Warrior at Peace With Himself Over Decision

When the last Jewish settlers leave the Gaza Strip, it will be the culmination of an extraordinary personal and political odyssey for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the man who almost single-handedly created the settlement movement.

Sharon’s decision to uproot the settlers he nurtured for so long is one of the great turnabouts in modern Israeli political history. Yet even those who have closely studied the 77-year-old leader are hard-pressed to say whether Sharon has reinvented himself, or whether he is acting in a manner entirely consistent with his core beliefs.

“It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance, really,” Tel Aviv University analyst Tamar Hermann said. “In some ways, leaving Gaza in this manner seems so at odds with the ethos he has always represented -- the toughness, the refusal to ever offer anything without something guaranteed in return.”

Whether as hard-charging army general or backroom politician, Sharon has always considered his life’s mission to be that of defending the Jewish people. And he has been unwavering in his contention that relinquishing Gaza is part and parcel of that.

“There are people who can’t stand him, and people who criticize him for all kinds of emotional reasons ... and people who have real questions about his character and judgment,” said Abraham Diskin, a Hebrew University political scientist. “But I truly think he is convinced, convinced utterly, that these are the right moves for Israel.”

Sharon has already paid a heavy political price for the pullout, which was set in motion early Monday as soldiers began knocking at settlers’ doors and telling them they had 48 hours to leave. In the year and a half since he unveiled the withdrawal plan, Sharon has been reviled as a dictator and a traitor, subjected to death threats by Jewish extremists. He now stands in real danger of losing the leadership of the Likud Party he helped found.

At times, it appeared that only the sheer force of a personality that earned him the nickname “Bulldozer” had carried him to this point.

“I have no regrets,” Sharon told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper last week in the nail-biting final days before the pullout began. “Even if I knew the scope of opposition in advance, I would do it.”

Few public figures tap into more elements of Israel’s national mythology or its sense of collective identity. Sharon is a member of the Jewish state’s fast-dwindling founding generation, a decorated veteran of its many wars and one whose battlefield excesses and hard-line politics made him the bete noire of the Israeli peace camp.

He was the man who refused to shake Yasser Arafat’s hand during the height of Israel’s 1990s rapprochement with the Palestinians, the defense minister who dragged Israel into a costly war in Lebanon with a 1982 incursion that went far beyond the scope of what his boss at the time, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had authorized.

Sharon left the Israeli political arena in disgrace in 1983 after an official inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangist Christian militiamen at the camps of Sabra and Shatila outside Beirut. It was a long climb back to the top echelon of power.

Sharon decisively won election as prime minister in 2001 and 2003 based largely on a single factor: Israelis trusted him to take whatever measures necessary, however harsh, to halt the Palestinian militants’ campaign of suicide attacks in Israeli cities -- even though many voters blamed his September 2000 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a site sacred to Jews as well as Muslims, for sparking the second intifada, or uprising.

As prime minister, Sharon sent troops into nearly every Palestinian town and city in the West Bank, ordered repeated raids on the crowded refugee camps of the Gaza Strip and authorized the construction of a separation barrier that Palestinians said was gobbling up land that belonged to them.

Palestinian attacks fell off sharply. But the iron fist wielded by Israel led to growing international isolation. The World Court sharply rebuked Sharon’s government over the separation barrier. Well-respected domestic rivals floated informal peace initiatives that were warmly received inside and outside the country.

Sharon was under growing pressure to somehow break the deadlock with the Palestinians, but he had declared Arafat persona non grata, and could not bring himself to negotiate with any government led by his longtime nemesis. During this period, close aides have said, he searched for a gesture that would dramatically demonstrate Israel’s intent to accept eventual Palestinian statehood but not harm national security.

The Gaza initiative was foreshadowed during Sharon’s most recent campaign for prime minister, when he repeatedly warned supporters within his conservative Likud Party that “painful concessions” were in the offing.

Yet the pullout plan caught his traditional constituency by surprise. They responded at first with bafflement, then with blossoming outrage.

Sharon had personally championed the creation of the Gaza settlements decades earlier, part of a defensive strategy he pioneered in the wake of the 1967 Middle East War.

