...Toward the end of the lunch, my group posed for pictures and I stood to Sharon's right: another unlikely metaphor. Over the years I have been unsparingly critical of him, but Sharon, the former paratrooper, has befuddled his critics. The adamant hard-liner, an architect of Israel's expansionist settlements policy, faced demographic reality and pulled Israel's settlements out of the Gaza Strip. That made him more popular in the country as a whole than in his own right-wing Likud Party. He smiles sphinx-like when asked about his new popularity with the political left. It is an old (77) man's wise acknowledgment that the wheel can turn yet again.

Still, for the moment no one in Israel can realistically challenge him. He sees himself as a latter-day Cincinnatus, the storied Roman farmer who dropped the plow to become dictator and returned to the farm once the crisis had passed. Others might trim their principles to remain in office, Sharon said, but not him. He lives by certain truisms and neither career nor ambition nor popularity can make him compromise. The way he tells it, he is just a farmer passing through politics and war, war and politics -- always yearning, he says, for the sweet smell of fresh hay and a peace he has never known.