THE GENERAL.(Ariel Sharon)

As far back as I can remember, I remember Arik Sharon. First, he was Arik of the Paratroopers, whose brutal acts of retaliation in the nineteen-fifties, after the War of Independence, exemplified the young Israeli state's reply to attacks by Palestinian infiltrators. Then he was Arik of Sinai, whose military wits in the battle of Abu Ageila, a strategic crossroads in the eastern Sinai, played an important part in the intoxicating Israeli victory of 1967. Then, in 1971, Sharon was Arik the Terrible, who temporarily eliminated Palestinian terror in the Gaza Strip by using collective punishment, threatening civilians, and applying a shoot-to-kill policy against suspected terrorists. In 1973, he was Arik, King of Israel, who confounded the Egyptians by crossing the Suez Canal, cutting off the Third Army, and turning what could easily have been a terrible defeat into victory. In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, as a civilian minister, he was Arik the Settler, who established more than a hundred Israeli outposts in the West Bank and Gaza, in a hubristic attempt to seize permanent control of large swaths of Palestinian-held territory. "Grab as many hilltops as you can," he later told the settlers. Finally, he was for us, the young liberals of Israel, Arik the Leper, who, in 1982, led the country into a catastrophic war in Lebanon and bore a great measure of responsibility for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

As far back as almost every living Israeli can remember, Sharon was in battle, pushing onward, annexing more and more territories to the Jewish state, and depriving it of its last remnants of moral innocence. More than any other single figure in Israel, Sharon led the transformation of a relatively modest and ascetic state into an occupying bully.

When Sharon swept the country into the Lebanon war, he appeared in my nightmares. When some eight hundred Palestinians were slaughtered at Sabra and Shatila, he made me ashamed of being an Israeli. And when he established the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza he caused many Israelis to fear that these settlements, and the occupation of Palestinian territories, would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Zionist enterprise.

As a citizen, and as a writer for the liberal daily Ha'aretz, I was someone whose political life became, in a sense, a life in opposition to Ariel Sharon, to all that he had done and had come to stand for. Indisputably, Sharon had rare military talent, and, unlike other right-wing politicians who specialized in rhetoric and incitement, he had the capacity to shape the reality in which we lived. He played a considerable role in saving the state of Israel in the nineteen-fifties and in 1973. But Sharon also seemed a perversion of the Zionist dream of the strong and fearless Jew.

Then I came to know him. Our first meeting, in the late summer of 1999, began at the Likud Party headquarters in Tel Aviv and continued in a daylong conversation at his home, Sycamore Ranch, a thousand-acre farm in the western Negev. By this time, Sharon was no longer a demon in Israeli political life. He was seventy-one, an affable, nearly irrelevant old general who was serving as the temporary head of a shattered opposition party. He did not talk politics, preferring to tell me at great length about his family's origins, in Russia. He explained that his inner strength had its source in the fact that, unlike many Israelis, he came from a family that had worked the land for generations. "I never had a political power base," he said. "The power to do things comes to me from the family and the soil, to which I have a unique attachment."

Surprisingly, this secular, Israel-born soldier defined himself not as an Israeli but as a Jew. Israel's raison d'etre, he said, is to be the place where the Jews will finally be cured of their mortal illness, their "eternal wandering." But he had doubts about whether they would, in fact, be cured. He felt a profound uncertainty about the Jews' ability to maintain sovereignty, and to hold on to the land and to preserve it. He spoke about the Arabs with great envy--they, he said, knew much better how to keep their honor and their land. "If there is something that I respect about the Arabs, it's the fact that they never change their position," he said. "The Palestinian leadership did not give up any of its demands, not one inch."

Sharon took me on a tour of his ranch in a four-by-four, pointing out his orchard, his sheep, his bulls. He said that his primary concern was with the Jewish future: "What will become of the Jews in thirty years' time, and what will become of them in three hundred years' time?" He complained that young Israelis didn't know their Bible. They weren't familiar with their history. They didn't feel a right to this land the way he did. "One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish," he said.