IN THE middle of the 1970s Ariel Sharon, who died this month, asked me to arrange something for him — a meeting with Yasser Arafat.

A few days before the Israeli media had discovered that I was in regular contact with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was listed as a terrorist organisation.

I told Sharon that my contacts would probably ask what he wanted to say to Arafat.

He told me his plan was to help the Palestinians overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state with Arafat as its president.

“What about the West Bank?” I asked.

“Once Jordan becomes Palestine there will no longer be a conflict between two peoples but between two states,” he said. “That will be much easier to resolve.”

My friends told Arafat, who simply laughed and told King Hussein.

Five years earlier the Palestinians in Jordan had been battling the Hashemite regime there. Israel came to the aid of the king at the request of US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

I had proposed the opposite in a magazine, to aid the Palestinians. Sharon later told me he — a general at the time — had wanted to do the same, but for different reasons.

My hope was to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank. His was to create one in the East Bank, in Jordan.

In Hebrew Eretz Israel refers to land on both sides of the Jordan river where the ancient Hebrew tribes settled according to Biblical myth. In Palestinian usage Filastin is only the land to the west of the river.

So an ignorant Israeli might think saying the Palestinians could have land east of the river was a fair offer, while to a Palestinian it means taking land abroad.

At the time Sharon was in political exile. He had left the army in 1973 after realising he had no chance of becoming chief of staff.

He was recognised as a talented battlefield commander. The trouble was he was also seen as despising his superiors, his peers, and in fact everyone else.

His relationship with the truth was also seen as problematic. David Ben-Gurion wrote that Sharon could be an exemplary military officer if only he could abstain from lying.

When he left the army Sharon almost single-handedly created Likud by unifying the right-wing parties. I chose him as Haolam Hazeh’s man of the year back then.

When the Yom Kippur war broke out he was drafted back into the army.

A photo of him with his head bandaged became his trademark, though it was only a slight wound caused by hitting his head on a command vehicle.

After the war he left Likud because he couldn’t become its leader while Menachem Begin was around. That was when he asked for the meeting with Arafat.

He was thinking about creating a new party, neither right nor left but led by him and other “outstanding personalities.”

At the time I was interested since I felt someone with military credentials was needed to lead a united drive for peace.

But during our conversations it became clear that Sharon was still a rightwinger.

He formed a new party, Peace of Zion. It was a flop on election day and he rejoined Likud.

Though Begin initially distrusted him, thinking he might attempt a military coup, when Ezer Weizman resigned as defence minister he was forced to appoint Sharon to the post.

For the second time I chose him as man of the year. He took this very seriously and sat with me for hours to talk about his ideas.

One of these was to conquer Iran. He felt that when ayatollah Khomenei was to die there would be a race between the US and the Soviet Union to take over the country.

The US was far away but if it armed Israel the latter would do the job, he claimed. He showed me full maps of the advance, hour by hour, day by day.

It was typical Sharon. The vision was audacious but based on abysmal ignorance of the other side.

At the same time he disclosed to me his grand plan for a new Middle East. This was what he wanted to propose to Arafat.

The army would invade Lebanon and drive the Palestinians into Syria. The Syrians would then drive them into Jordan.

There the Palestinians would overthrow the king and establish a state.

The army would also drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, where Sharon would choose a Christian officer and install him as a puppet dictator.

I published the plans without naming their author. Nine months later Sharon did invade Lebanon, after lying to Begin and the cabinet about his aims.

The war was a catastrophe. No unit of the Israeli army reached its objective on time, if at all.

The Israeli-installed dictator Bachir Gemayel was assassinated. The Syrians remained in Lebanon and would do for many more years.

The Israeli army extricated itself after a guerilla war which lasted 18 full years.

Worst of all, to induce the Palestinians to flee Sharon let the Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they committed a terrible massacre.

Hundreds of thousands protested in Tel Aviv and Sharon was dismissed from the Defence Ministry, though he was soon back in the cabinet.

At the height of the battle of Beirut I crossed the lines and met Arafat, who was by now Sharon’s nemesis. After that Sharon and I never again exchanged a word, not even greeting each other.

But his career flourished. One of his media vassals, Uri Dan, once said prophetically: “Those who don’t want him as chief of staff will get him as defence minister. Those who don’t want him as defence minister will get him as prime minister.”

We might now add that those of us who did not want him as prime minister are now getting him as a national icon.

He believed that destiny had chosen him to lead Israel. He did not think so. He knew.

Anyone who tried to block him was a traitor. He despised everyone, from Begin down.

But he was also the most typical Israeli politician one could imagine. He embodied the saying to which I modestly claim authorship: “If force does not work, try more force.”

Ideologically he was the pupil of David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, leaders who believed in the limitless expansion of Israel by brute force. Indeed, his military career started in the 1950s when Dayan put him in charge of an unofficial outfit called Unit 101. It crossed the border to conduct revenge raids on Arabs.

Sharon’s most famous exploit in the unit was the massacre of Qibya village in 1953, when 49 innocent people were buried under the houses he blew up.
In Gaza, he later had every Arab caught carrying arms shot.

I asked him once about killing prisoners. “I didn’t kill prisoners,” he told me. “I didn’t take prisoners.”

His main legacy is the settlement movement. As army officer, politician and successive chief of staff in half a dozen ministries, he was always setting up settlements in the Occupied Territories.

He planned them with the aim of cutting the West Bank into ribbons which would make a Palestinian state impossible.

Of course, he was ruthless enough to destroy them when they inconvenienced his plans, as he did in Gaza, a general prepared to sacrifice a brigade in order to improve his overall position.

When he died he was eulogised by the very people he despised, turned into a folk hero. The Ministry of Education compared him to Moses.

But his real contribution to Israel was catastrophic. The scores of settlements that scar the West Bank, each one a landmine that will one day have to be removed, and at great risk.

Uri Avnery is a former member of the Knesset and a founder of Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom. He blogs at www.avnery-news.co.il.