Peace -- on a warrior's terms
I MET ARIEL SHARON 30 years ago when I was making the rounds as the new Jerusalem correspondent for the
Everyone then remembered the famous photo of Sharon -- the general with the bandage around his head, leaning on a tank in the Sinai Desert, contemplating a bold crossing of the Suez Canal into Egypt that would reverse the early setbacks of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Sharon, adored by his men, was a brilliant, pugnacious, and resourceful field commander in the mold of George S. Patton, with a similar flair for self-promotion.
As Admiral Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye at the battle of Copenhagen, to avoid reading the more timid signals from his superiors, so Sharon would tell his radio operators to report communication difficulties when his commanders tried to reach him to urge caution. He was nearly fired for insubordination.
He had earned respect in the War of Independence and in the Six Day War in 1967, but the Yom Kippur War made him a national hero. Unlike Moshe Dayan, Sharon had no appreciation or sympathy for Arabs, and they would suffer under his lash. He believed passionately in a greater Israel to include all the territories captured in the Six Day War and famously backed Jewish settlements to make it politically impossible for any Israeli leader to give occupied lands back.
Yet when Egypt made its peace with Israel in exchange for the Sinai, it was Ariel Sharon who had to dismantle Jewish settlements there at the bidding of Prime Minister Begin. I doubt the Labor Party could have ever agreed to return all the Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty.
In 1982, as minister of defense, Sharon would persuade -- some would say con -- Begin into invading Lebanon and driving all the way to Beirut in an act of transformational warfare that was designed to install a friendly Lebanese government and destroy his arch enemy, Yasser Arafat. Just as Donald Rumsfeld promised that Americans would be welcomed with flowers in Iraq, so did Sharon underestimate the difficulties and soon enough Lebanon became Israel's Vietnam -- a long and painful experience that in the end did Israel no good and much harm.
Sharon's political nadir was the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla by allied Christian Lebanese militias, whom the Israelis had brought up to do the killing.
The Israelis remained just outside but turned the night into day with illumination rounds so their surrogates could see for the task at hand. An Israeli fact-finding commission found Sharon indirectly responsible for the atrocities.
It was Sharon's provocative walk on the Temple Mount that did much to provoke the second Palestinian Intifada, the uprising that would bring him to the height of political power.
He spent much of his time smashing any vestiges of Palestinian claims to statehood.
Yet something changed when Sharon became prime minister. He seemed to realize that he had a greater responsibility, and he managed, with considerable political skill, to engineer a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, dismantling his beloved settlements --something no other Israeli leader has done. He could do it because of his record -- like Nixon and China -- and he probably will be Israel's last leader to have led men in battle during the birth of the nation.
We will never know whether Sharon was simply sacrificing Gaza in a strategic move to hold on to most of the West Bank, or whether, as head of a new party, he would have promoted really meaningful concessions for a Palestinian state. But the distance he traveled toward a two-state solution would not have been believed 30 years before.
No Israeli leader ever so dominated Israel's relationship with its most important ally, the United States. Time and time again, he would get away with simply ignoring George W. Bush's initiatives.
Bush called Sharon ''a man of peace" at a time when he was not. But if Bush was right about him in the end, you can be sure that the peace would have been on the old general's terms.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
