Word: sharone
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...Sharon loved the military. He writes in his autobiography that it was in the camaraderie of the army that he first experienced expressions of familial love that he had missed out on as a child. He grew up in Kfar Malal, a moshav, or collection of farms in which major equipment is jointly owned. His parents were so prickly that the family was ostracized on the moshav. Life was hard. Theirs was a three-room house made of mud and manure walls. Sharon's response was to focus on work. "You could lose yourself in it," he wrote...
...Sharon, known as Arik to everyone, was just 14 when he joined the Haganah, a Jewish militia in British mandatory Palestine. Six years later he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that erupted after Israel declared its independence. As he rose through the ranks, he played a significant role in every one of Israel's wars. In 1967 he commanded one of three divisions that wrested the Sinai peninsula from Egypt. In 1973 he led a counterattack in Sinai that broke through Egyptian lines and ended up just 60 miles outside Cairo...
...Where Sharon fought, there was usually controversy. As head of Unit 101, Israel's first commando team, he was assigned in 1953 to avenge the murder of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers by Palestinian infiltrators from the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon's forces destroyed a few dozen buildings in Qibya, killing 69 villagers and earning Israel a censure at the U.N. Charged with cleaning Palestinian fighters out of the now Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip after the '67 war, he did so with ruthless efficiency. It was Sharon who pushed Israeli Prime Minister Begin to bomb Iraq...
Israel's most divisive war is often laid at Sharon's feet: the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which he planned as Minister of Defense. One objective, running the P.L.O. out of Lebanon, was largely achieved, but the scheme to install in power the leader of the Lebanese Phalangist militia, a Christian group friendly to Israel, was a debacle. After Phalangist forces massacred as many as 800 men, women and children at the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, an Israeli inquiry concluded that Sharon bore "indirect" responsibility, forcing him to resign as Defense Minister. Sharon sued TIME...
...Sharon's lifelong militarism is often mistaken for lifelong rightism. In fact, he spent his military career in the bosom of Mapai, the precursor to the Labor Party, as a favorite of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. Sharon remained close to those in Labor, especially his friend Shimon Peres. Sharon served as a special adviser to Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1970s...