Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was laid to rest yesterday in a funeral attended by what the Washington Post described as “Israel’s political and military establishment, joined by Vice President Biden and former British prime minister Tony Blair,” with those attending lauding the decorated Israeli war hero and statesman for his ‘warrior spirit and his turn toward peace.’
Biden, wearing a black suit and black skullcap, stood at the foot of Sharon’s flag-draped coffin to eulogize him as “a complex man” who “engendered strong opinions.”…“When a close-knit country like Israel, a country that has been tested as much as Israel, loses a man like Prime Minister Sharon, it doesn’t just feel like the loss of a leader, it feels like a death in the family,” Biden said.
Sharon’s decades-spanning career was marked by periods of deep controversy and widely acknowledged acclamation, and was book-ended by grave wounds acquired on the battlefield of the War of Independence and by political power secured via successive Israeli elections. His prime ministership – which lasted from 2001 until he suffered from a massive stroke in 2006 and slipped into a coma – began with sweeping counter-terror operations and ended with arguably even more sweeping peace gestures. The Washington Post noted that several particularly controversial periods of Sharon’s life were skipped over by top Israeli leaders, including the 2004/2005 Disengagement plan that saw all Israelis removed from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the West Bank. The move was hailed by among others President George Bush and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as providing breathing room and territory to a nascent Palestinian state. It however drained Sharon’s political capital and put him at odds with elements of the Israeli right, and eventually provided Hamas with an opening to seize the Gaza Strip and establish an irredentist terror outpost along Israel’s border. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired at least two rockets at Israel yesterday shortly after the conclusion of Sharon’s funeral, which was itself within rocket range.
[Photo: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv / Flickr ]