How Should Historians Respond to MOOCs.

How Should Historians Respond to MOOCs. Video. History News Network, January 8, 2014. YouTube.

2012 was, in the words of the New York Times, the year of the MOOC. Massive open online courses have been hyped as a game changer, a way to dramatically scale down the cost of higher education while at the same time opening up access to the best professors in the world – the so-called “superprofessors.”

 

But critics of MOOCs have been fierce, questioning whether or not a MOOC can offer the same kind of value as a face-to-face class and if MOOCs will be used by administrators to slash costs by slashing faculty.

 

Princeton’s Jeremy Adelman and the University of Virginia’s Philip Zelikow, who have both led history MOOCs, sat down for a spirited debate with Colorado State Pueblo’s Jonathan Rees (one of the leading MOOC critics) and Ann Little (of the blog Historiann fame) at the American Historical Association annual meeting. The panel was moderated by Elaine Carey, vice-president in charge of the AHA’s Teaching Division.


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Israel’s Ajax: The Tragedy of Ariel Sharon. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The suicide of Ajax the Great. Etrurian red-figured calyx-krater, ca. 400–350 BC. Said to be from Vulci. Wikipedia.

Israel’s Ajax: The Tragedy of Ariel Sharon. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, April 23, 2002. Also here and at VDH’s Private Papers.

Hanson:

Sophocles once wrote a magnificent play about the Greeks’ greatest fighter at Troy after Achilles — Ajax, as irreplaceable in war as he proved expendable in peace. During the struggle for Troy, the Greeks were often saved by the towering, clumsy “donkey.” Without the dash of a youthful, handsome Achilles or the divine dispensation of a crafty Odysseus, Ajax battered down the Trojans — fighting out of a sense of duty, personal honor, and perhaps a sheer love of combat.

 

Yet once the victory was obtained, danger past, and spoils allotted, the more politically astute and glib heroes — like the sons of Atreus and Odysseus — came away with all the honors and prizes. In a fit of madness, Ajax killed himself — bewildered that the race goes not to the swift, and the memory of men is short and of the moment. In the increasing democratization of fifth-century B.C. Athens, the playwright Sophocles was apparently captivated by a few old war-horses still in his midst who had once built Athens by blood and toil — and yet were clearly unfit for the nuances and subtleties of the duplicitous politics of the contemporary freewheeling assembly.

 

Films such as High Noon and Hombre draw on elements of the classical tragic hero, the man who does society’s dirty work, but receives no accolades for his sacrifice — and as often as not ends up as publicly shunned as he is privately admired from a safe distance. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films played on the theme of an over-the-top and often out-of-control cop, who bent the rules to thwart evil as he saw it. Shane was a similar figure. The solitary and much-needed gunman saved the homesteaders from the cattle barons; yet his skill at killing murderers ensured that such a dangerous gun-toting firebrand had no real role amid the very peace he alone had created.

 

Of course, Sophocles and Hollywood did not invent such figures, but rather their art was modeled after the rare mavericks who occasionally come into and out of democratic cultures — men who are blunt, unsubtle, uncompromising, and deadly in their anger. William Tecumseh Sherman was such a figure. Brilliant, but purposely uncouth, his fiery rhetoric (“I can make this march, and make Georgia howl”) and brutal marches terrified enemies, frightened his superiors, ended the war — and earned him eternal hatred for saving far more lives than he took.

 

It was probably fortuitous that the undiplomatic Patton died in December 1945, after his work at destroying Nazi Germany was done — but before his lunatic fire and brimstone clichés repelled the country he had helped save. His boasts that his GIs would “cut up” “Krouts” played well during the war. But after his enemies were vanquished, the media increasingly found his rhetoric dated — if not downright inflammatory in peace.

 

Others as raw come to mind — Arthur “Bomber” Harris and Curtis LeMay. The former resurrected a morbid British Bomber Command, burned down Hamburg and Dresden, helped to wreck the German economy, and was lauded during the conflict for the outright carnage he inflicted on England’s fascist enemies, who were butchering thousands each day of the war. After 1945 it was a different story. The portly general was quietly ostracized during the peace as more an unpleasant Neanderthal with the blood of children on his hands than the King’s valiant warrior.

 

Over his long career, Curtis LeMay said ghastly things (“We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age”) — and sometimes did the same. Taking his magnificently designed, high-tech B-29s down from a safe 30,000 feet to firebomb at low levels, he dropped leaflets of warning and then burned down Japan’s major cities — in the “collateral” damage killing innocent civilians, combatants, and factory workers alike indiscriminately, as well as wrecking Japanese communications, rail works, and storage facilities. During the war he was seen as a genius who saved millions of lives who would have been lost in the anticipated and much dreaded long land war against a fully armed and stocked pristine Japan — a dictatorship that at the time was killing thousands of American soldiers in the Pacific and far more innocents in China, Korea, and the Philippines. In peace, the cigar-chomping LeMay became the model for the repugnant and mad General Buck Turgidson of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, who bragged of Armageddon (“only 10-20 million Americans killed, tops”).

 

Ariel Sharon is a similar figure. His past is checkered. Critics cite his negligence in not restraining Lebanese militias from massacring Palestinians. His former opposition to peace accords has emboldened settlers — and gave encouragement to dangerous zealots and radicals. Opponents remember all that and more — forgetting that in 1967, and especially 1973, his service to Israel was heroic and life saving. Five years ago no sane person in Israel thought that the widowed, obese, sweating, blunt-speaking, untelegenic bulldog would ever be prime minister; five years from now no sane person will ever quite believe he actually was. But now? At this moment of Israel’s greatest peril? Israel is lucky to have the likes of him — one last time.

 

Without Israeli retaliation, Saddam Hussein’s rained Scuds into Tel Aviv to the cheers of Palestinians (who apparently hoped their payloads were gas-laden as promised); the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon brought not the hoped-for peace, but the shelling of Israel proper; and the giveaway at Camp David offered almost all of the West Bank and instead sired the intifada — all that implanted the impression to many in the region not that Israel was magnanimous, but rather tired, dispirited, and ready to call it quits. And so the utopians, peacemakers, and conciliators, for all their forbearance, got the murder-bombers — planned deliberately after Camp David, but blamed on Mr. Sharon’s single visit to the Temple Mount.

