George W. Bush may claim that Ariel Sharon is a “man of peace,” but his track record suggests a different title. Over a 50-year military and political career, Sharon has been responsible for incalculable civilian trauma. Specific examples include the 1953 massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya and the 1982 slaughter in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but he is also culpable of uprooting tens of thousands of Palestinians through settlement expansion carried out by his government. 

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American foreign policy has habitually displayed double standards towards the Middle East: one standard towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. To give just one example, the US effected regime change in Baghdad in three weeks but has failed to dismantle a single Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in 38 years.

Breakthrough Idea: Divestment

A growing number of world citizens are pushing for economic divestment from Israel to stem Palestinian suffering. The World Council of Churches has urged its members to give “serious consideration” to the idea, following the US Presbyterian Church’s moves in that direction. More than 40 university campuses across the US have active divestment campaigns, the first of which began at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. Even some Israelis are promoting economic sanctions as a means of nonviolent protest. In January 2005, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions became the first Israeli peace group to endorse such measures, telling its compatriots “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t complain about violence on the part of the Palestinians and yet reject effective non-violent measures against the Occupation that support their right to self-determination, such as economic sanctions.” Such tactics were essential to the success of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. And they can be just as effective this time around.

The two main items on America’s current agenda for the region are democracy for the Arabs and a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. America, however, insists on democracy only for its Arab opponents, not for its friends. As for the peace process, it is essentially a mechanism by which Israel and America try to impose a solution on the Palestinians. American hypocrisy is nothing new. But with Condoleezza Rice it has gone beyond chutzpah.

With Ariel Sharon, by contrast, what you see is what you get. He has always been in the destruction business, not the construction business. As minister of defense in 1982, Sharon preferred to destroy the settlement town of Yamit in Sinai rather than hand it to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel. George Bush once described his friend Sharon as “a man of peace.” In truth, Sharon is a brutal thug and land-grabber.

Sharon is also the unilateralist par excellence. The road map issued by the quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) in the aftermath of the Iraq war envisaged three stages leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. Sharon wrecked the road map, notably by continuing to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank and building an illegal wall that cuts deep into Palestinian territory.

He presented his plan for disengagement from Gaza as a contribution to the road map; in fact it is almost the exact opposite. The road map calls for negotiations between the two sides, leading to a two-state solution. Sharon refuses to negotiate and acts to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel. He told right-wing supporters: “My plan is difficult for the Palestinians, a fatal blow. There’s no Palestinian state in a unilateral move.” The real purpose of the move is to derail the road map and kill the comatose peace process. For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the prelude not to a permanent settlement but to the annexation of substantial sections of the West Bank.

Sharon decided to cut his losses in Gaza when he realized that the cost of occupation is not sustainable. Gaza was home to 8,000 Israeli settlers and 1.3 million Palestinians. The settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land and most of the water. It was a hopeless colonial enterprise, accompanied by one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Avi Shlaim is a professor at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. A longer version of this article first appeared in The Guardian.