Off to the great slaughterhouse in the sky

As Michael Schumacher improves while remaining in a coma, Ariel Sharon slipped away in his.  Undoubtedly, the former Israeli Prime Minister was a war criminal (the USA and Britain have their own unpunished miscreants too), killing women and children in reprisal attacks during the 1948 war of independence - Sharon did not know the destroyed houses contained such innocents because he did not care to check or even care - and responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, again of women and children (and elderly men).  He also sparked the second Palestinian Intifada by provocatively going to the Dome of the Rock in East Jerusalem as he asserted his hawkish credentials while bidding for leadership of the Israeli right. This said, his stroke that plunged him into a coma was a tragedy for the region.  He was ten times the man Binyamin Netanyahu is and a hundred times the man Sharon's immediate successor, Ehud Olmert, is.  He and he alone possessed the clout and the respect to overawe the military and the settlers to bring a permanent peace.  His incapacitation goes down as a pivotal 'what if' moment, alongside the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the early death of Kaiser Frederick III in 1888 and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
A journalist for Ha'aretz newspaper said Sharon was not a man of peace and his conversion to a peace process was no 'Nixon goes to China' moment.  He utterly misreads his metaphor.  Nixon recalled that having 'lost' China, coupled with the pressure he exerted, the Democrats could never come to terms with Red China, but as the arch anti-communist, he, Nixon, could.  It was realpolitik of the highest order, as Nixon sought a counter for the Soviet Union in his triangulation policy.  Similarly, as proved by his knowing visit to the Dome of the Rock that would catapult him to be prime minister, Sharon was the complete Machiavellian.  He would not negotiate peace, he would impose it, on Israel's terms, as a permanent peace settlement was and remains the only security for Israel's long-term future.  Part of his strategy was a wall to prevent bombings in Israel - though it cuts into Palestinian land, it has barring one incident worked.  As a war veteran, the army could not undermine him or slight him as it did with Olmert; as the implacable foe of the Arab world, the settlers would have to accept his actions were in the best interests of the State of Israel.  It was a 'Nixon goes to China' policy.
Not that the settlers accepted it with good grace, just as they kicked up a dust when evacuated from the Sinai peninsula.  Removing the ridiculous single settlement of 2,000 Jews from the midst of half a million Palestinians was only logical.  The trouble is, those who have a settler mindset are already extremists who will never be mollified.  Some said that Sharon's devastating stroke and subsequent limbo life was divine punishment for his forcible removal of them from Gaza.  This is a monstrous and fatuous viewpoint and demonstrates that pandering to settlers, let alone expanding their number, is a failure of political nerve and grand strategy.
David Cameron said, diplomatically, that Sharon was one of the most significant figures in Israeli history.  That he was and sadly he didn't get the chance to redeem himself for his past crimes - for that we should not mourn his passing now but when he effectively died back in 2006.