- Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that only
a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader Ariel Sharon will
have the credentials to broker any sort of lasting settlement with the
Palestinians. Maybe so. History is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?
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- Sharon's history offers a monochromatic record of moral
corruption, with a documented record of war crimes going back to the early
1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground
military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he was given
command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation
against Arab attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two
terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101's purpose was
that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous
violence not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the
helpless.
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- Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in
August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli
history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other
sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander,
reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through
the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled,
they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
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- In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101
on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign
minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would
stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong.
Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to
Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today,
least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times
who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty",
or the Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after
his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly
old warrior".
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- Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus:
"Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict
heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order
surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened
at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village
had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine
civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon
and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run
away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
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- The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion:
"One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door,
the body sprawled across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants
had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown
up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously
in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated
16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary
of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he
wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village
of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank
was annexed to Jordan).
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- According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had
entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses,
using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the
bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were
still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir
had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army
markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to
cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighbouring
villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
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- And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the
Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza
"clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece
in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.
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- "Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite
to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defence
Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant
Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well.
Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or
Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys
weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low,
two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who
then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their
future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit
from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes
to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their
heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control
and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.
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- "'They came at night and began marking the houses
they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired
labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave.
I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla!
They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in
bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost
in one day. And the soldiers would beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers
with guns, beating little kids!' By the time the Israeli army's work was
done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but
throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads.
Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already
badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with
a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to
exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
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- As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was
far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's
command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000
people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian
men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives
of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971,
104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest
suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
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- Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by
the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability
of the "Bar Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank
of the Suez canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
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- In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit
to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's
yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices
to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This the Israelis
managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic
relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa.
Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and
advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous
CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
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- As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government,
Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon,
with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians
as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was
a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese
lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis
bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres
at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762
bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However,
the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just
as the '82 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Begin, then Prime
Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel's nuclear trigger
to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.
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- The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and
Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00
in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the
Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia,
the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since
the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour
rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and
the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after
they were killed.
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- An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by
Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre,
and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B,
which remains secret until now).
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- Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct
knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan
Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other
Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report
stated: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the
Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of"
would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance
and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee
camps, and having failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"]
to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists
enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister
of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing
the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the
camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which
the Defense Minister was charged". (For those who want to refresh
their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the
Kahan coverup we recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
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- Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983,
he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in
the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
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- Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish
his credentials as a Likud ultra. Sharon has always been against any sort
of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to
accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this
year, in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace
treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops
to the so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed
Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted
No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained
in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against
the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal
from southern Lebanon was conducted.
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- As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s
he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction
to any peace deal. His present position? Not another square inch of land
for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state
on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian
control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will
retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources.
All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem
will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building
around the city. The Golan heights would remain under Israel's control.
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- It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the
long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff
or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions
of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and building
around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who okayed the military escort
for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and
Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months.
But that doesn't diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half
century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving
for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by a young Israeli woman, Ilil
Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural
high school outside Beersheva. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon",
Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for
16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over
16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer
in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister".
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- Ilil was wrong. He's there. And now the bloodbath will
begin. CP
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