"What Would Sharon Do?"
Gregory Levey, The Globe and Mail, August 5, 2006

The last time I saw Ariel Sharon was in the cabinet room in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office when he cautioned the small group of us standing there not to eat too many jelly doughnuts. It was last December and the traditional food for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah was laid out on a long cabinet table in the centre of the room.

His joke elicited laughter from everyone present, not only because it was quite obvious that he had himself eaten far too many jelly doughnuts in his time, but also because Mr. Sharon was obliquely referring to the minor stroke he had suffered just a few days before. The doctors seemed to agree that the stroke had largely been caused by the prime minister's weight, and that it was probably a warning of worse things to come.

With his humour, Mr. Sharon seemed to be reassuring us that he really was invincible, just as many Israelis seemed to believe.

But, of course, the minor stroke was indeed a sign of worse things to come: It was only a few days later that a far more major stroke would strike the prime minister, incapacitating him.

In less than two weeks, it will be a year since Mr. Sharon made the historic move of pulling out of the Gaza Strip. That was a very optimistic time in Israel, when it really seemed the region might be turning a corner. Now, the situation seems hopeless again, and will quite possibly only get worse.

With the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, I don't think I am alone in thinking about Mr. Sharon, and wondering what might have been if his health had not taken such a sudden, total plunge.

If he were still at his desk in the prime minister's office today, what would Mr. Sharon do?

In my short time working for him - writing English speeches and dealing with the foreign press on his behalf - it was hard for me to imagine him as the bloodthirsty war criminal he was seen as in the Arab world, or even as the hero he represented to many Israelis. To me, he seemed more of a grandfatherly figure, friendly, warm, making jokes about jelly doughnuts, and seeming like a relic from a bygone era.

When he was struck down by his second stroke, though, I witnessed first-hand the visceral centrality he held in the Israeli mind. Suddenly there was uncertainty and confusion not just in the country, but in the prime minister's office itself. Colleagues of mine who had worked for Mr. Sharon for years seemed almost destroyed by what had happened to him, and walked the halls of the building looking like zombies. The general populace acted somewhat similarly, rallying behind Ehud Olmert, but confused about what the future would bring.

Mr. Olmert was initially very conscious of the fact that to the Israeli people he was little more than a place-filler. When he was interviewed, he would often explain that, in making decisions, he asked himself, "What would Arik do?"

By now, Prime Minister Olmert has stopped asking this question publicly. He is a strong and capable leader in his own right. But in the heat of the crisis that surrounds him today, it is hard to believe the question does not still nag occasionally: "What would Arik do?"

The question is easier asked than answered, mostly because Mr. Sharon did so many things over the course of his long career, some of them contradictory and many of them revolutionary.

Born in 1928, he fought and almost died 20 years later in the war for Israel's independence, and never really stopped fighting after that. In the 1950s, he designed and led the small, elite battle units that have characterized the Israel Defence Forces ever since. He went on to command a powerful and important armoured division in the Six-Day War of 1967, and then to disobey the orders of his superiors in the 1973 war and bridge the Suez Canal in order to cut off the supply lines of a major part of the Egyptian army and effectively win the war.

It was also Mr. Sharon who founded the right-wing Likud party, which he was to decapitate and render impotent more than 30 years later when he left it to form Israel's current ruling party, the more centrist Kadima.

Finally, even though he was the Israeli leader who had given the most support to the Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, it was Mr. Sharon who dramatically reversed course last year, and launched his Disengagement Plan to pull the settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip for the first time since 1967. An incredibly bold bid to radically change the dynamic in the region, this was also the source of much hatred for Mr. Sharon among the right-wing Israelis who had formerly been his most staunch supporters.

Disengagement will probably be one of the things for which he is best remembered, but it is hardly the only revolutionary project he launched. Mr. Sharon did so many very different things during his long career, evolving with age and the posts he held, that it was almost as if there were actually several Ariel Sharons. So it is difficult to guess what he would do today.

Yet there is the possibility that the current crisis would not have arisen at all if Mr. Sharon were still leading the country. In the decades that he had been near the centre of Israeli decision-making, he so often proved himself ready to use violence as a political tool that his mere presence was a deterrent to Israel's enemies.

Maybe Hezbollah would not have pursued this war with Mr. Sharon as prime minister. The kidnapping of Israeli soldiers a few weeks ago may have been a test of the Olmert government, and Hezbollah may have been surprised by its response.

Assuming Mr. Sharon had faced the same conflict, though, one can ask what he did in an analogous situation. But it depends on which Ariel Sharon you have in mind.

In 1982, when Mr. Sharon was defence minister, Palestinian terrorists were using Lebanon as a launching ground for attacks against Israel. With the initially strong support of the United States, he launched the invasion of Lebanon that began a disastrous 18-year occupation.

His plan at that time was far more ambitious than the objectives of today's Israeli government; instead of just eliminating the threat to Israel from southern Lebanon, Mr. Sharon went about trying to entirely reshape the political landscape of the country. Lebanon was wholly devastated; 14,000 Lebanese civilians died in the first three months after the invasion, and young Israeli soldiers began to die en masse in "Israel's Vietnam."

