Theodore Millon, a psychologist whose theories helped define how scientists think about personality and its disorders, and who developed a widely used measure to analyze character traits, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenville Township, N.Y. He was 85.
The cause was complications of heart disease, his granddaughter Alyssa Boice said.
Dr. Millon (pronounced “Milan,” like the city in Italy) learned about the oddities of personality at first hand, by wandering the halls of Allentown State Hospital, a mental institution, after being named to the hospital’s board in the 1950s as a part an overhaul effort in Pennsylvania. A young assistant professor at nearby Lehigh University at the time, he “frequently ventured incognito through the hospital,” he wrote in an essay in 2001, “at times clothed in typical hospital garb overnight or for entire weekend periods, conversing at length with patients housed in a variety of acute and chronic wards.”
At the University of Illinois in the 1970s, he began to think and write more deeply about the patterns underlying specific character types that therapists had described: the narcissist, with fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention. By 1980, he had pulled together the bulk of the work on such so-called personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual.
Along the way he developed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI), which became the most commonly used diagnostic assessment for personality problems. It is still widely used today, in its third edition, the MCMI-III.
“He was a monumental figure in shaping the understanding of personality disorders,” said Thomas Widiger, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. “Prior to Ted, there wasn’t any measure to speak of. He just dominated the field during a key period of its growth.”
Theodore Millon was born in Manhattan on Aug. 18, 1928, the only child of Abner Millon, a tailor, and the former Mollie Gorkowitz. He grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn and graduated from Lafayette High School in 1945 before earning bachelor’s degrees in psychology, physics and philosophy at City College of New York. After graduating in 1950, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1953, the year after he married Renée Baratz. She survives him, as do three daughters, Diane Bobb, Dr. Carrie Millon and Adrienne Hemsley; a son, Andy; and eight grandchildren.
Loquacious and opinionated, Dr. Millon, who described himself as an exemplar of “secure narcissism,” became a kind of institution unto himself after laying a foundation for the study of personality disorders. He left the University of Illinois for the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami, where — between visiting professorships at Harvard and McLean Hospital — he founded the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, a platform to advance his ideas, publishing analyses, books and various personality assessments.
Dr. Millon wrote more than 25 books and co-wrote more than 50 academic papers. The American Psychological Association awarded him its Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.
In one of his books, an encyclopedia of behavioral scientists called “Masters of the Mind” (2004), he included an entry for “Theodore Millon (1928 — ).” Dr. Millon, he wrote of himself, was distinguished from many others in the book “by the fact that he appears, contrawise, to be invariably buoyant, if not jovial. Critics are not invariably enamored, however, finding his work to be, at times, too speculative, his writing unduly imaginative, and his creativity overly expansive.”
Millon was born in 1928, the only child of immigrant Jewish parents from Lithuania and Poland.[1] His 19th-century ancestors came from the town of Valozhyn, then a part of the Russian Empire.[2]:309 Receiving degrees from both American and European universities, he was a member of the board of trustees of Allentown State Hospital, a large Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital for 15 years.[3] Shortly thereafter he became the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. He is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and the University of Miami.[4]
In 2008, Millon was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychological Association.[5]
The American Psychological Foundation presents an award named after Millon, known as the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology," to honor outstanding psychologists engaged in "advancing the science of personality psychology including the areas of personology, personality theory, personality disorders, and personality measurement."[6]
Millon has written numerous popular works on personality, developed diagnostic questionnaire tools such as the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, and contributed to the development of earlier versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Among other diagnoses, Millon advocated for an expanded version of passive aggressive personality disorder, which he termed 'negativistic' personality disorder and argued could be diagnosed by criteria such as "expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate" and "claims to be luckless, ill-starred, and jinxed in life; personal content is more a matter of whining and grumbling than of feeling forlorn and despairing" (APA, 1991, R17). Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder was expanded somewhat as an official diagnosis in the DSM-III-R but then relegated to the appendix of DSM-IV, tentatively renamed 'Passive-Aggressive (Negativistic) Personality Disorder'.[7]
Millon, Theodore (2000). Personality Disorders in Modern Life. New York: John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-23734-5
Millon, Theodore. (2004) Masters of the Mind. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons.
Millon, Theodore and Grossman, Seth.(2007) Moderating Severe Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons.
Millon, Theodore and Grossman, Seth.(2007) Resolving Difficult Clinical Syndromes: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons.
Millon, Theodore and Grossman, Seth.(2007) Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons.
Blaney, Paul H. and Millon, Theodore (Eds). (2008) Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology, 2nd Ed.. New York: Oxford University Press.
Millon, Theodore, Krueger, Robert and Simonsen, Erik (Eds). (2008). Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology: Toward the DSM-V and ICD-11. New York: Guilford Press.
