Ariel Sharon was not an opportunist, as some commentators have stated, but a Zionist strategist. Underestimating his statesmanship has been another aspect of this past week’s farewell festival for the humorous grandfather. When the Palestinians honor their heroes with a thousandth of the ceremony that has been bestowed on the hero of Unit 101, our media condemns it as “incitement” and “support for terrorism.” Yet the number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians whom Sharon either killed or was responsible for their deaths is more than the combined number of Israelis killed by Palestinians released in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit and those whose release was secured by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Sharon evacuated a few colonies for the truly grand vision of establishing Palestinian Bantustans. It’s frustrating to see how many opponents of the occupation are falling once again into the linearity trap, just as they did during the first years of the “Oslo process.” Just as they were thrilled when the Israeli army pulled out of the Palestinian cities and was instead stationed around them, in 2005 they also concluded that the evacuation of a handful of settlements would lead straight to additional withdrawals.

Sharon did not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of Jewish soldiers in the war for new order in Lebanon. Why would he hesitate to hurt the feelings of a few thousand settlers in order to keep on place hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?

Even as the unilateral preparations to dismantle the Gaza settlements proceeded, Israel was developing the double and separate road system in the West Bank. It was dubbed “transportation contiguity,” and was meant to enhance the euphemistic “fabric of life.” In reality, it is an entire system of roads, interchanges, bridges and tunnels that diverts the indigenous Palestinians from the highways between the ever expanding “settlement blocs” and Israel, while creating transportation links between the Palestinian enclaves.

The road system linking Israel to the West Bank had been conceived by Shimon Peres back in the 1970s. The Palestinians fought these land-devouring plans in court during the 1980s, but Yasser Arafat, the biggest victim of the linear-and-gradual trap, agreed to them in the 1990s.

Avi Primor, who as the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director general for Africa in the early 1980s accompanied Sharon on the latter’s trips to Africa, told Haaretz that Sharon was most interested in the Bantustans. What fascinated Sharon, Primor says, was how these pseudo-independent states operated under South Africa control, and how its registered citizens could live as residents across the “border.” At some point Primor began “to suspect that Sharon wasn’t thinking about South Africa, but about us.”

Twenty years later, when Sharon, as prime minister, said he would give the Palestinians a state, Primor knew exactly what he meant: “At best he’ll give 60 percent of the territory and split it up, with each part surrounded by Israeli territory, and we will control the entrances and exits.”

But Sharon was merely upgrading the ethnic separation and discrimination plan that Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak had already been advancing on their own, shielded by the brand of peacemakers. The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which my colleague Gideon Levy has without cynicism referred to as Sharon’s “greatest achievement,” delivered a death blow to one of the only two positive clauses in the Oslo Accords (positive in the sense of our joint future in this land): that the Gaza Strip and West Bank are a single unit.

With the disengagement, Sharon demonstrated that Israeli bureaucratic and technological power had no limits; it is possible to control the Strip by remote control. Through heavy-handed policies (like banning Gazans from working in Israel and cutting them off from the West Bank), one could control the Palestinian leadership − to weaken it, force it even further into begging, and at the same time demand that it continue to be a subcontractor for the Shin Bet security service and the IDF − all while winning American applause.

Sharon conducted no “revolution”; his policies were the natural extension of the aggressive Israeli strategy developed by his friends-rivals in the Labor Party. It exacted, and will continue to exact, a high and painful price from both peoples that live in this land.