 

Despite being besieged by murder-bombers and hounded by the Europeans, the United Nations, and many in our state department, Mr. Sharon nevertheless did what all such gunslingers do. He said “no more,” and plowed into the West Bank to hunt down, kill, or capture the culprits. He barked out that he probably should have had Arafat shot years ago. He promised to bring a terrible retribution to the West Bank, which harbored, cheered, and aided killer bombers. He said all that and more — without make-up, scripts, or damage-control spinners and handlers.

 

Yet the reality was that his soldiers were far more humane than Russians who blew up entire neighborhoods in Chechnya. His men probably killed fewer civilians than did our outnumbered and trapped heroes in Mogadishu. Unlike the Kuwaitis, Sharon did not ethnically cleanse Palestinians; unlike the Jordanians he did not murder them in the thousands; unlike the Syrians he did not wipe out an entire town and pave it over; and, of course, unlike the Arab heroes, Nasser and Saddam Hussein, he did not gas civilians.

 

No, he sent combatants house-to-house, to pry out killers from boobytrapped parlors, in narrow streets where gunmen shot and then ducked into living rooms. No matter — he was Mr. Sharon and his soldiers were Israelis, and so the world dammed this new Sherman come alive. A corrupt international community that ignored thousands who were beheaded, incinerated, and blown apart in the Congo, Bosnia, India, and Rwanda has demonized him for a “massacre” in which less than a 100 Palestinians were killed in efforts to apprehend the murderers among them.

 

Sharon expected all that condemnation and worse, but cared little — knowing instead that his duty and his proper role, at this time and at this moment, were to reestablish the first principle of Israel’s existence: Attacks on the Jewish state will invoke reprisals of such magnitude that no one will dare again murder or maim its citizens in peace. The world believes he is a little mad; but the world also trusts that when the murder-bombing starts up again he will go back in to root out murderers and make clear to their supporters, both tacit and open, the bitter wages of sanctioning mass killing.

 

Pessimists now claim that the situation in the Middle East is worse for “Mr. Sharon’s War.” Pundits proclaim nightly on the purported Sharon “fixation” and “feud” with Mr. Arafat. Again, the weary warrior is an easy target of the blow-dried, chattering classes — aged, plodding, with heavily accented English, in poor health, and solitary. Indeed, Sharon seems to belong better with a shovel and wading boots on his farm, or astride a tank than trying to conduct a press conference in a cheap blazer with an ample belly.

 

Yet the truth we dare not speak is that had not Mr. Sharon acted, we would have seen another dozen or so suicide bombings by now, hundreds of more blown-up Jews, the increasingly frightening reality that Israel would not or could not act — and a corrupt international community’s sigh about butchered Israelis that “perhaps it had to come to this.” Due to Mr. Sharon’s resolve, his absolute disdain for the amoral posturing of European statesmen (who really do have the blood of Bosnians and Kosovars on their hands), his unconcern with the venom of the Arab world, and the irritation of the United States, Israel is more, not less safe — and peace for all concerned is more, not less, likely.

 

Now in his mid-70s Sharon will be lucky to get six months of retirement back on his farm for his trouble. When he goes, Americans will sigh relief. Most Israelis will learn that peacemaking will come easier for his absence. The Europeans in time will be wily enough to say, “Sharon did it, not the Israelis.” And so in his lifetime, Mr. Sharon will get no credit and much blame. At home most of his rivals who follow him to craft a peace will soon conclude that “Sharon was right, but his methods were not nuanced”; the best he can hope for abroad is something like “Well, the Palestinians asked for Sharon, when they started murdering women and children.”

 

No one will admit that Sharon’s warmaking was necessary to save lives and establish peace — and far more humane than the fighting that is characteristic of the Russian, Indian, and Pakistani armies — and all the Arab militaries without exception. You see, Sharon, is an Ajax. And all we “civilized” and “sophisticated” armchair critics can find personal redemption and smug self-righteousness in demonizing such men — but only when their necessary work is done and we are no longer being blown to bits.

Ariel Sharon: His Eye Was Not Dim. By Elliott Abrams.

Ariel Sharon: His Eye Was Not Dim. By Elliott Abrams. Commentary, January 11, 2014.

Assessing Sharon’s Complex Legacy. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 12, 2014.

What Ariel Sharon Knew. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, January 13, 2014.


Abrams:

Ariel Sharon often seemed bluff and simple, and he would play that role: in discussions with his kitchen cabinet down at his ranch (they called it the “farm forum”), he would react to some erudite advice by saying: “I am a simple farmer, not a professor. Explain that again, in simple terms so even I can understand it.”

 

But Sharon was not so simple: he was at different times clever, smart, devious, emotional, unemotional, funny, dry, tough, compromising, unyielding. He was a pariah who transformed himself by the end of his public career into an extremely successful politician and widely admired statesman. Nicknamed the “bulldozer” for both his physical appearance and his military tactics, in politics he was unpredictable and wily. A hero of the right for decades until his decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005, the “father of the settlements” pulled all the settlements out of Gaza and became very briefly the hero of the “peace camp.” This founder of the Likud Party pulled Likud apart and founded a new party called Kadima when his plans required it. At one point he lacked a majority in his own cabinet to pass the Gaza withdrawal plan, so he summoned two unconvinced ministers to his office—to fire them so he would have the majority in a smaller cabinet. They knew what was coming so they refused to meet with him, whereupon he fired them by fax. It was not easy to get around Ariel Sharon once he had made up his mind.

