LA Times: "The whitewashing of Ariel Sharon"

This is via Martin Kramer, who notes that the author Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is Edward Said's nephew. I note the following paragraph:

Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as "a man of courage and peace."

"Population transfers"? What would that refer to? Gush Katif? The next paragraph features yet another Leftist deployment of the word "Bantustans":

His much-ballyhooed withdrawal from Gaza left 1.4 million Palestinians in what is essentially the world's largest prison, cut off from the rest of the world and as subject to Israeli power as before. It also terminated the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by condemning Palestinians to whiling away their lives in a series of disconnected Bantustans, ghettos, reservations and strategic hamlets, entirely at the mercy of Israel.

The logic of this escapes me. I was against the Gaza withdrawal, but it was exactly one withdrawal--it didn't create Bantustans and considering it to be part of plan to create Bantustans doesn't magically remove it from the category of a territory transfer. And this is the recycling of an argument that was created in response to Barak's offer of contiguous territory equal in size to what it was always claimed the Palestinians wanted. Why are these guys always English professors? Further thought: The publication of this in the LA Times is at least as obnoxious as Pat Robertson's comments.

Sharon, Gaza