REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JERUSALEM - As a cabinet minister, Sharon visited Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound in 2000, the third holiest place in Islam, which is also revered by Jews as the site of the Biblical Jewish Temples. 

The visit, in a part of Jerusalem that Israel captured in the 1967 war and annexed in a move that has never won international recognition, was widely seen as a spark for the second Palestinian uprising. During the subsequent tsunami of violence, the respected Palestinian-American academic Edward Said called Sharon a "homicidal prime minister" who deployed "systematic barbarity" against the Palestinians throughout his career.

"Isn't it clear that Sharon is bent not only on breaking the Palestinians but on trying to eliminate them as a people with national institutions?" Said wrote in The Nation newspaper in 2002, a year before his death.

Said, in full Edward Wadie Said, sometimes Edward William Said, was an outspoken proponent of the political rights of the Palestinian people and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. 

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