January 21, 2014 | Quote

The Arab Myth of Ariel Sharon

During Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, he met Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general credited by his countrymen as one of the heroes of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Sharon’s crossing of the Sinai and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army had turned the tables on Sadat’s forces, ensuring a victory that had once been uncertain. “I tried to catch you when you were on our side of the canal,” Sadat told Sharon. And now, replied Sharon, “you have the chance to catch me as a friend.”

Since Sharon’s death January 11, the Arab press has been full of articles on Sharon, none of which consider him a friend, nor even, as Sadat did, a worthy adversary whose military stratagems thwarted the Arabs time and again. The Arab press fixates instead on some of the worst controversies in Sharon’s career: his role as commander of Unit 101, which led a 1953 retaliatory raid on Qibya that took the lives of dozens of Palestinian civilians, and as the defense minister who engineered Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Sharon is seen, that is to say, as evil incarnate.

Sharon will serve as “fuel for the fires of hell,” Jihad al-Khazen wrote in the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. Other assessments are similarly damning. The groundswell of Arab sentiment is so powerful that it has also colored the perspective of virtually every American and European journalist who has worked in the Middle East over the last three decades, even if they got their start long after Sharon fell into a coma in 2006. For the Western press corps as well as their Arab colleagues, Sharon is an object of loathing.

“It’s as if the Arabs can’t even own their violence,” says Tony Badran, a Beirut-born Middle East analyst and research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who lived through Lebanon’s civil war. “They portray their violence as somehow an imitation of, or as emanating from, a standard set by Sharon. This is a political culture that has produced, among others, the Assads, Sr. and Jr., Saddam Hussein, Omar Bashir, and Muammar Qaddafi. To make Sharon the avatar of Middle East butchery is absurd.”

Read the full article here.