 

All these contradictions made him a fascinating man to watch and to deal with. Yet he really was, I think, a simple man at root. He saw himself as a Jew whose job it was to protect the Jewish state. In early 2003, President George W. Bush sent deputy national security advisor Steve Hadley and me (I was the senior Mideast official on the NSC) to meet with him, hear him out, and see what he thought of the various peace plans. Was he open to compromises? What he told us, according to my notes of the meeting, was this:

I took risks personally but never took any risks with the security of the State of Israel. I appreciate Arab promises but will take seriously only tangible performance.  For tangible performance I will take tangible steps.  Israel is a tiny small country.  From the Jordan River to Jerusalem is only 17.5 miles.  Before 1967, the Knesset was in range of machine guns south of Jerusalem. From the Green Line to Tel Aviv is 11 miles.  From the sea at Netanya to Tulkarm is 9 miles.  Two-thirds of the Jewish population lives is a narrow strip on the coastal plain.  Between Haifa and Ashdod, which is 80 miles, is two-thirds of the Jewish population, our only international airport, and most of our infrastructure.  All of that is overlooked by the hills of Judea and Samaria.

 

I am a Jew above all and feel the responsibility to the future of the Jewish people on my shoulders.  After what happened in the past, I will not let the future of the Jewish people depend on anyone, even our closest friends.  Especially when you saw the crowds cheering Saddam who killed even members of his own family and government.  With the deepest friendship and appreciation, we do not choose to be the lamb, but not the lion either.  I will not sacrifice the nation.  I come from a farm family who settled here but I deal with these problems with a cold mind.  I met with the Pope, who said this is Terra Sancta to all, but Terra Promisa for the Jews only.

So: “a Jew above all” who wanted Jews to be able to make their own decisions and protect themselves in their sovereign state. I often thought he divided the world into two groups, Jews and all the rest, the latter being further divided into real friends like George W. Bush and real enemies—like most of the Arabs. On this he was unsentimental in the extreme. In the summer of 2005 Sharon gave then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a tour of his ranch, after which the Israeli and American teams sat down for a meal.  Sharon sat silently for a while, as he often did, eating huge amounts of food while he listened to the conversation.  Several of the Israelis were criticizing the Palestinians and their leaders harshly: their actions, their political culture, their history.  Eventually Sharon jumped in and said, “I am going to defend the Palestinians.  I have known the Palestinians my whole life.  I was raised with them here.  Of all the Arabs, the Palestinians are the most talented, and they have the best sense of humor.  But there are two problems: their desire to murder and their taste for Jewish blood; and their treacherous ingratitude.”

 

It was an extraordinary moment, for we were discussing the Gaza withdrawal and Palestinian Authority’s take-over of Gaza for most of the meal.  We were arguing about what exactly the PA security forces were doing, and not doing, and how to force them and/or help them to do more.  But here was a remarkable glimpse of the layers underneath, at what Sharon really thought he was dealing with.  He wanted peace, he was taking enormous political risks for peace, but it was clear—as I thought about his remark over and over—that to him the best that could be hoped for was an armed peace. Whatever dreams others may have had about a new Middle East, Sharon saw his work as defending Jews from people who would murder them, as they had been murdered throughout history. Now Jews had a state and they could and would defend themselves, and he would create new lines and new separations that would, he hoped, make that perpetual task far easier.

 

As to where those lines should be, Sharon was as expert as anyone in Israel. Flying in a helicopter over the land, he would point out settlements he had planned or encouraged. But he did not need the flight; he knew the map, in detail. If we asked why the fence line had to go this way and that near some Palestinian village, curving instead of straight or straight instead of curving, he would tell us about the hills and the streams, the elevations and the shapes; he loved the land of the land of Israel with passion. He had seen that land as a soldier, worrying about Syrian troops coming down from the north, Jordanians coming from the east, and Egyptians from the south. As prime minister he used to say, when challenged on changing some position he had taken before as a soldier or civilian, that “what you see from here is not what you see from there.” But wherever he sat he always saw things as a soldier, worrying about Israel’s lines of defense—military and political.

 

His pullout from Gaza won him accolades from many governments, starting with our own and the Europeans. When he went to the UN General Assembly in September 2005 his dance card was full: everyone wanted to see Sharon, the old bull, the warrior-turned-peacemaker, the guy who had done something no other Israeli leader could have managed. That last was true, and Sharon used to tell me, “the left can’t do anything and the right won’t. If I don’t do it, it won’t ever be done. If I am defeated in this, no one will ever try it again.”

 

But Sharon had a long memory, and he knew that many of those paying tribute in 2005 had once viewed him as an untouchable. Even in America: In 1991, when Sharon had visited the United States as Minister of Housing, not a single U.S. official would meet with him formally. He had taken the blame for the failures of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—he had been defense minister—and the massacre of Palestinians in two Lebanese refugee camps by Christian militiamen was deemed a stain not only on his leadership but his character.   On that trip, he was not invited to one U.S. Government office. Through the intervention of friends, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp finally agreed to see Sharon in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying. By 2004, the President of the United States was calling him “a man of peace” and Sharon no doubt enjoyed it. The idea that all insults bounced off harmlessly was, I think, entirely false; Sharon liked being liked, and he especially liked it when an American president trusted him, confided in him, and supported him. He enjoyed those days at the UN in New York. They did not go to his head, because he was too old for that, but you could not gain influence with him by blasting him—only by trusting, arguing, talking, trying.  President Bush knew that and it worked, or anyway worked unless Israeli security was in Sharon’s view directly at stake. He fought the intifada his own way, from building the security fence despite American doubts to surrounding Yasser Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah and cutting off his electricity. Bush used to urge Sharon: “Don’t kill Arafat, Ariel; don’t kill him, it’s not smart.” Sharon would nod and grunt—but never promise. After Arafat’s death in 2004, Bush thanked Sharon for restraining himself. Sharon smiled broadly this time and said, “Well, sometimes God helps.”

 

What were Sharon’s plans? He left no memoir or notes, so we can only speculate. Most of his closest collaborators agree that he wanted to set Israel’s borders before he left office; he wanted to act, not wait for the Palestinians. He did not think Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was a bad guy, but neither did he think Abbas would lead the Palestinians anywhere. This likely meant pulling settlements back to the fence line, securing the major settlement blocs for Israel in perpetuity, keeping the Israel Defense Forces in the Jordan Valley so as not to replicate what had happened in south Lebanon (and would soon happen in Gaza): when the IDF pulled out, terrorists moved in. Then someone could negotiate peace and a final status agreement some day, maybe in a few decades, maybe when the Messiah came. But meanwhile Israel would have secure borders and the key settlement blocs would permanently be part of the country. This is why he thought his exchange of letters with Bush in 2004 was a triumph: for the first time an American president said there was no “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and that, as Bush’s letter put it, “new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers” would have to be reflected in any peace settlement. There would be no return to what are usually called “1967 borders” but that Bush rightly called the 1949 armistice lines.

