Sorrowful Soliloquies: I Am Ariel Sharon (Part 2).

• Date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Normey, Rob

I Am Ariel Sharon by Yara El-Ghadban, is a timely novel that sheds light on the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian people.

OPINION | The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

Part 1 of this article described how Canadian politics, institutions and media have responded to the Israel-Palestine conflict, providing context for my review below of I Am Ariel Sharon.

As I read the novel, I visualized the various women at the bedside of an unconscious Sharon, felled by a stroke and in a coma in a Tel Aviv hospital in 2006. (He remained in a coma for the last eight years of his life.) The first woman is an earth-bound angel who introduces a vital motif, the injustice that hovers over death. In recounting Sharon's life through the personal recollections of the women who knew him best, we keep coming back to the deaths on the battlefield and those connected to Israel's occupation of Palestine after the 1967 War.

A Single-minded Goal

After the mysterious woman of the opening chapter, we are introduced to Ariel's mother, Vera. She addresses the gap between a parent with strong recollections of a different life in Russia with its more...