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JERUSALEM (By Kevin Peraino, Dan Ephron and Jeffrey Bartholet, Newsweek) January 8, 2006 — Ariel Sharon was not himself. At his ranch in the Negev desert with his family on Wednesday night, he was stressed and exhausted. "His voice was so weak," recalled Reuven Adler, an aide who spoke to him by phone around 7:30. The prime minister was concerned about the surgery he was scheduled to undergo the following day—a somewhat routine operation to repair a two-millimeter hole in his heart. Adler was concerned, too: fretting and griping were out of character for Sharon. Adler teased him. "You're scared?" he said. Sharon laughed him off. They agreed to talk again in a few hours.

The second discussion never happened. Around 9 p.m., Sharon heard a briefing by phone from Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, about Kassam rockets that had been launched from the Gaza Strip. Then he had dinner. Sharon seemed weary, but fine. Suddenly he felt pains in his chest. Sharon at first insisted that he didn't want to go to the hospital. But he was whisked into an armored ambulance with his son Gilad, and they sped toward Jerusalem.

Sharon didn't know it at the time, but the membrane of a tiny blood vessel in a dark cavity of his brain—one artery among tens of thousands of miles of winding vessels that irrigate the body—had broken open. The hole was minuscule. But Sharon, who had suffered a minor stroke on Dec. 18, was taking anticoagulants. His blood was seeping out, and beginning to penetrate the surrounding brain matter. He was dazed and pale, and probably felt disoriented.

Adler called Gilad on his cell phone, and spoke to him in the ambulance. The son was calm, thinking his father had suffered another minor stroke like the first one. "He's OK," Gilad assured Adler. "He's responsive. Everything will be fine." According to a report in the Maariv newspaper, Sharon began to vomit around the time the ambulance started climbing the hills of Jerusalem. His left leg and left arm stopped functioning, and his speech became slurred. At Hadassah Hospital, medical staff put Sharon on a stretcher; he was wearing an oxygen mask. "He was still conscious," Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the Hadassah director, told NEWSWEEK. "His eyes were open but he seemed very blurry, not focused, not alert."

A blood vessel bursts, and the course of history changes. The blood begins to suffocate brain tissue, and projections for war and peace have to be recalculated. Almost as soon as Sharon fell ill, troopers from Israel's state security services sped to the home of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to bolster protection. Israeli leaders had died in office before. But for the first time in the short history of the Jewish state, a living prime minister was incapacitated, and power had to be transferred—temporarily at first—to a deputy. The next morning Olmert convened an emergency cabinet meeting. An empty chair stood at the head of the table.

Israelis prayed, many stuffing scrawled appeals into cracks of the Western Wall. President George W. Bush prayed, too, hailing his ally as "a man of courage and peace." Others thanked God, or spoke in his name, or channeled his thoughts. The evangelical Pat Robertson told viewers of his "700 Club" that God gets angry "against those who 'divide my land'." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently called for Israel to be wiped off from the map, said he hoped the news of Sharon's demise was "final." Some Palestinians prepared to celebrate, while others worried that his absence would leave a dangerous vacuum.

Surgeons operated on the prime minister's brain for more than seven hours that first night. The length of the operation was unusual, and suggested severe blood loss. Doctors induced a coma, tried to keep the pressure inside the brain cavity down and hoped to keep him in a state that would allow the brain to rest. His eyes were responding to light, a sign the brain was still functioning at some level. But on Friday, surgeons had to operate again, this time for five hours. On Saturday, doctors were still fighting to save his life, and could not assess the extent of brain damage.

Sharon knows death as well as anyone alive. He sent countless young men into battle, lost many friends to bullets and mortars and tank shells, and was twice wounded. His first wife, Margalit, died in a car accident, and he married her sister Lily. She succumbed to cancer. Sharon's son Gur perished in his arms at the age of 10, minutes after he was accidentally shot in the head while playing with an antique gun.

Sharon also did more than his share of killing. For most of his career, Arabs regarded him only as a butcher—responsible for coldblooded attacks on civilians and, most notoriously, for allowing gunmen of the Lebanese Phalangist militias into the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where (according to conservative Israeli estimates) they slaughtered close to 800 men, women and children over three days in 1982. "The Palestinians remember an infamous general who for the last 50 years left a long trail of blood, settlements and imposed solutions," says Marwan Bishara, a Palestinian author and commentator for Abu Dhabi television.

