After Sharon got his degree he was asked to return to the military to command the first Israeli special forces unit, called Unit 101. This unit was specifically put together to punish neighboring countries for Palestinian infiltrations into Israeli territory. In the wake of the 1948 war, Palestinian refugees flooded into the neighboring Arab countries. Some would sneak back over the Armistice Lines into Israel. Theft, vandalism, assault and sometimes killings were the result. But for many of these “infiltrators,” they were merely trying to get back to land they had fled during the war. Israel decided that the most effective response would be to attack the host countries. So they put Sharon in command of Unit 101, which would carry out such missions.

In the same tradition as held in the 1948 war, the field commander had a great deal of latitude in how he went about his missions. Sharon took advantage of this and developed a well-earned reputation for using excessive force and disregarding the welfare of civilians. Baruch Kimmerling relates the following story, for which he credits Sharon’s biographer, Uzi Benziman. He says that Sharon proposed a “…limited raid against the al-Burg refugee camp…When he described the details of the operation to his soldiers, one of them…observed that the obvious objective of the raid was to kill as many civilians as possible.” In the end, the raid killed 15 civilians, most of them women and children.

Sharon then found international notoriety for his raid on Qibya, in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank in 1953. A Palestinian from Qibya had apparently infiltrated Israel and murdered a woman and her two young children. So, in what was neither the first nor the last example of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employing the illegal practice of collective punishment, Unit 101 entered Qibya. A total of 45 homes were blown up, with their inhabitants still inside. Sharon claimed during the investigation that he had ordered the homes evacuated first, but his soldiers all denied that he had issued such an order. 67 civilians, again including women and children, were killed. The international community was outraged, but this was, apparently, the moment when Sharon first found favor in the eyes of David Ben-Gurion.

Two years later, Sharon performed a much more daring raid which, while perhaps a bit less notorious than Qibya, had much more profound consequences. Sharon set up an ambush at an Egyptian military base in the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt at that time). Forty Egyptian soldiers were killed, many more wounded, and eight Israeli paratroopers were killed as well. But that was only the beginning. The attack caused Egyptian President Gamal Abd el-Nasser to abandon his attempts to form an independent third bloc of countries outside of the Cold War, as well as his fledgling and halting efforts at improving relations with the United States and enter into a military arrangement with the Soviet Union through Czechoslovakia. This led to the 1956 Suez War and ensured that the Israel-Arab conflict would be further complicated for years by the Cold War.

A destroyed home in Qibya

These sorts of daring, reckless actions typified Sharon in the 1950s and 60s. They won him great fame and a reputation for fearless action, though feelings were more mixed about him among both his military and political superiors. During the Suez War, he disobeyed orders and led his paratrooper battalion into a disastrous trap. This is behavior that would surface repeatedly for Sharon. As a field commander, he was able to take initiative, but he pushed this farther than it was supposed to go, sometimes successfully, sometimes disastrously. His constant provocations were major factors that led Israel into the 1956 and 1967 wars. Yet Israel continued to turn to him.

In the 1973 war, Sharon led his unit across the Suez Canal, getting many of them killed unnecessarily. But the battle, in which Sharon was lightly wounded, was viewed as a major component of the Israeli victory in that war. In reality, the threat of the ongoing battle had actually led the Soviet Union to threaten the United States that they would enter the war if the US would not pressure Israel into a cease-fire. Again, Sharon’s actions were reckless, but brought him much acclaim.

It is perhaps appropriate to close this brief review of Sharon’s military career with an episode not directly related to his military service. Sharon had an affection for firearms, not uncommon in so militarized a society as Israel. In October, 1967, Sharon’s son Gur and a friend were playing with an antique rifle of Sharon’s. The gun went off and Gur Sharon was killed.