meeting at Northern Command Headquarters. The obvious solution was to avoid house-to-house fighting by using the air force to destroy whatever buildings were in the way of the advance. This would open the road and save the Israel Defense Force (IDF) considerable casualties, but it would also cause a heavy death toll among the civilian population that the PLO was holding in the buildings.
In Warrior, Ariel ("Arik") Sharon, Israel's Minister of Defense at the time, describes the meeting at Command Headquarters that began at 1A.M. with all the divisional commanders and many staff officers present.
“As the night wore on the small room we were meeting in became shrouded in cigarette smoke. Despite the discomfort of the place, the discussion was intense and quiet, at times almost whispered. I had known most of these people for years; there was hardly one I hadn't been in battle with. I knew them as professional officers, men who had war in their blood. They knew precisely the price we would pay the next day if we decided not to blast the road open from the air - their soldier's lives, their offices' lives, perhaps their own lives. As we talked, messages came into the room from the front announcing new developments, adding to the tension…. When we finally finished early in the morning, every single one of the officers present had expressed himself. To a man they recommended that we not use the air force…And after listening to the soul-searching that had gone on for hours, that was the decision I took. I don't know if any other army in the world would have spent a night in the middle of a war…discussing such an issue, let alone making such a decision.”
That is the army that Arik Sharon loves.
Almost from the beginning of his tempestuous career thirty-five years earlier Arik has been hated by many Israelis - and loved and admired by many more. But the bitter feelings about Sharon's responsibility for the war in Lebanon, because he was minister of defense and supported the war, are wider and deeper than the old animosities, and now are the critical limit to his political power and potential. Most of the Israelis who oppose Sharon because of his responsibility for the Lebanon war have a simple reason. It was an "optional war," many Israelis were killed and wounded, it produced, at most, limited benefits, and it divided Israel as never before.
The more politically minded
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