The first time I spoke to Ariel Sharon was in the early ’90s at the editorial offices of the Jewish Forward. Seth Lipsky, now editor of the Sun and then the editor of the Forward, had invited Mr. Sharon in for coffee with the his staff. For my sins I was Washington bureau chief and was summoned to New York for the event, which had prompted some of the socialists on the Yiddish Forward to leave the building rather than have to shake hands with the man critics charged with being a far right fanatic.

Mr. Sharon sat with us at a modest round table for a conversation that rattled on for more than an hour. After he praised the Forward as a “Zionist paper,” we asked him questions which he answered with a bluntness that did not surprise me but with a warmth and sense of humor that did. I found myself, a long-time skeptic, transfixed, particularly when the group moved to a room next to Mr. Lipsky’s office and, since it happened to be channukah, Mr. Sharon, after insisting on donning his personal yarmulke, lit the candles and then tucked into the latkes. While I remained critical of many of his policies until his recent turn to seize the latent center of Israeli political life, the rancor was gone.

Fifteen or so years later, I am beside myself with sadness at the prospect that Mr. Sharon will no longer be leading Israel and full of trepidation over what will come next. I now see Mr. Sharon as this generation’s David Ben Gurion. All those years when we were all waiting in vain for the Palestinian Authority to clamp down on and disarm its non-state armies the way Ben Gurion did when in 1948, Mr. Sharon was busy doing to the settler movement what Ben Gurion had done to the leftist Palmach militia, disbanding it in the interest of the state.

This week, Mr. Sharon was collecting plaudits eve before the news of his second stroke. President Bush called him “a man of courage and peace.” John McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan both named Ariel Sharon as having made the boldest move of 2005, disengaging from Gaza and breaking away from hard liners in the Likud party, of which he as the original architect, to form the new centrist Kadima party.

The threat of losing Mr. Sharon is so huge because he has become the indispensable man. The Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea had only half in jest suggested that the new party be named Rashi (after the famous rabbinic commentator on the Bible and Talmud) as an acronym for Rak Sharon Yachol – Only Sharon Can.

Okay, only Mr. Sharon can do it – but do what? Mr. Sharon sought the flexibility to strike some type of grand bargain that would leave Israel safer and with a greater measure of calm. As Amnon Dankner wrote in Ma’ariv, Sharon will “establish … a new, very far-reaching line as Israel’s eastern border with the Palestinians, a line that will be decided on in consultation with the Americans,[and] … carried out with the understanding and cooperation of the Palestinian Authority … but only after the Americans announce that they recognize it at least as a temporary, de facto border, until a final settlement in the far distant future.”

Mr. Sharon has been living through a unique Ben Gurion moment of his own. Opposed on the right by those who wanted more land and on the left both by those who wanted more land and those who wanted a bi-national state, Ben Gurion pulled the Jewish people kicking and screaming into accepting the UN’s miserly 1947 partition plan. Ben Gurion saw that if Israel turned down the terrible partition compromise, not only would it abandon the Holocaust survivors in the displaced persons camps, but would soon find a world situation altered to Israel’s disadvantage. He understood that this was the last moment in which America and the Soviet Union would agree.

Mr. Sharon has been acting on the belief that America is at the zenith of its power. He knows that the West wants quiet, if not peace, with the Palestinians to ease tensions with the Moslem world. While we’re dickering, an existential threat to Israel has arisen from outside the Arab world, creating a paradox. Israel is simultaneously at its most vulnerable and its most secure. The new Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, said Iran will get the bomb, but that at the same time, “Our strategic reality at the moment is the best ever for the state. When I look about, I find it difficult to see an Arab coalition rising against Israel.”

Mr. Sharon could see that Americans are already turning inward. What if the next American president is influenced by the rising percentage of voters who think Washington should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

Before the deterioration of his health, Mr. Sharon figured that he and Mr. Bush have about the same amount of time left. Two years before contradictions within his new government create new instabilities; two years before Mr. Bush’s already eroding power is overtaken by the approaching presidential election. Mr. Sharon hast kept close to his chest Mr. Bush’s letter from April 14, 2004, which, according to the Israeli’s version, offers American support for Israel holding onto significant population centers across the green line in the context of withdrawing from most of the West Bank.

As I write these lines I cannot know what will become of Mr. Sharon, but I can tell you this: should he pass from the active scene or (God forbid) from life, we will not soon see his like again. Not in our lifetime. Jewish practitioners of magical realism will be tempted to see in Mr. Sharon’s demise an act of god: with no Sharon, they will whisper to each other, Judea and Samaria will remain Jewish. But I will know that in his lair in hell, the devil will be laughing.

We’ve known what has to be done for years and with the continuing and fantastical failures of the Palestinians, we know we will have to do it alone. But who can get us there? Who do we follow now? Even as he makes his last desperate fight for life, Ariel Sharon looms like a giant.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.