Israelis pay last respects to warrior-statesman Sharon

Tuesday, 14 January 2014 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

REUTERS: Thousands of Israelis bade farewell on Sunday to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the maverick warrior-statesman who helped reshape the Middle East, as his body lay in state outside parliament in Jerusalem. Sharon died at the age of 85 on Saturday after eight years in a coma caused by a stroke he suffered at the pinnacle of his political power. He will be buried on Monday in a military funeral on his farm in southern Israel. “They say old soldiers do not die, they fade away. Arik Sharon faded away eight years ago, and now we truly say goodbye to him,” Justice

Minister Tzipi Livni, using Sharon’s nickname, wrote in a tribute on Sunday. Sharon was one of Israel’s finest military strategists and most powerful and decisive political figures. He spearheaded military campaigns in several wars with the Arab world, expanded Jewish settlement-building on land the Palestinians want for a state, and made the shock decision to withdraw from one of those territories, the Gaza Strip. Famously beefy and brusque, Sharon was also widely hated by Arabs for what they regarded as harsh and aggressive policies, including a 1982 invasion of Lebanon in a bid to stamp out Palestinian guerrillas as well as military crackdowns and settlement-building in occupied territories. Prime minister from 2001 to 2006, Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke shortly after he quit the right-wing Likud party and founded a centrist faction to advance peace with the Palestinians, whose 2000-2005 “Intifada” uprising he had battled with air strikes and fierce military offensives. In parliament’s main plaza, Israelis filed past Sharon’s coffin, which was draped in the blue-and-white national flag. The mood was sombre but not deeply mournful; eight years after Sharon fell from public view. A few in the crowd wept, but many others paused to snap photographs of the coffin with their cellphones. Sharon drew the long-standing enmity of Arabs over the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel, where he was Defence Minister at the time. A lifelong farmer, Sharon was known as “the Bulldozer”, in part for his headlong pursuit of hard-line policies that included a major growth in settlements across terrain Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Many Israelis will remember Sharon as a brilliant but unpredictable military leader who fought in the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and, rising to general, went on to earn a reputation for trigger-happy disobedience on some occasions. But he was also hailed in Israel for the crucial counter-attack across the Suez Canal that helped to turn the tide of the 1973 Middle East war with Egypt and Syria.