Sharon's plans, made concrete
As a 13-year-old in 1930s Palestine, Arik Scheinerman sat
through inky black nights armed with his own engraved Circassian dagger, helping to guard his village fields from Arab attack. "When you work for something," his father told him, "it's your duty to protect it."
As an Israeli army commander after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Arik expanded on his father's advice, establishing a Jewish presence throughout the West Bank. "Survival ... depended on 'facts,' actually building on the land and actually defending it," he later wrote. Arik Scheinerman's name has changed - he's known today as Ariel Sharon - but Israel's prime minister still seems faithful to the lessons of his youth.
In Mr. Sharon's eyes, security means holding the land. He is making Israel's contentious barrier project part of that goal. Originally conceived to protect Israelis from Palestinian militants, the barrier's winding route through the West Bank suggests that it's also meant to buffer Israel from attack by Arab countries to the east.
Yet in using the barrier to protect Israel from regional threats, analysts say Sharon is exposing his country to profound internal danger. They say the barrier, along with Israeli settlement in the Palestinian territories, is tightening Israel's hold on the territories to such an extent that it could torpedo a two-state solution to this conflict. With the Palestinian birthrate set to make Jews a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in a decade or so, Israel will soon face a choice: whether to be a Jewish state or a democratic one.
"If you look at the route of the fence now, it serves Sharon's strategic vision," says Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. "Sharon, in my understanding, believes that Israel must maintain overall military control of the West Bank and Gaza."
Increasingly, Israelis are debating the double-edged dilemma raised by that strategy. "We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish," Avraham Burg, Speaker of Israel's parliament from 1999 to 2003, wrote in August.
From his earliest days, helping his father work their citrus orchards, Sharon's preoccupation has been the physical terrain and its link to security.
Sharon grew up in Kfar Malal, a small village 15 miles northeast of Tel Aviv that sat "in the shadow of Arab towns," as he notes in his autobiography, written with American journalist and author David Chanoff. Sharon's Russian parents were "pragmatic Zionists," particularly his father, a fiercely stubborn man who refused to obey community rules he disliked.
The Scheinermans imbued their son with a love of the land, an absolute certainty that Palestine belonged to the Jews, and a determination that nothing would force them out.
"When the land belongs to you physically, when you know every hill and wadi and orchard, when your family is there, that is when you have power, not just physical power, but spiritual power," Sharon writes. "Like Antaeus, your strength comes from the land."
In the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sharon was director of military training. To secure Israel's hold on the newly occupied territories, he felt that it should establish footholds at important road junctions and on the hilltops overlooking Israel's narrow coastal plain.
