If you were to ask a 20-year-old Palestinian today about Ariel Sharon, you might be surprised how little this generation knows about him. The past eight years, in which Sharon became incapacitated, and the few years before that in which he had softened his radical stance, appear to have chipped away at the warmonger image that is still etched in the consciousness of almost every Palestinian over 25 years old.

More than any other Israeli military figure, Sharon seems to be present in every violent mark since the Nakba and creation of Israel.

He joined the Israeli army in 1948 and one of his first assignments by David Ben Gurion was in 1953 to establish Unit 101, which focused on retaliation to cross-border attacks by the Palestinian fedayeen (militants). After one such attack, Sharon’s men crossed into the Palestinian town of Qibya, then under Jordan’s rule, and killed 69 Palestinian villagers, two-thirds of whom were women and children. The Qibya massacre showed Sharon’s ruthlessness and would become a symbol of the brutal Israeli retaliations to any Palestinian resistance attacks.

The brutality of Sharon and his Unit 101 was on display again after the Israeli occupation in 1967. His unit was dispatched to the Gaza Strip specifically to root out the fedayeen from the refugee camps. People of the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza still remember Sharon and his bulldozers as they literally widened the streets of the camp by destroying homes on both sides of the road, so that Israeli army vehicles could travel easily while they patrolled the camp to crush the resistance.