Sharon: Israel's Iron Man

A Napoleonic figure in Israel's history, with all that that implies.

He's not someone that you see and you can stay indifferent about.

You have an opinion.

You love him or you hate him,

you're afraid of him or you want to be with him.

He had so much political strength

that he could do almost everything he wanted.

A brilliant battlefield soldier who consistently disobeyed orders.

There was this tension, which I never really resolved,

between the charming, courteous, grandfatherly figure

beloved by so many people in Israel,

and the brutal, savage, violent, often irrational military commander

who believed in savage retaliation against the Arabs.

Sharon shunned dialogue,

almost always preferring the iron fist.

Sharon was a very intelligent man.

He used bully tactics to achieve his ends,

but his ends were always very cerebral

and always very carefully worked out beforehand.

He was known as "the godfather of the settlements",

but he finally withdrew settlers from Gaza.

The decision about the disengagement plan

is the most difficult of all.

He will be remembered as the man who reneged on his own ideology.

The one who built the settlement, and destroyed it.

But a debilitating stroke cut his Prime Ministerial career short.

Sharon was in a coma for years,

leaving Israel to weigh up his legacy.

He made it legitimate in Israeli political life

for settlements to be evacuated.

He did more harm to the state of Israel

than any Israeli state citizen I know until this very day.

Born in 1928 to educated parents of Russian origin,

Arik, as he was called, lived on a farm in a socialist cooperative -

a "moshav" - at K'far Malal, a village north of Tel Aviv

in British-ruled Palestine.

His childhood bred in him a love of the land

that was never to leave him.

His mother, like his father, was stubbornly independent -

IN the cooperative but not OF it, a cut above their neighbours

and fenced off from them.

TRANSLATED:

His father was strict, teaching his son never to be a coward

and arming him with a dagger to help guard their orchard from Arabs.

Arik was a lonely lad who enjoyed his schooling.

But when it came to supporting classmates in a strike,

he reflected the family spirit. He was uncompromising.

We asked Arik, "Why don't you come with us, to strike?

"We all are striking. We think that the teacher... did something that we didn't like."

So he said... His answer was very simple.

"I didn't come to strike in school.

"I came to learn in school."

We were on strike for three days.

And Arik didn't change his mind, no.

We came back to the class, we got punished.

Arik didn't get punished, no.

Arab villages dotted the landscape.

These were turbulent times and, as Sharon himself was later to write,

life never seemed safe.

These were the formative years of Ariel Sharon,

fearing the Arabs, hating the Arabs,

seeing the Arabs as the natural, eternal enemy.

Quarrelling with everybody around, sticking to his own beliefs,

being absolutely certain that you are right,

everybody else...is wrong.

At 17, Ariel Sharon joined the semi-underground Haganah,

precursor to Israel's army.

British rule in Palestine was in deep trouble.

Israel declared independence in 1948.

Her Arab neighbours attacked,

Sharon was wounded and never again trusted Generals in their bunkers.

He remained a fighter and, under the wing of the legendary Moshe Dayan,

he was by 1953 commanding Unit 101,

an elite commando force designed to punish marauding Palestinian guerrillas.

He gave us the feeling that we could do everything,

because...he never said,

"Listen, I'm not sure

"that you can do it."

We used to take many risks, really,

not just in the battle -

to cross mountain, to cross river, to do such things.

'The tiny village of Qibya on the Israel-Jordan border is in ruins

'as survivors tell how troops struck across the frontier at night.

'They accuse Israeli forces of levelling buildings with grenades, shellfire and explosives,

'trapping entire families in the rubble.

'The attack prompts the US, England and France to deliver their sharpest rebuke to Israel

'since its founding and to demand action to punish the guilty troops.'

Qibya, it was accident, it was an accident,

because...no-one...

thought - for sure, not Arik -

that something like this can happen.

I was myself there with the unit,

and I myself checked most of the buildings

that were destroyed.

And I can tell you that I didn't see anybody there.

It is clear that he got an order to kill as many people as possible,

this was a written order he got.

This must be remembered. It was not something which he initiated.

The order was to kill as many people as possible.

Now, he went there and he killed everybody, just...blew up the houses with the people inside them.