Yet for Israelis, Sharon had attained the gravitas that comes with leading men through dire circumstances and prevailing. Many generations from now, Israelis will read stories about Sharon's exploits in school textbooks. With Shimon Peres, he is one of the last of Israel's founding fathers. Unlike Peres, who dreamed of creating a "New Middle East," where Arab and Jew would prosper through cooperation, Sharon had a gruff, unsentimental belief in self-reliance. "Two eyes for an eye" could have been his motto. He believed in action and territory, not ideas or treaties.

In recent years, however, Sharon and Peres became allies. Peres was beginning to see the value of strong fences, and Sharon was coming round to the idea that Israel could not hold on to all the land it had captured in 1967. He no longer thought it was viable to keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation, and he couldn't drive them out.

Many Israelis had come to believe that Sharon was the only leader who could break the current stalemate while also ensuring their security. As he lay in a coma, uncertainty spread. "In a way, Israeli society is much less heroic than Sharon," says historian Tom Segev. Sharon's life had tracked virtually all the victories and failures of the Jewish nation, and now he himself was down. Where would that leave the country?

Sharon was raised at Kfar Malal, a semi-communal farming village that had the gritty work ethic of a kibbutz, but without the utopianism. His parents, immigrants from Russia, were stubborn individualists. They were the only family in Kfar Malal to fence off their land and keep it under lock and key. His mother and father both carried guns, mainly to protect themselves from Arab attackers. And at a time when Nazi Germany was trying to exterminate the Jewish people, the parents encouraged their son to develop a sense of militant self-reliance. At 14, Sharon joined the Haganah, the semi-underground Jewish Army, and by 17, he left home for extended military training.

Sharon confronted death at a young age. In 1948, during the battle for Israel's independence, he was the 20-year-old leader of an Army platoon battling Arab fighters near Latrun, outside Jerusalem. In the predawn fog, Sharon and 35 Jewish fighters aimed to take a hill and open the road to the Holy City. But they came under fire long before they neared their target, and when the sun rose, burning off the dawn mist, Jordanian gunners had a clear fix on them. Sharon's radio was smashed by bullet fire, so the young platoon leader was cut off from his commanders. The platoon hunkered down in a gully, and endured waves of Jordanian attacks. Sharon and his men fought back, choking on cordite, as the mud around them streaked red with blood.

At one point, when Sharon rose up from the ditch to take a look at the enemy, he was shot in the abdomen. The bullet exited his thigh. He was thirsty, and sticky with blood, and some of his men were beginning to question his leadership. Swarms of black flies buzzed in the heat, and armies of ants were attracted to the dead and wounded. As time passed, it became clear that other Jewish units had already retreated. Victorious Arabs were combing the battlefield. Sharon and his men had to make a break for it.

They left one wounded colleague behind. Simcha Pinchasi had been hit in the legs and was unable to walk or crawl. He manned a machine gun and asked for a grenade before everyone moved off. Fires blazed in the fields. Sharon could only crawl out at first; later he was carried. Most of his unit had been killed or wounded. In the hospital, parents of soldiers under his command came to get news of their children. He lay with his eyes closed, as they waited for him to "come awake enough to talk to them," he recalled in his memoir, "Warrior." "In their silence I imagined I could hear them saying that they had given the most precious things they had into my hands... Tell me, they were saying, where are our sons?"

That was part of Sharon's education as a leader. Even then, his military commanders valued his courage and his impulse to seize the initiative on the battlefield. From an early point in his career, Sharon was given the hard jobs, or the dirty jobs. In the early 1950s, he was chosen to lead Unit 101, an elite commando squad. Gideon Altshuler, who served with Sharon at the time, says the young officer was chosen because he was spoiling for battle. A brigade commander once told Altshuler that he had two new officers under him, one of whom asked where he could take his men for training, the other—Sharon—"asked where he could take his men to fight."

Unit 101 was dogged by controversy from its inception, and became especially notorious for a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibbiya. The night operation was in retaliation for an attack by terrorists who killed an Israeli mother and two young children. Sharon's commandos fought a quick fire fight outside the village, then set explosives in and around 42 stone houses. The blasts killed 69 men, women and children who were inside. Sharon later said he didn't know they were there, and called it a tragedy that the villagers had not responded to warnings to come out. But he wasn't repentant. "After so many defeats and demoralizing failures it was now clear that Israeli forces were again capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines," he wrote. "Now people could feel that the terrorist gangs would think twice before striking."