Mr. Sharon was forced to resign after being held "indirectly responsible" for the killing of more than 800 Palestinian civilians by Christian militia fighters allied to Israel. And, of course, Hezbollah itself was founded in order to counter the Israeli occupation, setting the stage for the current hostilities.

Israelis who today long for the 1982 Mr. Sharon and the retributive violence of which he was capable have managed to find a proxy in Dan Halutz, the current Israeli military Chief of Staff. In the early days of this conflict, it was Mr. Halutz who warned that, if the kidnapped Israeli soldiers were not returned, Israel's military would "turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years."

While Mr. Olmert has the calm, collected disposition of a lawyer and a career politician, Mr. Halutz exhibits many of the nakedly aggressive characteristics that made Mr. Sharon famous in some circles and infamous in others. Like Mr. Sharon, he is a hard-liner who believes more in force than in compromise, more in action than in words. Like Mr. Sharon, he is controversially in favour of using massive, even disproportionate power to deter Israel's enemies from aggression against it. Also, like Mr. Sharon as a young commander or middle-aged general, he is often more in the limelight than his political overseers, and sometimes even more influential.

In addition to all this, Mr. Sharon himself chose Mr. Halutz for the army's top job, and some believe he saw him as his real heir. Certainly, Mr. Halutz has much higher approval ratings than any of the politicians in the government. Israelis saw Mr. Sharon as a father figure a nd at this uncertain time it is perhaps only natural for them to reach for him again, or for the closest thing they can find.

But if Mr. Halutz is a surrogate Mr. Sharon, he stands for the younger man - the soldier, the renegade - and not for the older Mr. Sharon, the man who, realizing that things looked very different from the prime minister's chair than from the opposition, embarked on last summer's disengagement from Gaza. That Mr. Sharon, the one the world knew in the past few years before his stroke and even grew to admire, was very different.

What would that Ariel Sharon do?In October of 2000, a few months before Mr. Sharon first became prime minister, Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers, just as it did a few weeks ago. When he came to power, though, he decided to refrain from confronting the group.

There has been much speculation of what lay beside this uncharacteristic restraint - a hesitancy to open a second front while battling Palestinian terrorists or something else entirely. In fact, some aides close to Mr. Olmert have suggested that, had Mr. Sharon dealt with the Hezbollah problem during his tenure, the organization would not have been able to build itself up as much as it has.

Mr. Sharon's reluctance to confront Hezbollah has even been attributed to his own "Lebanon trauma," a residual anxiety some believe affected his judgment as prime minister.

It's hard to believe, though, that "Sharon the Bulldozer" had such debilitating anxieties. His reluctance to enter into a conflict with Hezbollah at that juncture may simply have reflected restraint, or even maturity.

While it is instructive to think about what Mr. Sharon did in 1982, it is just as instructive to think about what he did not do as prime minister. Whatever lay behind his actions, he decided to show far more restraint toward Lebanon than Mr. Olmert's government is showing now. He may have known that the sort of full-blown hostilities we are seeing today were exactly what Hezbollah was seeking.

Perhaps, however, exercising restraint was a luxury that he had, and Mr. Olmert does not. Mr. Sharon's history of very aggressive actions was arguably enough to convince Israel's enemies of his capabilities. Mr. Olmert, lacking Mr. Sharon's storied military background, was faced with a test of his resolve and strength, and arguably he had no choice but to meet it head-on.

Then again, maybe Mr. Sharon would have acted in exactly the same way as Mr. Olmert.

The Ariel Sharon for whom I worked - after I was recruited from a law school in New York to write speeches for the Israeli government, first for the United Nations mission and then for the prime minister's office - was the older man, the one who decided to withdraw from Gaza. He was grandfatherly, warm and even charmingly gossipy, not infrequently inquiring about the love lives of his young staffers. It was still possible, though, to see in him the iron fortitude that had characterized his life.

At almost 80, just a few days after suffering a stroke, he was able to return to what has to be one of the more stressful jobs in the world, and make jokes about jelly doughnuts in order to reassure his staff of his well-being. Even with severe internal dissent against his policies, frequent terrorist attacks in Israeli cities and increasingly harsh rhetoric from a potentially nuclear Iran, he always projected a sense of total calm and strength.

If it is possible to predict confidently anything about how Mr. Sharon would have affected today's crisis, it is that he would have brought that calmness and resolve to the Israeli public and their government.

This sort of discussion, in truth, is not wholly new. Israelis have long speculated about what might have been had prime minister Yitzhak Rabin not been killed by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995 because of his willingness to give up land for peace.

In the end, however, counter-factual history is rarely satisfying, and can even be dangerous. Although Mr. Sharon was many things over the course of his life, the one thing he was not was predictable. His career - both in the military and in the government - was built on acts of tremendous surprise that repeatedly and fundamentally changed the situation in the Middle East.

This situation would surely have been no different. The only thing certain is that he would have smiled his Cheshire Cat smile, and done something unexpected to, once again, change the rules of the game.