I am interviewing Freddy Eytan, polyglot Israeli journalist, diplomat, professor, former IDF spokesman and, presently, European Affairs director of the Jerusalem Centre of Public Affairs. Eytan is the author of the just-released biography, Sharon: A Life in Times of Turmoil. He is winding up the first, Montreal leg of a seven-city book tour. Tomorrow Toronto, then five American cities.
It’s a cynical observation, but Eytan has been spectacularly lucky in the timing of this, his 11th book’s appearance. Preparation for his unauthorized biography was in the works for years. Sheer coincidence coupled Sharon’s crippling second stroke with the book’s French publication in Paris last March, and the war against Hezbollah with the appearance of the English edition now.
Not a day of that war passed without Israelis wondering: What would Ariel Sharon have done? Eytan, who considers himself politically non-partisan (he has also written a biography of Shimon Peres) was not a personal friend of Sharon’s, but after 40 years of close observation understands how his mind worked. As then-Defence Minister, Sharon had been badly burned by his own incursion into Lebanon in 1982, an operation a full two years in the planning.
According to Eytan, Sharon would never have launched a spontaneous full-scale war with exposure on two other flanks — Gaza and the West Bank.
“It’s hard to speak of him in the past tense,” Eytan tells me. Sharon is there but not there. Israelis saw — see — Sharon as a reassuring and protective grandfather figure. That he has essentially vanished but not died imposes a subconscious hesitation on Israelis in accepting any replacement. Olmert was meant to be Sharon’s successor, but with Sharon still corporeally present he remains, psychologically, only a deputy who has notably failed to rise to the present crisis.
Eytan’s personal acquaintance with Sharon humanizes and nuances the somewhat brutal image Sharon projected on the world stage, just as the book takes the reader beyond two-dimensional headlines and into the tangled three-dimensional realities of a normal country with abnormal problems. The public warrior Sharon is revealed as privately polite and kindly, a man of civilized cultural interests, who loved reading and classical music, and the simple rustic pleasures of animal husbandry on his Negev ranch. He suffered humbling losses in his personal life: his beloved first wife died instantly in a car accident, and the only child of that marriage, his eleven-year old son, killed himself playing with Sharon’s loaded gun.
Eytan is preoccupied with the leadership crisis in Israel, but in wider-ranging conversation continually returns to the paucity of leadership on a global scale. He notes there has been no shortage of powerful leadership for evil causes in the past century — Hitler, Stalin, the ayatollah Khomeini to name a few — but a curious dearth of Churchills for good causes.
Sharon, he claims, for all his errors and personal shortcomings, had the necessary vision of a true leader. The proof lay in his independence of thought, his unfailing courage, the originality of his response to particular threats, his determination to soldier on in times of crisis and, despite the oppressive solitude imposed on him by widespread resistance from political rivals, his ability to entrench his sense of mission in the population.
In fact, Eytan believes Sharon has been Israel’s only prime minister to meet the standard of statesmanship set by the legendary Ben Gurion. Eytan cites Sharon’s dedication to the nation’s long-term interests over the defensive obsession with personal power that defines most politicians. Golda Meir? Yitzhak Rabin? They served Israel well in their own ways, Eytan affirms, but Sharon’s legacy will surpass theirs.
Eytan sums Sharon up as a man of intellectual honesty (a claim he supports with extensive documentation in the book). “You could buy a used car from him without a test drive”, he adds impulsively.
After such a long discussion about Israel’s gloomy prospects with no Sharon at the helm, and happy to have a reason, however trivial, we both laugh longer and harder than the little joke warrants. Laughter, we both know, represents Ha Tikvah — the hope — that all who support Israel are obliged to embrace, even — especially — when there seems to be nothing to be gained by it.
- Why Quebec is banning the burka - Wednesday May 19, 2010 at 7:15 pm
- I distrust Obama—but that doesn’t make me paranoid - Wednesday May 12, 2010 at 8:33 am
- The cult of multisexualism: It’s not all good - Wednesday April 28, 2010 at 7:07 am