His legacy will always be one of massacres,

dating back to the 1950s, even.

The establishment of the notorious 101 Unit,

the very painful Qibya massacre,

a massacre of children and woman and...

tearing down homes, blowing up homes and whole families.

The death toll was 69 Palestinians, a retaliation for the murder of three Israelis.

The world at large condemned the raid

but Israel's Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion -

seen here with Sharon - stood by his protege.

TRANSLATED:

Sharon then took over the army's paratroopers,

but in the 1956 Suez campaign against Egypt,

he disobeyed orders,

dispatching a parachute unit to capture the Mitla Pass in Sinai,

at heavy cost to his troops.

Criticised later by Ben-Gurion, he conceded, "Sometimes I make a mistake."

Yael Dayan was a war reporter who became a Labour MP.

She was attached to Sharon's division in 1967

and saw another side of the man.

He was very good with people,

I suppose that's what impressed me.

He was very calm. He did not panic or...

He talked to the drivers and the cooks and the machine-gunners

the same way that he would talk to the Chief of Staff or to his superiors.

He had a sense of humour bordering on the cynic,

and it was a very good atmosphere.

He was in his element, the battlefield was his element.

In the Six Day War, aged 38, a Major-General by now,

Sharon showed his gift as a battlefield commander,

knocking the enemy off-balance. His Sinai battle plan

is still taught as a model of its kind.

Sharon in the course of time became a very good General,

it has to be said. A General...a tactical General

rather than a strategic General,

somebody resembling Patton more than General Eisenhower.

He knew each and every place

in the battlefield.

And I think that he had a kind of talent

that when he was watching the map,

it's my imagination, but I think that he saw the actual...land.

Not the map, not the piece of paper, but he saw the hills, the dunes,

the canals, everything.

But despite his success on the battlefield,

Sharon's private life was marked with tragedy.

His son Gur died aged 10 whilst playing with an antique gun.

Gur's mother, Sharon's first wife,

had already died in a car crash in 1962.

Sharon was now overcome with grief.

His troops mourned his loss with him.

Then, it was back to business.

Sharon was deputed to clamp down on the Gaza Strip in 1971,

pursuing PLO guerrillas, 700 or 800 of them.

And, as ever, he punched hard.

TRANSLATED: In 1970, we sat near Gaza and he said to me,

"Eli, I will put an end

"to terror in Gaza." I said, "Arik, I read all the books on terrorism

"and I never read that anyone has ever managed to end terrorism by force." He said to me,

"Come back in three or four months and see for yourself."

Sharon tamed Gaza with, as he put it, "goodwill and humane values".

But Palestinian militants were killed and arrested,

thousands of houses demolished, roads driven ruthlessly through the refugee camps.

He was dubbed "The Bulldozer".

He was a senior commander going with the units from house to house,

from bunker to bunker, from orange grove to orange grove,

to explain what he meant.

Three months later, Gaza was quiet.

The terror was crushed with an iron fist, with a vicious hand.

He cast fear in Gaza. He was feared.

Feared in Gaza and unloved by his fellow Generals,

Sharon's maverick behaviour led them to block his promotion

and the top job of Chief of Staff eluded him.

He believed in his way

and it was very hard for him to accept...his commander decision.

Eh, he was a kind of trouble-maker along the years.

D'you believe orders should always be obeyed?

I believe that orders should be obeyed

but sometimes you come to situation

where you have to think about the orders that you get.

To whom should you be loyal, or more loyal?

To your troops... or to your superiors?

And I must tell you that... in many times

I believe you must be more loyal to your troops

than to your superiors.

HE SHOUTS TO HIS DOG

Sharon, at 45, was shunted into the army reserve.

The land, though, was in his blood.

"When you know every hill and wadi and orchard," he wrote later,

"when your family is there, that is when you have power."

He bought a big farm in southern Israel with his wife, Lily,

a turning point in his life.

The soldier-farmer moved into politics, typically doing it with a bang,

creating a new centre-right party coalition called Likud - Unity -

and teaming up with Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister.

He had considerable impact on Israeli politics

by establishing the Likud...

because until he established the Likud,

Israel was dominated by the Labour Party and by the Labour movement.

