I am still planning to ignore all or most of the tributes to and condemnations of Ariel Sharon, but this photo gallery at the Guardian is worth a look. It’s the best photo gallery I’ve seen at any of the news sites, including Haaretz, the NYT, and Washington Post. The iconic photographs are, of course, the familiar, iconic, brute pictures of power that mark out and illuminate the history of Israel. But I’ve never seen the photograph from 1941, when Sharon was thirteen. Taken in Palestine in the middle of World War II, six-seven years prior to the 1947/8 War of Independence, there is a vulnerability, I won’t call it innocence, to this particular picture of a young boy, A. Scheinerman, who looks already grown up, not yet Arik Sharon, a military man. In the photograph, a darkness surrounds his right eye.