The death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had been in a deep coma since suffering a stroke in January 2006, represents an extraordinary moment of rupture in his country's history. Of the generation of Israeli soldiers and politicians who fought in Israel's founding conflicts, only Shimon Peres now remains in a prominent role.
Sharon, who died Saturday at the age of 85, represented a metaphor for Israel's trajectory. The son of Russian immigrants and born in a farming community near Tel Aviv in 1928, he was a teenage volunteer in the fight against British rule in the Palestine Mandate.
He was present at many of the key symbolic moments in Israel's development. He fought, and was wounded, in the 1948 war of independence that Palestinians know as the Nakba — the "catastrophe." A bloody ruthlessness was also evident from early on when he led the infamous 1953 retaliation raid on Qibiya in Jordan that saw 69 Jordanians, many of them civilians, killed.