“I’m not sure how much he enjoys the job, but when he looks at the line of people who want it, he enjoys it very much,” says Barnea, the dean of Israel’s political analysts. Still, for someone who has spent much of his political life either in the wilderness or the woodshed or waiting in the wings, this turn of events is very sweet indeed. Impervious to criticism, convinced he’s always right, he needs little vindication. Sharon has always been a political party of one, without colleagues or heirs or disciples. Not only does Sharon have a heap of trouble on his doorstep, but, as the political columnists Nahum Barnea and Shimon Schiffer wrote recently in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper, there is a long line of people who covet his job. Instead, Sharon proved astonishingly resilient, even indispensable. That experience should have ended his political career. Similarly, nearly 20 years ago an Israeli commission found Sharon, then defense minister, “indirectly responsible”-by failing to safeguard against it-for the horrific 1982 massacre of more than 800 Palestinians by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during Sharon’s star-crossed military campaign in Lebanon. “Human relations is not his outstanding trait,” Henry Kissinger says. That was certainly true on September 28, 2000, when, with peace talks in the balance, he traipsed around one of Islam’s most sacred sites, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, an event that apparently did not cause the second intifada-it had already been brewing-but certainly provided an excuse for it. Sharon has spent a lifetime bending the truth, crossing lines, going too far, ticking off or taking on nearly everyone he has encountered: his childhood playmates, his fellow army officers, his political colleagues, foreign leaders, the press. This is apparently what can happen when a man forever dissatisfied with everyone else, including most of Israel’s important historical figures, is finally in charge, when the most vilified, polarizing, demonized person in Israeli history-someone who once asked the Anti-Defamation League to help him because he was the most defamed minister in the Israeli government-is suddenly among the most appreciated. He knows what he wants and can put everything, including all the tragedies and criticism, into perspective. He has achieved his life’s goal of becoming prime minister.

He has found peace with at least one entity in the Middle East: himself. Bush’s actions to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis.īut despite the bullets, metaphorical and real, flying all around him, Sharon is contented, almost mellow, even jolly.

efforts to include Israel’s enemies in the American anti-Taliban coalition, at least implicitly likened George W. Relations with the United States have been rocky since Sharon, perturbed by U.S. Israeli troops are mired in several West Bank cities they were supposed never to see again Israeli operatives conduct a wave of “targeted killings” of Palestinian activists. Israelis continue to die in suicide bombings and bus shootings and drive-by killings, and Arafat refuses either to punish those responsible or to hand them over to Israel. Israel not only remains at war by Sharon’s own lights, peace with the Arabs is more distant now than it was 53 years ago, when Israel won its independence. He promised to bring peace and security, and he has produced neither. Ask him about even the most serious topic-how the state of Israel has evolved, the persistence of terror, the manipulations of his political rivals, his family history, his relations with the two George Bushes (everything, in short, but Yasser Arafat)-and the famously ferocious Sharon will manage a chuckle.Īt 73 years old, eight months into his utterly improbable tenure as Israel’s leader, Ariel Sharon is plagued with problems. Two aides hand Sharon the latest details of the shooting, which he peruses briefly and then moves on after 50 years of death, dodging it or meting it out or dealing with it, he takes it all in stride. Outside Sharon’s window, sirens sound, and in Israel more than in most places, people take sirens personally. The news outside, as usual, is horrible: barely an hour earlier and a few miles away, a Palestinian from Hebron sprayed gunfire at a city bus, injuring 46 and killing two schoolchildren, whose happy faces will inevitably appear on the front pages of tomorrow’s Israeli papers. Ariel Sharon sits in the kitchen of the prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem, sipping tea with saccharin, fishing an occasional cashew out of a bowl of mixed nuts, and smiling.

Smart shooter israel dagger