By creating the Likud,

he offered the Israeli audience a political alternative,

and because of that, really,

we started a period when government changed.

The Suez Canal was Sharon's prescient location for his first party political broadcast.

It was autumn 1973. Israeli troops shared his complacency.

HE WHISTLES

On Yom Kippur, Judaism's most sacred holiday, Egypt and Syria attacked.

They caught the Israelis napping.

When the war started,

about 2,000 Egyptian artillery guns

opened fire. Dozens of aircraft were bombing us.

So all the Sinai Desert was shaking.

It was unbelievable.

Most of my brigade were either injured or killed.

And then Arik Sharon came as a kind of reinforcement unit immediately.

He gave us the feeling...

..that we will be able eventually to win the war.

He was quiet, precise, determined...

and very human and very kind,

because he knew by then

that we went through hell until the reserve unit came.

Sharon at his battlefield best, but even here his wife and two boys remained an inspiration,

as Geula Cohen discovered during the war while she was staying with Lily.

One day she answered the phone and all of a sudden I hear her singing.

So I...I-I couldn't understand.

I knew that she is talking to him in the middle of the war -

and what a war - and she's singing a very lyrical song.

And she told me that it's like for him the ammunition.

For, this is his weapon - the lyrical song.

For me it was to know the man again and again,

to love him more and more,

and to believe that we must win.

With such songs, with such commanders, we will win.

Sharon was at loggerheads as ever with fellow generals,

but it was HIS historic crossing of the Suez Canal

that won the 1973 war on the Egyptian front.

The bridges were not ready...yet.

And Arik Sharon took a very brave decision

to start the operation knowing that during the coming hours...

..everything would be settled.

And it was very risky.

Because of Arik Sharon's leadership, we continued to cross the Suez Canal,

and to fight, and I think that the people of Israel

owe a lot to Arik Sharon.

Investigated later and acquitted of the charge of disobeying orders,

he was hailed as the Israeli hero of the Yom Kippur War.

"Arik, King of Israel" was the popular cry.

Your now famous canal crossing in October

has been variously described

as a brilliant manoeuvre and military madness.

Which description is true?

I'm afraid both are true!

Because...without...madness,

I don't believe that anybody would have done it.

To believe that you can do it in one night,

a certain element of madness should be there.

But I would call it a positive madness!

After the Yom Kippur War,

he published a call to his soldiers

in which he more or less blamed the government

for what we then perceived, or what many then perceived,

as the disaster of the war, the surprise of the war,

and in the call, he said, "Now I'm going back to the civilian arena,

"and I expect that you will follow me there, as well."

Now, in Israeli...terms of what is right and what is wrong,

involving politics with the army - it was a scandal.

He used very deliberately his reputation as a military hero to gain political benefits.

Israel's 1977 election was a crossroads for the land,

ending almost 30 years of Labour Party rule.

Relatively liberal Zionism gave way to right-wing nationalism.

Sharon became Minister of Agriculture with Menachem Begin as the new Prime Minister.

What occupied territories?

If you mean Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip,

they are liberated territories.

They are part, an integral part, of the Land of Israel.

Populating these territories with Jewish settlements became a priority.

Sharon was the godfather of settlement,

turning tented outposts into small towns, with a consistent policy of expansion.

Sharon also saw this in military terms as a security issue.

But the dream was of a greater Israel that Messianic Zionists believed was theirs.

His greatest achievement is

to settle the historical...

..places of the people of Israel after the Six Day War.

He was the one who... Who changed our map.

It is the map, the road map of... the historical road map of ours.

And I'm sure that it will stay this way or other way. You can't... You can't change it any more.

And this was Sharon's message, "The land is ours - all of it, Gaza included."

The essence of everything in the eyes of Sharon, and people like him,

is the war between Israel and the Arabs.

This is the beginning and the end of everything.

The war is given.

It is a fact. It cannot end. There never will be peace. The Arabs will never accept us.

Now, the settlement effort is a weapon of war.

The bulldozer is more effective in that than the tank.

The tank conquers territory, but to hold the territory, you need the bulldozer.

You have to change the landscape and turn the Arab landscape into a Jewish landscape.

