Amos Oz on Ariel Sharon...

Oz, no fan of Sharon, was amazed at what he saw the last 2 years.

And then two years ago a sudden change occurred. A mysterious metamorphosis. Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals. As if he had switched overnight into speaking a different language. When Sharon said for the first time, about two years ago, that the occupation is a disaster for the occupied and the occupiers, I could not believe my ears. When he started to speak about two states for the two nations, I thought he must be joking. When he mentioned for the first time the rights of the Palestinians, I thought he was mocking the slogans of the peace movement. And when he first announced that he was going to evacuate the Jewish settlers and the Israeli army from Gaza, I thought it was no more than a cunning strategy.

Nevertheless he did it. They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements, and indeed he acted like a bulldozer when he uprooted them. The evacuation of the Israeli settlers from Gaza was a military operation. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he won his many wars. Not a single building in these settlements was left intact.