tural villages where most Palestinians had previously lived, sprung up.
This pent-up rage exploded un a semes of paroxvsms around the time of Sharon's birth. In 1929, what became known as the Burraq uprising erupted because of the encroachment of Zionist settlers from Europe on the previously Muslim shrine of the "Wailing (Burraq) Wall" in Jerusalem.
At the time, a special commission set up by the British government, which had begun lo understand the severity of the situation, had but in tangible realities and dispossession. Unlike then, there is as yet no third party willing to arbitrate between the Palestinians who have kept the land for countless generations and those who would take Palestine for themselves.
If Sharon himself was less squeamish about achieving the ends desired by the state of Israel, it was because he had seen it done trom the vert beginning.
Many younger Israelis protess amazement at the horrors revealed by historians such as Benny Morris, who have pointed out the massacres carried out against un-armed Palestinians in Israel's "war of independence" in 1947-1949.
For Sharon, these acts were necessary, and ne never shirked from his responsibilities as an Israeli to carry them did not fully cease until well into the 1950s, but Sharon made sure that this resistance never posed a serious threat. The Nemesis
No tale about Sharon is complete without mention of Yasser Arafat. Where once there had been disparate nanos or monters unorganised and under-funded, Yasser Arafat set about building a state-in-waiting, lending itself to parallels with Israel. Arafat,
had volunteered defend Egypt in the tripartite aggression of 1956 and was a trained engineer, brought order and discipline to the PLO, an initially intended by the Arab League, to be a dummy, to assuage the anger of the Palestinians withoul actually addressing their needs.
Arafat had employed skill, fighters, outnumbered and outgunned by Biblical proportions, fought SO tenaciously that Arafat was able to walk away claiming victory.
"We did not raise a white flag in Beirut", sang the lyrics of a popular Palestinian political song of the times; and the myth of Arafat, who succeeded where the much-better equipped Arab states had always failed, was sealed in Arab imagination.
Sharon's icon was yet to be made.
After the PLO fighters had left Lebanon under the terms ot an internationally-brokered agreement, Sharon and his Lebanese ally Elie Hobeika logetner witn group of Lebanese Forces fighters, walked into the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila and killed all the civilians they could get Palestinian streets. Groups had previously been working in secret, organised strikes, public education centres, and medical care in areas where the Israeli occupation forces were paralysed.
This eventually forced Israel to abandon its longrunning policy of not recognising the Palestinians and instead invited Yasser Arafat back to Palestine to seal the Oslo peace agreements. Sharon was personally opposed to the very idea of Oslo, and tried exhaustively to un-do the agreement.
Lately, this took the shape of the West Bank Wall, which he planned to use to annex as much as 40% of the West Bank, itself a mere shadow of historical Palestine, for Israel.
In the end, however, Sharon could not outlive Arafat by more than about a year or so; the resistance of the Palestinians is as fertile as it was in 1929, 1987 and 2000.
You can defeat an army, but not an idea whose time has come