During Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, all of us living in besieged West Beirut were aware that the Israeli military was seeking to eliminate the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and had no qualms about killing large numbers of civilians in the process. We knew this from the aerial bombardment of the area around Beirut's Arab University, where the PLO had many of its offices. Dozens of apartment buildings there had been reduced to rubble. 
 
 Toward the end of Israel's ten-week bombardment and siege of Beirut, a building that housed refugees located several blocks from my home in the Sanayeh neighborhood was entirely destroyed from the air, killing dozens. Immediately after the attack, I surveyed the carnage with a friend. After leaving him to return home, I heard another huge explosion -- it was a car bomb, presumably set off close to the destroyed building in order to kill those trying to rescue survivors. My friend barely escaped with his life. 
 
 This and other examples of the handiwork of the architects of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, preeminent among whom was Ariel Sharon, failed to make it into most of the hagiographic coverage of the man's passing in the American and Israeli media. We were instead told that Sharon was "controversial," and that Palestinians had criticisms of him, but that he was a "hero," a "staunch defender of Israel's security," and most grotesquely, "a peacemaker." 
 
 In September 2012, the New York Times published an op-ed on the 30th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, during which the Israeli military stood by while their right-wing Lebanese allies murdered nearly 1,400 defenseless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a Beirut refugee camp. The article, which was based on newly uncovered documents in the Israel State Archives, revealed new details on Sharon's role in, and indirect American diplomatic responsibility for, these atrocities. The New York Times did not, however, feature this account in its coverage of Sharon's death. Instead, it re-ran online a 1983 apologia by Sharon for his invasion of Lebanon, during which there were nearly 50,000 casualties, most of them civilians. 
 
 The Lebanon war that Sharon, then the defense minister, did more than anyone else to launch was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and in the view of most Israelis at the time, Israel itself. Israel's subsequent occupation of South Lebanon until 2000, the consequent intensification of the Lebanese civil war, the slaughter of untold numbers of innocents, and the deaths of hundreds of Israeli soldiers and thousands of other combatants should all be laid in large part at Sharon's feet. 
 
 Sharon's profound impact on the Middle East stretched far beyond Lebanon. If the creation of a truly sovereign, independent, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state is not possible today -- as most sober observers believe -- this is largely his achievement. From his appointment as agriculture minister in 1977 until his passing from the Israeli political scene after his stroke in 2006, he probably did more than any other Israeli leader to make Israel's colonization of the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem an astonishing success. 
 
 Sharon flew over the region in a helicopter to select sites for new colonies, all the while pioneering novel means of stealing land from its Palestinian owners. As prime minister, he continued this expansion process, which has turned the occupied West Bank into a Swiss cheese patchwork thoroughly dominated by lush Israeli settlements on what seems to be every hilltop. Simultaneously, he engineered a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while retaining draconian control over it from without, thereby turning it into the world's largest open-air prison. 
 
 Vice President Joe Biden eulogized Sharon today as a "historic leader" who was dedicated to the pursuit of peace. The very idea is ludicrous. Sharon began his career as a military commander renowned for ruthless assaults on innocent civilians -- like the slaughter in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, when commandos of his Unit 101 blew up homes over the heads of their residents, killing 69 people. 
 
 The attack led to the first ever U.N. Security Council condemnation of Israel. It was not an isolated incident: Indeed, it established a pattern of dozens of "eyes for an eye," and of the Israeli leadership's systematic deception about what was actually happening on the ground. This approach has characterized Israel's response to any resistance to its expansion since the foundation of the state. 
 
 Sharon was emblematic of the Israeli refusal to accept that Palestinian resistance was an inevitable response to the forcible establishment of a Jewish state and the concomitant expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In later years, he became one of the most sophisticated employers of the trope of "terrorism" to demean this resistance. 
 
 The characterization not only of those who took up arms against Israel, but of all Palestinians, as "terrorists" can be seen in the transcript of a meeting between Sharon, other Israeli ministers, and U.S. envoy Morris Draper on Sept. 17, 1982, in the midst of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. 
 
 Morris Draper: The hostile people will say, sure the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is going to stay in West Beirut and they will let the Lebanese go and kill the Palestinians in the camps. Ariel Sharon: So we'll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism [sic]. MD: We are not interested in saving any of these people. AS: If you don't want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them. 
 
 Everyone present at this meeting, American and Israelis, knew that there were no PLO fighters in the camps. More than 15,000 PLO personnel had been evacuated from Beirut weeks earlier in a deal brokered by the United States. Had any number of these hardened combatants -- who had resisted the Israeli siege of Beirut for nearly two months -- been present, the perpetrators of these massacres would not have been able to operate with total impunity. 
 
 Nonetheless, during this 90-minute meeting with Draper, Sharon repeated the canard that thousands of "terrorists" had remained behind after the PLO evacuation. He used the term "terrorist" 39 times, as part of a ceaseless browbeating of Draper, who had been told to demand that the Israelis immediately withdraw their forces from West Beirut. Instead of complying with Draper's request, Sharon stonewalled, giving the butchers inside the camps many more hours to complete their gruesome work under the glow of star shells fired by Israeli troops to illuminate the killing ground. 
 
 Today, the American and Israeli media are celebrating this very same man. It is hard to imagine this kind of kid-glove treatment of anyone else with such a list of atrocities to his name. But apparently, such inconvenient facts are not welcome. In a more just world, he would have ended up facing the International Criminal Court in The Hague. 
 
