Remaking Sharon

AP
This Sharon TV ad aims for voters worried he was too hard-line

A couple of weeks ago, Ariel Sharon sat in his shirtsleeves in the plush Tel Aviv office of his top campaign adviser. The 72-year-old Likud Party candidate in next week's prime ministerial elections was surrounded by his team of high-powered imagemakers, the professionals charged with persuading voters that the former general's reputation as a dangerous maverick is undeserved. At the end of the meeting to discuss his speaking schedule, Sharon raised his bulky frame and addressed his handlers. "I have to thank you all for making me look like such a very nice guy," he said. Then he raised his finger: "But I warn you that with one sentence I can undo it all." The spin doctors laughed in loud, nervous guffaws. They knew it was true.

In the past six months, Sharon's advisers have built an image of their candidate as a man of peace. Hard peace, perhaps, but a peace that makes sense to Israeli voters who are disappointed with Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It's an image deeply at odds with Sharon's reputation as an ironfisted, extremist adventurer, the man most associated with Israel's disastrous war in Lebanon and with the defiant Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

It's also an image that Barak is fighting desperately to smash. The image and reality of Sharon have become the main battleground of the election campaign. Though Barak went further than any other Israeli leader in offering concessions to the Palestinians, it is Sharon whose campaign jingle says he will bring peace. In his television spots, Sharon cuddles a lamb on his Negev farm and lovingly lifts his grandson into his arms as the sun sets over his wheat fields. Says Yossi Beilin, Barak's Justice Minister: "Sharon prefers the image of Grandma, rather than the reality of the wolf."

If Sharon can preserve that image until election day, he should win. There are some possible surprises, though. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators working in Taba, Egypt, could spring a last-minute peace deal on the world. Even if that happens, it may be hard to erase Sharon's 18-point lead in opinion polls.

If he wins, Sharon will be able to trace his victory back to a Park Avenue conference room. Last June, Sharon and his son Omri, 36, met American political guru Arthur Finkelstein and his assistant Jay Warshaw in the New York City office of Arie Genger, a wealthy supporter. Sharon was worried about what Barak was about to give up to Arafat in the name of peace. But he saw a bright spot: "I know that this will lead to elections, and I'll be the candidate to run against Barak." Finkelstein, who advised Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's predecessor as Likud leader, laid out a strategy. "You need to start showing that you support peace," he said, "but a different kind of peace than Barak. People are going to have to understand the real Sharon."

Sharon began to gear up an image as a man committed to a workable peace deal. There was a second front to the campaign: Sharon had to beat off a possible resurrection of Netanyahu, who was itching to return to politics after being cleared of corruption charges. That two-front struggle was captured in the most famous walk Sharon will probably ever make--his tour of the Temple Mount at the end of September. It was a maneuver designed to take the hard-line limelight from Netanyahu by asserting Israeli sovereignty over a site that is also claimed by Arafat. Yet Sharon also cast it as a move intended to show his faith that Jews and Muslims could live side by side. In the end, it touched off the violence that destroyed Barak's government and brought Sharon to the verge of power. Was that a motive as well? Sharon insists not.

Barak watched Sharon's makeover with incredulity. Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister settled into a chair in the conference room of the Tel Aviv television studio where his staff shot his election ads. As Sharon's campaign spot came on the air, the Prime Minister couldn't believe what he was seeing. Smiling Israelis of all walks of life, backed by the blue and white of the national flag, were intercut with a grandfatherly Sharon. Annoyed, Barak turned to his campaign manager, Tal Silberstein. "It's impossible that this guy shows himself with cows and wheat fields and playing with little girls," he said. "It's impossible with everything that we know about him. We have to change this perception."

An Israeli news show mocked Sharon's apple-pie image by juxtaposing his campaign slot with the remarkably similar structure and visuals of Madonna's American Pie video. But Barak's reaction was stronger. His campaign unleashed a series of spots that drilled home Sharon's role in Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion. Barak's admen accused Sharon of digging Israeli soldiers into the mire of Lebanon, from which they didn't emerge until Barak pulled them out last summer after a costly occupation.

Cracks in Sharon's new image have emerged. Last week he began making hard-line comments about Arafat, perhaps letting his real ideas out of the closet. But his worst moment came when, addressing high-schoolers in Beersheva, he was confronted by Ilil Komey, 16, who told Sharon that her father had suffered mental disturbances ever since he was a soldier in the Lebanon war. "Ariel Sharon, I blame you for causing my father suffering for more than 16 years," she said. "I blame you for many things that caused suffering to many people in this country." Sharon's imagemakers stepped in: he stopped visiting high schools and canceled appearances before journalists.