THE LAST OF HIS KIND

Ariel Sharon Personified Israel's Formative Era - Michael B. Oren
Ariel Sharon has clearly ended his term as Israel's prime minister. His passing from public life represents not only the fall of the pre-eminent figure in Israeli politics but, more fundamentally, the conclusion of the formative era in Israel's history - a period he personified.

Sharon has been intimately identified with every major event in that history. An infantry officer in the desperate battle for the Jerusalem corridor in the 1948 War of Independence, leader of the paratroopers in the 1956 Sinai campaign, he rose to the rank of general and commanded divisions in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As a government minister, he was the architect of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the primary force behind the settlement movement. With the sole exception of Shimon Peres, he has been a member of the Knesset longer than any other Israeli. Sharon, more than any single Israeli, represented the finest ideals of the Jewish state - its heroism, resilience, and versatility. The writer is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. (Wall Street Journal)

In the Shadow of Sharon - Benny Morris
Sharon will be remembered as one of Israel's great field commanders, the wily, bulldozing general who cracked the Egyptian bastion at Um Katef-Abu Awgeila in 1967 and led the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, turning the tables in the Yom Kippur War. His defeat of the second Palestinian intifada will doubtless be carefully studied, once the hysteria and hype die down, as a model of a relatively clean, successful counterinsurgency.

Sharon believed (as I do) that there was and is no viable Palestinian peace partner. The Palestinian national movement, he believed, still, in the deepest, immutable recesses of its heart, aspires to Israel's destruction and replacement by an Arab-majority state, a "one-state solution." That aspiration is why Arafat rejected the two-state compromise proposed by Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, and President Bill Clinton in 2000, and it is why, from the militant Islamic members of Hamas through Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian national movement refuses to give up the "right of return" of the refugees, the demographic battering ram with which it hopes, ultimately, to bring Israel down. (New York Times)