Ariel Sharon was better at war than peace.

Ariel Sharon never took it easy. After a stroke in January 2006 he clung on to life in a coma for eight years. The last days saw his organs shut down one by one. He died, aged 85, this Saturday.

The general and politician has played a huge role in Israeli public life for almost his entire career. For his fans he was the "King of Israel". His critics called him the "Butcher of Beirut". But even his political arch-enemy Uri Avnery, Israel's peace activist number one, respected Sharon as one of the big generals in this small country’s history. In this state of the jews, which was born out of the trauma of the Holocaust, the generals of the founding generation commanded special respect. Sharon or Yitzhak Rabin were the new type of jew: the Israeli, who does not go to his death without putting up a fight.

Sharon was also a charismatic and popular leader. The leftist Israeli film maker Avi Mograbi concluded in his documentary "How I learned to overcome my fear and love Ariel Sharon" that after months of stalking Sharon, he fell helplessly in love with him.

But would Sharon have brought peace to his nation, if the stroke would not have ended his political career suddenly? Very doubtful as an agreement with the Palestinians was not part of his political concept. Even as politician he still thought like a general.

He fought in the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, he crossed the Suez Canal and helped win the war against Egypt. After he retired as a general in the 1970s, he went into politics. Ideologically he was at that point not particularly extreme. He tried his luck with both big parties at first - the right-wing Likud and the left-wing Labour party. Neither was interested, so he founded his own party, Shlomtsion. He won two seats in the Israeli Parliament in 1977. Once in the Knesset, he merged with Likud and took up the post of agriculture minister.

Later in 1982 as defence minister, he pushed Israeli soldiers up to Beirut. This invasion of its small neighbour cost Israel as a country and Sharon personally dearly. With or without Israel's interference, Lebanon was a very unstable state with different ethnic and religious groups fighting bitterly for power. The war of 1982 destabilised Lebanon for many more years. Anti-Israeli forces like Hezbollah were strengthened, rather than weakened.

But Sharon will always be remembered for one event: The three-day massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camp, which was committed by Lebanese Christian militia under the eyes of the Israeli occupiers. This war crime cost the defense minister his job. In Israel, hundreds of thousands demonstrated against him. A commission of inquiry came to the conclusion he was indirectly responsible and although he resisted with all his might, he had to resign in the end.

Sharon still did not resign from public service. He hung on and subsequently took several other ministerial posts. I remember him standing on a hilltop in the nineties as infrastructure minister pointing up and down the West Bank, showing journalists where he would build new roads. Here and there, as broad as possible and not a problem if the highways were built on Palestinian land.

For him, the general, only one thing counted: Israel's security. And therefore the West Bank needed to remain under Israeli sovereignty. For the great battle strategist, a country limited to the 1967 borders would have been too small, too slim, too easily invaded.

This was the true reason why he pulled Israel's troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005. Sharon had meanwhile become Prime Minister. After the assassination of the other great general Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the next generation of politicians had tried their luck. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak came and failed. The people called for the other general of the founding generation in 2001. Sharon took the post and planned a bold move.

Since the war of independence in 1948, he knew Gaza well. The 8,500 Israeli settlers living among one and a half million Palestinians in a tiny strip of 365 square kilometers squeezed between the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt held no strategic value for Israel. Especially since Egypt was locked into a "cold peace" with the Jewish state. Sharon calculated coolly: if he cut Gaza loose, it would be easier to keep the West Bank. So he pulled out of Gaza in 2005 despite fierce resistance from his own party.

And without negotiating with the Palestinians. He never respected them. They lack great generals. And he was not interested in a comprehensive peace agreement with them, which would have also involved the West Bank. He proved his disrespect for the Palestinians also at the turn of the millennium, when he visited the Temple Mount alias Haram al-Sharif, triggering the Second Intifada.

Sharon was certainly willing to close a few settlements to give the Palestinians a bit of continuous land. But he wanted to keep most of it, as it was important for the internal and external security of Israel: the Jordan Valley, most settlement blocks and many areas close to Israel's 1948 borders, which he considered necessary as a buffer zone.

Maybe he underestimated the power of the precedent he had created. But it could turn into the most valuable aspect of his political heritage: Sharon showed Israelis that it is possible to confront settlers and their political lobby and pull out of occupied territory. Herein lies a small chance for US Secretary of State John Kerry's relentless efforts to restart Middle East peace negotiations.