This is what discrimination looks like. This is what theocracy looks like. The father was also shot and, cruelty upon cruelty, the Israelis gunned down a local ambulance driver who tried to rescue the boy. This is barbarism, and it's the kind of repression that the apartheid regime used to exercise in South Africa, that the French used to exercise in Algeria, or the Belgians in the Congo, or the British in India. Occupation requires violence.
Occupation requires dehumanization.
But Sharon does not want peace, above all. He wants Israel to remain a Jewish state, above all. It's that very insistence of a single religious national identity that has fueled the dehumanization of Arab Israelis and Palestinians. More than working out a cease-fire, more than hashing out the fate of Jerusalem, overcoming this chauvinism will be the most difficult challenge ahead.