The Likud party will be holding its primaries on August 3, and Gilad Sharon, son of the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has announced that he will be standing for a position on the party's list.
Sharon the elder was head of the Likud party and served as a Likud Prime Minister between the years 2001 and 2005, when he left the party to head a new party of his own creation, Kadima, in order to implement the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. A year later he suffered a stroke which left him in a vegetative state until his death in 2014.
"I have submitted my candidacy for a position on the national list of Likud candidates in the party's primaries," Gilad Sharon announced on Sunday, with a post on his Twitter account. "To my friends in the Likud, I need your support, I need you with me, so that we can deal with the burning issues that face the State of Israel. Join me so that we can return to power and restore governance."
It remains doubtful whether Sharon the younger has a future in his father's former party, given that anger at the Sharon family due to the "Disengagement" is still strong among both members and activists. Far from disavowing his father's policy, Gilad Sharon claims to have been its author, telling the New York Times in an interview in 2012 that, "It was I who suggested the Disengagement to my father."
In the intervening years, Sharon has doubled down on his views and adamantly refused to apologize for what happened, even once it became abundantly clear that Hamas had taken over and turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave. "The idea was to secure our hold on Judea and Samaria, and indeed that's what happened," Sharon told Radio 103FM in an interview. "In my opinion, no one person has a monopoly on the truth and if someone wants to think differently from me, then I respect that."
Gilad Sharon even suggested that if his father had not suffered a stroke that incapacitated him, the situation in Gaza would have been totally different. "If my father were still Prime Minister, things would not have turned out the way they did," he said, in the same interview. "It was if they took an expert surgeon and replaced him with [Ehud] Olmert, who wasn't even a first-responder. Olmert did not comprehend the basic idea and just let things get totally out of hand. You have no concept of what my father had planned to unleash against them. Things would certainly not have ended up the way they did."
Despite the disappointments, Sharon still insisted that the overall effect had been positive. "There's no doubt that as a result, our hold on the center of the country was strengthened," he said. "It's totally ridiculous to compare it to including the Muslim Brotherhood in government, which emboldens terrorists and causes immense damage in the Galilee, in the Negev, and in the mixed Arab-Jewish cities."
When asked if he was prepared to apologize for the expulsion of thousands of Jews from their homes, Sharon replied bluntly, "No. I have nothing to apologize for."