Ariel Sharon's Twilight Zone

“I don’t want to compare him to anybody else,” says Israeli President Shimon Peres, “but there was nobody as good as he was.” Peres, 85, who joined the centrist party Sharon founded, Kadima, after decades of fighting Sharon from Labor, adds, with amusement, “You could always expect from him the unexpected. [Moshe] Dayan said about him, ‘I prefer a galloping horse which is difficult to stop than a lazy mule that doesn’t know how to start moving.’”

Dov Weissglas, a savvy Tel Aviv attorney who became Sharon’s trusted chief of staff, recalls the days when Israel was “a teeny, tiny country, a weird strip on the map, with about a million miserable refugees from all over the world.” Because of Sharon, he says, “the whole nation regained its confidence, to successfully survive in this goddamn place in the world. He and his generation became a sort of manifestation that yes, we can live here, we can do it: We can overcome, we can retaliate. He became a myth.”

Or, an anathema.

“He is the largest vegetable in the country,” sneers Moshe Saperstein, an ousted Gaza settler and disabled war veteran who once taught Hebrew School in Brooklyn. Saperstein dissolves into tears when he compares the palmy oasis he and his wife, Rachel, built in the desert (then leveled so Palestinians couldn’t move in) to the plywood pre-fab where they now live temporarily. All because of Sharon: “We were betrayed by our own.” A different enmity comes from Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority. From his office in Ramallah, in the West Bank, isolated from Jerusalem by checkpoints and the meandering “Separation Wall,” the soft-spoken, professor-turned-politician says “Sharon is perceived as the worst Israeli leader to the Palestinians.” The unilateral Gaza pullout, he says, undermined the Palestinian Authority’s power by “disregarding that there is a political partner on the other side. Sharon was doing the kind of things that would make the two states impossible.” To most in the region, however, he is simply forgotten. “It’s like a Greek tragedy, a tragic geschichte [story],” says Reuven Adler, Sharon’s close friend and media adviser, who repurposed the ruthless warrior as the nation’s grandpa for the 2001 campaign, with the winning slogan, "Only Sharon Can Bring Peace." Adler ticks off the misfortunes: Sharon’s first wife, Margalit, died in a car crash. Their young son, Gur, was killed in a gun accident. Sharon lost his second wife, Lily—Margalit’s sister—to cancer in 2000. And then there is Sharon himself. “He came to the top, the most popular person in Israel,” Adler tells me, “and then”—he pushes an imaginary button on the round glass table in his airy Tel Aviv advertising office—“then, he’s finished. Push the button, and that’s it.”

The last public image of Sharon was the grainy frame from a TV news camera on the night of January 3, 2006, showing his shock of white hair through the ambulance window as he arrived at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. A more revealing photograph followed the next day: Ehud Olmert, his designated deputy, looking drawn and distraught in the Cabinet Room, next to Sharon’s large, empty chair. One hundred days later, Sharon was declared permanently incapacitated, and Olmert got the big seat. Today, Olmert is on trial for corruption (amid reports of receiving “envelopes of cash”), having been replaced as prime minister by his longtime Likud rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. The center is out. There is no left left. Peace negotiations are frozen.

So, what if Sharon were still in office? Might things be different?

“I think we would have a Palestinian state,” says former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, calling it “the logical conclusion” of the Bush administration roadmap. Eager to praise her old negotiating partner (“a tough little tank driver”), she also thinks Sharon would have pulled out considerably from the West Bank. “I do,” she insists. “Now, it would have required a Palestinian partner who was prepared to take half a loaf, not a full loaf, because nobody was going to get everything they wanted. But I think the terms were available, and maybe he was strong enough to lead a consensus in Israel and get it done.” “Sharon was somebody who could deliver,” she adds. “ You could trust him to do what he said he was going to do.”