Profile Ariel Sharon: He promised never to give up any occupied territories, but his 'pragmatic' decision to evict Jewish settlers from Gaza may have made him more enemies than friends, writes Nuala Haughey
One of Ariel Sharon's nicknames is "the bulldozer," a soubriquet he has earned because of his bulky appearance, his brutish battlefield reputation, his ability to flatten obstacles in his path and his passion for building Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.
On Sharon's orders, Israeli army bulldozers will soon be razing Jewish settler homes in the Gaza Strip, after the eviction of all 8,000 residents from occupied land which Sharon himself encouraged them to colonise.
Anyone who thinks this belligerent ex-general who has fought in every war since the foundation of Israel has risked his premiership, split his own party and caused substantial distress among his people because he believes it will bring peace with the Palestinians would be seriously mistaken. Sharon is no hawk-turned-dove, no De Gaulle, no visionary peacemaker.
He has chosen to uproot settlers from Gaza and a small pocket of the northern West Bank because it is the pragmatic thing to do to secure Israel's future security, and indeed its very existence as a majority Jewish state.
But, while the world focuses on the anguish and pain of Gaza's departing settlers, Sharon is continuing to defy international law by erecting a huge barrier against West Bank Palestinians and ceaselessly expanding settlements there.
He is relinquishing Gaza, then battening down the hatches, girding his country for a conflict whose end is not on the immediate horizon.
Sharon conceived the Gaza pullout plan outside the framework of peace as a unilateral "disengagement" - a short sharp shock to extricate a tiny number of Jewish settlers from the midst of 1.2 million hostile Palestinians in Gaza. In the four settlements in the northern West Bank also due for evacuation in the coming weeks, Sharon is removing 700 settlers from a total of 430,000 in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, who live in the midst of 2.5 million Palestinians.
In the past, Sharon may have supported the notion of a "Greater Israel" stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, but the Zionist dream built on geography survives on demography. And time is running out. With population projections showing that the number of Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will surpass Jews by the end of the decade, Sharon's scheme is a battle to stem an Arab demographic tide which threatens to swamp the Jewish character of the Israeli state.
In one of two televised addresses to the nation this past week, Sharon, who vowed two years ago that Israel would not give up even small, isolated Gaza settlements, said the disengagement was "essential for Israel's future".
"We cannot hold Gaza for good. More than a million Palestinians live there, doubling their numbers every generation." Such compelling logic is cold comfort for Gaza's ultra right-wing religious Jews, many of whom put Sharon into office and who built cosy lives for themselves in this coastal enclave they believe God gave them.
Only Sharon, the feared and famed self-styled warrior, could do what no prime minister before him has dared - to face down the settler leaders who have bullied so many previous governments, and to take the audacious step of redrawing his country's boundaries after 38 years of military occupation.
Sharon (77) is not particularly religious, and although he quotes the Bible, his references are usually more territorial than spiritual. But while he has never shared the religious zeal of the settlers, he nevertheless harnessed it to fulfill his secular Zionist drive to conquer Arab land and fortify the Jewish state.
Gaza's distressed religious ideologues have divined in Sharon's pullout plan signs of lunacy or efforts to cover up corruption scandals which have beset him for years. But many of them realise that they are merely the foot soldiers of a military man who has realised that the civilian settlement in Gaza was not serving its ends. Not only were the settlements costly to defend against attacks by Palestinian militants (both in terms of human life and the defence budget) but they were diluting the Jewish nature of the state. Opinion polls show that most Israelis support Sharon's plan.
So this week, Sharon found himself in the unusual position of being feted for his courage by world leaders who hope the disengagement will offer hope to Palestinians and help revive peace talks, while at the same time being reviled as a Nazi by some of his own people who see the move as a reward to Palestinian terror.
SHARON WAS BORN Ariel Scheinermann, in what was British mandatory Palestine, on February 27th, 1928, to Russian immigrant parents who settled in a rural area outside Tel Aviv in 1922. His father, Samuil, was an agronomist while his mother Vera abandoned her medical studies. He was born on a farm and his home now is his heavily guarded Shikmim (Sycamore) Farm close to Gaza in southern Israel, where he lives amid sheep and cattle and a pet Alsatian, Schwartz.
His security has been beefed up following death threats from extremist right-wing Jews opposed to his disengagement plan. Israel's Shin Bet secret service has not recovered from the drastic failure which led to the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally by an Israeli Jew.
Sharon occasionally grants interviews to foreign journalists in his farm, invariably touring the grounds with them, showing them his citrus groves, cattle and sheep and waxing about the beauty of the nature around him.
