Sharon’s son will share father’s fate: “Flatten all of Gaza”

Gilad Sharon, Former Israeli P.M.’s son draws contempt for scorching ‘Jerusalem Post’ op-ed, calling for a Hiroshima scenario over Gaza.

In one of the most incendiary op-eds on the current Gaza crisis, Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that Israel should “Flatten all of Gaza.”

Sharon, whose father ordered a withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, called for the blockaded Palestinian region to be annihilated or re-occupied by Israeli troops.

“There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire,” he wrote. “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”

Placing all blame for the current conflict on the people of Gaza, Sharon — a columnist for Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and a major in the Israeli Army reserves — suggests that Palestinians in the region chose and deserve a painful fate, essentially endorsing civilian deaths:

To prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.

Although Sharon has no role in Israeli policy making, his comments do not differ dramatically from those of Israel’s deputy P.M., Eli Yishai, who said on the weekend, according to Haaretz, that “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”