The new Jew was supposed to be a tough Jew. This was not just a response to the Holocaust, although the magnitude of the calamity reinforced this ideal. Rather, from the beginning of the second “aliya,” the wave of Zionist Jewish settlement that started at the turn of the twentieth century, the largely East European and often socialist Jews who became Zionism’s pioneers sought both to work and defend the land on which they settled. This put them into conflict with the Palestinian Arab population — not just with those who lived or worked the land before it was sold to Jews, but also with those who during the first aliya, beginning in the 1880s, had worked as both farmers for the early Jewish settlements.

What Israeli novelist David Grossman has described as Sharon’s combination of “primal urges, of violence, of combat, cunning and brilliance, bravery and corruption” are precisely the combination of qualities that were necessary to build a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab country. Grossman described another quality in Sharon — unbridled leadership.

Much of Sharon’s popularity is rooted in his position as a father figure to Israelis; their faith in him became so strong that they followed him even without knowing the course he was charting. Yet he was only filling the shoes of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first premier and the father of the modern Israeli state, whose duty it was to shape a young nation and lead it into an uncertain future. — Beliefnet.com