JERUSALEM (EJP)—Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was eulogized Monday as a great warrior and bold politician who was also devoted to his family and his farm, during a state memorial service held at the Knesset, the Israeli in Jerusalem attended by several world dignitaries including US Vice President Joe Biden and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Sharon died Saturday at the age of 85, eight years after a stroke left him in a coma from which he never recovered.
Some 1,000 people attended the ceremony, including Knesset members, cabinet ministers, the top leadership of the IDF and other security services, and 21 delegations from overseas.
‘’We are saying goodbye to you today, Arik, you were the shoulder on whom Israel’s security rested. The story of your life is bound to the story of this country. And your life was dedicated to the life of this country,” President Shimon Peres said at the ceremony.
The president described his first meeting with Sharon, whose reputation preceded him as “smart and brave, unconventional and impetuous, with leadership skills and resoluteness. A soldier who does not flee from the enemy, a citizen who does not fear vision.”
Sharon, he said, “was born for great things.” He said Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, loved Sharon “at first sight.”
“Arik was a man of the land,” Peres continued, who defended Israel, sowed and reaped its bounty. “He never stopped looking forward to the day when its children would live in security, when its sons would return to their borders, and peace would visit the promised land.”
“Arik, you were one of a kind,” Peres said. “May you have true rest, you great leader… The ground whence you came will now embrace you with the large, warm arms of our nation’s history, and take you in as a man who contributed an unforgettable, historic chapter to her saga.”
“We will miss you very much, Arik. May your memory be for a blessing.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu said “Arik Sharon had a central role” in the building of the Israeli army’s “heritage of valor.”
Sharon, he said, “laid the foundations of the battle doctrine of the IDF, the doctrine of reprisal and initiative in the war against terrorism.”
He detailed Sharon’s vital battlefield roles, highlighting the 1973 war when Sharon’s skill and bravery, in recognizing the opportunity and seizing it to cross the Suez Canal and encircle the Egyptians turned the tide of the war that had begun so disastrously for Israel.
Discussing Sharon the Prime Minister recalled Sharon’s speech in 2001 warning the US not to sell out Israel to the Arab world in the same way as the international community sold out Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in 1938, and used it to underline what he said is his and Sharon’s shared insistence on Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself.
Netanyahu admitted that he “didn’t always agree” with Sharon, his sometimes bitter rival in Likud, and Arik “didn’t always agree with me.”
But when they served in each other’s governments, he says, “we worked together for Israel’s security and economy.”
‘’Sharon didn’t think of peace as a dreamer, but did dream of peace,” said Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister and current Mideast Quartet envoy, praising Sharon’s “true love for the land of Israel – not only a country and a people but an idea.”
He rejected the idea that he changed from man of war to a man of peace. ‘’He never changed. His strategic objective never wavered. The state had to be protected for future generations. When that meant fighting, he fought. When that meant making peace, he sought peace with the same iron determination.”
He praised Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, “a move nobody thought he would make.”
Blair also recalled how Sharon was uncomfortable in formal meetings. So he invited him to his home, “where I saw a different Arik: warm, funny and compassionate.”
In a deeply personal eulogy that evoked Sharon’s political and personal courage, US Vice President Joe Biden said that Sharon’s passing was felt “like a death in the family.”
He described the former Prime Minister as “a complex man who lived in complex times in a complex neighborhood.”
He added, “Prime Minister Sharon engendered strong opinions. But like all historic leaders, he had a north star that guided him,” which he said was “the survival of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
“As Prime Minister he surprised many,” Biden says, praising Sharon for the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and laments “how things would have been different” had Sharon not fallen ill in January 2006. “He left us too soon,” he says.
Biden acknowledged disagreements between Sharon and the US when it came to the Palestinian issue, but said the US ‘’will always support Israel’s security.’’
“We’ve never failed to support Israel — and nobody in the world doubts America’s support for Israel’s security,” he stressed.
“May the bond between Israel and the United States never be broken,” Biden concluded.
Along with Biden, dignitaries from 17 countries attended the state funeral, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Czech Prime Minister Ji?í Rusnok.
The Foreign Ministers of Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic, the Defense Ministers of Greece and Cyprus, the chairman of the Russian Duma, and Ministers and Deputy Ministers from Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Britain, Holland, Singapore, the Philippines, France, Canada, and Romania were also present.
Notably, no official representatives from Africa, South America or Scandinavia were among the dignitaries to take part in the farewell to the Israel’s 11th Prime Minister who was admired at home, but deeply criticized abroad. Unsurprisingly, no representatives of Arab states were present.
IDF Chief Rabbi Rafi Peretz, who was forcibly evacuated from the settlement of Atzmona in Gaza during the August 2005 disengagement led by the former Prime Minister, delivered the psalm in Sharon’s memory at the commemoration ceremony.
Israel’s star singer Sarit Hadad performed Naomi Shemer’s ballad “We are both from the same village.”
After the Knesset memorial ceremony Sharon’s casket was taken to a ceremony at the Latrun Junction, in the hills west of Jerusalem, where Sharon fought and was almost killed in 1948 and where the casket was saluted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) General Staff in a brief ceremony.
Sharon’s funeral and commemoration ceremonies saw the closure of several roads throughout Monday morning and afternoon.
From Latrun Sharon’s coffin will be transported in a military command car convoy to his burial site – Anemone Hill – beside his wife Lily, at the family’s Sycamore Farm in the northern Negev desert.
Security measures have been heightened after Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip fired two Kassam rockets on southern Israel. One of the rockets landed in an open area, causing no injuries or damage and the other failed to cross the border into Israel.
Channel 2 television said the army had changed the deployment of the Iron Dome aerial defense system batteries in the area to defend against possible rocket attacks from Gaza, which is ruled by the Islamic Hamas.
Rockets had fallen close to the Sharon family ranch, where the former prime minister is set to be buried, in the past.