Road to Peace: A Biography of Shimon Peres.

• Author: Polner, Murray

Warrior: An Autobiography Warrior: An Autobiography. Airel Sharon with David Chanoff. Simon and Schuster, $24.95. The Road to Peace: A Biography of Shimon Peres. Matti Golan. Warner Books, $24.95. More than any other advanced nation, Israel has lived in an emotional meat grinder since its founding in 1948. It seems to gravitate from crisis to disaster, from insurmountable problems to fratricidal conflict. It's a country awash in turmoil and tension, confronted by religious and secular bigotry at home and abroad, disiilusioned at world Jewry's failure to immigrate to Israel, mired in an intractable war with the Palestinians, still threatened by Syria and Iraq, surviving economically and militarily partly through American largess, isolated diplomatically everywhere. One would hope that two of its most prominent personalities would offer their citizens some clear alternatives to the status quo and some humane, civilized notions that might encourage Israelis and their supporters to believe that the recent litany of blunders and failures can be overcome.

Unhappily, though, these books offer no such hope. Ariel Sharon's autobiography, cowritten or ghosted by one David Chanoof (the book tells us nothing about him), serves quite another purpose. Farmer and war hero, supporter of settlements on the West Bank, ultrarightist politician and cabinet minister, Sharon has clear aims: to describe how almost single-handedly he won many of Israel's wars; to justify his role in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and to excoriate his many enemies in Israel.

Sharon dwells on the invasion of Lebanon. He writes that he was forced to assume the major share of blame for the war although he kept the cabinet in Jerusalem thoroughly apprised. Still, virtually every student of the war has concluded that his role was central and that, as two respected Israeli military correspondents, Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'air, concluded in their book, Israel's Lebanon War, Sharon "transformed the war in Lebanon into a personal campaign, even though the cabinet had disqualified his approach, the country's intelligence community cautioned against it, and the senior ranks of the army--not to mention the political opposition and certain sectors of the press--forthrightly opposed it."

Sharon is unwilling to shoulder any blame for the massacre of Palestinians by Israel's Phalangist allies in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. He writes that he first learned of the murders when Israeli...