The Millon inventories: a practitioner's guide to personalized clinical assessment. (2008) Guilford Press. ISBN 978-1-59385-674-8
Martin S. Bergmann, a psychoanalyst, author and educator who became known to a wide general audience for his unplanned, much-praised role as a philosopher in Woody Allen’s 1989 film, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 100.
His son, Michael, confirmed the death.
At his death, Mr. Bergmann was an adjunct clinical professor of psychology in the postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at New York University, where he had taught for many years; he had been scheduled to teach a seminar there next week, Michael Bergmann said.
Mr. Bergmann also maintained a private psychoanalytic practice, although, in a concession to his age, he had scaled it back to about 30 hours a week.
A Freudian known for his erudition — he was the author of scholarly books on love, psychoanalysis, history and religion — Mr. Bergmann landed in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” entirely by chance, through a student of his who happened to know the casting director.
As the student was aware, Mr. Allen was looking for a tweedy, white-haired, European-sounding psychoanalyst to portray Professor Louis Levy, a humanistic philosopher. In the movie, a dark comedy about marriage and its discontents, Mr. Allen plays a filmmaker at work on a documentary about Levy, who is seen only in film clips.
Mr. Bergmann fit the bill. Introduced to Mr. Allen, he answered his searching questions about philosophical matters like love, life and death. Twenty minutes later, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1989, Mr. Allen told him, “You’ll do.”
Much of Levy’s dialogue in the film was extemporized by Mr. Bergmann along similar philosophical lines.
“Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation,” Mr. Bergmann, as Levy, says. “It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe.”
Mr. Bergmann, whose professional training let him put his finger instantly on the operative question in almost any situation, did wonder why, if Mr. Allen wanted a philosopher, he did not simply cast a philosopher.
“I asked him that question,” Mr. Bergmann told Newsday in 1989. “He didn’t answer.”
Martin Shlomo Bergmann was born in Prague on Feb. 15, 1913. His father, Hugo, was a noted philosopher and an early Zionist; the family moved toPalestine when Martin was 6.
As a young man in the 1930s, Mr. Bergmann was sent by his kibbutz to study agriculture in the United States. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the field from the University of California, Berkeley.
During this time, Mr. Bergmann’s parents divorced and he chose not to return to Palestine. Already interested in psychology, he began reading Freud while at Berkeley.
During World War II he served stateside in the United States Army, where his duties included administering psychological tests to servicemen. After World War II, he settled in New York, where he received his psychoanalytic training.
His books include “The Anatomy of Loving” (1987), a history of mankind’s struggle, from antiquity to modernity, to understand love; “In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions” (1992); and several volumes he edited, among them “Generations of the Holocaust” (1982, with Milton E. Jucovy) and “Understanding Dissidence and Controversy in the History of Psychoanalysis” (2004).
Among his many honors is the Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator Award from the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education.
On the strength of “Crimes and Misdemeanors” — and perhaps inspired by the cleansing power of psychoanalysis — a maker of washing machines attempted to cast Mr. Bergmann in a television commercial. He declined, his son said.
After an early marriage that ended in divorce, Mr. Bergmann married Maria Vari in 1947. Besides his wife, a psychoanalyst, and his son, a filmmaker, Mr. Bergmann’s survivors include a grandson.
When Mr. Bergmann first saw “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” he received a psychological jolt: at the end of the film, he discovered, Professor Levy commits suicide off camera.
“It was a little bit of a shock,” Mr. Bergmann told The Inquirer in 1989. “It was essential for Woody Allen, to develop the plot. It wasn’t so nice for me. Some of my patients were quite upset.”
Shulamit Aloni, a longtime left-wing Israeli minister and Parliament member who was an early champion of civil liberties, challenger of religious hegemony and outspoken opponent of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, died Friday at her home in Kfar Shmaryahu, a Tel Aviv suburb. She was 86.
One of her sons, Nimrod, said she had not been seriously ill, “just very old.”
Mrs. Aloni, an elected lawmaker for 28 years, was the author of six books, including one of Israel’s earliest texts on civics. She was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize in 2000 “for her struggle to right injustices and for raising the standard of equality.”
In 2008, at age 80, she published “Israel: Democracy or Ethnocracy?” a harsh assessment of her homeland. She wrote on the cover, “The state is returning to the ghetto, to Orthodox Judaism, and the rule of the fundamentalist rabbinate is becoming more profound.”
Reuven Rivlin, a Parliament member from the conservative Likud Party, described Mrs. Aloni on Friday as “the last politician in her generation who said what she thought.” But her outspokenness also made for problems.
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Shulamit Aloni, then education minister, talking to students in 1992.David Rubinger/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images
In 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rebuked her for questioning the biblical version of Creation and speaking in the same breath of the Hebrew matriarch Rachel and the prostitute Rahav. The next year, after Mrs. Aloni’s challenging of religious political leaders provoked a coalition crisis, Rabin demoted her from education minister to minister of communications and science and technology.
After Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, she was among the first to call for the expulsion of hundreds of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron. She also said that high school trips to Holocaust sites were turning Israeli youths into xenophobes, and she incited outrage by holding official meetings abroad in nonkosher restaurants.
Former political allies and opponents alike lauded her on Friday as a boundary-breaking pioneer for peace, “a moral compass,” “a special breed,” “an inspiration for all women” and a “pillar of fire.”
“It was impossible not to admire such a combative woman who fought for what she believed in and was prepared to pay the price,” said Geula Cohen, who founded a right-wing faction and frequently faced off with her in Parliament.
Yossi Sarid, who in 1996 successfully challenged Mrs. Aloni for leadership of the far-left Meretz Party, called her “a phenomenon” who feared “absolutely nothing.”
“How did we first become acquainted with civil rights? How did we first discover the occupation?” Mr. Sarid, now a political analyst, asked rhetorically Friday morning on Israel Radio. “She wanted to change the national and social agenda, and she did so, on her own, by virtue of her own capabilities, and attained great and unparalleled achievements.”
Although some sources say she was 85, her son Nimrod said she was 86 and was born in December 1927. Born Shulamit Adler in Tel Aviv to Polish immigrant parents, she fought in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
She started her political career with the Labor-Alignment faction, then helped create the Citizens’ Rights Movement and, later, Meretz. She was married for 36 years to Reuven Aloni, who died in 1988. She is survived by their three sons, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Her death was a reminder of the decline of the left among Jews in Israel. Labor’s last prime minister was Ehud Barak in 2001, and Labor and Meretz combined hold 21 of Parliament’s 120 seats today. When Mrs. Aloni left elected office, they had 56.
“The pillar of fire has been extinguished,” the advocacy group Peace Now lamented in a statement.
Irving Milchberg, Who Smuggled Guns Under Nazis’ Noses in Warsaw, Dies at 86
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Irving Milchberg, left, in 1944 with a fellow cigarette seller from Warsaw nicknamed Conky.
Irving Milchberg, who as a plucky Jewish street urchin escaped transport to concentration camps three times and sold cigarettes to Nazis in the heart of occupied Warsaw while smuggling guns and food to resistance fighters, died on Sunday in Toronto. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.
Mr. Milchberg’s improbable saga was chronicled in a 1962 memoir by a Holocaust survivor, Joseph Ziemian, called “The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square.” The square was in the heart of a Warsaw district that German authorities had taken over. A nearby Y.M.C.A. had become a barracks for SS troops, another building was a German gendarmerie and a third building housed Hungarian soldiers collaborating with the Germans. A Gestapo secret police office was nearby.
The square itself was bustling and noisy, and much of the racket was contributed by about 14 cigarette sellers, most of whom were orphaned boys and girls hiding their Jewish identities and sleeping either on the streets, in cemeteries or with nervously accommodating Polish families.
For a year and a half, Mr. Milchberg and the other children hustled, sometimes fighting among themselves over customers, who included not only Poles but also the hundreds of Germans who could shoot them on the spot if they discovered they were Jewish. The fact that Mr. Milchberg had sandy hair and blue eyes made it easier for him to pass as a Polish gentile.
“This group of Jewish children, wandering around under the very noses of a thousand policemen, gendarmes, Gestapo men and ordinary spies, constituted an unexplained and inexplicable phenomenon,” Mr. Ziemian wrote.
Mr. Milchberg, who had taken the Polish name Henrik Rozowski but was known by the nickname Bull, was a leader of the group.
Born Ignac Milchberg on Sept. 15, 1927, into a Warsaw housewares merchant’s family, he saw his fairly comfortable world begin to crumble after the Nazi invasion in September 1939 and the walling off of a Jewish ghetto about six months later. The family was assigned to a room over an abandoned grocery store, and Ignac and his father were sent to work in a lumberyard outside the ghetto, sometimes bartering for food that they would sneak back.
In 1942, his father, while on the work detail, was killed by a Gestapo officer who found him hiding bread, then ordered him to run before shooting him in the back. Ignac, who had been working nearby, managed to slip back into the ghetto to bring food to his mother. When he returned, the body had already been taken to a mass grave.
One day he was seized in the street and taken to the Umschlagplatz, where Jews were put aboard trains to the Treblinka death camp. But during the night he scaled a fence, fled and returned to the ghetto. There he encountered an empty apartment. His mother and three sisters had been sent to Treblinka.
He made it out to the Aryan side and joined another work detail, but those workers, too, were taken at gunpoint to the Umschlagplatz and put aboard a train. When the train was stalled, Mr. Milchberg managed to break the bars of a car window and scramble out, roll into a ditch and flee.