 Yoav Lemmer-Pool/Getty Images ||||| Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed incorrectly stated that Ariel Sharon “withdrew troops from southern Lebanon.” Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in 2000. The following version has been updated. 
 
 Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. 
 
 Arik Sharon started as a warrior. He ended his career on the way to being a peacemaker. On that journey from fighting in every one of Israel’s wars to lying comatose for eight years in a Jerusalem hospital, he symbolized the anguish and dilemmas of Israel. A people who had come to their historic homeland had established themselves, surrounded by a culture that never acquiesced in ceding what it considered Islamic patrimony. Even before the proclamation of the Jewish state, Israel found itself in a state of war that has never ended. It has always lacked the essential prerequisite for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors: their recognition of its existence, which everywhere else is the precondition of diplomacy, not its outcome. 
 
 This state of affairs produced two aspects of the Israeli psyche: a hair-trigger response to security threats and an attitude toward the peace process both grudging and nostalgic. Israel’s margin of survival has been so narrow that its leaders felt they could not run risks about emerging military capabilities of countries that refused to accept and daily castigated the Jewish state. When threatened, preemption became its style of warfare. And it viewed the peace process both with reluctance to give up territory in an environment so rife with denunciation and with a definition of peace so sweeping as to be very difficult to achieve in a single negotiation. 
 
 When he was struck down by a stroke in 2006 , Sharon as prime minister was in the process of putting before his people a vision of coexistence with the Palestinians. Many visionaries of peace in Israel were military men: Yitzhak Rabin won the 1967 war. Shimon Peres, though not a military man, went the same route: a hawk in his early career, a passionate advocate of the peace process in recent decades. 
 
 Sharon had to undertake the longest journey to reach this insight. A daring commander, he conducted the battle that reversed the tide of the 1973 war; he was the principal advocate of the operations in Lebanon. For many years, he deplored America’s decision in 1973 to bring about a negotiated end of the war. I was secretary of state at the time, and he missed few opportunities to chide me. 
 
 1 of 86 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Tom Toles goes global View Photos A collection of cartoons about international news. Caption A collection of Tom Toles cartoons about international news. Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 The United States acted as it did then because we were convinced that, however vast the margin of victory, it would leave Israel with its historic challenge: how to translate victories over threats to its security into political coexistence with the societies it lived among. The Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, seemed to offer such a prospect. 
 
 In our many discussions, I always respected, then grew to admire and eventually develop affection for, this dedicated man living on a farm at the edge of the Negev desert, a kind of symbolic outpost. I looked forward to his visits while he was out of office; he would arrive at our meetings with maps under his arm that he used to explain the minimum requirements of Israel’s survival. 
 
 As prime minister, Sharon unexpectedly broadened his definition of security. He sought to bridge the gap between physical and political security with the same courage and decisiveness that had brought him victory in battle. He volunteered the largest withdrawal in Israel’s history. He ended the Israeli occupation of Gaza and returned it to Arab self-rule as a unilateral act without reciprocity, abandoning even the Jewish settlements that had been established there. These gestures were conceived as a test case for a negotiation about the future of the West Bank, which Sharon once had viewed as a permanent Israeli outpost. The man who had identified security with the acquisition of territory became willing to cede territory for an outcome to fulfill the hopes for peace. 
 
 It cannot be said that the result justified this act of faith. Israel was threatened by missile attacks from non-state actors: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza. Politically, Sharon’s vision was under attack from all sides: from those in Israel who insisted on a larger state, from Arab leaders who denied Israel the right to exist altogether, and from non-state terrorist groups. Still, Sharon’s vision reflected an essential first step; it was a sacrifice on behalf of raising prospects for a lasting peace — to which both sides must make a contribution by taking concrete steps and not by largely symbolic acts alone. 
 
 With another peace process underway, one needs to respect the courage of those who are willing to brave it in light of so many disappointments. It must be conducted both with commitment to the process and with a recollection of unfulfilled hopes. The vision of peace must be coupled with a determination not to permit the peace process to be turned into another form of warfare. An outcome must not only draw lines of territorial divisions but also bring a meaningful acceptance of the Jewish state by its negotiating partner as well as by key Arab states. 
 
 The writer was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.
– Ariel Sharon's death has brought on a bout of hagiography. The American and Israeli media will call him "controversial," but then call him a hero. Joe Biden praised him for his pursuit of peace yesterday, while Henry Kissinger terms him a "peacemaker" in today's Washington Post, noting his late-life willingness to pull out of Gaza. It's a "grotesque" characterization, Rashid Khalidi argues at Foreign Policy. "It is hard to imagine this kind of kid-glove treatment of anyone else with such a list of atrocities to his name." Khalidi was living in West Beirut during Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and it was obvious Israel "had no qualms about killing large numbers of civilians" to get at the PLO. "A building that housed refugees located several blocks from my home … was entirely destroyed from the air, killing dozens," he writes. Soon after, a car bomb went off, presumably "in order to kill those trying to rescue survivors," nearly killing one of Khalidi's friends. Sharon characterized all Palestinians as terrorists, and did more than anyone to prevent a contiguous Palestinian state. "In a more just world, he would have ended up facing the International Criminal Court in The Hague." Click for the full column.