The adulation of Ariel Sharon, the leader who did good and reascended the throne as "king of Israel," demands answers from his critics. Those on the left who cast doubts when new admirers sang his praises for what seemed to be a deep personal turnabout, owe an accounting. How will the skeptics deal next week, on the eve of Yom Kippur, with the sins of impure lips, slander, gossip and confusion of the mind? After all, Sharon carried out the disengagement, stood up boldly against the Likud rebels, and on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, even promised Shimon Shiffer, from the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, that the coming year will see "giant progress" in the political process and in the implementation of the road map.

The skeptics are obliged to admit their doubted that the prime minister would carry out a full evacuation of the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria settlements. He did it strongly, quickly and elegantly, as Haim Bar-Lev said about the Six-Day War. Evaluation of the depth of Sharon's turnabout now encompasses the possibility that if he loses in the Likud primaries, he will change his spots, leave the Likud, and set off toward the horizon with a new party. The gamble on whether or not to believe in a new Sharon is not just political lottery. He has the capabilities that make such a change possible. He has transformed himself dramatically, not always elegantly, many times in the past, and the shift this time will have especially far-reaching significance.

What is the defense being mounted by those who remain doubters? He lagged decades behind the espousers of the agreement-for-territories thesis. Better late than never? Not so terrible? It is pretty terrible, because his new understanding, which is, thus far, partial, arrived very late and exacted a heavy price in victims and in national investment. An effort is made not to expel a student who lags behind in his schoolwork - but to give him a prize? The difficulty with Sharon, which in many ways resembles the difficulty with the twists and turns of Benjamin Netanyahu, is the unforgotten record of his problems with sticking to the truth.

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He fulfilled the disengagement promise because he had no choice. He had to do it, because the Israel Defense Forces failed in the battle for the Gaza Strip and the prime minister came under domestic and external pressure to act. His critics have to admit that they did not fully grasp the scope of that necessity. Sharon is as much to blame for this as they are: Throughout his career he often acted in a manner not consistent with either common sense or his own promises.

Has he been weaned of his propensity for non-truths, as David Ben-Gurion asked about Sharon in the late 1950s? This is far from certain. This coming year may resolve the contradiction between Sharon's promise of political momentum and what his authorized prompter, Dov Weissglas, said about placing the road map in formalin. In the meantime, in order to crush Netanyahu once and for all, will he not seek to reassure his voters that no great progress looms in the political process over the horizon? And what will happen when he wins the primaries, as is likely, and leads his party in the election campaign? Will the Likud functionaries, who will support him in the primaries in order to improve their chance of remaining in power, let him run wild with this leftism afterward? Until that is known, there is no way to anticipate the moves of the man on his way to another term in office. The doubt remains great, and it ought to go on gnawing at us.

Those who believe in Sharon, even outside the Likud, are fond of the paradoxical hypothesis that he would have actually preferred to lose to Netanyahu in order to facilitate his leaving. But the truth is that Sharon wishing to be won over is like Shimon Peres craving to be a loser. As Sharon's sophisticated adviser, Eyal Arad, believed all along, Sharon can and must win in the party. Afterward, the confidants think, God is great. But is Arik Sharon?

Those who leak his thoughts to the media are more accurate than he himself was in the Shiffer interview. They say that all these tumultuous developments will occur only in negotiations on a final-status agreement, which is synonymous with the advent of the messiah, and in any event will occur after Sharon has retired to his ranch. The road map talks about a Palestinian state at a date that has long since passed; but it provides Sharon with almost unlimited time because of the condition of ending terrorism. He will overcome the hurdle of the elections, try to gain time, and will be threatened by a reinforced camp of rebels in his party who will view him as a liar and a traitor if he tries to bring about the spectacular progress toward a settlement that he talked about. Sharon at the head of the Likud may, then, turn out to be a ticking political hazard.

He created what is known as a dynamic, and for that he is to be congratulated. But politics, like physics, does not know a dynamic motion without a force to propel it. The only propulsion that will permit progress of the kind that Sharon is promising is for him to leave the party he established and to reshuffle a stuck political alignment, which is stuck. This is apparently not what we can expect if he captures the security zone in the Likud. Then, there will be no dismantlement of more settlements and no serious negotiations with the Palestinian leadership. The doubts about Sharon? Don't allow them to doze off.