“To tell you the truth, I never thought much,” Mr. Milchberg said in a 2013 interview, trying to explain his daring resourcefulness. “If I had to do something, I did it. I didn’t have time to analyze it.”
He took a series of jobs that allowed him to move between the Jewish ghetto and the outside world, and he smuggled in food. While they were loading coal for a railway, his mother’s brother, the family’s only other survivor, put him in touch with rebel fighters. Not yet 16, Mr. Milchberg, according to the Ziemian memoir, smuggled guns to the ghetto in hollowed loaves, twice by spiriting through the sewers.
For several weeks in April and May 1943, as the last remnants of the ghetto were being “liquidated,” the fighters, armed with guns, grenades and firebombs, staged a quixotic revolt in what became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a milestone of Jewish resistance. Mr. Milchberg, who had visited his uncle for Passover but did not actually fight in the uprising, was rounded up and put aboard a train to the Poniatowa camp. But when the group was switched to another train, he mingled with a crowd of Polish boys selling water and escaped.
He made it back to Warsaw’s Aryan side, but he badly injured his leg while running from a gendarme. He managed to persuade a Polish doctor he had known before the war to treat him. He ran into some youths he had met before, who were now hanging out with the cigarette sellers of Three Crosses Square, and joined the clique. The boys had nicknames like Conky, Hoppy, Toothy and Frenchy.
According to Mr. Milchberg’s son, surviving meant balancing “extreme fear and extreme hubris.” And indeed, some boys perished. The boy known as Frenchy was flattered by the attention of an SS man, thinking that might be an advantage, but for reasons they never learned, Frenchy was taken to the Gestapo and never heard from. Fearing that Frenchy might expose them all, the cigarette sellers scattered and went their own ways until the Soviet Army liberated the city.
In 1945, Mr. Milchberg made his way to Czechoslovakia, then Austria, then to a camp for displaced people in occupied Germany, where he learned watchmaking, his lifelong occupation. In 1947 Canada allowed 1,000 children to immigrate, and he became one of three cigarette sellers who settled there, while most went to Israel.
He ended up in Niagara Falls, where he opened his own jewelry and watch business. In 1953 he met his wife, Renee, who had survived the war because she was sent with an aunt and an uncle to a Russian labor camp. She had come to Niagara Falls as a tourist.
In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Milchberg is survived by a daughter, Anne, and three grandchildren.
In old age, Mr. Milchberg wound up in Toronto, in a neighborhood of survivors who met regularly over tea or coffee in a courtyard and traded jokes and stories of the war.
In 1993, he took a trip to Poland with his son for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and visited Treblinka.
“He completely broke down,” his son said. “I’d never seen him do that before.”
Ariel Sharon, one of the most influential figures in Israel’s history, a military commander and political leader who at the height of his power redrew the country’s electoral map, only to suffer a severe stroke from which he never recovered, died Saturday in a hospital near Tel Aviv. He was 85.
Gilad Sharon, one of his two surviving sons, told reporters at the hospital where the former prime minister spent most of the last eight years that his father “went when he decided to go.”
A cunning and unforgiving general who went on to hold nearly every top government post, including prime minister at the time he was struck ill, Mr. Sharon spent his final years in what doctors defined as a state of minimal consciousness in a sterile suite at the hospital, Sheba Medical Center. Visits were restricted for fear of infection.
Prof. Shlomo Nov of the medical center said heart failure was “the direct cause of his death,” resulting from organ deterioration that had deepened over “a number of days.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the nation bowed its head to a man he described as “first and foremost a brave soldier and an outstanding military commander” who “had a central role in the battle for Israel’s security from the very beginning.”
In many ways, Mr. Sharon’s story was that of his country. A champion of an iron-fisted, territory-expanding Zionism for most of his life, he stunned Israel and the world in 2005 with a Nixon-to-China reversal and withdrew all Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza. He then abandoned his Likud Party and formed a centrist movement called Kadima focused on further territorial withdrawal and a Palestinian state next door.
Mr. Sharon was incapacitated eight years ago, in January 2006, and in elections that followed, Kadima still won the most votes. His former deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. But the impact of Mr. Sharon’s political shift went beyond Kadima. The hawkish Likud Party, led by his rival, Mr. Netanyahu, was returned to power in 2009, and Mr. Netanyahu, too, said then that he favored a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
An architect of Israeli settlements in the occupied lands, Mr. Sharon gained infamy for his harsh tactics against the Palestinians over whom Israel ruled. That reputation began to soften after his election as prime minister in 2001, when he first talked about the inevitability of Palestinian statehood.
