Indomitable fighter poised for victory

On Thursday, September 28th, a contingent of security personnel bristling around him, Ariel Sharon, 72-year-old leader of Israel's opposition Likud party, made a brief visit to the Temple Mount, the compound that houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem's Old City, and overlooks the Western Wall.

To put it mildly, Mr Sharon is not the Arab world's favourite Israeli leader. In many Arab eyes he remains notorious as the architect of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a misadventure that saw him branded with "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, and stripped of his Defence Minister's job, by an Israeli commission of inquiry.

Through this filter of bitter past experience, Mr Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount - coveted by Jews as the site of the biblical temples, and by Muslims as the scene of the Prophet Mohammed's ascent to heaven - was seen as a deliberate provocation, even though hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims visit the area each year.

Mr Sharon did not so much as set foot in a mosque. His very presence, and the substantial security detachment he brought with him, were regarded as a "symbolic reconquest" of the disputed area, which Israel had captured from Jordan in the 1967 war.

The following day, after Friday prayers that had drawn tens of thousands to the Mount, clashes broke out between Palestinians protesting the Sharon visit and Israeli police. Seven Palestinians were killed. More than three months later the clashes are continuing: about 300 Palestinians and 40 Israelis have died.

While President Clinton scrambles to salvage some semblance of goodwill from years of shattered peace efforts, mutual Israeli-Palestinian mistrust is overflowing, the naked hatred more tangible than it has been for years. And Ariel Sharon is en route to take over as Israel's prime minister.

The bitter irony of this descent into violence, and its simultaneous revival of Sharon's political fortunes, is that while the Likud leader never believed in the viability of the peace process now tottering on its last legs, and never consented to shake hands with the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat (whom he insists is a "war criminal" and unreformed terrorist), his motivation on that fateful September day was entirely mundane.

He was seeking to emphasise dramatically his commitment to maintaining Israeli rule throughout Jerusalem, his misgivings over the concessions being contemplated by the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, mainly because he knew he was about to be eclipsed as opposition leader by the Comeback Kid, the former prime minister, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.

It was an open secret that, after a year's "time out", Bibi was ready to return to oust the unpopular Mr Barak. The portly, pensionable Mr Sharon, who had been appointed by Mr Netanyahu as a stop-gap leader, would be swiftly shunted aside, ran the conventional wisdom, and Bibi would reclaim his rightful position. Mr Sharon, after all, was proving unpopular in the polls, uncharismatic in the Knesset. A spent force. A bulldozer finally out of fuel.

It was to change that perception, to ignite enthusiasm in the opposition, to remind Israel that he, and not Mr Netanyahu, was leading the Likud, that Mr Sharon went walkabout.

For the peace process, the consequences have proved cataclysmic. For Mr Sharon, the impact has been spectacular. He is a politician reborn. The toast of the right. The man who, barring a similarly spectacular reverse, will defeat Barak in the prime ministerial elections on February 6th, barely a month away.

That success, should it come, will be a triumph of persistence, the achievement of an indomitable fighter who has survived and bounced back personally, militarily and politically, time and again, where lesser spirits would have been broken.

Born on a farm in northern, pre-state Israel in 1928, Ariel Sharon likely inherited his indomitability from his father, Shmuel, the one farmer in the area who sensibly defied the conventional wisdom and, where others were growing citrus fruit, made an improbable success growing mangoes and avocados.

The farmer's blood still runs through Sharon's veins. He is most comfortable when at his own large farm in the southern Israeli Negev, most relaxed in the photographs where he is tending his sheep.

But as with most young Jews growing up in his era, the inevitable first career was the military, and the teenage Sharon joined the Haganah, the prestate army, and began a rise through military ranks that saw him recognised as the smartest tactician in uniform - albeit, and this is crucial, far from the smartest strategist.

He was wounded in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, shot in the stomach and left for dead outside Jerusalem during a battle in which Israel's forces were badly routed.

It was an experience, he would indicate, that had two consequences. It persuaded him of the need for an iron-cast army rule that Israel later adopted - never to abandon soldiers wounded in the battlefield - and it convinced him that most of those above him in the ranks were either immoral or plain incompetent.

It may also have injected him with a ruthlessness as regards his enemies. For his rise to prominence a few years later was as the head of a commando force named Unit 101, operating beyond Israel's borders, behind enemy lines, to root out the Arab gunmen who were raiding Israel, and to punish the civilians who were hiding them.

He was enormously effective, but often an embarrassment as well, and already a figure of controversy; never more so than when, in a 1953 operation, his forces left 69 Jordanians dead in the village of Qibya, blowing up homes that Sharon later insisted he had assumed were empty.

Sharon thrived in Israel's wars, commanding an armoured division in the Sinai desert in the Six-Day War of 1967, and spearheading the crossing of the Suez Canal in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, an action that changed the course of the conflict.

But his disinclination to follow orders too exactly, his commanders' awareness that he was constantly capable of surprising them with initiatives that might or might not turn out to their taste, blocked his rise to the military heights, and saw him elbowed away from the chief-of-staff's job.

And so he entered politics. If he could not lead the army from within, he could, he hoped, command it from parliament and the cabinet table.

By now, along with military frustration, Sharon had endured personal tragedy, too. His first wife, Margalit, whom he had married in 1953, had been killed in a car crash less than a decade later. (Sharon subsequently married her sister, Lily, a warm, supportive figure whom he adored, and who died just recently.)

And in 1967, soon after that year's war, his eldest son, Guy, was killed in a chilling accident, shot dead by a neighbour's child who accidentally fired Sharon's gun. Another son, Omri, has now emerged to lead his father's current prime ministerial campaign. As in the army, Sharon the politician has thrived despite setbacks that would have crushed most others. He helped create the Likud party that saw Menachem Begin become Israel's first right-wing prime minister in 1977, but strived in vain for years to win the party leadership.

