Ariel Sharon has never ceased being a general, the man who allowed his soldiers to shoot 11-year-old schoolgirls in the head, writes Dr Hikmat Ajjuri
The world is always safer without military generals, in my opinion. Despite being the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon has never ceased being a general. In his approach to the Palestinians, he has taken many unilateral actions. He has avoided negotiation at a time when negotiation is necessary with the Palestinians.
Although his disengagement from Gaza has been hailed as very progressive and of benefit to the region, I think care needs to be taken in making this point, by those commentators who have.
The simultaneous expansion of the illegal West Bank settlements, and the continuing strangulation of Arab East Jerusalem and other West Bank areas by the "apartheid wall" are all harbingers of another unilateral action by Israel, which will have more dire consequences than the disengagement from Gaza.
In writing this piece, I am reluctant to express an opinion regarding the gravely ill Israeli prime minister and his vision of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace.
For Palestinians, Sharon is tantamount to a war criminal for his murderous campaign against Palestinians in Lebanon.
He is also the Israeli leader who sparked the violence in the West Bank and Gaza in 2000, after his visit to the Palestinian holy site of the Dome on the Rock, exerting an Israeli claim to this part of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians died that day at the hands of the Israeli security apparatus, and the ensuing intifada cost more 3,700 Palestinian lives; men, women and, most significantly, children.
The Israeli prime minister is currently enjoying an avalanche of sympathetic media coverage. But for Palestinians it will always be very difficult to forgive the role that Ariel Sharon has played in their lives. He has brought only death and destruction to Palestinian homes and families.
I, however, understand the sensitivity of the matter, considering the seriousness of Sharon's ill health. Many countries have been willing to accept that he has fundamentally changed his spots and has seen that peace with the Palestinians is the only way forward.
Yet, despite this political understanding, I have found the coverage provocative and unfair, especially, in my opinion, as it has not tried to create some balance.
In the opinion of President Bush, Ariel Sharon is a "man of peace". The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, quipped that even Mr Sharon himself would not believe that.
I believe the Palestinians must deal with whomever sits across the table, even if that happens to be Ariel Sharon, but I do not think we or others in the world should be blind to who he is, and what his ultimate aims are.
There is already enough evidence in the last five years under his stewardship to give the tell-tale that he is ultimately about peace on Israel's terms. This will not work. Peace must be a two-way process.
As a medical doctor, I sympathise, of course, with a man struggling in hospital as a result of this brain haemorrhage.
I must at the same time remember that this is the man who allowed his soldiers to shoot 11-year- old schoolgirls in the head while they were at their school desks in UN-protected schools.
The Palestinian nation has suffered tremendously from Sharon's policies and aggressiveness. I had hoped that he might be brought to international justice for his crimes.
He has caused inestimable damage to the cause of peace between Palestinians and Israelis, who have been fighting over a small peace of land (the Holy Land) for more than half a century.
If as we decided together in September 1993 that our future lies in living in peace, side by side, then we must be visionary and work together. No forced solutions will ever work.
Sharon is and was always the wrong man to forge peace. This is the Sharon who came to prominence in October 1953 when he and his special 101 military unit raided a Palestinian village called Qibya and, according to a UN report, blew up 45 houses on the heads of their inhabitants, killing 69 Palestinian civilians.
This is the Sharon who, according to credible newspaper reports at the time, in his invasion of Lebanon in 1982, killed 17,500 people, of whom two-thirds were Palestinians.
Of course, these killings preceded the huge massacre and ethnic cleansing of defenceless Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila, for which Sharon was found indirectly guilty, even by the Israeli justice system, and consequently sacked form his ministerial post.
Sharon's insensitive peacock stunt at the Haram Al Sharif, in East Jerusalem, parading with his security apparatus on the third-holiest place for more than 1.3 billion Muslims, sparked the second Palestinian intifada but also widened the conflict to include all Muslims in the world.
Three days before that visit the late Yasser Arafat was eating at the then prime minister Ehud Barak's house. Arafat begged Barak not to let this visit take place because of the disaster that it would inevitably create. The latter refused.
Arafat advised caution also for the July 2000 Camp David meeting. He advised both Barak and Clinton not to rush into that meeting without proper preparations. Again, another request fell on deaf ears.
The meeting was held on time and, as expected, failed. Arafat is erroneously blamed for the consequences until today.
In Taba in Egypt in later negotiations, there was progress towards compromise on the sticky issues of Jerusalem and refugees. This progress was to be followed up after the premiership elections in Israel at that time.
Unfortunately, there never was any follow-up because in those elections Barak lost to Sharon. And the rest is history, as they say.
Despite our difficulties with Barak, dealing with him proved there could be light at the end of the tunnel for both Palestinians and Israelis.
David Aaron Miller, in a recent opinion article in the Washington Post, titled "Israel's lawyers shed some light on the Camp David negotiations", writes: "Had the American side presented the Clinton parameters in Camp David in July rather than late in December, we would have had an agreement then."
In March 2002 the Arab summit in Beirut adopted the Saudi peace initiative, which explicitly recognises the right of Israel to exist with full normalisation with all the Arab countries, in return for the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories of the 1967 war. The Sharon government did not choose to respond.
Sharon's actions at that time were to undertake an operation called Defensive Shield, launched on March 29th. The declared objective was to destroy the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism.
What Sharon's soldiers destroyed in fact were the offices, equipment, furniture, computers, archives and records of Palestinian banks, schools, land registry offices, radio stations, businesses, research centres, town halls, municipal jails, police stations, and the ministry of higher education as well as the ministry of national economy, and last, but not least, was my office at the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology, of which I was the honorary vice-president.
This destruction of the infrastructure of the Palestinian National Authority and Sharon's later orders to remove the late Yasser Arafat were aimed at depriving the Palestinians of status as a partner in order to carry on dictating to the Palestinians unilaterally "Sharon's Peace".
Sharon's peace envisages annexing 42 per cent of the West Bank, Jerusalem unified under perpetual Israeli sovereignty, no right of return for Palestinian refugees and an indefinite interim period of stalling full Palestinian nationhood.
The unilateral disengagement from Gaza has made life there exclusively Palestinian for the first time in a long time. We welcome the fact that we no longer feel the humiliation of occupation soldiers and settlers intervening in our daily lives.
But in removing settlers from Gaza, he has just sent many to the West Bank. It is conflicting signals like this that will stall peace further.
In defiance of the International Court of Justice ruling, Sharon has continued to build an illegal wall, which aims, while "snaking through" (President Bush's description) Palestinian land, to swallow at least 25 per cent of it. Of course, the environmental disasters of this wall needs another article.
I, for one, believe that the peace process in the Holy Land was derailed the moment the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by the Israeli terrorist Yegal Amir.
Rabin was assassinated because he believed in justice as the best solution to the Middle East conflict.
Why is peace so difficult for us when the majority in our two societies, the Israelis as well as the Palestinians, favour peace? Is it because men like Ariel Sharon make it next to impossible to have peace?
Ambassador Hikmat Ajjuri is General Delegation of Palestine/Dublin