The pioneer settlers called themselves Gush Emunim - Bloc of the Faithful.

Most, unlike Sharon, were religiously motivated.

But with government help, secular Jews were to join them, and Sharon was their patron.

They had the spark, and he took this spark

and turned it into a very, very great fire.

And there is no one settlement in Judea and Samaria

that his fingerprints are not in.

Sharon the soldier, eyeing the narrowness of Israel between the West Bank and the Mediterranean,

explained to me why settlement was a matter of security,

but also of Zionist import.

We had a problem here. How to keep in our hands...the high...

important strategic terrain, which was overlooking the coastal plain.

How to keep in our hands and how to prevent in the future,

when we'll come to any kind of political solution,

from having it in the hands of anybody else.

Yet it was Sharon who supervised the destruction of the Yamit Settlement in Sinai in 1982

following a peace agreement with Egypt - an odd pre-echo of Gaza 23 years later.

How did the godfather of settlement justify his change of heart?

Sharon managed to dismantle Yamit

because Sharon had no ideology

whatever, in any...in any subject.

And when he decided or got the approval to dismantle it,

he had no big problem to dismantle it emotionally or psychologically

because, according to my view, he was a very pragmatic person, even an opportunistic person.

And that's the key to understanding him.

This was the period that I didn't speak to him - for years after Yamit.

Then he... It was 20 years ago

or 15 years ago that he said,

"I regret what I did. It was a mistake,

"and never I'll repeat it again. I'll never repeat it again."

Sharon had become Defence Minister in 1981 - a real prize given his failure to become Chief of Staff.

His real aim in life was to become Minister of Defence.

Begin did not want to give him the job.

He gave it to Ezar Weissmann.

Begin was afraid of Sharon. He once said, jokingly,

that if Sharon becomes Minister of Defence, he'll surround the Knesset with his tanks.

It was a joke, but...

a telling joke.

But four years later in '81, he had no choice. Weissman was dead.

He had no valid reason to prevent Sharon - a famous general, a victorious general -

from assuming this post, and he became Minister of Defence.

Power at last for Sharon,

but he was, as Alexander Haig, the US Secretary of State,

was to discover when he met him in Washington,

still a member of the awkward squad.

His first greeting to me was to pound the table...very...

very noisily and say, "When are you going to start to treat us as an ally?"

I replied and mimicked him, and pounded the table equally hard

and said, "When you begin acting like an ally."

So that began the conference.

Sharon's next adventure was the invasion of Lebanon,

against the PLO leader Yasser Arafat,

who was Beirut-based, and controlling the militant groups

who fired rockets from Lebanon into Israel.

Sharon saw his opportunity

after a particularly heavy rocketing of Galilee.

Israel's main ally, the United States, was dismayed.

Their worry was the risk of provoking Syria,

whose army had been deployed in Lebanon for the past six years.

I wanted to really impress him

with the dangers that he was toying with.

And I told him in no uncertain terms

that this was not going to be anything that would be taken lightly,

reiterating our policy and warning against the conflict.

Israeli tanks were only supposed to clear Palestinian guerrillas out of the Lebanese border zone.

But Sharon had a grander scheme, a drive all the way to Beirut -

not quite what he'd told his cabinet colleagues.

When the decision was taken to invade Lebanon,

he spoke of occupying 40km.

And then on the second day of the war,

I began to realise that really he's trying to push the army further on,

and that he's using all sorts of pretexts in order to explain it

and create the impression that it's only for a short...

for a very short distance.

And on the third day, I realised that he was deceiving us,

that, actually, he has in mind something entirely different.

And the result was, of course, that one kilometre was added to another

and, in the course of time, he reached Beirut.

Several cabinet ministers have said publicly that you deceived them.

That you implied you were only going to go 25 miles and went to Beirut.

I never deceived any of them.

And every step that was taken in Lebanon

was as a result of a cabinet meeting

or a cabinet resolution. Every step.

Beirut was besieged in a three-month campaign,

with Sharon improvising daily and informing his cabinet colleagues bit by bit.

The man himself turned up to view the scene.

The campaign was brutal, killing at least 15,000 civilians.

