How Sharon won Israel’s trust

ARIEL SHARON is fighting for his life. He’s a man of potent primal urges, of violence, of combat, cunning and brilliant, a sharp manipulator, brave and corrupt. He has swung like a mighty pendulum between construction and destruction, and blatantly ignored limits, whether international boundaries or the boundaries of the law. Clearly, he has seen himself as a man destined to make history, not one who yields to circumstances.

Time after time, he instigated large-scale political and military maneuvers meant to change the world utterly, to make it fit his own vision. And he always did so with determination, sometimes with brutality, without regard for what means he used to achieve his ends.

Even his sworn opponents are concerned today, as Sharon lies in a hospital bed. They hope, of course, that he will recover from his illness. But they also are worried about the huge vacuum that has suddenly opened in the Israeli leadership.

Because Sharon, in an amazingly short time, has metamorphosed from being one of the men most hated and feared by most Israelis into a respected leader, accepted and even much loved by his people. He has become a kind of big, powerful father figure whom Israelis are willing to follow, with their eyes closed, to wherever he may lead them. Their faith in him is so great that they do not even demand that he tell them which direction he plans to go, or what his foreign policy will be, or what state of affairs he intends to create for them.

Not a man, not even the government ministers closest to him, knew Wednesday night -- less than 90 days before the upcoming elections -- whether Sharon intended, after his reelection, to commence peace negotiations with the Palestinians or to conduct another large, unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank. Suspending their right to know, Israelis have preferred to put their future in Sharon’s hands, to put aside their personal judgment and their right to information and to criticize their country’s policies.

With the huge swell of support that the public has given Sharon’s new political party, the Israeli majority has said to Sharon: “We trust you to do the right thing, and we don’t even want to know the details.”

Here are a few events and statements about Sharon that have been etched in the Israeli consciousness. They offer one possible portrayal (just one, because his personality is complex enough to allow several).

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s mythological first prime minister, said in the 1950s of the young, bold and brilliant officer: “If he could overcome his bad habit of not telling the truth, he could be an exemplary military leader.” Menachem Begin, prime minister in the 1980s, said: “Sharon is liable to surround the prime minister’s office with tanks.”

In the 1950s, when he wielded no little influence on the Israeli army’s way of thinking and carrying out its missions, he was an officer in the elite Unit 101. Then he was known for his violent, brutal and extreme treatment of Arabs, both combatants and innocent civilians. His commanders, such as Moshe Dayan, warned him about his disdain for human life, including the lives of his own soldiers. Time after time, his advancement in the military hierarchy was blocked because of reservations and severe criticism of his behavior by his superior officers.

IN 1972, as general of the southern command, he conducted a campaign to expel Palestinians from Gaza in order to make room for Israeli settlements. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were cruelly, violently displaced. Their homes were destroyed and their wells filled in. That was the beginning of Sharon’s career as the architect and contractor of Israel’s settlement enterprise.

It is difficult to imagine how the hundreds of flourishing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories could have been built without his determination, his questionable methods and his ideological fervor. As a politician, he built more and more, making sure to locate them so that they would sever Arab population centers one from the other, and serve as obstacles to any accommodation with the Palestinians.

After the 1973 war (in which he commanded the division that crossed the Suez Canal), Sharon entered politics. As a member of the Knesset and as a cabinet minister, he opposed the peace treaty with Egypt, virulently opposed the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, even opposed the peace treaty with Jordan. In 1982, when he served as minister of defense, he took advantage of the confidence of his prime minister, Begin, and entangled Israel in the Lebanon war. Thousands died on both sides, and the Israel Defense Forces spent the next 18 years deep in the Lebanese mire.

His conduct during the Lebanon war, and his responsibility for the massacre that Lebanese Christians carried out against Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, led an official commission of inquiry to disqualify him from serving as defense minister. His visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, when tension between Israel and the Palestinians was combustible, was the match that set off the bloody Al Aqsa intifada.

But a short time after he was elected prime minister, a change came over him. No one predicted it. At this particular point in his life, Sharon seems to have reached the conclusion that Israel could not achieve any further territorial or diplomatic gains and that he had to concentrate on securing what the country had achieved so far. We can only presume that, when he viewed events in Israel, he saw that the country appeared to be losing its way, that its people were in despair about the conflict, which seemed to have turned into an endless, low-grade war.

The Geneva initiative -- a process of informal negotiations between leading Israelis and Palestinians -- produced an alternative, nongovernmental peace plan that pressured Sharon to set out on the most surprising and bold gambit of his life. He realized that the land had to be partitioned between its two peoples, that the occupation could not continue, that the Palestinians would have their own state and that thousands of Israeli settlers would have to be evacuated from the Gaza Strip.

Just as he had done every other time he tried to change the world, Sharon carried out the Gaza disengagement with his signature determination and brutality, with virtuoso political manipulation. He established facts unilaterally, displaying personal and public courage that can only be admired.

What will happen now? Israel is a democracy, but we are witnessing a phenomenon that recalls what happens in totalitarian states when a leader leaves the stage. Sharon’s rule was so centralized and total that it seems as if there is no man who can take his place.

The clear will of the majority -- expressed time and again in opinion polls -- is to end the conflict with the Palestinians and establish, finally, Israel’s permanent borders. Yet the initial impression is that no other Israeli leader would have the political backing to take the difficult and painful steps necessary to reach this goal. Bloodletting was avoided during the evacuation of Gaza in large measure because most Israelis obediently accepted the authority and will of Ariel Sharon.

THE PEOPLE saw Sharon as their unchallenged, natural leader, mature and wise. He became a kind of “democratic monarch.” Was it his physical presence, his huge farm in the Negev, his profound, almost erotic connection to the land, his tales of heroism? Something about him said power, confidence and stability. It linked him to Jewish warriors and heroes of past ages. Israelis compared him to Bar-Kochba, to Judah Maccabee. His masses of admirers replaced King David’s name with Sharon’s nickname in a familiar folk song and sang “Arik, King of Israel.”

Israel now faces a period of political instability. There is no way of knowing who will be its next leader, but we can certainly lament that we will probably miss, or put off for an uncertain period of time, the great opportunity that Sharon created when he set Israel on the road to the end of the occupation. Even if he did so while completely ignoring the Palestinians, and even if he did nothing to shore up the other side, which must be our partners in peace, we cannot but admire his courage and determination.

He did what he thought necessary, in complete contradiction of his previous ideology. For now, we can only wish him recovery, and mourn the fact that only in their eighth decade do Israeli leaders realize that force is not a solution, that concessions and compromises are necessary, and that we must walk the painful but inevitable road to peace.