That would be Sharon's attitude and style throughout his career. He was not a moralist, and shrugged off complaints about his rough tactics. He was valuable to his superiors because he acted decisively, often without waiting for explicit orders. When he overstepped his authority and failed, he also took the fall.

During the Suez War of 1956, Sharon had a limited mission to reach a certain point and wait. But he pressed for permission to cross through the Mitla Pass, without realizing there was a sizable Egyptian force there. His unit became trapped, and 38 Israelis were killed, 120 wounded. "The chief of staff later accused him of deliberately misinterpreting his orders," says Sharon unauthorized biographer Uzi Benziman. Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan would write in his diary that Sharon escaped court-martial because the Israeli Army did not punish a commander for doing too much, but only for doing too little.

A small state like Israel, fighting for its existence, could not afford to sideline a soldier like Sharon for long. In 1967, he won one of the more dramatic battles of the Six Day War, at Abu-Ageila. But his most renowned moment on the battlefield was still to come, in 1973. After a period in which Egyptian peace feelers had been neglected, Anwar Sadat's Army attacked Israeli forces by surprise and penetrated 15 miles into the Sinai. Sharon was part of the counterattack, this time as the commander of a tank division. The survival of the state seemed to be in the balance. Sharon and his men punched through enemy lines and crossed the Suez Canal, cutting off Egyptian supply routes. "It was very daring of him and again not exactly as his commanders had ordered," says Altshuler, the longtime friend who served as Sharon's chief of staff in 1973.

He was a hero of the war, but relations with his superiors were still difficult. Dayan didn't completely trust him. "My uncle used to say about Sharon that he'd rather tame wild horses than motivate mules," says nephew Uzi Dayan, who served as head of the Israeli National Security Council under Sharon. "But they had many clashes."

In moments of existential threat, confidence past the point of hubris can be an asset. But in 1982, it led Israel to disaster. As Defense minister in the right-wing government of Menachem Begin, Sharon oversaw the removal of the Jewish settlement of Yamit in Sinai. Then, as if to make up for that, he oversaw the invasion of Lebanon. He told the cabinet the incursion would last 48 hours and extend 40 kilometers into Lebanon, but few could doubt that Sharon would exceed his authority again. He pushed to Beirut, driven by a vision that he could reshape the map of the Middle East. The aim was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization and put a friendly Christian government in control of Lebanon.

It was a delusion. Israel's Kahan Commission found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. He had known the leadership of the Christian Phalangist militias well, and knew they were capable of grotesque savagery, the commission concluded. Sharon taunted the militias for not taking a more active role in the fighting against Muslim and Palestinian forces. And when those militias did move into the Palestinian camps, after the assassination of Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, they clearly were there for vengeance.

Lebanon became a quagmire for Israel: the PLO was expelled, but that solved little. A draining 18-year occupation of the country would cost a thousand Israeli lives. The verdict of the Kahan Commission would briefly curtail Sharon's ambitions. He was ostracized—and frustrated with his colleagues and superiors, including Begin, for their failure to support him when he was down. His bosses often praised his initiative and tactics, Sharon complained at several points over the years, but they were also quick to distance themselves when anything went wrong.

Still, Sharon remained in cabinet-level posts, first as minister of Trade and Industry, and later as minister of Construction and Housing. He dedicated himself to another mission: populating the occupied territories with Jewish settlements. His nickname was "the Bulldozer"—given to him when he was a soldier smashing Palestinian homes in Gaza to battle guerrillas there. But now it had a new shade of meaning. He could destroy, and he could build, and sometimes he did both at once.

Few Israelis knew the territories better than Sharon did. As a young commando leader, he had trained his men by going on long night excursions into the starlit hills and valleys around Arab villages. Now he became more obsessed than ever with each cave and cranny. He was not a particularly religious man, like so many of the settlers who were moving into the West Bank and Gaza. But he felt a tribal connection to the warriors of the Bible, and loved the sound of Biblical place names.

By the late 1990s, as foreign minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, he was to the right of his boss. He made it clear that he did not trust Yasir Arafat. At the Wye Plantation talks in 1998, where Israel was forging an interim deal with the Palestinians, it was Sharon who refused to shake Arafat's hand. As the two sides greeted each other at a formal session, Sha-ron "turned sideways so he wouldn't face Arafat," says Robert Malley, then a U.S. diplomat involved in the negotiations. "Arafat's hand was just left hanging. There was a moment of awkwardness, then a U.S. official came by and sort of stood between them, filled the gap."

