HOW MANY TIMES must all the world's Palestinians have wished for this moment, when they could see the man who was always ready to come and crush their hopes, suffering on his deathbed?
But life never that simple, as Sophocles may have pointed out, and the current atmosphere amongst the Palestinians is one of trepidation more than total ecstasy.
For the Palestinians, Sharon, more than any other man, embodied the unbridled desire of Israel to seek and destroy.
Sharon makes much of his agricultural upbringing, and this is no coincidence. Part of the driving force behind the early Zionist movement, with its roots in European romanticIsIn, was to create a "new Jew", unlike the urbanised artisan or burgher, who would re-establish an umbilical relaDon wild toe earlo.
What worried some of these settlers is that the Palestinians were already there, and they had already developed a proud farming tradition, from centuries of living with the land, and did not need to import their seeds and materials from Europe. From this realisation. it became clear that the Palestinians would have to go.
When the man himself was born in 1930s Palestine, on one of the earlier Russian settlements, the Palestinians were becoming increasingly cognisant of what Zionism had in store for them. The organised Israeli labour movement, the Histadrut, which is today a pillar of the Israeli state, made it impossible for any Jewish-owned company to hire Arabs.
The mandatory powers in Palestine were also making it absurdly restrictive for the Palestinian economy to develop on its own, leading to mass social deprivation, particularly in the urbanised port towns such as Jaffa.
Here a proletariat, fleeing the harshness of the agriculruled that the Wailing Wall was, indeed, the property of the Muslim Trust Lands (Awqaf) of Palestine.
Note that it was Sharon who, 71 years later, pushed the boundaries even turther by staking a claim on the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the
Like that previous uprising Palestinians' frustration lay carried out against un-armed Palestinians in Israel's "war of Sharon never shirked from violence in pursuit of Israel's demands out.
In 1951, when Palestinians, evicted from their homes in what became Israel, WCIC launching guerrilla attacks on their former homes, Sharon led a punitive, needless raid on the hamlet of Qibya, just within the border of the
The resistance of Palestindeceit and strong-handed tactics to gain political and financial backing for his military exploits against Israel. Like Fawzi al Kawoukji, a Syrian-Lebanese volunteer who had fought the Israelis during the Nakba of 19471949, Arafat met with stellar success.
ne representea not only a small-time rebel army, but a people with serious aspirations for a state, gaining recognition by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 and sending emissaries around the world.
The Suez War of 1956 was not the onlv time he and Sharon would meet on the battlefield, or their personas would clash on the world scene. Ironically, Sharon once suggested, in 1970, that the Palestinians should be allowed to carve out a state for their own — in Jordan, the
which the PLO KINCOONO nearly de-stabilised.
1982, Arafat's PLO their hands on.
Many of the bodies were covered in white lime, as per the testimony of Ang Swee Chai in her book From Beirut to Jerusalem, becomes difficult to know how many actually died.
It seems that through the decades, though, Sharon, for all nis lamea brilllance as a general. did not lose his hunger for purely punitive raids against undefended Palestinians.
The massacre at Sabra and Shatila was a watershed. Although it was carried out in an isolated pocket of the Palestinian diaspora, Palestinians around the united; in ultra-conservative Kuwait, the Palestinian community, at the time large and immeasurably powerlul, staged demonstrations out side foreign embassies which the police could not control.
The PLO had proven its ability not only to wage war, but also to run hospitals, schools and coordinate the evacuation of US diplomats
Palestinians inside the West Bank, on whom Israel had had a stranglehold since the 1967 war, were beginning
make their political demands, and their loyalty to the PLO, known.
A series of small protests culminated in 1987 with the world's first televised intifada. Israel, which was braced for an attack from organised Arab armles boat never alised, was faced instead with
rebellion
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