 

That day, April 14, 2004, was certainly one of Sharon’s happiest: in Washington, with a friendly president, with America on his side and backing his plans, and of course away for a while from Israel’s incessant political battles. Sharon’s comprehension of English was imperfect—Condi Rice once said he was the only person she ever met who spoke English better than he understood it—so he wasn’t immediately certain that the language Bush was using was everything Sharon had been led to expect. His staff later told us that Sharon was only convinced when an inveterate enemy of his in the Israeli press bitterly described the whole thing as a Sharon triumph. If that enemy was sour, Sharon could be sweet.

 

But this was Ariel Sharon; sweetness might have been nice, security was everything. Three weeks before visiting the White House, on March 22, he authorized the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas. And three days after the White House ceremonies on April 14, he authorized the killing of Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, who had replaced Yassin. There were protests everywhere, but those really did bounce off Sharon; terrorists who killed Jews had to be stopped. This was his job as prime minister.

 

Bush liked Sharon for many of the same reasons he liked Tony Blair or John Howard in Australia: they were people who got themselves elected not to enjoy life but to accomplish things. They were willing to take political risks to do what they thought right. Sharon as prime minister certainly met that test, though it cost him the support of many of his old friends in Israeli politics—not least among the settlers, who saw him as a traitor to the cause. During the Gaza withdrawal period, Sharon’s security was stepped up. “I’ve spent my life protecting Jews, and now I have to be protected from Jews,” he told me sadly at the time. He fully understood the bitterness many old allies felt, but Sharon the general was making a tough, unsentimental assessment of where Israel’s interests and security lay, and then acting.

 

He would calculate the balance of forces, and weigh the costs and benefits. And once he made that strategic calculation and decided what to do, it was all a matter of tactics and he would select the best one and press ahead. If you got in the way—whether you were an Egyptian army, Palestinian terrorists, or Israeli political foes—you were, as the nickname suggested, likely to be knocked over. He would drive right through you. What he did not calculate at all was how he looked, how the polls would be affected, whether his image would suffer.

 

In December 2005, his chief of staff came to Washington and told us Sharon wanted to move forward, to set Israel’s final borders—by negotiation if possible, unilaterally if as Sharon feared the Palestinian leaders would not be willing to sign anything. On December 18, Sharon suffered a small stroke, losing consciousness briefly. He was hospitalized for only two days. When he emerged, President Bush called him. “I will rest for a few days and then get back to work,” he told the president. The president told him to be careful: “We need you healthy; don’t work too hard. Keep rational hours! Watch what you eat. I want to see a slimmer Sharon! We need your leadership and your courage to get to peace.” Sharon replied that the two of them can accomplish many things; “I have no doubt I can move forward,” he said, “as long as the terror stops; Israel will not cooperate with terror.” That was the last time they spoke.

 

On January 4, 2006, at his ranch, Sharon suffered the massive stroke from which he never recovered. His death was expected, and we in Washington laid plans for the funeral; the president intended to go. I wrote a eulogy for the president to read at the funeral, and kept the final version, worked over by the speechwriters, with me over the next few months so it would be handy when Sharon died:

Ariel Sharon also knew this land as a soldier. He enlisted in the struggle for a Jewish homeland as a boy . . . fought in all of   Israel ’s wars . . . and was severely wounded in battle. Over an army career, he became familiar with every inch of the terrain. He knew how high the hills were . . . how broad the rivers . . . where enemies would be likely to hide or strike. And knew he that the land he loved needed both swords and plowshares to prosper in an environment always harsh and often hostile. Ariel Sharon was a brilliant general—and led Israel to some of its most celebrated victories.  His experience also taught him the costs of war. In his autobiography, he wrote that “at the age of twenty, most of my friends were dead.” Because he understood these costs, he believed so deeply in keeping Israel strong. Because he understood these costs, the man who made his reputation in battle would also leave his mark as a peacemaker.

 

In his pursuit of peace, Prime Minister Sharon proved as daring and resourceful as he had been as a general and tank commander. As leader of his nation, he made decisions that caused him great personal pain—and that he knew would be unpopular with many who had been his closest supporters. Yet he stood by his decisions, for this warrior did not dream of more victory in battle; he dreamed of peace for the people he led. And when he committed Israel to a new plan for peace, he did so on the same terms that he had insisted on throughout his life – from a position of strength.

 

Bringing peace to his people was his life’s work, and Ariel Sharon kept at it up to the moment of his stroke. His energy and determination were a source of inspiration to men many years his junior. As the Scriptures say of Moses, his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.

Sharon left the political scene in his prime, not physically but politically: on top of Israeli politics, a leader whom opponents and rivals feared and whom everyone understood was almost unstoppable. Sharon was born on a moshav in 1928, two decades before the state. The Israel he leaves finally, today, is a tower of strength and stability in a region being torn apart. Many Israelis contributed their lives to that achievement, but very few can match the contribution of Arik Sharon.

 

 

Ariel Sharon: The Andrew Jackson of Israel.

A 2005 photo of Ariel Sharon. (Kevin Frayer/AFP/Getty Images.)

Warrior, Farmer, Leader. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, January 11, 2014. Also here.

Ariel Sharon: Israel’s Soldier and Strongman, 1928-2014. By Karl Vick and Lisa Beyer. Time, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: A Hard Charger Who Was Loved and Hated. By Josef Federman. AP. Real Clear World, January 11, 2014.

Remembering Ariel Sharon – a great man who defied stereotypes. By Judith Miller. FoxNews.com, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: Larger Than Life. By Caroline Glick. Townhall.com, January 12, 2014. Also at National Review Online, CarolineGlick.com.

Sharon: Myths, Facts, and Blood Libels. By Tom Gross. National Review Online, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: 1928-2014. By Benny Morris. Tablet, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon’s Legacy of Separation. By Geoffrey Levin. The Atlantic, January 11, 2014.

