Architect of Toughness

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If Sharon has his way, he will follow up the Israeli air raids into Lebanon with an Israeli ground invasion and drive all the way to Beirut. As for the Camp David peace treaty's provisions for Palestinian autonomy, Sharon says: "We are not going to give this area any sign of a Palestinian state, even a symbol of a state."

Sharon has long been contemptuous of American policymakers who have tried to mediate with Israel. "The Americans should not treat Israel as 'natives,' " he says, "and we should not behave as beggars." When, after the Israeli annexation of the occupied Golan Heights last year, the Reagan Administration canceled the U.S.-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding, which Sharon had helped to frame, the general declared that Israel could survive perfectly well without American help. Many Israelis, meanwhile, are deeply worried about Sharon's aggressive policies. There are murmurings among some politicians that Labor should make a supreme sacrifice and join a coalition with Begin's government, which has only a one-vote majority. The price, and the point, of the exercise: Sharon would have to go.