Israeli settlers, who had seen him as their patron, considered him an enemy after he won re-election in 2003. In addition to withdrawing from Gaza and a small portion of the West Bank, he completed part of a 450-mile barrier along and through parts of the West Bank — a barrier he had originally opposed. It not only reduced infiltration by militants into Israel but also provided the outline of a border with a future Palestinian state, albeit one he envisioned as having limited sovereignty.
Before becoming ill, Mr. Sharon was said to have been planning further withdrawals of Jewish settlers and troops from Palestinian lands in hopes of fulfilling the central goal of his life: ensuring a viable and strong state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland.
But even if he had stayed healthy, his plans might have been interrupted by the rise of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the 2006 conflict with the militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and increased concerns over Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Sharon viewed negotiating with Palestinian leaders as pointless; he felt they had neither the will nor the power to live up to their promises. Mr. Sharon said he believed that by carrying out the withdrawal unilaterally and building the barrier to include large Israeli settlement blocks, he was ensuring a Jewish state with defensible borders. Critics argued that by redeploying without handing responsibility to the Palestinian Authority, he had increased the power of Hamas.
Mr. Sharon’s final years in power contained surprises beyond the settlement reversal. He had long shown disdain for diplomacy, yet calculated his new path directly in line with what he thought the United States would accept and support. And though he had forced Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to remain a prisoner in his Ramallah compound, Mr. Sharon built a cordial relationship with his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, after Mr. Arafat died in 2004.
Despite years of antagonism, Hosni Mubarak, then president of Egypt, and King Abdullah II of Jordan gave Mr. Sharon public support in pursuing a solution to the conflict. Those close to him said he had always been more pragmatic than most people realized.
Pragmatism and Resilience
Thick-limbed and heavyset, with blue eyes, a ready smile and a shock of blond hair that whitened as he aged, Mr. Sharon was the archetypal Zionist farmer-soldier. He was not religiously observant, but he was deeply attached to Jewish history and culture and to the land where much of that history had occurred. He believed unshakably that reliance on others had brought his people disaster, and that Jews must assert and defend their collective needs without embarrassment or fear of censure.
As he put it in “Warrior,” his 1989 autobiography, “The great question of our day is whether we, the Jewish people of Israel, can find within us the will to survive as a nation.”
Defiant and brusque, Mr. Sharon had many enemies, who denounced him as self-promoting, self-righteous and unyielding. But he was also courtly to his political rivals and had a surprising sense of humor. His popular appeal was consistently underestimated.
He was dismissed as washed up in 1983 when he was forced to resign as defense minister after an official committee charged him with “indirect responsibility” for a Lebanese massacre of hundreds of Palestinians the previous year.
Mr. Sharon survived that humiliation and remained politically active enough to take command of his rudderless Likud Party after a 1999 rout by Labor. Even then, he was viewed as a seat warmer for younger leaders, yet he surprised everyone again when, in 2001, he was elected prime minister in the biggest landslide in Israel’s history.
He entered office four months into a violent Palestinian uprising. Israeli voters selected him over Ehud Barak, his predecessor, in the hope that Mr. Sharon would restore security.
Given how he had crushed the Palestinian guerrilla infrastructure in Gaza in the early 1970s, there was logic to his election. But there was a paradox, too. It was Mr. Sharon’s visit, in September 2000, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police officers, to the holy site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, that helped set off the riots that became the second Palestinian uprising.
Once elected, he brought dovish members of Labor into his cabinet to form a government of national unity to contend with growing Palestinian and Arab hostility after the collapse of a seven-year Middle East peace effort begun at Oslo, under the Labor-led government of Yitzhak Rabin.
Mr. Sharon faced clashes between, on one side, Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza and, on the other, Palestinian militiamen and guerrillas. And there were many episodes of Palestinian terrorism inside Israel.
He responded by sending envoys to the Palestinian leadership and calling for an end to the violence. But when that proved fruitless, he proceeded with force, moving tanks and heavy equipment into areas that Israel had previously turned over to Palestinian control.
The border with Lebanon also grew tense, and previously cordial relations with Jordan and Egypt, more moderate governments, froze. Hopes for amity between Israel and its neighbors seemed the dimmest in a decade.
But Mr. Sharon said that if peace could be forged out of the century-long conflict, he would be its blacksmith. He had, he said, a firm grasp on Israel’s security needs and understood his adversaries.
In the years before Mr. Sharon’s election, it was often said that the Middle East had entered a new era of coexistence fostered by the Oslo peace negotiations and increased global interdependence. This struck Mr. Sharon as dangerously naïve, and most of his fellow Israelis came to agree with him.
“The war of independence has not ended,” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in April 2001. “No, 1948 was just one chapter.” He added: “The end of the conflict will come only when the Arab world recognizes the innate right of the Jewish people to establish an independent Jewish state in the Middle East. And that recognition has not yet come.”
It was a theme taken up later by Mr. Netanyahu as well.
