Short answer: Ariel Sharon was not simply a supporter of Israel, he was one of the founding-generation military and political leaders who built and defended the state. He fought in every major Israeli war from 1948 to 1973, rose to general, served as a cabinet minister, and became Israel's 11th prime minister from 2001 to 2006. He died on January 11, 2014, so this page describes what he did, not what he currently supports. As of August 2026.
What Ariel Sharon has actually said and done
1948 to 1949: Born Ariel Scheinermann in 1928 in Kfar Malal in Mandatory Palestine to Jewish immigrant parents, Sharon fought as a platoon commander in Israel's 1948 War of Independence and was wounded in the battle for Latrun, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
October 1973: As a reserve armored division commander in the Yom Kippur War, Sharon led the Israeli crossing of the Suez Canal, an action widely credited with helping turn the war in Israel's favor, Britannica reports.
2001 to 2006: Sharon served as Israel's 11th prime minister, first as head of the Likud party, per Britannica.
August 15 to September 12, 2005: As prime minister, Sharon ordered and carried out Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza, withdrawing the Israeli military and evacuating roughly 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza Strip settlements, plus four in the northern West Bank, with the operation completed on September 12, 2005, according to Britannica's account of the disengagement.
November 21, 2005: Sharon resigned from Likud, which opposed his disengagement policy, and founded the new centrist party Kadima, which formally launched on November 24, 2005 and drew defectors from both Likud and Labor, including Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, and Shimon Peres. This is reported by Wikipedia's entry on Kadima and cross-checked against the Jewish Virtual Library's history of the party.
January 4, 2006: Sharon suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke and was placed in an induced coma at Hadassah Hospital near Jerusalem. He never regained consciousness, according to CNN.
January 11, 2014: Ariel Sharon died at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, at age 85, of organ failure after eight years in a permanent vegetative state. He was given a state funeral in Israel, as reported by the Washington Post.
The fuller picture
Ariel Sharon's connection to Israel was total and lifelong. He was born in pre-state Jewish Palestine, fought in the founding war of 1948, and went on to hold nearly every senior military and political post in the country, up to and including prime minister. He was a lifelong Zionist whose public identity was bound up with secular Zionism and Israeli statehood as the organizing purpose of his career, though he was not a religiously observant Jew in his personal practice.
His record is genuinely complex rather than simply "pro-settlement" or "pro-withdrawal." For decades, from the 1970s through the 1990s, he was a chief architect and champion of the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza. Then, as prime minister facing a different security calculation, he ordered the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza over fierce opposition from his own party and much of the settler movement, a decision that split Likud and led him to found Kadima.
He was also a divisive figure abroad. An Israeli state commission, the Kahan Commission, found him indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre carried out by a Lebanese Christian militia, and he was forced to resign as defense minister as a result. He remained in the cabinet, however, and later returned to the top of Israeli politics. None of this changes the basic fact pattern: every stage of his adult life, from soldier to general to minister to prime minister, was in direct service of Israel's security, sovereignty, and governance.
The bottom line
Ariel Sharon's entire adult life was devoted to Israel's founding, defense, and governance, as a soldier, general, and eventually prime minister. He died in January 2014, so the correct framing today is that he was a defining pro-Israel figure of the state's founding generation, not that he currently supports anything.
Carry that history forward
Sharon's career, soldier to statesman, tracks the same thread that runs through Israel's story: a people building and defending a homeland. If that history moves you, our Support Israel collection offers a way to carry a small piece of it with you every day.
Related
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Does Tzipi Livni Support Israel?
Does Naftali Bennett Support Israel?
Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
