Architect of Toughness

He first won military fame in the 1950s for his swashbuckling leadership of fierce raids against Arab villages and refugee camps in Jordan and Gaza. After the 1973 October War, his soldiers hailed him "Arik, Arik, King of Israel." Former Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman once wrote: "In war, I'd follow him through fire and flood, but political life has different values." Says a ranking general: "His world is divided into black and white, good guys and bad guys. According to his philosophy, 'Whosoever is not with me must be against me.' "

Defense Minister Ariel ("Arik") Sharon, 54, is the undisputed architect of Israel's bombing raids into central Lebanon last week. If he is not the most powerful man in Israel today, he is second only to Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Sharon covets Begin's job. "Arik would sacrifice everything, and I mean everything, to get the Prime Minister's post," says an Israeli general. Begin had misgivings about awarding the powerful Defense portfolio to Sharon, who had a reputation for disobeying superiors on the battlefield. Begin, who held the Defense post himself for more than a year after Ezer Weizman resigned in May 1980, once remarked to Deputy Prime Minister Simcha Ehrlich: "Sharon might surround the Prime Minister's office with tanks." Not even Sharon's military colleagues trust his commitment to free government. Says former Cabinet Secretary Arye Naor: "If ever, God forbid, he reaches the supreme position, I wonder what the fate of Israeli democracy will be."

Such harsh judgments have never daunted Sharon. Born in what was then the British mandate of Palestine, he joined a paramilitary youth organization at the age of 14 and soon after began a military career that spanned nearly three decades. Passed over for the post of Chief of Staff in 1972, he resigned from the army and entered politics, eventually aligning himself with Begin's Likud coalition. When the opposition Labor Party pulled ahead in campaign polls early last year, Sharon organized a huge busing operation to bring 300,000 voters to the West Bank for guided propaganda tours emphasizing the security risks involved if Israel were to give up the occupied territories. After the election victory Begin supporters convinced the Prime Minister that Sharon deserved the Defense Ministry post. Last summer he got it. Initially, the burly (5 ft. 6 in., 235 Ib.) Sharon surprised everyone with his low profile and relatively moderate statements. He set up a civil administration in the occupied West Bank. It seemed a puzzling policy for a military firebrand whose campaign against terrorism in the early 1970s included bulldozing roads through refugee camps in occupied Gaza and the Sinai. But by last month it was evident that Sharon's civil administration cloaked the toughest policy Israel had ever exercised in the occupied territories.

Few West Bankers were fooled. They recalled that it was Sharon who, as Minister of Agriculture from 1977 to 1981 during the first Begin government, all but doubled the number of Jewish settlements established in a decade by previous governments. Declaring his intention to stamp out any support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Sharon last month fired three duly elected West Bank mayors. In the demonstrations that followed, twelve Palestinians were killed.