One would have to say that from an Israeli point of view, what they did was justified.

They did it a little heavy-handedly.

From an American point of view, they managed to split the administration in Washington -

the Reagan administration - right down the middle.

SINGING

Under an American-brokered agreement,

some 10,000 of Yasser Arafat's guerrillas quit the Lebanon.

For Sharon - a tactical success.

But his larger strategy for redesigning the Middle East was a failure.

Arafat was forced to board ship and flee the land.

Sharon failed in particular in one of his key ambitions.

He believed that by driving the PLO out of Lebanon, he would defeat Palestinian nationalism at the root,

and that was nonsense. That was shown as nonsense when

the first intifada broke out in the occupied territories in 1987.

He didn't realise that he created a vacuum,

in which a much worse element came into power in Lebanon.

And instead of the PLO we've got Hezbollah,

which hardly existed before the Lebanese war.

And so he was really the father of Hezbollah.

Worse was to follow. Sharon let his Lebanese Christian allies

into the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Putting the Falangists, who were professional murderers,

who already had a long record of atrocities in Palestinian camps,

putting them into the refugee camps, you knew what the outcome was.

I once said that you put a snake in the cradle of a baby -

poisonous snake - you don't have to prove you wanted to kill the baby.

Sharon's troops lit the skies with their flares to help the Falangists,

Inside the camps, the Falangists butchered hundreds of Palestinians and their families.

Israeli forces did nothing to stop them.

The world was appalled.

It remains one very dark chapter, for which Sharon was responsible,

and he will be held responsible

throughout history.

But that doesn't mean he wasn't responsible for an ongoing,

systematic, incremental policy of bloodshed

and of violence and militarism and oppression.

Many Israelis too were horrified.

Some 400,000 of them took to the streets in the biggest demonstration

the country had seen. This was the humane voice of Israel talking.

Sharon's name was immutably sullied.

And with Israel's cabinet against him, he was to be sacked as Defence Minister.

'The commission declares that Sharon holds personal responsibility

'and recommends he resign his post as Defence Minister.'

Of course, he deceived the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister realised it in the end.

And that affected him and sent him into a depression.

He retired from public life and very soon after that he died.

Sharon, once again, retreated with his wife Lily to the farm.

Surprisingly, despite Sabra and Shatila, he survived politically.

No longer Defence Minister, but still in the cabinet.

He felt betrayed by his colleagues' acceptance of the damning report.

I'm the only Minister of Defence in the world,

the only one,

who left his post

and went back to work on a tractor

on his farm

as a result of what Christians did to Muslims. The only one!

But the time he spent with Lily, he later wrote, "was more healing than anything else could possibly be."

For her, Arik was God.

I have seldom seen such adoration.

And it was very moving, actually.

And he was good to her. I mean, it wasn't a one-sided thing.

His family and his land was his strength and his shelter.

I remember him telling me once

that his strength does not come from any political apparatus of any kind.

It comes from the land and the family.

That's why it was important for him.

It's important to realise with Sharon

that he's not an entirely rational man.

There's this love of the land, love of classical music.

Very powerful emotions at work.

Deep, deep attachment to the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

A belief that Israel has to stand on its own. A contempt for outsiders.

And this sort of drive that Israel had to do it on her own.

Many Israelis supported him.

There were demonstrations against him, but also those in his favour.

Just as Israel has so often been divided, so was the public attitude to Sharon.

He drove his tractor, but his political career was far from ruined.

He was still in the cabinet and continued to fund Jewish settlement in occupied lands

whilst campaigning for more Jewish immigration to Israel.

Out of sight quite often, like Yasser Arafat, but never out of mind.

Arafat himself returned in 1994 to the Gaza Strip.

It was a time of hope,

of the Oslo Peace Accords of the Labour government,

which began a dialogue with Arafat and the Palestinians.

Sharon, though, had opposed Oslo from the beginning.

A somewhat inflammatory speech. Little did he realise that a month later, Israel's PM Yitzhak Rabin

was to be murdered by a Jewish religious zealot for pursuing peace. Likud returned to power.

Sharon was back as Minister for National Infrastructure.

It didn't last.

