Henry Kissinger on Ariel Sharon

[yubochur]

I attended a lecture tonight in which the speaker (Michael Oren, author of the NYTimes bestseller _Six Days of War_) quoted something I found interesting and provoking. He said he was having lunch with Henry Kissinger a short while ago and the legendary statesman said, "Ariel Sharon may be one of the Great Men of history, but I can't stand the bastard."
What do you think?

[tomwbarker]

ehhh . . . not sure that he is a "great man" or a "bastard" as both extremes seem hard to qualify . . . I guess only history will tell!

[yubochur]

Well, I figured that the fact that it came from he lips of Henry Kissinger forces you to consider it.
And why should we let "history tell"? Now is when we can form opinions; we are involved, understand the ramifications, and know the situations intimately. Who isn't aware of the importance of the Mideast today?
I can already hear your response: Yes, but we have to wait to see the long-term results, to see what will develop, and to see what attitudes will be formed by future generations. After all, that is simple historiography!
This is something I'd love to discuss at length, but let me just say that in short, I think it is the job of the present generation to form paradigms strong enough to direct the study and examination of future historians. Down the road, they aren't going to unearth much fact that we don't have (apart from such things as classified documents, but I wouold argue those are less important than the flow of events), so we should take the oppurtunity to form a coherent school while we are closest to the action and understand motivatrion and its link to activity. [but I want to spend time on this in the future, to really think it through, if someone is willing to get into it with me]

Returning to Sharon: Consider these factors:
The last 60 years in the Mideast have been filled with crises, warfare, political manuevering, tragedy, and all the other ingredients that make the region such a ripe study. In almost every affair, Israel has either been a very major actor, or played the part of very interested party.
In every one of those affairs, Sharon has been involved, has effected decisions, and executed policy (sometimes all on his own). The man fought in the wars of 1948 and 49, '56, the Six Day War (leading a division that executed some of the greatest military tactics in history), the Yom Kippur War, masterminded the penetration of Lebanon in the '80's, and so on and so forth.
He was one the greatest supporter of the Settler movement, referred to as its "architect." Yet he was also involved in removing settlments from the Sinai to honor Israel's treaty with Egypt. And without getting into current politics, let me remind you he that this past August, he unilaterally withdrew Israeli settlers from the Gaza strip.
All of these things have drastically reformed Israel's border's and their relations with neighboring states.
At the same time he has become one of Israel's greatest and powerful political leaders, forming and maintaining coalitions in Knesset that displayed stability often unheard of in Parlimentary politics.

Does all this mean Great Man? I think it is very possible, unless you want to minimize the role that the only Democracy in the region, the ally of the US, the force that has forged the modern Middle Eastr for good or for bad. I thiunk that would be intellectually dishonest.

[tomwbarker]

Hey thanks for the great response. While I am indeed going to “open up the can” here, I have to admit that I personally feel that modern description of events are to some degree less history and more journalism. History itself is all about perspective and there are tons of them. There is no absolute truth, for example, of whether Ariel Sharon is a great man or a bastard. As I said before these are both extremes that are more or less opinions and are going to be skewed depending upon your views and insights. If we are to follow the traditions of historians being objective, which is another issue in itself, then we have to remove ourselves from the intimacy of an event or an individual as best as we can. While this is the “ideal,” I believe to some degree most professional historians do try to achieve this, but being totally objective is impossible.

You said: I think it is the job of the present generation to form paradigms strong enough to direct the study and examination of future historians. Down the road, they aren't going to unearth much fact that we don't have (apart from such things as classified documents, but I wouold argue those are less important than the flow of events), so we should take the oppurtunity to form a coherent school while we are closest to the action and understand motivatrion and its link to activity.

YES AND NO

Most methods used by historians today have actually not been developed by them, but are in due part rather a collaboration of an interdisciplinary approach used by other acedemics. The only one that I can think of off the top of my head, though in my opinion invalid, is Max Weber’s protestant work ethic. The use of new methods, vantage points and “unearthing” new facts is continually happening. Within the last 100 years history has changed dynamically as histories that are largely Eurocentric are consider invalid, though they still haunt us. Even in my own field of Early Modern Japan and East Asia has change or new views have been brought to light using new information or deriving new perspectives. Therefore my statement is that these new methods and/or perspectives are derived from these new materials that may not have been view in such a manner before. To establish an ideology based around a contemporary event/person only plague us with concept of being teleological, which is not objective. I hope this makes sense.

I think the bigger question here is whether or not History has become to overly academic in nature. While David McCullough sales lots of book, they do not generally tell us anything we really did not already know.

TAKE CARE,

TOM