Sharon sealed his reputation as the scourge of the Palestinians in September 2000, when he made a highly controversial visit to the site of the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem, home for more than a thousand years to the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques. A new round of peace talks at Camp David, with Ehud Barak at the helm, had recently finished without result, and Sharon was dueling with Netanyahu for leadership of the Likud opposition. The visit won Sharon support among right-wing Israelis, and certainly drew attention to himself. It also provided the spark that helped set off a new Palestinian intifada.

The uprising probably would have happened anyway—Palestinian extremists were looking for an excuse to launch a new round of attacks. But Sharon had also helped create the conditions for his own political rise. He was elected prime minister four months later, and told NEWSWEEK at the time that his government would "not negotiate under terror or violence." That was taken by many to mean he would not negotiate at all. Sharon ruthlessly quashed the intifada, and forced Arafat into virtual house arrest at his compound in Ramallah. But Sharon did negotiate—with the Americans.

In return for withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon demanded Bush's written agreement that Israel could hold on to major settlements in the West Bank, and that Palestinian refugees would not return to Israel. (Sharon later explained that six settlements were covered by the agreement, although Bush did not name them publicly.) The final deal, cemented in writing in April 2004, spoke the language of the "Roadmap"—the international plan to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. But its real meaning lay in a single phrase: "in light of new realities on the ground," it would be impossible to return all occupied land to the Palestinians.

Some thought that Sharon was playing for time, and that he would find any excuse to avoid actually leaving Gaza. Israelis were astonished that the withdrawal proceeded with surprisingly little violence, by Jews or Palestinians. What was the Bulldozer up to, razing Jewish homes and synagogues? How far would he go? One top Sharon adviser, Kalman Geyer, told NEWSWEEK last fall that Sharon might be willing to cede up to 90 percent of the West Bank for a future Palestinian state, and perhaps even compromise on the division of Jerusalem.

Sharon later disavowed his adviser's remarks. But nobody knows what he was really thinking. In his mind, a deception to gain tactical advantage was acceptable.

It had been that way throughout his career. In Israel's early days, Dayan asked Sharon if he might be able to kidnap some Jordanians to be used as bargaining chips for the release of captured Jewish fighters. Sharon said he'd look into it and went with a fellow officer to the border at the Jordan River to check out the possibilities. Near the river, on the far side, Sharon saw a small squad of Jordanian soldiers. With his gun holstered, he went to a bridge that divided Israeli from Jordanian territory and called to the Arabs in a friendly way. In Arabic, Sharon told the men he was looking for a stolen cow. Then he invited them to join him and his Israeli colleague under the shade of a big acacia tree. The soldiers agreed, and Jews and Arabs had a rare, affable chat—until the Israelis jumped two of the soldiers and took them back to headquarters. "I hadn't exactly felt good about fooling that sergeant, especially after the pleasant talk we had," Sharon wrote in his autobiography. "But all that was really on my mind was the necessity of grabbing some Jordanians so we could get our own people back."

Sharon always had chutzpah. In the latest chapter of his long career, he also had immense stature. And he seemed to be developing a coherent vision for the future of the Jewish state, though he wouldn't tell anyone exactly what that was. Only two months ago, he had broken away from the Likud Party he helped to form in 1973, in order to create a new centrist party, Kadima ("Forward"). He took many Likudniks with him, and attracted a few leading politicians from the leftist Labor Party, too. Polls showed that Kadima would likely dominate elections on March 28, giving Sharon a mandate to continue his program to unilaterally determine new borders for Israel—and for the Palestinians.

Now all of that is uncertain. The country seems at a crossroads. Will Israel's vaguely defined "moderate center" prevail regardless of personal leadership—or did Kadima attract support simply because Sharon was leading it? "I don't think we've ever had a situation where so much of our politics depends on one person," said historian Segev late last week.

Kadima is such a new party that it had not settled yet on rules to choose a successor before Sharon went into a coma. Olmert, in his capacity as the top-ranking government official in the party, may take that job by default. An Israeli poll late last week by Yedioth Ahronoth suggested that Kadima under Olmert would get 39 Knesset seats in fresh elections. And if Peres took over the party (at the age of 82), it would get an astounding 42 seats—little different from what the party polled when Sharon was in charge. But opinion surveys taken in a moment of deep emotion and passion could easily change—dramatically—over the coming weeks. "These are very, very moody polls," says Labor Knesset member Ephraim Sneh. "I would not give them any weight."

