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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (25627)	4/16/2002 3:23:23 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

From BBC archives....mentions the Lebanon incident... Low Graphics Tuesday, 4 December, 2001, 11:37 GMT Ariel Sharon: Controversial hardliner It once looked like Mr Sharon's political career was over By Middle East analyst Gerald Butt Ariel Sharon has a thick skin and is proud of it. He does not care who loves or hates him - be they Israelis or Arabs. The one aim in life for the 72-year old former soldier and veteran politician is to ensure total security for Israel on his terms. Sharon cares nothing for the cynics That means keeping maximum land and political rights for the Jewish state and giving the very minimum of both to the Palestinians. Mr Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928, when it was a British mandate. As a young man he joined the Jewish underground military organisation Haganah and fought in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948-49 after the creation of the Jewish state. Political career 1975-77: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's special security adviser 1977-81 : Minister of Agriculture 1981-83: Minister of Defence 1984-90: Minister of Trade and Industry 1990-92: Minister of Construction and Housing 1996-98: Minister of National Infrastructure 1998-99: Foreign Minister 1999-today: Chairman of Likud In the 1950s he led a number of punitive military operations against Egyptian military units stationed in the Gaza Strip - one incident in 1955 resulting in the deaths of 38 Egyptian troops. Mr Sharon rose to the rank of brigadier general and commanded a division during the Six Day war of June 1967 in which Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The harsh occupation measures that he enforced there gave many Palestinians their first taste of a man who has become their sworn enemy. Lebanon disaster First elected to parliament in 1977, Mr Sharon masterminded Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. As defence minister, and without explicitly telling Prime Minister Menachem Begin, he sent the Israeli army all the way to Beirut, a strike which ended in the expulsion of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Lebanon. The move stopped the PLO using Lebanon to launch attacks against Israel, but also resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militiamen in two Beirut refugee camps under Israeli control. Mr Sharon was removed from office in 1983 by an Israeli tribunal investigating the 1982 Lebanon invasion, finding him indirectly responsible for the killings. Political come-back For most politicians, an indictment of that kind would have meant the end of a political career. But Mr Sharon remained a popular figure among the Israeli right, and he felt that if he bided his time, then another opportunity would present itself. Ariel Sharon's mission - his enemies call it a dangerous obsession - is to fight for Israel's security, believing all the while that the end justifies the means As housing minister in the early 1990s, he presided over the biggest building drive in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza since Israel occupied the territories in the Six Day War. After Mr Netanyahu's right-wing coalition came to power in 1996, the new Israeli PM bowed to pressure to include the former army general in his cabinet. On appointing him as foreign minister in 1998, Mr Netanyahu said Ariel Sharon was the best man for the job. "We shouldn't deal with bygones," he said. "He has a record throughout his public life and during the past 15 years that people should be proud of." Mr Sharon went on to become leader of the right-wing Likud Party in opposition after Mr Netanyahu's decisive defeat in the 1999 general election. After the failure of last year's Camp David talks, Mr Sharon sought to stir a public groundswell against Mr Barak, depicting him as a usurper ready to trade Jerusalem for a peace agreement. ''Barak does not have the right to give up Jerusalem, which the people received as a legacy,'' Mr Sharon said at a parliamentary session. Security above all His controversial visit last year to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, a site which is also holy to Jews, was one of the sparks for the second Palestinian intifada (uprising). Cynics say Mr Sharon knew the visit would trigger violence and gambled on the Israeli public turning to a tough leader like him who would know how to handle it firmly. But once again, Mr Sharon is not interested in what cynics or anyone might say. In the recent election campaign he said he was prepared to make peace with the Arabs, but not under threat. Above all, he would do nothing that undermined "the rights of Jews to live safely in their own land". Ariel Sharon's mission - his enemies call it a dangerous obsession - is to fight for Israel's security, believing all the while that the end justifies the means.