And so he tried his luck with all kinds of other political groupings and, his critics would say, with all kinds of political stances. Though widely perceived internationally as a no-nonsense political hawk - a man who once argued unequivocally that Israel would "not trade land for peace", and that "As far as Israel is concerned, there is a Palestinian state: Jordan" - he is a more complex politician than that, to the comfort of some and the dismay of others.

On the one hand, he championed the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank when named agriculture minister by Begin in 1977.

On the other, it was arguably his influence that persuaded Begin to sign the Camp David peace accords with Egypt during that same period, and who personally oversaw the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Sinai as part of those accords.

At one memorable Likud party conference in 1990 he seized a second microphone to shout down Begin's successor, Yitzhak Shamir, accusing the diminutive hardliner of being "soft on terrorism" and overly ready for compromise with the Palestinians.

Yet, while viciously dismissive of Arafat, he has met privately for serious talks with Arafat's urbane deputy, Abu Mazen, and, when briefly foreign minister to Netanyahu in 1998, he backed Bibi in signing the Wye River Memorandum, in which Israel agreed to relinquish a 13 per cent chunk of the West Bank to Arafat's control.

His late former army colleague, Mordechai Gur, would explain such apparent inconsistencies with withering simplicity. "Sharon has one thing in mind: power," Gur believed. "Everything he does is self-serving."

But his best friend, the journalist Uri Dan, has always insisted there is both ideology and pragmatism at work. The painful demolition of Jewish homes in Sinai coincided with the huge expansion of settlements in the West Bank; the dialogue with the Palestinians was an inevitable consequence of Israel's peace treaty with Jordan, and was begun in the reluctant recognition that Palestinian statehood was now inevitable, and that Israel's need was to limit the scope of that statehood.

For all Dan's tireless attempts at explanation, however, it is Gur's assessment that comes to mind where Sharon's most dramatic initiative is concerned, the Lebanon War of 1982.

By now promoted to minister of defence, finally in command of all those men and women in green, Sharon launched an invasion that was expected merely to try to force enemy gunmen back from Israel's northern border, but turned into a full-scale war that took the army into Beirut, saw the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, and left Israel trapped in Lebanon for years, losing hundreds of lives.

When the Kahan Commission of Inquiry forced his removal from the Defence Ministry, he was reduced to serving as minister without portfolio. Now a figure of revulsion in Arab and many moderate Israeli circles, it was clear that Sharon's political career had come to an ignominious conclusion.

Except that it hadn't.

It has taken him almost two decades. But the irrepressible Sharon is back, a wrinkled, slowed, would-be avuncular figure, preaching unity and harmony, arguing sadly that Barak's policy "will not bring peace; unfortunately, it will bring the opposite".

He is promising to give Bibi the Foreign Ministry and Barak the Defence Ministry should he win the election, campaigning for the prime ministership under the improbable slogan "Only Sharon Can Bring Peace".

Yossi Beilin, the Justice Minister in Barak's current, failing government, is adamant that behind the new Sharon permasmile lurks what he calls "the ugly Israeli", a Sharon as hardline and untrustworthy as ever, a leader who, if elected prime minister, will do for Israel again what he did in 1982 - lead it into war.

Ten years ago the respected political scientist, Prof Shlomo Aronson, said much the same thing, in bleakly succinct terms: "Sharon is a man you can gladly give a division to. But not the whole army or, God forbid, the whole country."

Ironically, many on the right mistrust him, too, remembering those Sinai settlement evacuations, that support for compromise with Egypt, that backing for the Wye Memorandum. And they shuddered again this week when Sharon spoke, without elaboration, of the "painful" compromises that might need to be made for peace.

But one thing is crystal clear. Whether the new Sharon is ready to trade some parts of the West Bank for a peace treaty with Arafat, he will not offer the scale of concessions that Barak has put on the table.

There will be no voluntary division of Jerusalem, no Palestinian sovereignty in the Old City, no abandoning of the settlements on the Jordan river that constitute what he calls Israel's "eastern security border".

President Clinton's latest, last, peace formula envisages Israel relinquishing control of 90something per cent of the West Bank to Arafat. Sharon's maps, the sheaf of papers he has carried with him for years, unfurling at every opportunity, provide for Palestinian control over maybe half of the territory, with Israeli-controlled roads and security zones dividing Palestinian areas into small, disconnected blocs.

Even allowing for Sharon's undimmed fighting spirit, the rise to his current status - 20 per cent ahead of Barak in the polls, prime minister-in-waiting - is as much a consequence of others' miscalculation as his own political skill.

Netanyahu turned the Likud over to him confident that Sharon could be casually tossed aside when the moment came. But Sharon used Netanyahu's "time out" to cement relations with politicians from other right-wing parties, who ultimately rebuffed Netanyahu's attempted comeback.

Other, younger leaders in the Likud, more popular than Sharon with the party faithful, misjudged the swirling political winds just a few weeks ago, and cancelled planned leadership bids, leaving Sharon as the unopposed opposition leader.

Sharon requires one more miscalculation to make it to the top, and it is unfolding right now. As Arafat and his advisers criticise Clinton's peace proposal, and the violence that began three months ago continues, Barak's popularity is plummeting, and Israeli scepticism about the viability of peacemaking is growing.

Barak might just defeat Sharon and win re-election, but only if Arafat orders his Fatah militiamen to put away their guns, re-embraces negotiation and accepts the Clinton formula for peace. It's not going to happen.