As this Agence France-Press article today demonstrates, Sharon is preparing his way to taking on everyone both inWashington and in the Middle East quite well when he is able to manage to get himself portrayed as "restrained", as "impressive", indeed as "new".

JERUSALEM, June 19 (AFP) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon swept to office as a champion of security and the rights of Jewish settlers, but many Israeli hardliners are bitterly disappointed by his new policy of restraint.

The former general, who has confounded expectations by holding fire despite an unprecedented wave of Palestinian violence, now finds himself under attack from the right-wing that once counted itself among his fiercest supporters.

"It's going to blacken his name in the annals of Jewish history," said David Wilder, settler spokesman in the West Bank town of Hebron, scene of some of the worst unrest since the Palestinian uprising began nine months ago.

"If he doesn't do something fast, he's going to be remembered as the man whose policy of restraint brought death and destruction on the Jewish people and the land of Israel," Wilder told AFP.

Sharon has refrained from retaliating after a series of Palestinian attacks including a suicide bombing this month at a Tel Aviv disco that killed 21 people, the deadliest such incident on Israeli soil in six years.

That restraint has changed the image of Sharon, loathed in much of the Arab world because of refugee camp massacres during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon which he ordered as defence minister, as an implacable hardliner.

Few could have predicted the man who won a landslide election victory in February, with a pledge to "restore" Israeli security, would now be holding to a tentative ceasefire in the face of nearly daily Palestinian attacks.

"There will come a point at which it no longer makes sense," said Barry Rubin, deputy director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies.

"That point has not been reached. From an Israeli point of view that's a difficult thing to say, because it means more Israelis are going to be killed," Rubin said.

Many Sharon supporters say Sunday's broadcast of a BBC programme looking into whether he could be charged with war crimes over the 1982 massacres was a politically motivated attack aimed at undermining him.

Yet Rubin said the paradoxical result of the controversial broadcast was to make him even stronger in the eyes of many Israelis, while he gains further credibility abroad by keeping up the ceasefire.

"It helps him here because people feel it's completely unfair," Rubin said, adding that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's long history of violence has meanwhile been largely overlooked.

"To say Ariel Sharon is a war criminal -- well what does that make Yasser Arafat?" he said. "People don't know that Sharon has been historically a much more complicated figure than some simple right-wing nut."

But right-wingers and others are clearly growing impatient watching Sharon keep the guns idle while events unfold like those on Monday, when two more settlers were slain by Palestinian gunmen.

West Bank settlers rampaged through a Palestinian village overnight Monday, while a poll this week conducted by an Israeli television channel found nearly one out of two Israelis disapprove of Sharon's restraint policy.

Ehud Sprinzak, dean of the Lauder School of Government in Herzliya, said Sharon has so far been able to discount the political pressures on him to strike back hard against the Palestinians.

"He's done a very impressive job in resisting," Sprinzak said. "He will not change course just because of political pressure. He likes the kind of new legitimacy from the Americans and others who have discovered a new Sharon."

But Wilder said he and many others feel little beyond "tremendous disappointment" at Sharon's failure to live up to his campaign promise to deal firmly with Palestinian violence.

"The time has come to stop this restraint; it's a suicide policy," he said. "It creates more jobs for those who dig graves. It's good for Israeli cemeteries."