His second wife, Lily, who died of cancer in March 2000, is buried on a hill on his farm beneath a willow tree. She was the sister of his first wife, Gali, who died in a car crash in 1962. Five years later their 11-year-old son, Gur, died in Sharon's arms after he accidentally shot himself with an antique shotgun. He had two more sons with Lily.
During the 1948 Arab-Israel war, which for Israelis is their War of Independence, a 20-year-old Sharon commanded an infantry company, distinguishing himself in fighting in Jerusalem where he was almost mortally wounded in a badly planned effort to open the road to the city.
In the 1950s Sharon led the commandos whose punitive military operations established the army's reputation for ruthless reprisals. These include a retaliatory attack in 1953 on the village of Qibya in the West Bank (then part of Jordan) in which 69 Arab civilians were killed when 50 houses were blown up.
Sharon has called the civilian deaths a tragedy, but also said Qibya was meant to teach the Arabs a lesson, a theme which he would return to repeatedly throughout his half-century long military and political career.
Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, took a shine to the young roguish commando leader, inviting Sharon to his home for private chats. In 1960, Ben-Gurion wrote of Sharon that he was "an original, visionary young man. Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional military leader."
Sharon was a brigadier general during the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbours and captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. During the 1973 Yom Kippur war he disobeyed orders to lead his forces across the Suez Canal, a daring move that helped bring the conflict to an end. Some claim that he had considerable responsibility for failures in the Yom Kippur war.
He was the chief architect of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a war which forced Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation into exile in Tunis but which was immensely unpopular both in Israel and abroad and led to some 20,000 deaths.
IN 1983, SHARON was forced to resign as defence minister under Menachem Begin after a government commission found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of more than 800 Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Lebanese Christians the previous year.
For most politicians, such an indictment would have been the end of their careers, but not Sharon, who bided his time.To the Israeli right he remained a hero and he spent the next two decades in about seven different ministerial portfolios, including the post of housing minister in the early 1990s, when he vigorously presided over the biggest building drive in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza since Israel occupied the territories in the 1967 Six-Day War. The idea was to create facts on the ground, without bothering with the legalese, until the reality of Jewish life in the biblical region of Judea and Samaria was too strong to dislodge.
By and large, the plan has worked, with US president George Bush stating last April that any realistic future peace agreement must respect "existing major Israeli population centres". In 1973, Sharon helped create the rightist Likud Party which he went on to become leader of after the decisive defeat of his arch-rival Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1999 general election.
He endlessly poured scorn on the Oslo peace process of the 1990s and after the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks sought to stir a public groundswell against the then-prime minister Ehud Barak, who he accused of being ready to give up Israeli-annexed Arab East Jerusalem for peace.
Sharon's provocative visit to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem in September 2000, an intensely disputed site which is also holy to Jews who call it the Temple Mount, was one of the sparks for the second Palestinian intifada or uprising. Sharon has said he visited the site with a message of peace and that it was used by the Palestinians to launch a pre-planned campaign of violence against Israel.
Israelis, however, did not hold it against Sharon. Five months later, desperate for a leader to protect them from the intensifying Palestinian violence, they elected him prime minister by a landslide on a platform of peace through security (as opposed to security through peace).
His period in office has seen a dramatic upsurge in Palestinian terrorism, especially suicide bombs, and he has responded with all the force that might be expected of an ex-general of his calibre. He vowed following his election that he would not sit down to talk to his lifelong foe, Yasser Arafat, until Palestinian violence ended.
Sharon proposed his "unilateral" disengagement plan while Arafat was still alive, reviled by America and effectively imprisoned in his Ramallah compound, the peace process in shreds. He has said he took the initiative to break the stalemate before the US, Israel's greatest supporter and the chief backer of the stalled 2003 Road Map to peace, attempted to step in.
After the settlers' tears dry, Sharon will face another battle within his own party for leadership. His hawkish rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who desperately wants to be prime minister again, is snapping at his heels.
Netanyahu dramatically resigned as finance minister earlier this month in opposition to the pullout, launching his bid to supplant Sharon who may have to become even more hardline to fend off his right-wing rival and prevent the collapse of the current Labour-Likud governing coalition.
One way or another, Sharon will reap the whirlwind.
The Sharon File
Who is he?
Israel's prime minister, a 77-year-old ex-general and veteran of every Israeli-Arab war
Why is he in the news?
His long-awaited plans to "disengage" from the Palestinians by evacuating occupied Gaza's 8,000 Jewish settlers became reality this week when troops began forcibly evicting residents from their homes
Most appealing characteristic
Keeps Benjamin Netanyahu out of power
Least appealing characteristic
Check out his war record
Most likely to say
"The end justifies the means"
Least likely to say
"I've started (evacuating the occupied territories), so I'll finish"