In this yo-yo of Israeli power, Prime Minister Netanyahu also came and went.

Neither he nor Sharon favoured dialogue with the Palestinians.

At Camp David, though, Netanyahu's Labour successor Ehud Barak

did make a bid for peace with Arafat. But it collapsed,

with President Clinton blaming the Palestinian.

Sharon was out of government, but not out of the headlines.

In September 2000, he paid a politically charged visit

to the Noble Sanctuary, the third holiest site in Islam.

Things quickly turned sour. Shortly after,

another Palestinian uprising started - the second intifada.

There was no provocation here. It was from the other side.

Sharon's visit to the mosque was deliberately designed

to provoke the Palestinians,

to unleash a whole new cycle of violence.

We knew then that the situation was extremely volatile

and we said this at that time to Ehud Barak.

When he went to the Temple Mount it was a totally cynical move.

He didn't go from religious motivation.

Sharon wasn't a religious person. It was a totally cynical political move

to embarrass the Ehud Barak government. And it succeeded.

There is no question that the intifada brought Barak down,

that violence helped elect Sharon.

But I don't think it's accurate to say Sharon calculated that his visit

to the Temple Mount would spark a violent response,

which would then get him into office.

That is simply a misreading of history.

He was like a lightning rod.

He always managed to attract and to create

situations of volatility and extreme violence.

Away from politics, Sharon's private life had been dealt a tragic blow.

His beloved wife Lily died from cancer, a loss that he felt keenly.

From now on, he would have to face the world on his own.

Five months later, by now the Likud Party leader,

he fought a formidable election campaign.

His spin doctors portrayed him as Sharon the cuddly, family man.

His luck was, as a politician,

first of all he's an excellent politician, which was why he succeeded in politics.

He was a born politician - not a statesman.

He was the opposite of a statesman.

Very cunning. And he knows how to present his views in a way that deceives the public.

If he was able to deceive Menachem Begin, who was a shrewd politician,

where is the surprise in the fact that he deceived the public?

Escalating Palestinian violence played into Sharon's hands

as Labour's Prime Minister faltered.

Barak, in the face of the violence,

continued to make concessions to Arafat.

The Israeli people just rejected that notion

that they would give more under fire.

They were very angry about it

and they wanted a tough response.

And Sharon was in effect the epitome of the tough response.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had won the elections hands down.

Forget Qibya, the Mitla Pass and Lebanon,

in their fear and anger, Israelis turned to their trusty bulldozer. For Likud, a time of rejoicing.

The day after his election win, he visited the Western Wall,

Judaism's holiest shrine, adjoining the Al-Aqsa mosque where he'd caused such a rumpus the previous year.

I will bring peace to the citizens of Israel...

and stability to the Middle East.

But when violence flared,

Sharon favoured the iron fist -

particularly in the occupied territories.

EXPLOSION AND SIRENS

Palestinian militants played brutally into his hands.

A suicide bomber at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv,

not long after his election, killed 19 teenagers and injured 120.

Chairman Arafat is an enemy...

..because he decided about strategy of terror

and formed the coalition of terror.

Sharon's election year ended

with tanks moving in on Arafat's headquarters in Ramala.

Ceasefires had come and gone.

The Israeli prime minister unleashed waves of assaults

against the Palestinian leader, besieged in his offices amid the ruins.

I am appealing to the whole international world...

to stop this aggression.

He tried to exclude Arafat from the political arena,

he described him as irrelevant.

We saw how he surrounded him physically.

We saw how he blew up the headquarters,

we saw the relentless bombing and shelling.

There was a deep visceral loathing of Arafat,

which went far beyond the rational.

I remember the chief of Israeli Military Intelligence

raising his eyebrows when Sharon was going on about Arafat.

Even his courtiers found sometimes

that Sharon's obsession with Arafat to be beyond what was justified.

His actions not only ended that political era in Palestinian life,

but ended also the chances of peace for a long time.

SIREN WAILS

'I remember the day there was the terror attack in the Pat Junction in Jerusalem.

'I spoke with the Prime Minister at 7.15 when it happened.'

He said, "I'm going there." It took me three seconds to understand

there was no way to convince him not to go.