Left for dead in 1948: The battle that shaped Arik Sharon. By Mitch Ginsburg. The Times of Israel, January 12, 2014.

Sharon, a warrior who sought peace. By Michael Oren. CNN, January 11, 2014.

Sharon realized the limits of military power. By Gideon Levy. Haaretz, January 11, 2014.

Sharon’s contradictory life and legacy: The good, the bad and the very, very ugly. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, January 11, 2014.

Sharon’s lasting legacy: Proving that rabbis and settlers can be defied. By Anshel Pfeffer. Haaretz, January 10, 2013.

Ariel Sharon, the Ruthless Warrior Who Could Have Made Peace. By Ronen Bergman. New York Times, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: Champion of controversy. By Amir Oren. Haaretz, January 12, 2014.

“Sharon was no warmonger, he just put Israel first.” Ron Ben-Yishai interviewed by Atilla Somfalvi. Ynet News, January 12, 2014.

Sharon: The man who executed the Zionist vision. By Nahum Barnea. Ynet News, January 12, 2014.

Barnea:

The life of Ariel Sharon and the life of the State of Israel are intertwined. He was everything the State’s forefathers dreamed of seeing in the generation of the sons, the born Israelis: Handsome, strong, a farmer working his land, a soldier for life. The forefathers provided the vision; the sons – the execution. And there wasn’t a more determined, talented, scheming person of execution than Ariel Sharon.

. . . .

 

He didn’t believe in peace agreements. In that he was no different from most of the members of his generation, who were raised on the sword and found it difficult to accept any Palestinian as a partner. He believed in unilateral moves. They matched his activist character, and catered to his anxieties over an external solution, a forced solution. If he hadn’t fallen asleep in 2006, he would have spent several months in negotiations doomed to fail with the Palestinians, and then carried out a one-sided withdrawal from most of the West Bank. That was his scheme.


Let’s Remember the Dark Side of Ariel Sharon’s Legacy—and Bury “Sharonism” With Him. By Gershom Gorenberg. Tablet, January 13, 2014.

Arik the Recalcitrant and Brutal. By Emily L. Hauser. Haaretz, January 13, 2014.

How will Sharon be remembered? By Sima Kadmon. Ynet News, January 13, 2014.

What if Sharon Still Lived. By David Landau. New York Times, January 13, 2014.

Burying Unilateralsm Along With its Patron. By Tom Wilson. Commentary, January 13, 2014.

Why I can’t mourn for Ariel Sharon. By Amit Schejter. Haaretz, January 14, 2014.

“How fast can you run?” A soldier remembers Sharon. By Barbara Opall-Rome. The Times of Israel, January 14, 2014.

Sharon realized occupation was the greatest threat to Israel, says just-released biography. By Judy Maltz. Haaretz, January 14, 2014.

Sharon didn’t embrace peace, he defeated it. By Daniel Levy. Al Jazeera America, January 14, 2014.

Top Ten Ways Ariel Sharon Ruined Israel and the Middle East. By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, January 14, 2014. Also at History News Network.

Call Off the Sainthood of Ariel Sharon. By Rashid Khalidi. Foreign Policy, January 13, 2014. Also here.

Sharon: The Man Who Made Peace Impossible. By Ali Jarbawi. New York Times, January 21, 2014.

Ariel Sharon and the Great Leader Peace Myth. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, January 3, 2014. With related article by Jacob Heibrunn.


Khalidi:

Sharon was emblematic of the Israeli refusal to accept that Palestinian resistance was an inevitable response to the forcible establishment of a Jewish state and the concomitant expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In later years, he became one of the most sophisticated employers of the trope of “terrorism” to demean this resistance.


Miller:

Reflections on the flawed-but-unmatched legacy of Israel’s Ariel Sharon.


Love him or hate him, Ariel Sharon was a stunningly consequential, larger than life, and historic figure the likes of whom we will not see again. For those Palestinians, Arabs, and even Israelis who will never forget or forgive his transgressions, that’s just as well. Still, Sharon’s passing highlights the troubling reality of a region without leaders. This isn’t so much reflected in the comparison of what Sharon accomplished to what little has been achieved by current politicians in the Middle East; Sharon was far too controversial for greatness. Rather, it is reflected in the thought of what leaders of Sharon’s stature, authority, and power might be able to do for the Middle East today if they had the necessary skill, strategy, and partnerships.

 

We face a regional leadership vacuum: In Israel, younger leaders lack the credibility of their predecessors. Among the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas may have the desire to make peace, but he does not have the power. He’s also 78, and it is not evident what figure of national prominence could succeed him and unite a divided Palestinian polity. And in the Arab world, you would be hard-pressed to identify a single leader of vision and capacity.

 

You might say that we’re rudderless. In contrast, Sharon – for all his flaws – could steer the ship that was his country, and particularly as prime minister, he did so boldly.

 

I met Ariel Sharon for the first time at a Druze wedding feast outside of Haifa in the summer of 1973, a few months before the October war. He was much thinner and more agile then and bounded out of his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jeep bantering in Arabic, plunging into the crowd of Druze and Israeli Arabs who had gathered to greet him. The bride's family was honored he had come, and Sharon seemed as comfortable there as he might have been at a Jewish wedding in Tel Aviv.

 

His appetite was already legendary. My wife Lindsay and I watched him devour the heaping platters of rice and steaming lamb – including the brains, of course, which we and Sharon, as guests, were offered. Years later, at meetings with various prime ministers, I’d watch Sharon consume hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches with such abandon that I wondered even then about his life expectancy.

 

Even more legendary at that time was Sharon’s image as a bold, courageous, and somewhat reckless warrior. His battlefield exploits in crossing the Suez Canal in October 1973 were well-known, as were his grand schemes to use the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to push the Syrians out, make the Lebanese Christians allies of Israel, and force the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into Jordan, and convert the Hashemite Kingdom into a Palestinian state.

 

These schemes were as nutty as they were dangerous; certainly, the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis who died in the course of them paid dearly.

