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Article: Lights and shades; Ariel Sharon.(Ariel Sharon: A Life)(Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait)(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 16, 2006
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The personification of Zionism, or a stain on its character?
"THE question then must be asked," reflected a recent unfriendly psycho-history of Zionism: "Is Sharon an aberration, or does he represent Israel's dark night of the soul? Is he a travesty, or rather does he, by giving flesh to an abiding logic of Zionist thought, bring to fruition thenation's most powerful, unanswerablevision of itself?"
Ariel Sharon has been in a coma foralmost exactly a year, after a stroke cut him down at a moment of extraordinary popularity. As prime minister he had just forced all of Israel's settlers to evacuate their villages in the Gaza Strip. He had reacted to a ...