I went there with him. We walked out of the car

a metre and a half from a bus that had exploded.

On the bus, there were two dead girls - decapitated, naked because the fire burned their clothes.

And then we were walking and passing the 24 body bags that were lying on the ground

and this was his responsibility.

He was the Prime Minister of those people.

It was his responsibility what happened.

It was his responsibility to make sure it never happens again.

It happened time and time and time again.

I saw his frustration

at his inability to control Palestinian violence.

His resort to the reaction, really, he'd had in the 1950s -

of believing that the only way to deal with Palestinian violence

was to kill ten Arabs for every Jew who was killed.

I remember being with him once when news of an attack came in -

outside the settlement of Emmanuel on the Northern West Bank -

and seeing him react with cold, irrational fury,

picking up the phone to his Defence Minister, Fuad Bin Eliezer,

and ordering retaliation without any real thought of the consequences.

Just this basic primeval instinct

that violence has to be reacted to with violence...

and several eyes for every Jewish eye that had been taken.

WOMAN WAILS

Sharon ordered an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in April, 2002 -

a response to suicide bombings.

More than 50 Palestinians were killed,

almost half of them civilians,

and more than 20 Israeli troops.

He thought that terrorists should be fought

as long as there's no-one from the Palestinian Authority who is doing what he should do

and fight terrorists. Terrorists should be fought by Israel

and at the same time, on a parallel route,

peace process or any accord should be moved forward.

And that's what he did.

Then came the wall,

a security barrier separating Israelis from the West Bank.

Sharon was slow to support the barrier, concerned it would be seen

as a ruse to expropriate more Palestinian land.

He was afraid that the barrier would be a political barrier.

I told him it should be a security barrier, but it should be built.

It took a few months until he was convinced.

Then, he behaved as if it's his own idea.

And that was Ariel Sharon. When he understood professionally

that we need a barrier, he was behind it,

and when he was behind something it was a bulldozer.

With Sharon as boss,

the levels of violence on both sides remained high.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, wheelchair bound, quadriplegic and half blind,

was victim of one of Sharon's so-called targeted killings.

WAILING AND GUNFIRE

Yassin was spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas,

which promoted suicide bombings.

A martyr was created.

Targeted killings, assassinations were the most controversial

part of Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism.

But after 9/11 the United States engaged in targeted assassinations.

And so, therefore, there was no ability any more,

no willingness, to criticise Israel.

President Bush was Sharon's crucial ally. They had a strong rapport

and Bush backed him to the hilt.

'George Bush, evidently, was the person who'd come closest'

to Sharon's worldview, his ideological outlook,

but most importantly, the person who gave to Sharon

what other Prime Ministers of Israel had not been able to get -

American acceptance that Israel should keep settlements it had taken by force

in the occupied territories and to annex them to Israel

before the final peace deal with the Palestinians was done.

Sharon was extremely skilful

in feeding Bush's White House the information

he thought they needed - the so-called intelligence

he thought they needed to get them to take a particular view

on a particular issue at a particular time.

And his two coups were really

persuading Bush that Arafat was a liar, something we all knew,

and that Bush thereafter refused to deal with Arafat.

And then persuading Bush to endorse,

more or less, Sharon's vision of withdrawal from Gaza.

The Gaza Strip was one of the most densely populated places in the world,

packed with poverty-stricken Palestinians.

Sharon, who'd encouraged Jewish settlers to move to Gaza,

now said they had no future there.

Sharon made it clear...

over and over again that the Gaza disengagement

was consistent with the road map and would lead to the road map.

And he much preferred a unilateral disengagement from Gaza,

which would enable him, he thought,

to define the territory that Israel could keep on the West Bank.

He didn't want a Palestinian partner for this process

because it meant he would have to give up more than he was prepared to agree to on the West Bank.

For Sharon, Yasser Arafat remained a problem.

Until, that is, he went abroad for hospital treatment and died.

His departure was presented

as clearing the way for political discussion.

Sharon pressed on with his plan for Gaza.

In all my years of service,

I have made hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions,

many in regard to life and death.

But the decision about the disengagement plan

is the most difficult of all.

THEY JEER

Sharon's Gaza policy got him into serious hot water -

not just with the settlers, but with his own party.