 

As it turned out, an Israeli State Commission charged Sharon with indirect responsibility for allowing Christian militias to massacre hundreds of Palestinian innocents in Sabra and Shatila. He resigned as minister of defense. As for his schemes, the Palestinians didn’t end up in Amman but instead went to Tunis. Sharon, it turns out, produced the very circumstances he had sought to avoid. Stripped of a military option and stunned by the First Intifada, Yasser Arafat ended up in a political process that brought him to where Sharon didn’t want him: the West Bank and Gaza.

 

There may not be second acts in American politics. But Sharon’s rise to prime minister – a move few thought imaginable, given his role in the 1982 war and his bulldozing personality – revealed that there are in Israel. His election in February 2001 over Ehud Barak – the largest electoral landslide in Israel’s history – reflected Barak’s unpopularity and the public’s fear and anger at Palestinian suicide attacks during the Second Intifada. It also demonstrated the desire for strong, experienced, and tough leadership from a man much of the public believed might break the back of Palestinian terrorism. And through security measures, the wall/security barrier (which he initially opposed), and targeted killings, he delivered.

 

In addition to being a warrior, Sharon was also a farmer, with a deep knowledge of and connection to the land – both its agricultural and biblical dimensions. He was proud of this fact and loved to talk animals, or about them. This was on display at the 1998 Wye River Summit, hosted by President Bill Clinton in the United States. Sharon refused to shake Arafat's hand, and he talked about the Palestinians in the third person even though they were sitting at the same table. Indeed, Sharon seemed more interested in the herd of prize Angus cows that the University of Maryland maintained at the Wye River plantation than in the negotiations themselves. Also, on more than one occasion at his farm at Shikmim in southern Israel, Sharon insisted on talking flowers and livestock before business. In 2002, on the helicopter tour he gave Gen. Anthony Zinni, then the Bush administration’s special envoy on the peace process, Sharon narrated with the authority of a man who had walked or driven every kilometer from the Lebanese border to the Negev. Watching Sharon explain the real estate, I thought of the poet’s line about individuals being monarchs of all they survey. Sharon was certainly that.

 

As prime minister, Sharon matured. I think he learned at least two critical things about his own politics: First, that he had to read the public correctly and not overreach; and second, that if it was possible to do and didn’t cost much, he should keep the Americans happy. Sharon's decision to disengage from Gaza – and essentially take down the settlement enterprise he had created – did both these things. However imperfect the disengagement turned out to be, it was an act of boldness and brilliance that no other Israeli politician of his day could have implemented. Hamas or no Hamas, few Israelis would still want the IDF in Gaza today, even with Hezbollah’s rockets in southern Lebanon.

 

Just as Sharon learned two things as prime minister, upon his passing, I now have two takeaways on his legacy.

 

First, with Sharon gone, Israel faces a significant leadership transition. Only the extraordinary and indefatigable Shimon Peres – now 90 – remains from the cast of Israeli characters who shepherded the state through its early years. At a breakfast once at Sharon’s farm with Peres, I watched the two interact. Despite their political differences, there was a real affection and a shared sense of history between them. Indeed, they had both seen just about everything. At one point, Peres actually said that there were few surprises left for the two of them.

 

The Israeli prime ministers who have followed that generation – Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu – are incredibly smart, able leaders. But they don’t have the same authority, legitimacy, and authenticity as their predecessors. Despite their flaws and mistakes, Israel’s previous leaders had tremendous will and skill to keep a challenging enterprise afloat and prosperous during very tough times. Who now will make the difficult but important decisions? Sharon presided over the evacuation of 8,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza – deeply traumatic but without serious or sustained violence. Who will deal with the evacuation of tens of thousands of ideologically motivated and well-armed Israelis living on the West Bank? The answer just isn’t clear.

 

Second, Sharon was not a peacemaker. Suspicious and mistrustful, he believed deeply that Israel was engaged in a hundred-year war with the Arabs and had profound doubts about the viability of a Palestinian state. He asked me once whether it was true that I wanted to become the first ambassador to the state of Palestine. When I said no, he laughed and said that was a good thing because there would never be one.

 

Could Sharon – a man with the power to make big decisions – have changed his tune while prime minister, had he not been felled by a stroke? I doubt it. But we’ll never know.

 

Had he changed his mind while in office, it would have confirmed the reality that, on the Israeli side, the history of peacemaking isn’t the purview of the left, the doves, or even the moderate right. Instead, it's a history of transformed hawks – Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and perhaps Netanyahu, still the only Likud prime minister to have actually withdrawn from any West Bank territory. By and large tough guys who, for any number of reasons, believed – as Sharon did in calling for disengagement from Gaza – that the situation (and Israel’s interests) demanded a change.

 

Yet the equation of peace requires many parts to reach a conflict-ending solution. Even if U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry succeeds in getting a framework agreement on peace, anything remotely resembling the creation of a Palestinian state, let alone a true end to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, will require heroic leaders on both sides willing and able to make big decisions. And in the wake of Sharon’s passing, I’m reminded, sadly, that even will and capacity aren’t enough. Such leaders must also have the desire to do get the job done.


Vick and Beyer:

Ariel Sharon died Saturday after having spent the last eight of his 85 years on life support. Incapacitated by a coma that followed a massive stroke, Sharon’s last hours were spent with members of his family at his bedside. Outside, an Israeli nation watched with one eye on the news and another on the past, re-assessing the qualities of a leader whose lifetime spanned the life of the nation.

 

The long illness, out of public view, seemed to transform how Israelis viewed Sharon. In active life, he had always been a warrior first — a profoundly polarizing one, in the thick of every major conflict during the nearly six decades Sharon spent either in the Israeli military or running it. As an invalid, the hard edges disappeared.

 

When Sharon was remembered at all in recent years, it was for the five years he spent as prime minister. His signature actions in office – including the unilateral pull-out  of Jewish settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip, and leaving behind the rightist Likud Party he founded to start the center-right Kadima –  were seen as the bold strokes of a confident leader, a quality more associated with the country’s vanishing Founding generation than the media-genic politicians who followed.

