Volume 53, Number 20 · December 21, 2006
The Enigma of Ariel Sharon
By Jonathan Freedland
Ariel Sharon: A Life
by Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom, translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg
Random House, 490 pp., $29.95
Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait
by Uri Dan
Palgrave Macmillan, 292 pp., $27.95
Politicide: The Real Legacy of Ariel Sharon
by Baruch Kimmerling
Verso, 248 pp., $18.00 (paper)
One night in the early 1930s, Vera Scheinerman, the mother of the future Ariel Sharon, grabbed a rifle and a pair of pliers and headed out into the dark. Vera, an immigrant to Palestine from newly Soviet Georgia, was angry at a plan approved by her neighbors in the moshav, or agricultural commune, of Kfar Malal that would force each family to give up a portion of its land in order to found a new village close by. With a gun in her hand, Vera cut the wires which designated the turf the Scheinermans were expected to surrender, thereby collapsing an entire two-mile-long fence and, with it, the plan. Sharon would later tell that story to his own children, a parable on the importance of borders, the merits of bold, if unauthorized, action, and, above all, the power of facts on the ground.
Review, 5053 words
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