Sh. was born in Kfar Malal, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, to Litvish Jews Shmuel Sheinerman, of Brest-Litovsk and Dvora (formerly Vera), of Mogilev. His father was studying agronomy at the university of Tbilisi, Georgia, and his mother had just started her fourth year of medical studies when the couple married. They immigrated in 1922 to the British Mandate Palestine from Russia, fleeing the Red Army and settled in a socialist, secular community. At age 10, Sh. entered the Zionist youth movement Hassadeh. In 1942 at the age of 14, Sh. joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later the Haganah, the Jewish underground paramilitary force.  

At the creation of Israel in 1948, Sh. became a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade. In 1949, he was promoted to company commander, and in 1950 to intelligence officer for Central Command. He then took leave to begin studies in history and Middle Eastern culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A year and a half later, he returned to active service in the rank of major and as the leader of Israel's first special forces unit. The unit was known for targeting civilians, notably in the Qibya massacre in the fall of 1953, in which 69 Palestinian civilians were killed in their West Bank village. Ben-Gurion said to Sh.: "Let me first tell you one thing: it doesn't matter what the world says about Israel, it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here". From 1958 to 1962, Sh. served as commander of an infantry brigade and studied law at Tel Aviv University. In the 1956 Suez War, Sh. commanded a Paratroopers Brigade. Thereafter he occupied the position of an infantry brigade commander and received a law degree from Tel Aviv University. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Sh. commanded an armored division on the Sinai front. At the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Sh.'s forces moved to the Suez Canal and was widely viewed as a war hero. 

Sh. was relieved of duty in 1974 and was instrumental in establishing the Likud party. From June 1975 to March 1976, Sh. was a special aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 1977 he became Minister of Agriculture. He used his position to encourage the establishment of a network of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and said: "Everything we take now will stay ours". In 1981, Prime Minister Begin appointed Sh. Minister of Defense. During the 1982 Lebanon War, while Sh. was Defence Minister, the Sabra and Shatila massacre took place, in which between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps were killed. Because of his responsibility, Sh. was called "the Butcher of Beirut". In 2001, relatives of the victims of the Sabra massacre began proceedings in Belgium to have Sharon indicted on war crimes charges. The Belgian law was subsequently changed to disallow such lawsuits.  

Sh. remained in successive governments as a Minister and Chairman of the committee overseeing Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union. Upon the election of the Barak Labor government in 1999, Sh. became leader of the Likud party. In 2000, Sh. and an escort of over 1,000 Israeli police officers visited the Temple Mount complex, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. He declared that the complex would remain under perpetual Israeli control. After the collapse of Barak's government, Sh. was elected Prime Minister in February 2001. He embarked on a course of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while maintaining control of its coastline and airspace. The Gaza withdrawal would allow Israel to delay negotiations, and a Palestinian state. 
Israeli soldiers left Gaza in September 2005 and closed the border fence.  

IN November 2005, Sharon resigned as head of Likud, and dissolved parliament to form a new center-left party. In January 2006, Sh. suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and entered into a coma. Ehud Olmert replaced him as party head and became 
Prime Minister in March 2006. Sh. is since then in a persistent vegetative state. Sh. and his wife Lily who died in 2000 had two sons. 

Literatur über / Writings concerning Sh.: 

Letzte Änderung / Last update: 07.01.2009 

 Zum Register / Back to Registry