    http://www.haaretz.com

    Ariel Sharon has in recent days delivered a conclusive answer to those
    who had been wondering whether he had changed his stripes since his
    election as prime minister. The answer is this: once a bully, always a
    bully.

    Sharon is the perfect exemplar of the violent Israeli, the sort who
    tramples his neighbor and who responds wildly and screams bloody murder
    whenever anyone tries to put him in his place. That's what he always
    used to be; and now it turns out that his term as prime minister did
    nothing to soften the edges, and change his behavioral traits. The
    moment he gets into trouble, the moment he sets a goal for himself, he
    doesn't fret about the means used to get what he wants. He doesn't
    flinch about breaking the rules of the game - and sometimes these rules
    happen to be actual laws. And when he's called on to make accounts, he
    puts on a martyr's face, playing the part of a victim of some heinous
    miscarriage of justice.

    As an army officer, Sharon's military talents were often counterbalanced
    by criticism of his proclivity to interpret orders given to him as he
    saw fit. Whenever his actions were scrutinized, Sharon responded as
    though he were being persecuted by people seeped with envy of his
    success, who wanted to blame him for misdeeds done by others. That is
    how he acted after acts of reprisal undertaken at Qibya (in 1953), after
    the misadventure at the Mitla Pass (during the 1956 Sinai War), the 1973
    Yom Kippur War and the Lebanon War.

    When he left the Israel Defense Forces, against his will, Sharon
    delivered a disgraceful speech to his army colleagues in which he
    shamelessly attacked his superiors, and threw in some partisan political
    barbs. When he left his division after the Yom Kippur War (as a major
    general in the reserves), Sharon saw fit to release an order in which he
    attacked the state's political and military leadership for the war's
    errors, and basically called on his soldiers to support his political
    endeavors.

    In his political career, Sharon has come across as a bull raging back
    and forth in its arena. As a minister in Menachem Begin's government, he
    quarreled with his cabinet colleagues, attacked them savagely, and was
    not loath to firing some blunt accusations at the prime minister
    himself. Whenever one of them dared to stand up to Sharon, he responded
    with unbridled violent invective ("Mr. Deputy, I'll strip you bare on
    this government table," he yelled at Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Yadin).
    Sharon introduced vulgar, unrestrained idiom to Israel's political
    discourse, and his crude broadsides reached the point at which a motion
    was forwarded to dismiss officially his attacks on Begin. He operated on
    a particularly short fuse whenever realization of his personal ambitions
    seemed within reach (as in his campaign to wrest the defense portfolio,
    after Ezer Weizman resigned as defense minister). Concurrently, he
    wallowed in self pity whenever his behavior stirred opposition ("They
    are spilling my blood," he moaned. "They're spreading vile gossip about
    me").

    Sharon waged his political battles with a mix of aggression, patronizing
    self-righteousness, media manipulation, and the occasional deviation
    from the truth. His track record was littered with verdicts reached by
    IDF judicial tribunals, state commissions of inquiry and courts which
    ruled (among other things) that Sharon failed to act squarely with his
    superiors.

    None of this was a secret in February 2001, but Sharon's past did not
    stop a vast majority of the public from voting him into the Prime
    Minister's Office. The bitter fruit of this election result is currently
    being eaten by the state, in all its spheres.

    Sharon's last public appearance resoundingly vindicated Napoleon's
    dictum that if you scratch a Russian soldier you'll find a Tartar.
    Sharon and his sons are the objects of an investigation about funds
    which they used to help erase an illegal contribution which he received
    in 1999. Sharon is not providing answers to the accusations; instead of
    giving intelligible answers, he's attacking the nation's law authorities
    and the media. He has taken on the role of the victim so as to violate
    the nation's election campaign laws and attack his political rival,
    Amram Mitnza, who has no connection to the investigation against him.
    Sharon's mask is off, but whether the public really perceives the face
    revealed beneath is to be doubted.