A Zionist Vision
Mr. Sharon was born Ariel Scheinerman on Feb. 27, 1928, on a semicollective farm, or moshav, named Kfar Malal, about 15 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. His parents, Samuel Scheinerman and the former Vera Schneirov, had emigrated from Russia. His mother, from a wealthy Belarussian family, was forced to interrupt her studies in medicine by the Russian Revolution. His father was a Zionist youth leader and agronomy student in Russia and a farmer in Palestine.
The isolation and mistrust of others that characterized Mr. Sharon’s relationships throughout his life had familial roots. His parents, who brought him up to treasure classical music and Russian literature, disdained their fellow moshav dwellers as unlettered and uncouth. Theirs was the only farm on the moshav with a fence around it.
In his autobiography, Mr. Sharon described his father as cantankerous and stingy with love. As a child, he reported, he felt lonely. Known from boyhood by the nickname Arik, Mr. Sharon began his military career in the Gadna, a paramilitary high school organization.
After graduation and a special course, he became a Gadna instructor at an agricultural school. His own instructor, Micah Almog, told biographers that even then Mr. Sharon refused to follow any script given to him and insisted on teaching his own way. He also joined the Haganah, the main underground Zionist fighting brigade, which became the Israel Defense Forces after independence.
In 1947, Mr. Sharon worked for the Haganah in the vast, flat stretch north of Tel Aviv that is called the Sharon Plain. It was from there that he took his new Israeli family name in the emerging Zionist tradition of Hebraizing the names brought from the diaspora. This was part of the plan to create a “new Jew” rooted in the homeland and no longer tied to the Old World.
At the height of the independence war, in May 1948, Mr. Sharon’s unit was sent to take part in the battle of Latrun against the Jordanian Army, at the foot of the hilly entrance to Jerusalem. It was a disastrous battle for the Zionists, and Mr. Sharon was badly wounded in the abdomen. Despite initial rescue efforts, he lay abandoned and bleeding for hours, and nearly died. It was an early and influential encounter with what he considered incompetence above him.
When he was 20, Mr. Sharon married a young Romanian immigrant named Margalit Zimmerman, who had been his student in Gadna and who went by the nickname Gali. After the 1948 war, he remained in the army and served in a number of posts around the country. In 1952, he took a leave from the army, and the couple moved to Jerusalem, where Mr. Sharon began Middle Eastern studies at the Hebrew University and his wife became a psychiatric nurse.
A Reputation for Boldness
Mr. Sharon had already earned a reputation as an effective battalion commander who believed that Israel had been timid in the face of Arab border provocation. Many of his superiors were wary of him, but others, including David Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding prime minister, admired his boldness.
In 1953, Mr. Sharon was asked to form and lead the first elite commando force for special operations behind enemy lines. It was named Unit 101, and although it operated as an independent unit for less than a year, it became legendary in Israel. The aim of the unit was to retaliate for cross-border raids, Arab violations of the 1949 armistice agreements and attacks against Israeli civilian targets.
The unit’s first major operation came in October 1953, after an Israeli woman and her two children were killed while sleeping in their home in the town of Yehud. Mr. Sharon led a reprisal raid on the Jordanian town of Qibya, which was said to be harboring Palestinian guerrillas.
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Mr. Sharon met with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt at the Movenpick Golf Resort in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2005.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The battle of Qibya, in which 69 people were killed, more than half of them women and children, and 45 houses were demolished, brought Israel its first condemnation by the United Nations Security Council and became a Palestinian rallying cry for a generation.
A furor erupted in Israel over the civilian deaths, but the government did not investigate and covered up for the commando unit by saying that no Israeli soldiers had been involved. The raid, Ben-Gurion said at the time, must have been by people around Jerusalem, “refugees from Arab countries and survivors of Nazi concentration camps, who had suffered terribly at the hands of their tormentors and had shown great restraint until now.”
Unit 101 cultivated a sense among its members of being above rules and able to operate under the most severe conditions, an attitude that later permeated all elite Israeli military units.
In the 1956 Sinai campaign, Mr. Sharon commanded a paratroop brigade and violated orders by driving his men deep into Sinai to the Mitla Pass, where they were ambushed by Egyptian forces and sustained dozens of deaths, with scores of soldiers wounded. He had been unaware of a deal among Britain, France and Israel regarding the Mitla Pass. He was not shy with his complaints or sense of betrayal, and when the war ended his career suffered.
It was a period of personal loss as well. In May 1962, his wife, Gali, was killed when the car she was driving veered out of its lane and was hit by a truck. Mr. Sharon later married Gali’s younger sister, Lily, who had followed her to Israel. Lily became a mother to his son Gur, and together she and Mr. Sharon had two more sons, Omri and Gilad.
