"Sharon: Hero and Villain"
Gregory Levey, The Globe and Mail, October 28, 2006

Books

Sharon: A Life in Times of Turmoil
By Freddy Eytan
Translated by Robert Davies
Studio 9 Books, 263 pages, $18.99

Ariel Sharon
By Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom
Translated by Mitch Ginsburg
Random House, 484 pages, $39.95

When former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon graduated from elementary school, part of the ceremony involved his reciting a fairy tale to the audience. He had memorized his lines, but when the time came to say them, he was so afflicted with stage fright he could not speak at all. Staring out at the crowd in terror, he waited silently until the curtains were lowered, and then went home and burst into tears.

This incongruous little story is especially interesting to me. In the short time I worked for prime minister Sharon, writing some of his English speeches and official statements, I was always struck by his hesitation when it came to public speaking. Even in Hebrew, he was reluctant to speak too much, putting more stock in actions than in words. In English speeches, he was particularly shy and nervous. Reading shakily from prepared texts, he seemed totally to underestimate his actual ability to speak in English. If the story about his childhood graduation ceremony is indicative, it seems that this verbal anxiety apparently began years earlier.

The stage-fright anecdote is recounted near the beginning of both Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom's Ariel Sharon and Freddy Eytan's Sharon: A Life in Times of Turmoil. In each book, it seems to presage a work full of background stories probing the psychology of this pivotal figure in the modern Middle East. However, while this tantalizing promise is realized brilliantly in one, it goes completely unfulfilled in the other.

Instead of any real depth or sense of nuance, what we get in Eytan's Sharon is a shallow chronology of Israeli history, told through a focus on Sharon. Because he was so deeply connected to nearly every major event in his country's past, from its War of Independence until January of this year, the book effectively becomes a basic primer on Israeli history and Sharon's crucial role in it. As a simple - though very slanted - synopsis of the last 60 years in the Middle East, it is effective. As anything else, it is disappointing.

Eytan is a former Israeli foreign ministry official, now affiliated with the right-leaning think tank the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. In fact, the essential problem with his book is that while as a diplomat he was quite successful, as an analyst he sounds like he is still parroting the party line of the Israeli government, more specifically, its right-wing elements.

In a style that is often strangely colloquial (my favourite quote: "Shimon Peres, what a guy!"), Eytan provides little more than superficial observations. Not just substantively simple, though, the book is also simplistically one-sided. Eytan's hero-worship of Sharon is so robust that he seems almost blind to any possible controversies in his history. For example, he refers to Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in 14,000 Lebanese deaths in three months and a more-or-less pointless 18-year occupation, as an "unmitigated success." He fails even to mention the crucial fact that an Israeli investigative commission found Sharon "indirectly responsible" for the massacre by Christian militias of hundreds of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps shortly after.

Eytan is similarly blind to any shortcomings in Israel's record, almost completely ignoring incidents that cast the country in a bad light, and too often unquestioningly repeating the talking points of the Israeli foreign ministry. Sometimes he even goes beyond these into the realm of right-wing Israeli conspiracy theory, such as when he suggests, with unnerving certainty, that Yasser Arafat "died of complications from AIDS."

In the end, this unabashed partisanship does a disservice to Eytan's book, and discredits it as serious biography. It doesn't take long even for someone sympathetic to Israel and to Sharon to grow wary of Eytan's one-dimensionalism, and distrustful of what he has to say.

Hefez and Bloom's Ariel Sharon provides a far more useful and interesting picture of the former prime minister. Hefez and Bloom barely make any overt judgments about Sharon, instead focusing on providing a balanced and objective account of his life. Employing a vast array of sources, all impeccably noted and analyzed, they are able to paint a full and satisfying portrait of this complicated figure. When accounts differ on aspects of Sharon's past, they have no problem offering contrasting versions of events.

Neither are they at all reluctant to provide unflattering or even damning testimonies or facts. Perhaps the major deficiency is that, although the authors use sources from across Israel's political spectrum, they neglect to consult much in the Arab world, where Sharon's influence was often felt almost as keenly as in Israel, for better or worse.

Sharon, as portrayed here, was ruthlessly political throughout his military career, and almost obsessively militaristic in his later political career. He was wholly committed to the safety of Israel and its people, but sometimes more than willing to put both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians in harm's way in order to advance the goals he had set for himself and the state. Through a career of ups and down, replete with both tremendous heroism and horrific failure, his guiding interest was the security of the Israeli people - as he defined it.

He was both the Sharon who preserved Israel's existence in wartime and the Sharon many believe ultimately endangered its long-term chances for survival by engineering its settlement program in the Palestinian territories. He was also, of course, the Sharon who caused the suffering and deaths of so many Arab civilians, as well as the one who finally seemed bent on revitalizing the hopes for a real peace in the region before he was struck down by a stroke in January.

The effect is a portrait of Sharon as an almost Shakespearean character, vastly talented and deeply flawed. This Ariel Sharon is at times heroic and valiant, at other times malicious and brutal. Aspects of his character marked by heavy-handed violence are balanced with aspects of deep pathos. Hefez and Bloom examine the way that Sharon was able to suddenly change course - in last year's disengagement from the Gaza Strip - and find that he was in essence more of a pragmatist than an ideologue.

To their credit, they are able to steer clear of either hero-worship or demonization, and it is this that makes their book a work of fascinating and lucid biography. A man of epic proportions - both historically and physically - Ariel Sharon was still just a man.

In this chaotic era in the Middle East, and with Sharon lying on what seems to be his death bed, the time is certainly ripe for an illuminating new book on this most central figure in the region's modern history. Such a book should explore his complicated psychology and multilayered life, and his tremendous impact on both Israel and the Arab world. Ideally, in so doing it would hold a mirror up to the nuanced and endlessly interesting Middle East itself.

With these two books, we have one that comes very close to this ideal, and one that doesn't even seem aware of it.