After living for months in a coma, former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has died.  For most of his tenure, I thought highly of Sharon’s leadership.  But then, to the dismay of many including myself,  he agreed to give the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2005.  Although the Gaza Strip is a very small piece of land, turning it over to the Palestinians (essentially to Hamas, the predominate Sunni Muslim faction) significantly increased Israeli’s exposure to hostile borders at it’s western corner, and Hamas has taken advantage of that geography to smuggle in lots of weaponry for use against Israel.

President George W. Bush’s former deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams, now an author and senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written an informative and realistic assessment of Sharon at the online Commentary Magazine, HERE, and it may be the best of the many written in the days since his passing.

ADDENDUM:

Also an interesting read, this account (from the Times of Israel via PowerLine) of how a 20yo Sharon was wounded in a battle during the 1948 struggle for Israeli independence.