Israel' necessary man: the one and only Sharon.(THE MIDDLE EAST)(Biography)

ARIEL SHARON was the man other Israelis always relied on to do the heavy work, which they knew might well turn into dirty work. A minority admired him without reserve for his daring and ability. The majority were usually critical and dismissive. They were sophisticated, were they not, cool, go-getters, part of the Ph.D. crowd homing in on the American campus, people with universal values superior to crude nationalism, and in their view Israelis and Palestinians had only to sit down together and the brotherhood of man would spring up of its own accord.

Sharon knew otherwise in his bones. Born in British-mandated Palestine, he grew up at a distance from Hitler and Stalin, but every Jew of his generation felt the fear of genocide. Subsequent generations took it for granted that nothing of the kind would ever happen again. That, surely, was the justification for the state of Israel.

But the Arabs persisted in picking up and repeating the old European litany of massacre and extermination. Throughout Sharon's life, these Arabs kept on trying to put their threats into practice. Sometimes they invaded in massive strength, sometimes they infiltrated as fedayeen (guerrillas), pioneers of air piracy, and suicide bombers, deliberately out to murder women and children. In this total form of warfare no holds are barred, and what might be called the ...