In his autobiography, “Warrior,” Sharon described prowling the length and breadth of the newly seized territory, trying to figure how best to defend it.

“I spent ... months walking through Gaza’s orange groves and refugee camps,” he wrote. “I’d get up in the morning, pack a lunch and a canteen of water, take my chief of intelligence ... and head off to that day’s sector. I did it methodically, walking every square yard of each camp and grove.”

The plan Sharon conceived in the early 1970s is imprinted on the maps that security forces evacuating Gaza are poring over today: Jewish communities thrust like “five fingers” to divide the narrow seaside strip into segments. That this measure would isolate and impoverish the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants was not part of Sharon’s strategic thinking.

“Standing with Cabinet members on a high hill of dunes, I pointed out exactly what I thought we needed if in the future we wanted in any way to control this area,” he wrote. “I told them we would need to establish a Jewish presence now.”

Sharon succeeded in securing Gaza, but never in subduing it. The territory, dotted with sprawling slums and fetid refugee camps, was the birthplace of the Palestinians’ first intifada, from 1987 to 1993, and became a stronghold of Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas throughout the current conflict, which erupted in the fall of 2000.

The settlements, claiming a fifth of Gaza’s arable land, half its Mediterranean coastline and a disproportionate share of its scarce freshwater, were a constant and festering source of grievance to the Palestinians. As military deaths in defense of the settlements mounted, Sharon gradually came to view the Israeli presence in Gaza as a security liability, not an asset.

More crucially, he saw Gaza as a demographic time bomb. Israel, he believed, could not maintain both its democratic character and its Jewish majority if it held fast to the territory.

Despite his unyielding persona, Sharon has always been able to perceive and act on changing circumstances; adaptability was perhaps his greatest military strength. It was he who oversaw the dismantling of Israel’s settlements in the Sinai peninsula after the landmark 1979 Camp David accords led to a peace treaty with Egypt, which he supported.

“When it comes to him, nothing, but nothing, surprises me,” said Uzi Benziman, an Israeli journalist and author of an unflattering Sharon biography, “An Israeli Caesar.” A supporter of the Gaza initiative, Benziman believes the prime minister is motivated by political opportunism, but also by his notion of what is good for the country.

“He’s someone who is completely uninhibited about going back on promises,” Benziman said. “He really, really doesn’t care what anyone thinks.”

Sharon gives few speeches these days, mainly because his security advisors discourage public appearances. But when addressing any audience, he rarely omits a mention of what he calls his driving motivation.

“I know that it is my responsibility to defend and protect the Jewish people,” he told a Jewish crowd in Paris last month.

In the eyes of the Israeli public, Sharon has always been somehow larger than life, and not only because of his considerable girth. Demonized and lionized, he manages to seem serenely indifferent to both perceptions. One of the few times during the pullout struggle that he publicly lost his temper was when right-wing activists reportedly threatened to vandalize the grave of his wife, Lily.

As Sharon relentlessly plodded toward the Gaza pullout over the last 18 months, Israeli leftists have become accustomed to watching solicitously over the health and well-being of a man they once despised, even if it leaves them rubbing their own eyes in disbelief.

“It feels so strange to worry all the time about whether he is all right,” said Janet Aviad, a founding member of the Israeli group Peace Now.

Sharon brushes aside assassination threats and health concerns. After right-wing activists spread word last month that he had suffered a stroke or a heart attack, he appeared at a Cabinet meeting and announced he was in good health, adding sardonically that he knew that would be a relief to some and a disappointment to others.

The Gaza pullout has reminded many here of the peculiar Israeli political tradition that only the most uncompromising hawk -- a Begin, a Yitzhak Rabin and now a Sharon -- can muster sufficient public support for territorial concessions meant to help achieve peace.

“No one but him could have done this, and everyone understands that,” Aviad said.

Sharon’s intentions in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal remain cloaked. He has consistently said that large Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank will not be relinquished. But he has hinted that the disposition of smaller and more isolated ones will be subject to eventual negotiation with the Palestinians.

“I never answer when asked what the boundaries of the settlement blocks are,” he told Yediot Aharonot last week, displaying a flash of the old battlefield tactician. “And not because I’m unfamiliar with the map.”