"In his role as minister of construction and housing, Ariel Sharon, former defense minister and once Israel's most famous tank commander, oversees the government's emergency house-building program. He has drawn much criticism, at home and abroad, for planting new settlements in the occupied territories. Sharon brushes the critics aside and presses ahead with the same bluff determination that led his troops across the Suez Canal to counterattack Egypt in 1973 and plunged Lebanon deeper into chaos when Israel invaded that stricken country in June 1982.

By comparison, those old campaigns were easy, according to Sharon. Providing enough housing for the olim [new immigrants], he tells me, 'is the hardest thing I've been involved in for the past 40 years. We're building at the rate of 100,000 apartments annually, but we're about a year and a half behind time.' By paying bonuses to contractors who deliver buildings rapidly, Sharon claims to have cut the average construction time for an apartment complex from 26 to 11 months.

'Three months ago I was attacked for being a complete failure in construction,' Sharon says, smiling briefly. 'Now it's a failure because we build to much.'"

-From The Great Soviet Exodus, National Geographic, February 1992. By Tad Szulc.