Thousands of Israelis bade farewell yesterday to former prime minister Ariel Sharon, the maverick warrior-statesman who helped reshape the Middle East, as his body lay in state outside Parliament in Jerusalem.
Sharon died at the age of 85 on Saturday after eight years in a coma caused by a stroke he suffered at the pinnacle of his political power. He will be buried today in a military funeral on his farm in southern Israel.
“They say old soldiers do not die, they fade away. Arik Sharon faded away eight years ago, and now we truly say goodbye to him,” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, using Sharon’s nickname, wrote in a tribute yesterday.
Sharon was one of Israel’s finest military strategists and most powerful and decisive political figures. He spearheaded military campaigns in several wars with the Arab world, expanded Jewish settlement-building on land the Palestinians want for a state, and made the shock decision to withdraw from one of those territories, the Gaza Strip.
Prime minister from 2001 to 2006, Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke shortly after he quit the right-wing Likud party and founded a centrist faction to advance peace with the Palestinians, whose 2000-2005 “Intifada” uprising he had battled with air strikes and fierce military offensives.
A maverick warrior-statesman who helped reshape the Middle East
In Parliament’s main plaza, Israelis yesterday filed past Sharon’s coffin, which was draped in the blue-and-white national flag.
The mood was sombre but not deeply mournful, eight years after Sharon fell from public view. A few in the crowd wept, but many others paused to snap photographs of the coffin with their cellphones.
“Whatever he decided to do, he followed it through to the end – and that was his greatness,” said Shlomo Tal, 74, from Jerusalem, who came to Parliament to pay his respects.
A memorial service is being held in Parliament today be-fore an afternoon funeral at the Sharon family’s Sycamore Farm. Israeli generals will serve as pallbearers.
US Vice President Joe Biden is today expected to deliver a eulogy for Sharon at the service in Jerusalem.
Among other foreign dignitaries expected to attend the ceremony were Mideast peace mediator and former British prime minister Tony Blair, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and delegates from Russia, Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, Australia, Singapore, Belgium and the Czech Republic.
Many Israelis will remember Sharon as a brilliant but unpredictable military leader who fought in the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and, rising to general, went on to earn a reputation for trigger-happy disobedience on some occasions.
However, he was also hailed in Israel for the crucial counter-attack across the Suez Canal that helped to turn the tide of the 1973 Middle East war with Egypt and Syria.