Ariel Sharon lived much of his life like a farmer-soldier. He was like one of the Old Testament judges of Israel. First defending his own village from attackers and marauders, then chasing his enemies, conquering and destroying their villages, then building his own new villages, then defending the new ones, then chasing the enemies again, and round about, like a vicious circle.
Back in his youth it began with armed skirmishes of shepherd boys that evolved over the years into huge battles with thousands of tanks on each side. Yet the man Sharon remained the same throughout the war of independence in 1948 and the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and in the war in Lebanon in 1982 and in the project of building settlements. Throughout his life, from boyhood until old age, he maintained that that which cannot be done with force can be done with extra-force. He maintained that we Israelis can create more and more facts on the ground that the Arabs will have to swallow and the world will eventually have to recognise.
He was the man of muscle.
We remember him in the blood-stained white bandage in the Suez Canal threatening to unleash the wrath of the legions against the politicians if they dared to make even one small concession to the Arabs.
We remember him also in Beirut during his ruthless crusade into Lebanon trying to install by force a new order in the old Middle East.
And we remember him planting hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in Sinai, in the Golan Heights. Always the man of muscle.
For all those decades I resented him. He symbolised for me everything I could not stand about my country: violent self-righteousness, a mixture of brutality and self-pity, insatiable greed for land and a mystical religious phraseology that, coming from a secular hedonistic soldier, always struck me as hypocritical. There was no other individual who personified the intoxication of many Israelis with the power of power.
I have never met him personally. I have never been in the same room with him. People say that in a small circle Sharon is a warm-hearted, generous, entertaining man. People say that he is a charmer with a lively sense of humour, a lover of good food and luxury. I always refused to be impressed by such impressions. I loathed him for being the enemy of peace.
And then two years ago a sudden change occurred. A mysterious metamorphosis. Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals. As if he had switched overnight into speaking a different language. When Sharon said for the first time, about two years ago, that the occupation is a disaster for the occupied and the occupiers, I could not believe my ears. When he started to speak about two states for the two nations, I thought he must be joking. When he mentioned for the first time the rights of the Palestinians, I thought he was mocking the slogans of the peace movement. And when he first announced that he was going to evacuate the Jewish settlers and the Israeli army from Gaza, I thought it was no more than a cunning strategy.
Nevertheless he did it. They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements, and indeed he acted like a bulldozer when he uprooted them. The evacuation of the Israeli settlers from Gaza was a military operation. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he won his many wars. Not a single building in these settlements was left intact.
However, what he did in 35 years he only had two years to begin to undo. All the settlements in the West Bank and on the Golan Heights still stand as monuments to the old Sharon. He is leaving us taking with him the answers to two great mysteries: why in the autumn of his life had he suddenly converted so radically; and what else was he going to do in the direction of peace and reconciliation?
One thing, however, Sharon never succeeded in doing, not even when he evacuated Gaza to the last inch. He never really sat down with the Palestinians to try to talk with them the way one neighbour speaks to the other neighbour. Not even the way one godfather sits down with another godfather after a long feud. Ariel Sharon is leaving us even as he is signalling to us - I understand my mistakes. I finally tried to mend them, but life was just too short.
· Amos Oz is an Israeli novelist and a founder of the Peace Now movement
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