Sharon's Early Years

Ariel Sharon was born Ariel Scheinerman in 1928 in Kfar Malul, a tiny farming community (a moshav) about fifteen miles from Tel Aviv. He was said to have had a combative childhood, due to constant disputes between his aggressive father and his neighbors. Embracing military service at an early age, Sharon joined a youth brigade and, soon after, the Hagana (the precursor to the Israeli army) while he was still in high school. A platoon commander in the 1948 war, Sharon was wounded but continued his military career, rising to become an intelligence officer, before leaving in 1951 to pursue a degree in Middle East history at the Hebrew University.

That Sharon’s first twenty years culminated in the Israeli War of Independence and the Palestinian Naqba (catastrophe) is telling. By the time he was born, violent conflict between Zionist settlers and Palestinian Arabs was entrenched. Kfar Malul was frequently under siege and the small community was destroyed or severely damaged in the year before Sharon’s birth, again the year after his birth and yet again during the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine. In some areas in Palestine, Jews and Arabs were struggling to find ways to live and work together, in other areas each side saw the other as nothing more than hateful and hated enemies. As Baruch Kimmerling put it in his book Politicide, “…it was commonly agreed that the Arabs did not accept the idea of Palestine as a ‘Jewish national home’…and that the whole Jewish existence in the country was based on British bayonets. Added to these tensions were the xenophobic tendencies of both communities, which served to exacerbate the mutual enmity, fear and hate between Arabs and Jews.” Kimmerling speculates that this was a major factor shaping Sharon’s lifelong dedication to fighting Arabs. One might go further and speculate that this was also a major influence on Sharon’s basic belief that a true peace, one arrived at through cooperation and recognition of the others’ rights, was not possible.