 

“People are forgiving him for what happened in the past, and he is seen as a national icon today,” his longtime media adviser, Ra’anan Gisson told TIME last week, after doctors announced that the end was finally coming. “This is the reincarnation of Israel that people would like to see in the future.”

 

The following piece on Sharon, “The Lonely Warrior,” was written by Lisa Beyer and ran in TIME magazine on Jan. 9, 2006 after Sharon had slipped into a coma.

 

To his detractors, Ariel Sharon will always seem the fanatic. He convinced Menachem Begin that invading Lebanon in 1982 would be worth the costs, and in 2000 he insisted on visiting the Temple Mount, the Muslim-controlled holy site in Jerusalem—a walkabout that helped trigger the second intifadeh. As Israel’s Foreign Minister, he refused to shake Yasser Arafat’s hand at the Wye Plantation peace talks in 1998 and eventually made sure Arafat spent his last years barricaded in his offices in Ramallah, unable to jet around the world espousing the Palestinian cause. His planetary dimensions—at 5 ft. 7 in., he weighed as much as 312 lbs.—have long suggested a lack of discipline at the table that many think reflects a deeper wildness. At one point, American intelligence monitored Sharon’s weight in an effort to predict his actions—the theory being the more he consumed, the more adveanturously he would behave. Alluding to his politics, Sharon once acknowledged that he was thought of as someone who “eats Arabs for breakfast.”

 

That is one image of Ariel Sharon: the right-wing zealot. In the past few years, another reputation has taken hold: Sharon reborn as peacemaker. The idea is that, having achieved his dream of becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 2001 at the age of 73, Sharon would—in a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of way—become the man to reconcile the Israelis and Palestinians once and for all. That was his campaign slogan: “Only Sharon can bring peace.” And people inside and outside Israel began to believe it after Sharon, the man who once planned and nurtured the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, had them forcibly evacuated last August, enabling Israeli troops to leave and turning the entire Gaza Strip at last over to Palestinian self-rule. In the weeks before Sharon’s debilitating stroke, rumors abounded that he was preparing to make bold withdrawals in the West Bank as well.

 

Sharon, however, has always resisted the stereotypes imposed on him. He was never an unrelenting right-wing ideologue nor, in recent years, a devotee of peace-making. Politically, Sharon is best known as a co-founder of the hawkish Likud bloc, but he has been a member of four other parties, including the precursor to the left-wing Labor Party, in which he started out, and his own creation, Shlomzion, which flirted with doves.

 

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip served the interests of peace, although that was perhaps not why Sharon carried it out. His emissaries suggested that he quit Gaza—a sandy, squalid quarter to which few Israelis feel any attachment—to win goodwill in the world in order to strengthen Israel’s claim to its more valued settlements in the West Bank. Media reports recently suggested Sharon was prepared to unilaterally draw a border in the West Bank between Israel and what might become a Palestinian state, emptying Jewish settlements that fell on the wrong side. It’s an interesting idea, and perhaps a good one, but it’s not peacemaking, which requires mutual consent. Sharon almost certainly would have apportioned more West Bank land to Israel than the Palestinians would have kept the conflict alive. His notion of coming to terms with the Palestinians is a bit like the idea that getting out of a bad marriage is as simple as saying, “I divorce thee,” and dictating the property settlement.

 

But what made Sharon such an enduring—and ultimately appealing—politician was his obdurate self-belief, a refusal to be bound by the constraints of negotiated agreements or ideology. Whatever Sharon did, he was at least as devoted to the fight as to the cause. That is what made him one of the greatest—some peers say the greatest—military commander in Israeli history. It’s what enabled him, from a variety of Cabinet posts, to construct settlements in the face of international opprobrium. But it’s also what allowed him not only to evacuate Gaza but, 23 years earlier, to tear down settlements in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula and use water cannons to force out the Israelis there, putting Israel in compliance with Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.

 

Sharon loved the military. He writes in his autobiography that it was in the camaraderie of the army that he first experienced expressions of familial love that he had missed out on as a child. He grew up in Kfar Malal, a moshav, or collection of farms in which major equipment is jointly owned. His parents were so prickly that the family was ostracized on the moshav. Life was hard. Theirs was a three-room house made of mud and manure walls. Sharon’s response was to focus on work. “You could lose yourself in it,” he wrote.

 

At 13, armed with a club and a dagger, he joined the older moshavniks guarding the fields at night from sporadic attacks by Arab villagers living nearby. “They were not afraid of anything,” he observed of the moshavniks, a quality he emulated the rest of his life. He respected the moshavniks’ views about the local Arabs: they believed the Arabs had “full rights in the land” but only Jews had rights “over the land.” Translation: you can live here, but under us.

 

Sharon, known as Arik to everyone, was just 14 when he joined the Haganah, a Jewish militia in British mandatory Palestine. Six years later he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that erupted after Israel declared its independence. As he rose through the ranks, he played a significant role in every one of Israel’s wars. In 1967 he commanded one of three divisions that wrested the Sinai peninsula from Egypt.  In 1973 he led a counterattack in Sinai that broke through Egyptian lines and ended up just 60 miles outside Cairo.

 

Where Sharon fought, there was usually controversy. As head of Unit 101, Israel’s first commando team, he was assigned in 1953 to avenge the murder of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers by Palestinian infiltrators from the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon’s forces destroyed a few dozen buildings in Qibya, killing 69 villagers and earning Israel a censure at the U.N. Charged with cleaning Palestinian fighters out of the now Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip after the ’67 war, he did so with ruthless efficiency. It was Sharon who pushed Israeli Prime Minister Begin to bomb Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981, an operation applauded today but widely condemned then.

 

Israel’s most divisive war is often laid at Sharon’s feet: the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which he planned as Minister of Defense. One objective, running the P.L.O. out of Lebanon, was largely achieved, but the scheme to install in power the leader of the Lebanese Phalangist militia, a Christian group friendly to Israel, was a debacle. After Phalangist forces massacred as many as 800 men, women and children at the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, an Israeli inquiry concluded that Sharon bore “indirect” responsibility, forcing him to resign as Defense Minister. Sharon sued TIME for $50 million for a 1983 cover story that said a secret appendix to the Israeli report stated, in effect, that he had encouraged the massacre. In 1985 a federal jury in New York City concluded that TIME had not libeled Sharon, though it also found that the magazine had acted negligently; after being allowed to examine the appendix during the trial, TIME acknowledged that it had erred in describing what the appendix said and apologized.

