The Lonely Warrior

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But what made Sharon such an enduring—and ultimately appealing—politician was his obdurate self-belief, a refusal to be bound by the constraints of negotiated agreements or ideology. Whatever Sharon did, he was at least as devoted to the fight as to the cause. That is what made him one of the greatest—some peers say the greatest—military commander in Israeli history. It's what enabled him, from a variety of Cabinet posts, to construct settlements in the face of international opprobrium. But it's also what allowed him not only to evacuate Gaza but, 23 years earlier, to tear down settlements in Egypt's Sinai peninsula and use water cannons to force out the Israelis there, putting Israel in compliance with Israel's 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.

Sharon loved the military. He writes in his autobiography that it was in the camaraderie of the army that he first experienced expressions of familial love that he had missed out on as a child. He grew up in Kfar Malal, a moshav, or collection of farms in which major equipment is jointly owned. His parents were so prickly that the family was ostracized on the moshav. Life was hard. Theirs was a three-room house made of mud and manure walls. Sharon's response was to focus on work. "You could lose yourself in it," he wrote.

At 13, armed with a club and a dagger, he joined the older moshavniks guarding the fields at night from sporadic attacks by Arab villagers living nearby. "They were not afraid of anything," he observed of the moshavniks, a quality he emulated the rest of his life. He respected the moshavniks' views about the local Arabs: they believed the Arabs had "full rights in the land" but only Jews had rights "over the land." Translation: you can live here, but under us.

Sharon, known as Arik to everyone, was just 14 when he joined the Haganah, a Jewish militia in British mandatory Palestine. Six years later he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that erupted after Israel declared its independence. As he rose through the ranks, he played a significant role in every one of Israel's wars. In 1967 he commanded one of three divisions that wrested the Sinai peninsula from Egypt.  In 1973 he led a counterattack in Sinai that broke through Egyptian lines and ended up just 60 miles outside Cairo.

Where Sharon fought, there was usually controversy. As head of Unit 101, Israel's first commando team, he was assigned in 1953 to avenge the murder of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers by Palestinian infiltrators from the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon's forces destroyed a few dozen buildings in Qibya, killing 69 villagers and earning Israel a censure at the U.N. Charged with cleaning Palestinian fighters out of the now Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip after the '67 war, he did so with ruthless efficiency. It was Sharon who pushed Israeli Prime Minister Begin to bomb Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981, an operation applauded today but widely condemned then.