The prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, high in a midtown hotel, welcomes his guests with the same smile and chuckle with which he has greeted old friends for as long as I have been covering him, now going on 25 years. It’s an underappreciated element of his leadership. He is not doing press interviews during his stay, which is a private visit. But one of his friends, Michael Saperstein of Bear Stearns, has gathered for a private breakfast a handful of associates and friends, including the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and one of the lowest-profile but most influential editors in town, Neal Kozodoy of Commentary magazine.

No sooner is the group seated before a spread of smoked salmon and an assortment of bread and cheeses than the prime minister is asked about Iraq. He stresses the importance of having acted against Saddam Hussein and also of looking beyond Iraq to the danger that Iran will, as he puts it, “try to take advantage of the situation there.” And, without saying anything of a partisan or political nature, he makes it clear that he has great regard for the way President Bush has handled the situation. “There’s no doubt that President Bush leads,” he says. “He understands.”

This understanding, he suggests, extends to the idea that we are at the “end of the era of limited war” and into a period when the “main problem will be terror.” It also extends to certain fundamentals for the Jewish state – that the Palestinian Arab refugees are not going to be able to return to Israel, that certain major blocks of Jewish population in the West Bank are going to stay, and that the Palestinians will not be able to force Israel back to the 1967 borders. And that the only plan going forward can be the roadmap, the journey along which, he has long said, begins only when the Palestinian Arabs have halted terror and dismantled the structure for it.

At one point, Mr. Sharon is asked about Egypt and concern he has voiced over the years about the hostility that lingers there in respect of the Jewish state, particularly now that Egypt’s military is armed with more sophisticated, American weapons. He responds that it’s important to get beyond treaties between leaders. He stresses the importance of education in the Muslim countries. Relations may have improved with Egypt, but beyond the friendly talk, he sees Egypt as behind the boycott against Israel that still obtains in many countries, with Israel not marked on maps and with exchanges blocked between academic and trade groups.

“One should be very, very careful,” he says. “The Arabs until now do not accept the birthright of the Jews to have an independent Jewish state in the homeland of the Jews.”

On Iran, Mr. Sharon makes it clear that Israel has “no doubt” – as he put it – that the regime in Tehran is working on nuclear weapons. But he clearly does not want Israel to be out in front. “I don’t think Israel should lead this struggle. It should be an international effort led by the United States.” He doesn’t suggest an American military attack, and he doesn’t mean to spurn the Europeans, or, for that matter, the United Nations. He suggests that what is needed is a coordinated international effort with America in the lead. He says steps should be taken to bring the matter to the United Nations Security Council.

One question the premier is asked has to do with France, where he ignited a bit of a controversy some months ago when, in the face of rising anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews in the country, he called on Jews there to move to Israel for their own safety. One must understand, Mr. Sharon replies, that 10% of the French population are Arabs and that they have become an important factor in France. Israel has started to see growth in the number of French Jews staking a position there, buying apartments, say, or basing themselves in Israel for part of the time while working in France. He feels all the tumult in the United States had a beneficial effect in drawing the attention of the French government to an important problem.

Mr. Sharon is asked to reminisce about his first meeting with Mr. Bush, when the future president was still governor of Texas and making his first trip to the Jewish state. Mr. Sharon was his tour guide and took him by helicopter over Samaria for a view of the River Jordan, which he called the “smallest greatest river in the world.” He speaks of how excited Mr. Bush was and the sense of revelation on the part of the future president.

The reverie puts Mr. Sharon in mind of his visit with the late pope, John Paul II, and he retells a famous story of how he started talking of place names with the leader of a billion Roman Catholics, only to have the pope take over the listing of them, as the pontiff clearly had a picture of the holy land in his mind’s eye. It was then that the pope said to him, as Mr. Sharon tells the story, “I would like you to remember that the land of Israel is holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jews – but it was only to the Jews that it was promised.”

“That,” said the pope, turning to Mr. Sharon’s wife, Lili, who has since died, “is the difference between terra sancta and terra promissa.”

Though I have heard the story several times before, it is illuminating how fresh and moving it is to Mr. Sharon, not to mention the rest of us. Yet the matter on which Mr. Sharon becomes the most animated is the question of American Jews visiting Israel. Mr. Sharon speaks of Israel’s goal of a million new Jewish immigrants in the years ahead. He dilates on the importance of programs designed to introduce Jewish youngsters to Israel. And when he agrees to place his remarks at breakfast on the record, he says the point to stress is the importance of American Jews coming to spend time in the Jewish state.