 

Sharon’s lifelong militarism is often mistaken for lifelong rightism. In fact, he spent his military career in the bosom of Mapai, the precursor to the Labor Party, as a favorite of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. Sharon remained close to those in Labor, especially his friend Shimon Peres. Sharon served as a special adviser to Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1970s.

 

Those good relations are partly the product of good manners. Belying his oafish appearance, Sharon was a charmer. At the house he shared with his wife Lily until her death in March 2000, on their 1,000-acre ranch on the edge of the Negev Desert, he was an enthusiastic and attentive host. “Please, more lemonade, more cookies,” he would insist to visitors.

 

After years of political probation following the Lebanon war, it was, ironically, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who gave Sharon his final big break. At peace talks in the summer of 2000, Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the bulk of the West Bank, including some part of East Jerusalem. Arafat refused the deal. Presumably to protest Barak’s offer to divide Jerusalem, Sharon, accompanied by dozens of Israeli police, took the unusual step of visiting what Jews call the Temple Mount, the plateau that today hosts al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The visit provoked rioting and an Israeli response that sparked the second intifadeh, which together with Israel’s countermeasures has claimed some 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives. While some Israelis and Palestinians blamed Sharon for provoking the violence, it soon became clear that Arafat, who fanned the unrest, had been spoiling for a fight and would have taken any excuse.

 

Sharon had always opposed the Oslo peace agreements, arguing that Arafat would just use self-rule to wage war against Israel from up close. As a Palestinian mob lynched two Israeli soldiers on camera, as Palestinian marksmen shot into Israeli houses, Sharon’s view came to be accepted by a growing number of his compatriots, propelling him to power in 2001. Israelis, right and left, were spoiling for a fight too, and Sharon was just the man to deliver one. In his first year in office, he was relatively restrained, punching hard but always calibrating his response to avoid a slap-down by the U.S. But after Sept. 11, the Bush Administration moved closer to Sharon’s zero-tolerance view of Palestinian terrorism. So when a bomber killed 30 people at a Netanya hotel during Passover in 2002, Sharon went all out. He reinvaded the cities of the West Bank with brutal force, using the army’s presence to get intelligence on the terrorists and to make arrests. He stepped up construction of a controversial barrier, started by Barak, that cut through the West Bank and walled out the Palestinians. In 2004, Sharon ordered the assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and, later, another of the group’s leaders, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, steps that previously had been considered too provocative. And he got results; the intifadeh never recovered its early strength, and Israelis regained their sense of security. Sharon succeeded at what many security experts said was impossible: he found a military solution to terrorism.

 

Sharon was elected and re-elected in 2003 for his pugnacity, not his vision. He swam among many political ideologies, and none have found the solution to the Palestinian problem. But in the final years of his tenure as Prime Minister, with what was likely to be his last election looming, he seemed closer than ever to defining an ideology of his own. The hard-line Likudniks still believe that Israel can somehow hold onto all the territories. Sharon came to accept the Labor argument that it is impossible for Israel to rule over millions of Arabs indefinitely and still remain a democracy with a Jewish majority. But Labor’s efforts to negotiate a division of the land with the Palestinians have failed. Sharon may have found a third way: draw the line yourself and see what happens. If his successors in his new party Kadima have a chance to try it out, the success of the venture will define a unique political legacy for Sharon. If they don’t, he will have been a hell of a warrior.


Moshe Dayan on Why David Ben-Gurion saw Sharon as the New Jew. Dayan quoted in David Landau, Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, pp. 32-33.

In his memoirs, Dayan wrote of Ben-Gurion’s “special affection” for three IDF officers: Haim Laskov, Assaf Simchoni, and Sharon. The founding father saw in all three of them “the antithesis of the galuti, or diasporic Jew. The New Jew was a fighter, bold, self-confident, expert in the art of war, in weaponry, in field craft, in the region, and in the Arabs. Ben-Gurion could not bear casuistry and beating around the bush. He didn’t like the Talmud; his heart rebelled against two thousand years of exile. He yearned for the Israelites of the Bible, living on their land, farming and fighting, independent and proud and building their national culture. Haim, Assaf, and Arik were like those ancient Israelites in his eyes.” Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar writes that the Old Man told him he admired two soldiers above all for their bravery and resourcefulness: Dayan and Sharon.


A major goal of Zionism was to reverse centuries of Jewish passivity and powerlessness by creating a “New Jew”: a bold assertive Jewish farmer and warrior, in effect a Hebrew-speaking Jewish Jacksonian. Max Nordau had called for such a “muscle Jew” in 1898: “We must do away with the demeaning image of the stooping Jew in the ghetto, afraid for his life . . . Let us become strong men, with full chests and a deep, lucid expression in our eyes.” Nordau’s description is similar to Walt Whitman’s description of Jacksonian manhood in “A Song of Joys.”

 

While politically Ben-Gurion wanted modern Israel to be the kingdom of David reborn, socially and culturally he wanted to re-create the independent Israelite farmer warrior of the period of the Judges.

 

William Dever writes [p. 18 in pdf] that “the early Israelites are best seen as homesteaders—pioneer farmers settling the hill-country frontier of central Palestine, which had been sparsely occupied before Iron I.” The Israelites were in a sense the Jacksonian pioneers of the ancient Near East, who created a primitive democracy of small autonomous farming villages in the highlands of Canaan. Israel Finkelstein believed the houses in one village (‘Izbet Sartah, possibly biblical Ebenezer) were arranged in a circle for protection against Canaanite or Philistine attacks much like the covered wagons on the American frontier. So America’s Jacksonian frontier settlers, who saw themselves as Israelites building homesteads the Promised Land, had a more profound understanding of history than they realized.

 

As Dayan observed, Ben-Gurion saw this New/Old Jew, ancient Israelite/modern Jacksonian come to life in Ariel Sharon.