Who Is Ariel Sharon?

Sharon: Israel's Warrior-Politician, by Anita Miller, Jordan Miller, and Sigalit Zetouni (Academy Chicago, 400 pp., $30)

Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon has the looks of a Tyrannosaurus rex. And of course a baleful bloodthirsty monster is what Arabs generally think he is. He symbolizes everything they hate about Israel. Most days of the week, Yasser Arafat or his sidekicks bombard him with epithets like Nazi and racist and war criminal, and so do columnists and editorialists from Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad, all of them naturally under government control. Western leftists demonize him in similar terms. The French left-wing paper Liberation lately published a cartoon of Sharon as a kosher butcher slaughtering Arafat. Accusing him of war crimes, the BBC staged a mock trial on television. Some magistrate in Brussels wanted him brought before Belgian justice, itself a comic turn among the nations. It's safe to say that for these politically correct mouthpieces Sharon has an even uglier reputation than Saddam Hussein.

Since its inception, the state of Israel has had to defend its right to exist. The Arab neighbors may establish armistice lines or even sign treaties, but as a whole they balk at accepting Israel's legitimacy, and attack with regular armies or guerrilla forces as occasion arises. The Left hopes to appease this intransigence through the holy grail of a peace process, in the expectation that concession and withdrawal in one sphere or another will generate the indispensable goodwill. Contradictorily, the Right believes that only an unyielding Israel will eventually persuade the Arabs that the costs of their military adventures are too high. The more the Arabs attack, in this view, the worse off they must find themselves. (In the words Dickens put into the mouth of a French aristocrat in A Tale of Two Cities, "Repression is the only lasting philosophy.")

The current intifada is testing to the maximum the tension between these two approaches. Does Sharon really have only a lasting philosophy of repression? Or is he carrying within himself some vision of Israel finally at peace -- and, if so, what form does this take? These questions require an immediate answer.

These biographers are very sparing with personal information that might offer clues, as if they couldn't quite trust themselves to handle so controversial a character. They do not appear to have had any special access to Sharon or those around him; they do not identify his close friends and have very few quotes from anyone who has ever known him. They turn exclusively to printed sources for their information and -- more surprisingly -- for their opinions. Objectivity is the book's keynote.

Sharon's luck, or ill luck, was to be born in 1928, and his entire adult life has therefore been spent in the turbulence of the state's formation and survival. His parents had fled from the Communist revolution in their native Russia, to settle as pioneers on a farm in the early days of the British Mandate of Palestine. They seem to have been an unsociable and abrasive couple, and their son to be a chip off the same block. In this portrait, he is coldly intelligent, ambitious but remote, locked into himself without charm or humor. (At least he enjoys music.) He has experienced much tragedy. His first wife died in a car crash, and their eleven-year-old son was killed by a playmate in a freak accident with an antique shotgun. Sharon married his wife's sister, and she died not long ago of cancer. Heritage and circumstances have taught him to go his own way.

Evidently he was a natural soldier and leader. Since his youth, the abiding question has been how to secure the borders of Israel, first from freelance infiltrators, later from invading armies. Moshe Dayan was among contemporaries and colleagues critical of Sharon, and the two of them engaged in lifelong rivalry. Nevertheless in 1953 Dayan appointed him commander of an elite force known as Unit 101, recognizing that he was "superior in his ability to think." Unit 101 was responsible for raids against saboteurs and guerrillas behind Arab lines.

During one such raid, in the Jordanian village of Qibya, the unit blew up houses before checking that the inhabitants were out. Sixty-nine civilians were killed. The world was shocked and indeed continues to hold it against him, but according to these biographers Sharon felt that the raid had had a "strong, positive effect" on civilian and military morale.

