The Old Arik

Bret Stephens describes how the old Ariel Sharon ran Gaza.

Ariel Sharon once ruled Gaza. From July 1971 to February 1972, Mr. Sharon, then the officer in charge of Israel's southern command, suppressed a PLO guerrilla insurgency with one of the most inventive and relentless campaigns in modern military history. To stop Palestinian boys from stoning Israeli infantry, Mr. Sharon gave their fathers a choice: Discipline your children, or face deportation to Jordan. To uncover underground PLO bunkers, Mr. Sharon assigned a bulldozer to every search-and-destroy patrol, literally rooting out Palestinian fighters from their hiding places and possibly burying some of them alive. To facilitate military operations in refugee camps, Mr. Sharon widened alleyways into streets, demolishing whatever housing stood in the way.

And to make certain Gaza would never again pose a security problem for Israel, Mr. Sharon recommended the building of several Jewish settlements that would divide the Strip into four zones. "If in the future we wanted to control this area," Mr. Sharon recalls in his memoirs, "we would need to establish a Jewish presence now. Otherwise we would have no motivation to be there during difficult times later on."