A childhood in conflictThe younger of two children, Ariel Sharon was born to Russian immigrants Shmuel and Devorah “Vera” Scheinerman on February 27, 1928, on a small moshav named Kfar Malal located near Kfar Saba, in the Sharon plain in the country’s center. At the suggestion of one of his mentors, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, he changed his last name to Sharon.
He was born into a life that was immediately filled with conflict. His parents, who came to Palestine only in 1922, were often at odds with their neighbors over farming issues. If the moshav decided that “everyone should plant oranges and lemons,” recalled Sharon, his father would “insist on experimenting with mandarins and mangoes.”The Scheinermans’ relationship with the moshav was further strained by the murder of Zionist socialist leader Haim Arlosoroff in 1933.“I cannot forget the agonies of those days,” wrote Sharon in an op-ed article for The Jerusalem Post in 1994.
“Even before the end of the investigation into the murder, the Left exploited the tragic event by slandering members of the Revisionist Movement led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, as if they had murdered Arlosoroff.”
“My parents, members of Mapai – the Labor Party of those days – were so riled by that blood libel that they openly voted for the Jabotinsky movement, the Left’s enemy,” noted Sharon. “Only those who lived on a moshav or kibbutz in those days can understand how much courage this took. Immediately my parents suffered severe sanctions. We were ostracized by the moshav for many years.”The family was expelled from the local healthfund clinic and village synagogue. The moshav’s truck would not make deliveries to their farm, nor collect their produce.The antagonism was so bitter that even in his will Shmuel requested that no one from Kfar Malal eulogize him and that his body not be driven to the cemetery in a community vehicle.Outside his moshav, Sharon’s childhood was marked by Arab violence. Kfar Malal itself had been destroyed by Arabs in 1921 and rebuilt.
Fearing the village would again be attacked during the Arab riots of 1929, Sharon’s mother at one point took Sharon, aged one, and his three-year-old sister, Yehudit, to a nearby barn to hide.His father was twice ambushed by Arabs in the 1930s and, as Sharon recalled, often carried a pistol with him. His mother, he said, slept with one under her pillow.Images of an enemy lurking outside made him determined rather than fearful, wrote Sharon in his autobiography, The Warrior. Newspaper stories of Jews who had gone to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War inspired him.
