Few believed Sharon would rise to become Primeminister

Ariel Sharon has a thick skin and is proud of it. He does not care who loves or hates him - be they Israelis or Arabs. The one aim in life for the former soldier and veteran politician is to ensure total security for Israel on his terms.

For most of his career, that meant keeping maximum land and political rights for the Jewish state and giving the very minimum of both to the Palestinians. His mission - his enemies call it a dangerous obsession - has been to fight for Israel's security, believing all the while that the end justifies the means. But his plans for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip provoked ire from his staunchest supporters and have been voted down by his right-wing Likud Party.

Mr Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928, when it was a British mandate. As a young man he joined the Jewish underground military organisation Haganah, and fought in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948-49 after the creation of the Jewish state.
Politcal Career 1975-77: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's special security adviser 1977-81: Minister of Agriculture 1981-83: Minister of Defence 1984-90: Minister of Trade and Industry 1990-92: Minister of Construction and Housing 1996-98: Minister of National Infrastructure 1998-99: Foreign Minister 2001-today: Prime Minister

In the 1950s he led a number of punitive military operations - one incident in 1953 when 50 houses in the village of Qibya were blown up, killing 69 residents. Another in 1955 resulted in the deaths of 38 Egyptian troops in the Gaza Strip.

Mr Sharon rose to the rank of brigadier general and commanded a division during the Six Day war of June 1967 in which Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The harsh occupation measures that he enforced there gave many Palestinians their first taste of a man who has become their sworn enemy. Lebanon disaster Mr Sharon was first elected to the Knesset in 1973, but resigned a year later to serve as a security adviser to Yitzhak Rabin. He was later re-elected to the Israeli parliament in 1977.

Mr Sharon masterminded Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. As defence minister, and without explicitly telling Prime Minister Menachem Begin, he sent the Israeli army all the way to Beirut, a strike which ended in the expulsion of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Lebanon. The move stopped the PLO using Lebanon to launch attacks against Israel, but also resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militiamen in two Beirut refugee camps under Israeli control.

Mr Sharon was removed from office in 1983 by an Israeli tribunal investigating the 1982 Lebanon invasion, finding him indirectly responsible for the killings. Political comeback
For most politicians, an indictment of that kind would have meant the end of a political career. But Mr Sharon remained a popular figure among the Israeli right, and he felt that if he bided his time, then another opportunity would present itself. As housing minister in the early 1990s, he presided over the biggest building drive in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza since Israel occupied the territories in 1967. After Binyamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition came to power in 1996, the new Israeli PM bowed to pressure to include the former army general in his cabinet. On appointing him as foreign minister in 1998, Mr Netanyahu said Mr Sharon was the best man for the job. "We shouldn't deal with bygones," he said. "He has a record throughout his public life and during the past 15 years that people should be proud of." Mr Sharon went on to become leader of the right-wing Likud Party in opposition after Mr Netanyahu's decisive defeat in the 1999 general election. After the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks, Mr Sharon sought to stir a public groundswell against the then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, depicting him as a usurper ready to trade Jerusalem for a peace agreement.

''Barak does not have the right to give up Jerusalem, which the people received as a legacy,'' Mr Sharon said at a parliamentary session.

Security above all

His controversial visit in 2000 to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, a site which is also holy to Jews, was one of the sparks for the second Palestinian intifada (uprising).

Critics say Mr Sharon knew the visit would trigger violence and gambled on the Israeli public turning to a tough leader like him who would know how to handle it firmly.

0n 6 February 2001 he won a landslide victory, pledging to achieve "security and true peace" while insisting he would not be bound by previous negotiations with the Palestinians.

US President George W Bush may have called him a "man of peace", but Mr Sharon's years in office have seen the prospects for negotiated settlement diminish with the Palestinians and mark time with Syria. He has used the time to put old rival Mr Arafat out of the equation, but instead of seeking answers around the negotiating table, he has sought to fortify Israel with the controversial West Bank barrier and a withdrawal from Gaza.

But he risked the ire of a group whose cause he has championed for so may years, the Jewish settlers, some of whom find themselves on the wrong side of the lines Mr Sharon has drawn up to separate the two peoples struggling for the same land.

And with the rejection of his Gaza disengagement plan by his own Likud party, Mr Sharon's attempt to impose a unilateral solution on the Palestinians must also be in doubt.