Ariel Sharon

In 1947, Ariel Sharon met sixteen-year-old Margalit Zimmerman. The two got married in 1953 and had a son named Gur. She worked as a supervisory psychiatric nurse.

In May 1962, Margalit died when her car was hit by a truck on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Five years later, in October 1967, Gur was accidentally shot by his friend while they were playing with a rifle in Sharon’s family home.

In 1963, a year after Margalit’s death, he married her younger sister Lily, with whom he had two sons Omri and Gilad. Lily died of lung cancer on 25 March 2000.

Ariel Sharon was born as Ariel Scheinerman on February 26, 1928 at Kfar Malal, a Jewish Settlement located within the then British Mandate of Palestine, now part of Israel. His father, Shmuel Scheinerman, was originally from Brest-Litovsk while his mother, Dvora, was from Mogilev, both located in present day Belarus.

His parents met while they were studying at the university in Tiflis, then a part of Russia. To escape the growing persecution of Jews by the Communist regime, they emigrated to Kfar Malal with the Third Aliyah, as the third wave of Zionist immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine is called.

Ariel was the younger of his parents’ two children, having an elder sister called Yehudit or Dita. As a child, he was proficient in both Hebrew and Russian.

In around 1933, when Ariel was five years old, the family was ostracized for taking independent stand in many important issues. Among other measures, they were expelled from the local synagogue, which helped him to grow up in a comparative secular environment.

Even as a young boy he became aware of the fact that they were not really safe in the politically turbulent environment, and had to be prepared to defend themselves. In 1938, as he turned ten, Ariel joined HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed, a Labor Zionist movement for the young.

From the autumn of 1947, his unit, consisting of thirty men, started making hit-and-run raids on Arab forces around Kfar Malal. They also hit Arab villages and bases, destroying roads and ambushing traffic. Very soon, they were able to build up the strength required for more such operations.

Thereafter, the ambushes and raids closely followed one another and for his roles in these raids, Ariel was made a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade sometime in 1948. By now he had become an aggressive soldier.

Later in the same year, his platoon took part in the First Battle of Latrun. During the course of the war he was shot in the groin, stomach, and foot. Although some sources claim that he was taken a prisoner and traded, he had never admitted that.

Nonetheless, he quickly recovered from his wounds and returned to take charge of his platoon. Sometime during the end of the year 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the state of Israel, Hebraized his name into Sharon. From that point, he began to be known as Ariel Sharon.

In September 1949, Sharon was promoted to the post of company commander of the Golani Brigade's reconnaissance unit. A few months later in early 1950, he became an intelligence officer for Central Command. One of his final operations during this period was the Operation Bin Nun Alef into Jordan.

In 1952, he took leave of absence to study history and Middle Eastern culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the following year, he was recalled to establish a special task force capable of responding to the Palestinian fedayeen attacks. Some time now, he was also promoted to the post of Major.

In August 1953, the Commando Unit 101 was created with Major Sharon as its Commander. They undertook several raids in the West Bank, then held by Jordan. Such raids for the first time warned their enemies that Israel is capable of hitting back.

In October 1953, his troops attacked Qibya, a village located in the West Bank and used as a base by the Palestinian fedayeens. This was in retaliation of the Yehud attack, which killed an Israeli woman and her two children while they were sleeping in their home on October 12, 1953.

In response, Sharon’s troops dynamited forty-five civilian houses, a school and a mosque in Qibya. At least 65 Palestinian civilians, half of them women and children, were also killed. The incident, known as Qibya Massacre, drew international condemnation and Israel government denied that Israel army was involved in the incident.