They booed him. Many hated the very notion

of even a truncated Palestinian State.

He was always against his party.

When his party was not willing to hear about a Palestinian State,

he came during pre-elections and said,

"This is a fact, there will be a Palestinian State next to Israel."

And he was criticised by key members in his party.

When he said that, "Well, you know, we believed in Greater Israel,

"but this is something that looking towards the future is not possible

"and I'm redeploying unilaterally from the Gaza Strip," he lost the referendum.

The party was something that he always knew to put aside.

It was Israel and the party, and Israel was more important.

THEY SHOUT

For Israel settlers, the Gaza withdrawal was a nightmare -

for them it was part of the land of Israel.

SHOUTING

The fallout was largely peaceful,

though some settlers had to be physically removed.

As for Sharon's motives - the views differed.

The debate, I feel, about whether Sharon had changed his spots,

had changed hearts finally and that he was giving up Gaza or other land

because he'd fundamentally changed heart about making peace with the Arabs and the Palestinians,

I think is nonsense. He didn't believe that permanent peace with the Palestinians was possible

or would not be possible for 40 or 50 years to come.

And the only issue was whether he was going to be confronted with enough American and international pressure

to make the deal to achieve real peace with the Palestinians or not.

The withdrawal from Gaza was very blunt.

Rather than a context of an agreement with the Palestinians,

he gave it for free to Hamas.

Because he did not believe there was any difference between Hamas

and the people. They were all Arabs.

As for Likud, his rebellious party, Sharon simply dumped it,

leaving it shrunken and enfeebled.

Sharon founded a new party - Kadima - taking many Likud Ministers with him.

Kadima was a hot favourite for the next election.

But at the beginning of 2006, Sharon again shocked the world.

He suffered a major stroke.

He would remain in a coma till his death.

Ehud Olmert, his Kadima brother-in-arms

and a former mayor of Jerusalem, took over.

Sharon's image dominated the election,

underwriting Olmert's campaign.

Kadima won.

Likud collapsed.

The old general, even in his absence, had won another victory.

But, as Sharon lay incapacitated in hospital,

his vision of a path to peace began to fall apart.

Israel was drawn into a brutal new war in Lebanon.

Over a thousand Lebanese and 165 Israelis were killed.

In Gaza, the Palestinian militant group Hamas had taken power

and Israel had blockaded the Strip.

Volleys of rockets were repeatedly fired

on Israeli towns close to the border.

Israel hit back, pounding Gaza for three weeks.

Over a thousand Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

Iran's disengagement policy had not delivered the security it promised.

Regardless of what he did politically,

his legacy is one that made violence

and bloody resolution of issues

the modus operandi in Palestine, against the Palestinians.

Now, Sharon's new party, Kadima, has collapsed,

replaced in power by a coalition run by his old party, Likud.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has shown

little interest in talking to the Palestinians.

The settlements have continued to expand.

The Americans are trying to revitalise talks,

but peace in the Middle East seems as elusive as ever.

And for many, this is Sharon's legacy.

He wasted our time.

We could have done so much about occupation,

about settlements, about peace.

He was an obstacle to these things

and it's sad, because he had the capacity to lead,

and he led the country in the wrong direction.

He did not believe in diplomacy.

He really believed

that Israel could live on an island,

detached from the world, detached from the Middle East.

He was centre stage in all the main events of Israel's bloody story,

and his place in its history is secure.

If he would have stopped one day to ask himself

"What do you want history to say about you?",

I think, if I can imagine, he would have said

"A strong leader, but a leader for peace."

The fact of the matter is,

he broke the mould.

No other prime minister was prepared to take on the settler movement.

Yitzhak Rabin gave up his life because he antagonised the settlers.

And Sharon not only had the courage,

but he had the political capability to do that.

And I think in many ways, in terms of his contribution to peace,

that will be his lasting legacy,

that he made it legitimate

in Israeli political life

for settlements to be evacuated.

Loved and loathed in equal measure,

Sharon was a formidable man who lived by the sword.

For many in Israel, he is a hero beyond criticism.

For others, his legacy will forever be tainted

by the destruction he left in his wake.