His finest hour in uniform, as he described it, came in the 1973 Mideast war. Yanked out of retirement by an army desperate for leadership, he commanded 27,000 Israelis in a daring drive across Egypt’s Suez Canal that helped turn the tide of the war. A picture of a boyish-faced, 45-year-old Sharon, bloody bandage wrapped around his head, remains one of the most enduring images of the war.
Out of uniform, he used sheer force of personality to coerce a quarrelsome array of hawkish factions into forming the Likud, which four years later would be elected to power, ending 29 years of rule by the moderate Labor Party.
Sharon became a minister in Menachem Begin’s government, and clung to his hawkish views. When Begin negotiated the historic 1979 Camp David peace treaty with Egypt, Israel’s first peace agreement with an Arab country, Sharon voted against it.
By the time Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula under the accord, Sharon was Begin’s defense minister. Begin quipped that he was reluctant to give Sharon the job lest he “encircle the prime minister’s office with tanks.”
But when it fell to Sharon to remove the Jewish settlements Israel had built in Sinai, he obediently ordered the protesting settlers to be dragged away and their homes bulldozed to rubble.
Then came one of the most controversial chapters of his tumultuous life.
In 1982 he engineered the invasion of Lebanon. It was portrayed as a quick, limited strike to drive Palestinian fighters from Israel’s northern border. Later it emerged that Sharon had a larger plan: to install a pro-Israel regime in Lebanon — a design that typified boldness to his friends and dangerous megalomania to his critics. The conflict quickly escalated, and Israel remained in Lebanon for the next 18 years.
That September, the Israeli military, controlling parts of Beirut, allowed members of the Phalanges, a Lebanese Christian militia allied with Israel, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla in Beirut to root out “terrorists.” The militiamen systematically slaughtered hundreds of civilians, including women and children. The massacres sparked mass protests in Israel and abroad. An Israeli commission rejected Sharon’s contention that he didn’t know what was coming, saying: “It is impossible to justify the minister of defense’s disregard of the danger of a massacre.”
He was fired as defense minister.