Ariel Sharon: the warrior prime minister for the warrior state Subsequently, battling Palestinian insurgents in the 1950s and then fighting in full-scale wars against Israel's Arab neighbours in 1956, 1967 and 1973, it was the making of his miliary and political career. Colonel Ariel Sharon visits the Northern Command military base in November 1964 (REUTERS) Later, as defence minister overseeing the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it was almost the breaking of it - when he was forced to resign after an Israeli government commission partially blamed him for the massacre of between 762 and 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites by a Lebanese Christian militia in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Yet as a pioneer of the early settlers movement that encouraged Jews set up home in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in his fierce opposition to Palestinian national aspirations, he was in many ways the architect of Israel's contemporary political landscape. At least half of the current Israeli cabinet - top heavy with pro-settler politicians deeply hostile to Palestinian statehood - are cut from an ideological cloth that Mr Sharon did much to weave. Ariel Scheinerman, as he was born, was the epitome of the early Zionist movement's "New Jew" - distinguished from the "Old Jew" of the diaspora not only by being born in what was then British Mandate Palestine ("Eretz Israel" to the Zionists) but by his readiness to fight in self-defence. He was as much a son of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister and dominant political figure during its first 20 years, as of his biological father, Samuil, with whom he had a difficult relationship. Ariel Sharon, right, in discussion with former Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion during a 1971 bus tour of Israeli installations (GETTY IMAGES) It was Ben-Gurion who gave the up-and-coming soldier the Hebrew name of Sharon - after the Mediterranean coastal plain area where had had grown up - as reward for his role in leading a bloody commando raid into the Arab village of Qibya in October 1953 to avenge attacks by Palestinian guerrillas who had been infiltrating into Israel from Jordan. Seventy civilians, mostly women and children, died in an operation that saw commandos go from house to house, shooting occupants and throwing grenades through windows. The sheer violence of the episode set the tone of the Sharon aura for decades to come - as did the duplicity surrounding it. Ben-Gurion, having authorised the raid, denied that the Israeli army was involved and blamed it on vigilantes. But the young, newly-renamed Sharon had won the old leader's gratitude and would be forever the apple of his eye. "Dear great Arik....You are destined for great things," Ben-Gurion wrote years later afte his protegewas promoted to the rank of general. Others saw took a dimmer view, seeing in Mr Sharon a ruthless gambler ready to sacrifice others to further his personal goals. In September 2000, when he toured a site known to Jews as the Temple Mount but revered by Muslims as the Harem-e Sharif (noble sanctuary) accompanied by 1,000 police officers for protection, critics accused him of deliberately inflaming Palestinians emotions to sabotage fragile peace talks and advance his own leadership ambitions. Ariel Sharon is surrounded by security guards during his controversial visit to Temple Mount in 2000 (ZOOM 77/AP) Whether the accusations were justified or not, it proved a fulfilling calculus - and one that may not be lost on cabinet Right-wingers opposed to any nascent peace deal that emerges from the current efforts of John Kerry, the US secretary of state. Within days, the second Palestinian intifada [uprising] had erupted with spectacular intensity, torpedoing Bill Clinton's hopes of brokering a peace agreement. By the following March, Mr Sharon - once politically written-off - had been elected prime minister amid widespread Israeli electoral disillusionment about the prospects for peace and fears over a growing wave of suicide bombings. His premiership followed his time-honoured template in suppressing rebellions. With its mixture of massive military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, and controversial "targeted assassinations"of known militants, Israeli strategy was true to what Mr Sharon once called the need to "retaliate relentlessly." Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president and one-time guerrilla leader who had recognised Israel and signed the Oslo peace accords, was ostracised as a "terrorist" and put under siege in his compound in Ramallah. Work began on a 430-mile concrete and steel separation barrier through the West Bank with the stated goal of stopping suicide bombers but whose true objective, Palestinians alleged, was to gobble up land they wanted for a future state. The controversial Israeli separation barrier (GETTY IMAGES) It was the perfect prelude to today's status quo so staunchly upheld by ideological hawks in Mr Netanyahu's Likud party and Naftali Bennett's Jewish Home, the far-Right partner in the current coalition. Yet rounding it off was a sting in the tale that continues to be bitterly criticised by those same hawks. In unilaterally evacuating settlements and withdrawing troops from Gaza in 2005, Mr Sharon seemed to shred his own legacy - splitting Likud in the process and pushing him into abandoning the party to form a new centrist grouping, Kadima, to pursue fresh negotiations with the Palestinians. The man of war, it seemed, had become a pragmatic man of peace - ready to sacrifice the settlers he once championed for a last stab at compromise with Israel's historic foe. Yet the true motives for Mr Sharon's unexpected move - first proposed while his arch-foe Mr Arafat was still alive - remain in dispute. The prime minister and his backers said the goal was to improve Israeli security while reviving the international peace plan for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict of Israel alongside an independent Palestine. Mr Sharon himself publicly argued that Israel could not maintain responsibility and control over several million Palestinians indefinitely, who would eventually outnumber Israelis. Others suspected a more devious plan, involving the sacrifice of Gaza to strengthen Israel's hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, home to a far greater number of settlers. Dov Weisglass, the prime minister's then chief advisor, fanned suspicions when he said the Gaza withdrawal would "freeze" the political process and stop the discussion about establishing a Palestinian state, border, refugees or the status of Jerusalem. The remarks were subsequently disowned by Mr Sharon The intervention of his crippling stroke in January 2006 prevented us from ever knowing the truth. But as he is laid to rest, the legacy of his abortive final mission leaves Mr Netanyahu, his successor and sometime political rival, with an unavoidable challenge - how to shed to shed decades of ideological commitment for a historic final agreement that the world has come to deem essential.