In 1964, Mr. Sharon’s flagging military career was revived by Mr. Rabin, then the chief of staff, who made him chief of the northern command. When the 1967 war broke out in June, Mr. Sharon was sent south to his old command area and played a crucial role on the Egyptian front.
When the war ended in a stunning victory for Israel — which had tripled its land mass and defeated the combined armies of Jordan, Syria and Egypt — Mr. Sharon felt a euphoria nearly unmatched in his life, he wrote in his autobiography.
Personal tragedy struck again soon. In October 1967, Gur, 11, his eldest son, was playing with friends with an old hunting rifle, stuffing it with gunpowder. A neighbor boy playfully aimed it at Gur’s head and pulled the trigger. Mr. Sharon, who was alone in the house at the time, ran out at the sound of the blast, scooped his son off the ground and flagged down a passing car to go to a hospital. The boy died en route.
His wife, Lily, remained Mr. Sharon’s fiercely loyal companion until her death from cancer in 2000. His two sons survive him, as do a number of grandchildren.
A Turn to Politics
Mr. Sharon’s relations with his military superiors remained tense as the country faced intermittent Palestinian guerrilla attacks in what became known as the War of Attrition. He was nearly thrown out of the army in 1969.
In 1970, as commander of the south, Mr. Sharon crushed Palestinian guerrilla units in the Gaza Strip. He bulldozed homes and groves, imposed collective punishment, set up intelligence units of Israelis who could pass for Palestinians and established the first Jewish settlements to hamper travel and communication of Palestinians.
In 1973, Mr. Sharon felt drawn to politics. With help from American friends, he also bought a large farm in the Negev Desert — it remains the largest privately owned farm in the country — and talked about retirement from the military. But that October, a shocking invasion by Egypt and Syria, a war that Israel nearly lost, delayed his plans.
He pulled off his most extraordinary feat of combat when he waged a daring crossing of the Suez Canal behind Egyptian lines, a move often described as either brilliant or foolhardy, and a turning point in the war.
Mr. Sharon had been hit in the head by a shifting tank turret, and photographs of him with his head bandaged appeared in many newspapers and remain a symbol of that war. After that, Mr. Sharon did retire and helped engineer the birth of the Likud bloc, a political union between the Liberal Party and the more right-wing Herut Party of Menachem Begin.
Mr. Begin, who was in many ways more Polish than Israeli, admired Mr. Sharon for his gruffness, courage and energy, and as a native-born symbol of the emancipated Jew. Mr. Sharon won his first election to Parliament, on the Likud ticket, in December 1973. But he quickly found the confines of Parliament, with its wheeling and dealing and endless committee meetings, not to his liking. He fought with his political allies, grew impatient and thirsted for more decisive action.
In the spring, he led a group of Israelis into the West Bank near the city of Nablus and, using the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by members of Parliament, helped them establish an illegal settlement. He then quit Parliament and returned to the army. Mr. Rabin had become prime minister and brought Mr. Sharon into the prime minister’s office as a special adviser. He held the job for about a year, and Mr. Sharon later wrote that this first exposure to central political power was extremely instructive.
In 1977, Mr. Begin’s Likud bloc beat Labor in the general elections, the first time in Israeli history that Labor was ousted from power. Its loss was the result of several factors: the 1973 military debacle, rampant party corruption, and the feeling of neglect and injury of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world, the Sephardim, who had become a majority of the population.
Mr. Sharon, who had struck out on his own with an independent party that failed to take off, joined the Begin cabinet as agriculture minister and set about constructing Jewish settlements in the West Bank to prevent Israel from relinquishing the territory. The plan worked well, forcing future Israeli governments to care for and protect the settlers, who now number more than 350,000 in the West Bank, with an additional 200,000 in annexed areas of East Jerusalem.
Shortly after Mr. Begin’s election, the Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat, offered to come to Jerusalem and negotiate a peace treaty in exchange for a full return to Egypt of the Sinai Peninsula, lost in the 1967 war, and autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It was a historic offer, and many Israelis did not know whether the Egyptians could be trusted. Mr. Sharon was among the doubters and voted against the deal as a cabinet member, although he then voted for it in the full Parliament. The offer led to the Camp David accords and the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which returned Sinai to Egypt.
Mr. Sharon made no secret of his ambition to be defense minister, but he had to wait until the 1981 re-election of Mr. Begin. He made clear that his biggest concern was southern Lebanon, where Palestinian guerrilla groups had taken advantage of that country’s chaos and set up a ministate, with militias and weapons, using it as a launching pad for attacks on Israel’s north.
Lebanon and Beyond
In June 1982, after Palestinian guerrillas tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London, leaving him critically wounded, Mr. Sharon began the invasion of Lebanon, saying it would last 48 hours. He saw it as an opportunity not only to remove the Palestinian threat but also to form a strategic alliance with Lebanon’s Christian elite by helping install its members in a new government and signing a peace treaty with a second neighbor.
