Juan Cole weighs in (I know, bad pun) on Sharon [view ad to read article]:
“Sharon…saw the future as one in which Israel stopped expanding in some directions, instead accepting a fixed territory. It would become a huge gated community, surrounded by seven or eight small enclaves. Each enclave might remain a bad neighborhood, but gates, punitive raids and assassinations would keep the ghetto dwellers from storming the citadel. The “gates” include checkpoints, highways and a wall that would have made the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi — who built his own Great Wall — proud. It would break up the Palestinian regions into isolated cantons and guarantee that they could never mobilize politically and would remain de facto stateless. It would also preserve the Jewish polity by keeping the Palestinians in their current limbo, prevented from claiming Israeli citizenship even as they are denied a viable state of their own.