ARIK SHARON the uncrowned King of Israel. Ariel Sharon the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila. Both of them are passing into history.

A pivotal figure in the history of the Jewish state, its warrior-farmer-politician is the history of modern Israel itself, and like Israel polarised opinion: love, hatred but never indifference.

Without question the supreme politician of the post-Rabin era, Ariel Sharon remains an enigma.

Five years ago he catapulted himself back into the political spotlight with his September 2000 walkabout on Temple Mount that revived his political career — at the price of inciting the opening riots of what became the al-Aqsa intifada.

For a decade before that he was a fallen giant on the margins, sidelined in 1982 after the bloody massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Beirut by Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies during the Lebanon invasion which, as Defence Minister, he spearheaded and for which he was held responsible.

After Temple Mount he was transformed — the “Bulldozer” whose ruthless security-first approach toward the Palestinians and instinctive appreciation that Israel had lurched to the Right and lost patience with half-measures and playing footsie with Yassir Arafat — turned him into the central figure of Israeli politics.

The principal sport of all Israeli politicians and political commentators became trying to guess what was in the mind of Ariel Sharon, and what he was planning to do next.

Some have wondered whether he became convinced that the hawkish ultranationalism of his early years — the commando raids, tank battles, invasions, incursions and round-ups identified with his progress through the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 — were no longer the way to promote Israel’s survival in a changed world.

Perhaps he has remained true to his original principles, intent on redrawing Israel’s borders politically instead of militarily. Even Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was fuel to those who simply could not believe that Sharon the 1970s hardman of Gaza was giving it up.

For them the arch-deceiver was intent on trading Gaza for the West Bank, building a wall and slowly expanding the Jewish state’s de facto borders toward the River Jordan, condemning a Palestinian state to oblivion by 1,000 cuts rather than one tank advance.

Perhaps he was making it up as he went along, ever — as his critics allege — a master tactician without a master plan.

Those tactical skills were honed from an early age by life as a “Sabra” — a native-born Israeli — in a tough farming community to where his father — named Scheinerman — had moved from Russia in 1922 and where he learnt as a boy how to defend the village against Arab intruders with axes and guns.

He joined the Hagganah, the underground Jewish Defence Force defending settlers against Arab attacks, and after the 1948 war that came after the birth of the State of Israel developed his military skills as the leader of Unit 101, the commando force that led reprisal raids into the Jordanian-held West Bank. “Always escalate,” was his motto.

The most controversial of these raids was in 1953 on the Palestinian village of Qibya, in which 69 civilians were massacred, provoking international outrage that did little to stem his rise through the ranks. In the 1967 Six-Day War he was the leader of a brigade that helped to rout the Egyptian Army, and saved Israel in its hour of greatest need.

He moved up the ladder, as head of the Southern Command in 1971 crushing Palestinian fedayeen in the Gaza Strip, where he is still remembered with animosity for his policy of bulldozing houses that earned him his nickname.

In the Yom Kippur War of 1973 he returned from semiretirement to glory as a tank commander, recapturing the Sinai peninsula.

He quit the army, helping Menachem Begin to form the right-wing Likud Party, serving as Housing Minister from 1990-92 during the big expansion of Jewish settlements.

He remained associated with Likud for his entire 30-year political career, until the last weeks when he broke away, a bitter man intent on consigning to oblivion the hardliners in whose ranks he stood himself not so long ago, but who now accuse him of betrayal over the Gaza pullout.

Latterly he has been a politician. But he remains what he described himself in the title of his autobiography: Warrior.

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