Things went well at first. The Israeli military rooted out the Palestinian groups and built an alliance with the Phalangist Party, led by the Gemayel family. Mr. Sharon’s popularity in Israel soared.
But the Reagan administration and others grew wary and then angry as the Israeli invasion seemed not to end but rather to take on an increasingly punishing nature, including the saturation bombing of Beirut neighborhoods and delaying agreed-upon cease-fires. Some historians have accused Mr. Sharon of deceiving Mr. Begin and the rest of the cabinet on his broader intent for the war as it progressed.
Whether he was acting alone or in concert, Mr. Sharon saw his plans for Lebanon derail. Less than three weeks after his ally Bashir Gemayel was elected president in late August with the Israeli military’s help, he was assassinated in an explosion at his party headquarters.
The Israelis, in violation of a cease-fire agreement with the United States, sent troops into several West Beirut neighborhoods. These included Sabra and Shatila, Palestinian refugee camps where, the Israelis asserted, the Palestine Liberation Organization had residual bases and arms and thousands of fighters. That claim was disputed by American diplomats who said that Palestinian fighters had already been moved out of the area. The Israelis nonetheless sent in the Phalangists, who killed hundreds of civilians.
The massacre provoked international outrage, and many Israelis, already despondent that the “48-hour” Lebanon incursion had turned into a lengthy military and geopolitical adventure, were outraged. There were furious calls for Mr. Sharon’s resignation.
Mr. Sharon and Mr. Begin said this was intolerable slander. As Mr. Begin said, using the Hebrew word for non-Jews, “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.” Nonetheless, even Mr. Begin started to distance himself from Mr. Sharon, whose political demise began to seem inevitable.
The government established an official investigation of the massacre, led by Israel’s chief justice, Yitzhak Kahan. The investigating committee absolved Mr. Sharon of direct responsibility, but said he should have anticipated that sending enraged militiamen of the Phalange into Palestinian neighborhoods right after the assassination of the group’s leader amounted to an invitation to carnage. The committee recommended his resignation.
Time magazine reported that Mr. Sharon had actually urged the Gemayel family to have its troops take revenge on the Palestinians for the death of Mr. Gemayel. The magazine said Mr. Sharon made this point during his condolence visit to the family. It claimed further that a secret appendix to the Kahan Commission report made this clear.
Mr. Sharon sued Time for libel and won a partial victory in Federal District Court in New York. The court found that the secret appendix, which contained names of Israeli intelligence officers, included no assertion by Mr. Sharon of the need for Phalangist revenge. But it ruled that Mr. Sharon had not been libeled because he could not prove “malice” on the magazine’s part.
In February 1983, the Israeli cabinet voted 16 to 1 to remove Mr. Sharon as defense minister. He remained as a minister without portfolio. His was the sole dissenting vote.
Depressed over the war and his wife’s recent death, Mr. Begin resigned as prime minister in September 1983 and was succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir. The 1984 election was a tie between Labor and Likud, and Mr. Sharon played a crucial role in negotiating a unity government with Mr. Peres of Labor whereby each party occupied the premiership for two years. Mr. Sharon remained active in politics throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
After Mr. Netanyahu defeated Mr. Peres in 1996 to become prime minister, Mr. Sharon joined Mr. Netanyahu at the Wye Plantation in Maryland to negotiate a continuation of the peace process with Mr. Arafat and the Palestinians.
But Mr. Sharon remained aloof from the talks, and pointedly refused to shake Mr. Arafat’s hand, as Mr. Rabin had done on the White House lawn in 1993. Mr. Sharon said that he had spent years trying to kill Mr. Arafat, and that he was not about to shake his hand.
Mr. Barak, of the Labor Party, defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999, but after the collapse of his peace talks with the Palestinians, Mr. Barak called for new elections for early 2001. It was widely expected that Mr. Netanyahu would run for the Likud Party. When he decided not to, Mr. Sharon, the stand-in party chief, became the unexpected candidate and surprise winner.
He brought Mr. Peres in as foreign minister, and the two septuagenarians, who as young men had sat at the elbows of Ben-Gurion when he ran the newly formed country, found themselves back together. Their partnership continued to thrive, and Mr. Peres left the Labor Party, which had been his political home his entire life, to join Mr. Sharon’s Kadima Party. Mr. Peres was later elected the country’s president.
Raanan Gissin, a close aide, said the main reason Mr. Sharon went from a champion of the settlements to an advocate of territorial withdrawal was growing international pressure for a Palestinian state.
“He was not an ideologue; he was a political architect,” Mr. Gissin said. “As a military man he knew one thing from the battlefield — you have to seize the initiative, you have to be the one driving the action. Even if peace was impossible, he wanted the process seeking it to be on his terms. And while he was in power, it was.”
