12^th January 2013
Statement by ECAJ President, Robert Goot AM SC on the passing of Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon was, like many great leaders, a complex human being with a public life full of paradoxes.
He was a brilliant and creative military commander who was instru­ment­al in Israel’s military victories over Egypt in 1967 and 1973, and an early and eager proponent of the Israeli settler movement.
Yet he was prepared to go further than any other Israeli Prime Minister, in taking risks to achieve peace between Israel and its Arab neigh­bours. He endorsed Israel’s military with­draw­al from and the dis­mant­ling of set­tle­ments in, Sinai, in order to achieve Israel’s ground-breaking peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. As Prime Minister in 2005, he cour­ageously and con­tro­ver­sially ordered Israel’s uni­lat­er­al pull-out from Gaza and the evac­u­ation of the Gaza set­tle­ments.
Arab officials routinely portrayed Sharon as a warmonger, but this was largely for public con­sump­tion. Privately, there was no Israeli leader they feared and respected more than Sharon. They under­stood that Sharon was perhaps the only leader in the Middle East who could change reality and not merely adapt to it.
The Kahan Inquiry into Israel’s military inter­ven­tion in Lebanon in 1982 held Sharon ‘indir­ectly respons­ible’ for the killing of Palestini­an residents in Sabra and Shatila by Christian militia men, but any final judgement must await the release of crucial documents which remain clas­si­fied.
Sharon was also wrongly accused of starting the second Intifada in September 2000 merely because he visited the Temple Mount, a site sacred to Jews as well as Muslims. In truth however, multiple Palestini­an sources have since confirmed that PLO leader Yasser Arafat, in clear violation of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, had issued orders two months before Sharon’s visit, for a return to violence and the com­mence­ment of another intifada.
History’s verdict will undoubtedly be much fairer and more favour­able to Sharon after he is gone, than were his critics while he was alive.