To reduce Ariel Sharon's life and legacy to a tidy assessment of good or bad is as fruitless an exercise as distilling all the complexities of the Middle East into one neat package of right or wrong. Oversimplification would be as disingenuous in Mr. Sharon's eulogy as it would be perilous in the U.S.'s foreign policy.
Mr. Sharon, who died Jan. 11 at 85 after lingering for eight years in a coma, lived a life that evolved with the circumstances around him. If there was one constant, it was that he unquestionably had what he believed to be the best interests of Israel always at heart. But if the goal never changed, his means certainly did. From his days as an infantry leader in the 1948 war that brought about the Jewish state to his leadership and daring in the 1973 war against Egypt and Syria, he was hero whose actions even his own people could not always reconcile. His command in the 1950s of the Unit 101 commando force that waged retaliatory strikes for Arab attacks was criticized for killing women and children.
As a politician, too, he defied easy categorization. As minister of defense in 1982, he led Israel into war in Lebanon and the following year resigned after being found indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians in refugee camps at the hands of Lebanese Christian militia.
Yet he would later gain praise as foreign minister for signing the Wye River agreement, which gave Palestinians additional control over the West Bank, and as prime minister for dismantling all Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip in 2005 — settlements he had once helped create. Amid increasing right-wing criticism, he quit the hawkish Likud party and created a new centrist one, shortly before two successive strokes left him comatose in 2006.
We can't know what further evolution Mr. Sharon might have undergone, but he certainly appeared to appreciate where world sentiment and history were heading, and where Israel needed to go — toward a resolution that preserved Israel and gave the Palestinians a home.
Mr. Sharon paved the way. His legacy — one politicians may embrace today — is the pragmatism essential for survival, and the courage to adapt in order to achieve that goal.