Promoted steadily, Sharon played an important part in the set-piece wars provoked by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat and their allies. In broad terms, Sharon has always believed that Arabs are brave and effective soldiers, but handicapped by weaknesses of organization. It was imperative therefore to exploit those weaknesses by rapid movement, preferably attacking from the rear to create surprise. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, he was opposed to building the so-called Bar Lev line along the occupied right bank of the Suez Canal, on the grounds that such a static position failed to take advantage of the Israelis' remarkable capacities of improvisation and mobility.

Events were to prove him right. The 1973 war tested Israeli intelligence and military power as no other war did. To be personal for a moment, as a war correspondent I happened to arrive at the pontoon bridge thrown over the Suez Canal in time to witness Sharon leading his tanks across to the left bank, from where he could have advanced on Cairo. Sitting in the open turret of a tank, in a very visible white shirt, he looked like someone enjoying a sporting event. It was his finest hour.

Until the 1967 and 1973 wars Israel had been widely perceived as a socialist state, and it was therefore comme il faut to worry about its fate and to dispatch teenagers to work on some kibbutz. The Egyptians, Syrians, and Arafat's PLO had been proxies of the Soviet Union, and their defeat by Israel checked Soviet influence in the Middle East, contributing to the overall outcome of the Cold War. Israel is occupying Arab territories only because it was attacked from them. Sharon did not initiate the policy of building settlements there but he believes that it obliges the Arabs to pay for their mistakes. Whether or not this is wise in itself, the occupation of the territories also allowed the Soviet Union to wage one of its last and most successful political campaigns, putting out incessant worldwide propaganda that Israel was imperialist, what's more a tool of the United States, and so forfeited its right to a place on the map. Here was a manipulation of public opinion of the kind Orwell called a "Two Minute Hate," and its malign effect still conditions the present animus against Israel in general, and focuses the accusation of imperialism on Sharon in particular.

The biographers do not hide Sharon's failures. At one point he tried to launch a political party of his own, Shlomzion, no doubt because he felt in competition with Menachem Begin, Dayan, and indeed every contender in sight. The Lebanese Phalange under Elie Hobeika carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. As minister of defense, Sharon was responsible for the nearby Israeli forces, which could have intervened to stop the Phalange. Absolute yet misplaced confidence in his own abilities had allowed Sharon to pursue a grand strategy without paying attention to the detail. This was his worst hour.

By 2000, already past 70, he should have retired to his farm. His political opportunity arose when Arafat that September chose to renew the intifada. Sharon had always argued loudly and obstinately that the Oslo peace process was a cover behind which Arafat was preparing for war. Apparently proved right by the outbreak of the intifada, and at the same time lucky in the dog-fighting of Likud, his political party, he was elected prime minister.

The biographers devote half this very long book to his less than two years in office. In detail, repetitively, and at the expense of all other issues, they gazette the actions and reactions of the two sides during this intifada, duly padded out with press commentary. The disproportion altogether unbalances what is supposed to be a biography.

Palestinians are under the widespread illusion that suicide bombing is a tactic that must eventually lead to the long-sought downfall of the Israeli state. Their religious and nationalist frenzy is at least as great a threat to their own society as it is to Israel. Against expectations and in spite of propaganda to the contrary, Sharon has been moderate so far in his response, evidently out of the conviction that Israel must take one carefully calibrated step at a time to raise the cost of terror, until -- one hopes -- the moment comes when the Palestinians refrain from their own self-destruction. For him, it is still a matter of secure borders, as it has been all his life. The majority of Israelis share this perspective and approve of Sharon, according to polls. Fifty years after his first combats, he is still having a "strong, positive effect" on morale.

For the present, it seems unlikely that any Palestinians will come forward with an alternative that would encourage Israel to replace repression with compromise and a resumption of genuine political negotiation. Whether Sharon is right or wrong in his approach, whether repression breeds only resistance, are topics upon which these biographers pass no judgments. They simply break off their narrative with a brief and neutral mumbling about "complex problems." Objectivity is all very fine, but this book is too close to copping out to be the guide that it should have been in this time of crisis.