Sharon Backgrounder
Foreign Affairs has a nice Sharon backgrounder, which puts a lot of stuff into context:
His current policy of hitting PA installations to retaliate for terror attacks on Israelis developed in the 1950s, when the prime minister, “B.G.,” would send Sharon to attack police stations in the West Bank. Then, as now, Israel believed that humiliating its Arab enemies would pressure them into curbing terror attacks. In both cases, this strategy has had mixed results: in the 1950s, Israel’s retaliations inflamed the regional arms race and eventually led to the Sinai war of 1956, which was followed by a decade of relative quiet. In recent years, meanwhile, retaliations against the PA have had little positive effect.