I doubt I’m alone among my Hebrew-school generation in conflating Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Punjab, Little Orphan Annie’s protector.
Sharon, who has been in a coma since suffering a stroke in January, wasn’t yet on my radar when I needed a larger-than-life champion 60 years ago.
It was still an age of sandlot anti-Semitism, a sport that brought me pain and confusion. So I chose the turbaned, 8-foot-tall faithful servant of the popular comic strip as my fantasy bodyguard.
My route to Hebrew school passed close to a Catholic school. Boys would sally forth to take vengeance for what they claimed my ancestors did to their faith’s founder. Only later did I get the irony of the church’s name: Our Lady of Mercy. Disheveled by a pummeling at their hands, afterward I’d be berated by our teacher for picking a fight, though it was hardly my choice. My mother preached that Jews did not return violence with violence.
The heck with such pacifism, I thought. Along with street-corner buddies, I identified with Jewish gangsters such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, a bagman for Al Capone. I revered heavyweight champion Max Baer for wearing the Star of David on his boxing trunks.
Although I idolized these rough-and-tumble heroes, they were from the past. Then came the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which made Sharon a military hero. His political philosophy had a ring-wise simplicity: Take your best shot at my chin, and I’ll match you jab for jab. His swagger said he wasn’t above getting in a kidney punch. In short, he was anything but Mr. Nice Guy.
My guess is that a similar appeal played a role in Hamas’ victory in the recent Palestinian elections. They were billed as an exercise in U.S.-style democracy with, outsiders assumed, a scripted outcome. The winner was supposed to be Fatah, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, positioned himself as a moderate. Hamas’ platform said: Forget about peace negotiations, Israel has no right to exist. Given a choice, Palestinian voters rejected the Mr. Nice Guy approach.
It would be fascinating to have Sharon’s reaction to how Israeli and Palestinian politics have come to flow in parallel streams. Yet we’ll probably never know. Sharon’s physical condition is seemingly irreversible; his political career is over.
At the top of his game, he took the burden of Israel as Mr. Nice Guy off my back. By his very bluntness he took a veil off the world’s eyes. He was the Jew as both superman and everyman: tough as nails but also announcing himself as no more moral than anyone else. He was the combination Punjab and Max Baer I’d been looking for since Hebrew school.
Don’t get me wrong, I have an emotional attachment to Israel formed by a childhood of singing HaTikvah (“The Hope”), a national anthem for which there was then no nation. My bar mitzvah was in 1947, a year before Israel was born.
Once it was founded, other Jews and I found ourselves having to answer for Israeli policies in a way other Americans didn’t have to vouch for their ancestral homelands. You wouldn’t dream of holding an Irish-American responsible for IRA bombings. Yet otherwise thoughtful people would ask: “How can you justify taking away Palestinian land for Israeli settlements on the West Bank?”
My questioners and I would be standing on ground seized from the Potawatomi and other Indian tribes. Yet it never dawned on them that they were reproaching Israel for something that is also the story of American history.
Partially, it was the Israelis who put me on the spot. They often chose leaders who followed my mother’s prescription of how Jews were supposed to behave. The early Israeli ambassador to the United Nations was Abba Eban, who spoke in the cultured tones of an Oxford don. Shimon Peres, the dovish former Labor Party leader, was for building a world where distinctions of rich and poor would be unknown.
With front men like those, you’re a sitting duck for being held to a higher–albeit double–standard.
Sharon put an end to that vulnerability. A military genius, he was also a pain in the neck, especially to his superiors.
Given orders to scout a crucial route during the 1956 war in Sinai, he not only found it but kept on going without so much as a by-your-leave.
He could pretend naivete at the most ethically inopportune moment, such as when he failed to prevent Israel’s Lebanese allies from massacring Palestinians in Beirut in 1982.
I’d venture to guess that it wasn’t just my shoulders from which he took a weight off. Sharon seemed an embodiment of the golem (Hebrew for “shapeless mass”), a mythological Frankenstein monster-protector celebrated in Jewish legend and lore.
He almost brought the story full around, bringing my vision of Jewishness together with my mother’s. At the end, he had become a man of peace, a sort of tough-guy man of peace. He came to power after years of negotiations based on the principle of trading land for peace were followed by a deadly wave of Palestinian suicide bombings.
Sharon’s solution was to drop the polite, diplomatic talk in favor of action. He built a security fence and evacuated Gaza. The political party Sharon founded is now campaigning on a pledge of completing his vision in the West Bank.
It would have been fascinating to see Sharon go one-on-one in a no-gloves match with a Hamas prime minister similarly unrestricted by polite rhetoric. If anybody could have brought the Israelis to do the unthinkable and deal with a Palestinian party loudly committed to Israel’s destruction, it would have been Sharon.
Now the key ingredient in that scenario, Sharon, is out of the picture, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. History moves in unanticipated directions, especially when it has been given a nudge by the likes of him. Anti-Semitism has largely vanished from my children’s and grandchildren’s America. Who knows: If peace finally comes to the Middle East, Sharon may be recalled as its unlikely architect.
Myself, I’ll remember him every time I walk the streets of my youth and receive nothing but smiles from the children of Our Lady of Mercy parish.
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rgrossman@tribune.com
