The prime minister had long indulged his gargantuan appetite for rich food and cigars, despite doctors' repeated warnings that he needed to lose weight and take exercise. The prime minister was kept in hospital for 48 hours. Seventeen days later Sharon had another, much bigger, stroke at his Negev ranch. Despite paramedics urging his immediate transfer to the nearest major hospital, one of Sharon's personal doctors insisted the prime minister should be kept at home until the physician could personally examine him.
However, following a further collapse while waiting for the doctor's arrival, an ambulance was called. Instead of being taken to the nearest hospital, the doctor directed the ambulance staff to drive to the Hadassah hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem, a journey of around an hour. Sharon underwent several long operations but never recovered consciousness. Four months after the stroke he was transferred to a long-term medical facility near Tel Aviv, where he remained — apart from one brief home visit in to assess whether he could be moved to his Negev ranch — until his death on Saturday.
There was a glimmer of hope last January when doctors said the former prime minister had exhibited "robust activity" in his brain during tests. Scans showed Sharon responding to pictures of his family and recordings of his son's voice. However, medical experts said the chances of him regaining consciousness were almost zero.
Sharon — known as "Arik" to his friends, "the Bulldozer" to his critics — was a giant figure, both literally and metaphorically, in Israel. He was accused of war crimes after between and 2, Palestinians were butchered at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in in Lebanon by Phalangist Christians while Israeli forces stood by.
Sharon was defence minister at the time. But his reputation as a belligerent and uncompromising rightwinger was challenged in the period immediately preceding his stroke by his astonishing decision to withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, and his determination to carry out the evacuation in the face of virulent opposition and accusations of betrayal.
Analysts were divided over whether the man who had been a driving force of the settlement enterprise then intended to initiate a much more complex withdrawal of settlers from the West Bank, or whether he had "sacrificed" Gaza in order to maintain Israel's hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The disengagement was only one stage of a major plan that began with the construction of the [West Bank] separation barrier. The barrier was forced on him. But the moment he began, he drew our eastern border, as he saw fit. I welcome the fact that a leader arose who decided that borders must be drawn for the State of Israel. Every attempt to repeat the facts and to prove that this was not the case, encountered opposition. The State of Israel tries to ignore this question.
The two right-wing leaders whom I dealt with — [the late Prime Minister Menachem] Begin in my previous series, and now Sharon — tried to offer solutions to this question. The series only includes a short, truncated reference to the investigations against Sharon and his sons Gilad and Omri.
Zini gets slightly annoyed when asked why the reference to the investigations is so brief. Where are they? I wanted to talk about a leader who started to draw the borders of the state, and was suddenly taken from us. The investigations are only foolish background noise. The series features interviews with right-wingers who suggest several other reasons to explain why Sharon suddenly changed course. And then, because he was a man of action, he would go for the solution he deemed appropriate.
Even if it was necessary to exercise force, even if it was necessary to kill along the way. In other words, you claim that Sharon was actually very consistent: He was guided by condescension and disgust when it came to the Arabs — he saw them as an enemy about which there was nothing to be done.
In his opinion, all they ever wanted was to cause harm and destruction, never to build for themselves. In effect, Ariel Sharon was a Ben-Gurionist, a pragmatist. Zini says he drew inspiration from U. I also built a set, but had to make do with three cameras.
The choice of backdrop relates to a story Sharon once told the late journalist Adam Baruch. In a passage that also appears in the series, he tells about the hard agricultural work in his youth alongside his father, about the heat and fatigue in the field, and about the tiny flies that got into his nose, mouth and eyes. When they took a break, his father used to spread out his hand toward the field and say to him: Look how much we accomplished.
Sharon actually spent most of his term at war, fighting the Palestinian uprising. The contrast between pastoral nature and the reality is what I was looking for. Without women. With the exception of Tzipi Livni , who makes a brief appearance, not a single woman is interviewed in the series. Zini claims the reason for this is that during the periods relevant to the discussion of Sharon — the early s and the period around the first Lebanon war — there were no women at the relevant intersections of Israeli politics.
His series focuses on the political aspect, in which those playing the main roles are all overly familiar. He left rescuing the economy to [Benjamin] Netanyahu, who was finance minister, and gave him room to maneuver. His plan was to focus more on domestic issues, after completing the matter of the borders. So what really was his motivation?
What did you understand about him? He arrives at a problematic situation, it has to be solved. As an ultra-orthodox Jew he says that he believes that what has happened to her must have occurred for a good reason, "But even now I sit next to her and cry," he says.
During this time Eli and his family have visited the ward regularly, updating her about their lives and bringing news from the outside world. Despite any change in her condition, his daughter has progressed, growing from a young child into a teenager. In four years' time she'll be a young woman and moved to the adult ward. The doctors seem to encourage a sense of hope. One tells me, "Hope for a miracle is a fundamental human trait". I'm looking around the ward and another doctor comes up to tell me that a mother has heard that we're here and has requested that I come and speak to her adult son.
She thinks that having the BBC here might be enough to wake him up. She looked expectant. I knew I was going to disappoint her. She was from Georgia and spoke no Hebrew, but through a three-way translation she tells me, "I've been here all day and all night for eleven years. Her son looks as though he was asleep and there seems to be flickering behind his eyelids, but he too is unconscious after a cardiac arrest.
Beside the bed an old folded mattress leans against the wall, alongside several giant checked shopping bags, a small fridge and a coffee machine. Although she doesn't speak the same language as any of her the staff, his mother had made the ward her home.
She now lives at his bedside and her daughter who works in a shop nearby often visits too. His mother is determined not to leave his bedside in case he wakes up. My visit didn't have that effect. Like Hava she continues to sit at her loved one's bedside. Hava says the whole experience has changed her. She has learnt to live day by day and has some advice for me, "You can't live your life in the future.
Do what you have to do now and not later.
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