Sharon biography exhaustive — and exhausting

The late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The hard-charging Israeli general and prime minister who was admired and hated for his battlefield exploits and ambitions to reshape the Middle East, died Jan. 11.

Its dust jacket hails Arik, published this month, as “the first in-depth, comprehensive biography of Ariel Sharon, the most dramatic and imposing Israeli political and military leader of the last 40 years.”

Comprehensive it certainly is, and author David Landau’s timing is fortuitous. Sharon died Jan. 11 at age 85. Born Feb. 26, 1928, in Kfar Malal in central Israel to parents of Russian Jewish descent, Ariel Sharon (originally, Scheinerman) joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish army during the British Mandate, at age 14. He fought bravely in the war of independence and joined the Israel Defense Forces after creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Sharon remained in the IDF until 1973, rising to the rank of major general. In 1953, he founded and commanded Unit 101, a commando unit charged with launching retaliatory strikes against Palestinian terrorists. He commanded a brigade of paratroopers in the 1956 Arab-Israeli War, and an armored division in the 1967 war.

Sharon’s greatest military triumph came when he took his armored division across the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, cutting off the Egyptian Third Army and forcing Egypt to sue for peace.

A national hero as a result of that daring action, Sharon went into politics. He helped found the right-wing Likud Party and became defense minister in the government of Menachem Begin in 1981.

As defense minister, Sharon designed and presided over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He was forced to resign a year later when Lebanese militias allied with the Israelis massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. When Time magazine claimed he’d conspired with the militias, Sharon sued for libel. A U.S. court found the story false, and Sharon won an apology from Time.

After outmaneuvering Benjamin Netanyahu for leadership of Likud, Sharon was elected prime minister in a landslide in 2001. Then — in a move reminiscent of President Richard Nixon’s overtures to China — Sharon, who had opposed trading “land for peace,” unilaterally withdrew Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.

Sharon’s dramatic change of heart caused a revolt in the Likud Party, so he bolted it and formed a new centrist party, Kadima. He was soaring in the polls when he was felled by a stroke in December, 2005. After suffering a second, more severe stroke in January, 2006, Sharon fell into a coma from which he never recovered.

Landau, former editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, began work on the biography shortly after Sharon suffered that stroke.

He discusses the highlights and lowlights of Sharon’s remarkable career from the perspective of a left-wing Israeli with what to American readers may seem like mind-numbing detail, with a heavy emphasis on inside baseball.

There’s gossip about Sharon’s conflicts with other Israeli military leaders, more gossip about his conflicts with other Likud Party leaders, and a lengthy discussion of how he was treated for his stroke.

If you like exhaustive detail, you may like this rambling book. But if you find exhaustive detail exhausting, you may conclude, as I did, that the fat kid who became one of Israel’s greatest soldiers, then its most controversial politician, deserves a biography that does a better job of separating the wheat in his life from the chaff.

The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette. Contact him at: jkelly@post-gazette.com