Some Israelis compared the situation to the period immediately after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in November 1995. Peres became prime minister then, riding a potent wave of national sympathy, and seemed assured to win re-election in the spring. But Hamas initiated a fierce bombing campaign, which badly undermined his support. Netanyahu led Likud to a surprise victory on May 29, and became prime minister. "Netanyahu was the beneficiary of Rabin's passing, and now the historical wheel may turn again," says Aaron Miller, a former U.S. peace negotiator and now a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

But Miller and others believe that Netanyahu will have to move toward the center to garner wide backing, and that is dangerous for him. In some ways, Netanyahu is the anti-Sharon: a slick talker and American-style campaigner who enjoys political theater. He's telegenic, smart and articulate. But he also has a reputation as an opportunist. After quitting Sharon's government over the Gaza withdrawal—and fortifying his position as the leader of the right wing of Likud—an abrupt swing to the center may only accentuate a sense of unease about the man.

Yet none of Sharon's potential successors in Kadima has much magnetism, either. Peres certainly has great stature, but he is seen by many as unreliable on security issues. Olmert has been a fixture in Israeli politics for years, and he is a longtime proponent of unilateral action to leave parts of the occupied territories. A lawyer by training, he won his first election at 28. He has also collected some political barnacles over the years, including a reputation for expediency and an indictment for corruption (he was later acquitted). But he benefited from being close to Sharon.

Palestinians were unsure how to gauge the new situation. "We're confused at this point, just like the Israelis," said Nasser Jumaa, 38, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank town of Nablus. Palestinians have plenty of turmoil in their own camp: legislative elections are scheduled in Palestinian areas on Jan. 25, and the Islamic militant group Hamas is poised to do well. Will any of the militant groups have a political interest in initiating large-scale attacks on Israel? Nobody was saying. But militants don't rhapsodize about Sharon's qualities as a leader, or as a peacemaker, and many claim not to care who leads Israel. "I don't think even Netanyahu would be worse than Sharon," says Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas official in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Whoever leads Israel faces some tricky foreign-policy dilemmas. The government firmly believes—but cannot prove—that Iran is attempting to build a nuclear weapon. Some in the West, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have suggested that Israel might take it upon itself to bomb Iranian facilities. That could be particularly tempting to a new administration. "A government that feels it has to prove its security credentials will operate on a much lower threshold," says Dennis Ross, the former U.S. peace negotiator. Hard-line Israelis have a different worry. "We'll lack Sharon's ability to take a decision about Iran," says Sneh, the hawkish Laborite. "I'm afraid we'll miss his cojones."

The conventional wisdom is that Sharon may be the single Israeli leader capable of completing a withdrawal from more of the West Bank. Peres is thought to be too weak to placate Israel's right, Netanyahu too rash, Labor leader Amir Peretz too inexperienced. Even Olmert is something of a wild card. "[Sharon's] incapacitation is a huge blow to Israel's peace coalition," says Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

Even some Palestinians had come to see Sharon as the evil they knew. "Sharon is responsible for the wall that's suffocating me," said Rajaee Abd el-Hamid, 32, whose home in the West Bank town of Bethany is surrounded by the separation barrier Sharon began. But el-Hamid added that he believes Sharon at least knew where he was driving the process. "He had a political vision none of his predecessors had," el-Hamid said. "Whoever comes next, we'll have to start from scratch."

If Sharon dies from this stroke, he will be remembered as a warrior, and that is just as he would like it. But he also likes to think of himself as a simple rancher. Visitors to Sycamore Farm in the Negev tell of how he could name every flower. His friend Gila Almagor, the actress who plays the protagonist's mother in the new Steven Spielberg movie "Munich," recalls that when she visited Sharon there a few years ago, he picked up a handful of sand and thrust it toward her. "Smell it, smell it..." he insisted. Like other aspects of his character, his attachment to land—to the dirt itself—suggests an earthy reliability that many other Israeli politicians lack.

NEWSWEEK asked Sharon in August 2003 what it would take to bring about peace. "First, it needs Arab recognition that it is the birthright of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people," he answered. "That might be regarded as the end of the conflict. It [also] needs strong and serious leadership that can make those painful compromises on areas which are the cradle of the Jewish people. That's what I will try to do." He had started down that path. But Israelis may never know exactly where he was heading, or if anyone else can lead them there.

With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem, Nuha Musleh in the West Bank, Michael Hirsh and Richard Wolffe in Washington, Christopher Dickey in Paris and Alan Isenberg in New York