- Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, is currently
facing possible war crime prosecutions for two massacres that occurred
20-years apart: the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in
the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon (click for more), and the
April 2002 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) mass killings in the Jenin refugee
camp in the West Bank.
Sharon is, without doubt, guilty of these crimes against humanity, and
others. He is also unrepentant. For him, these mass killings are merely
necessary steps on the path toward his objective of a "Final Solution"
to the "Palestinian problem," through the mass expulsion and/or
extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living
in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Under
various labels, Sharon and a rogues gallery of collaborators inside Israel,
Britain, and the United States, are now moving toward the final phase of
their "mass transfer" plans for the Palestinians and Arabs.
EIR has "written the book" on Sharon's blood-soaked career for
over 30 years. (see 1994 Profile) As a service to the current worldwide
debate on his government's fascist actions, we provide this summary dossier
on the Israeli mass murderer. This summary is linked to a compendium of
earlier exposés of Sharon and his partners in crime.
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- The Sharon File
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- Sharon was born in Kfar Malal in 1928. At the age of
14, he joined the Haganah, and at 20, headed an infantry company in the
Alexandroni Brigade during the 1948 War of Independence, during which
the Israeli forces drove an estimated 300,000 Palestinians from their
land, using some of the same genocidal methods against unarmed civilian
populations that were used in the recent IDF invasion of the Palestinian
Authority's Area A territory.
In 1953, Sharon founded "Unit 101," a secret death squad within
the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians. In October 1953,
Sharon's "Unit 101" massacred 66 innocent civilians during a
cross-border raid into the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya. Under
intense machine-gun fire, local residents were driven into their homes,
which were then blown up around them, killing the occupants by burying
them alive in piles of rubble. The April 2002 IDF massacre at the Palestinian
refugee camp in Jenin was, in fact, modeled on Sharon's "Unit 101"
operations at Qibya.
On Oct. 18, 1953, the U.S. State Department issued a bulletin denouncing
the Qibya massacre, demanding that those responsible be "brought
to account." Instead, Sharon was rewarded for his war crimes by having
his "Unit 101" absorbed into the Israeli paratroop corps. By
1956, Sharon had been appointed paratroop brigade commander.
Between Feb. 28, 1955 and Oct. 10, 1956, a Sharon-led paratrooper brigade
conducted similar cross-border invasions into Gaza, Egypt, and the West
Bank in Jordan. At the West Bank village of Qalqilya, Sharon's death squad
killed 83 people.
During the 1956 joint British, Israeli, and French invasion of the Suez
Canal, Sharon and his lifelong collaborator in mass murder, Rafael Eytan
(click for more), carried out another horrific war crime: In three separate
incidents, Sharon- and Eytan-led units murdered Egyptian prisoners of
war, as well as civilian Sudanese workers who had been captured. All told,
273 unarmed prisoners were executed and dumped into mass graves. When
the story broke, nearly 40 years later, in the Aug. 16, 1995 London Daily
Telegraph, it nearly ruptured Israeli-Egyptian relations. This was less
than three months before Sharon would bloody his hands once again, by
orchestrating the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin, in Sharon's eyes, had committed the mistake of signing a peace
treaty with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
During the 1960s, Sharon's military career advanced. In 1964, he was appointed
to head the IDF's Northern Command; in 1966, he took charge of the Army
Training Department; in 1969, he was named commander of the IDF's Southern
Command.
In 1972, at the urging of American organized crime figure and leading
right-wing Zionist Meshulam Riklis, Sharon resigned from the IDF (he was
recalled, briefly, to active duty during the 1973 Yom Kippur War) to run
for the Knesset (parliament). Henceforth, Sharon would be wedded to leading
international organized crime figures associated with the Meyer Lansky
National Crime Syndicate in the United States, and allied Jewish mafia
figures from Israel and Russia.
Even at the end of his career, Sharon was still running death squads.
On Sept. 25, 1997, Israeli Television Channel One interviewed Benny Golan,
a veteran of the Rimon Unit, which Sharon had created and deployed in
the early 1970s in the Gaza Strip to carry out targetted assassinations
of Palestinian "militants." Golan described the assassination
program, and reported that members of the unit frequently "disguised
themselves as Arabs" for "special operations" (click for
more). Other sources reported, at the time, that the "special operations"
included terrorist attacks on Israeli Jewish targets to justify "retaliatory
strikes" against pre-selected Palestinian and Arab targets.
Far from ending his career of mass butchery, Sharon's resignation from
the IDF coincided with the launching of an even more ambitious criminal
enterprise that would see thousands of Palestinians killed and wounded
as part of the "Eretz Israel," or "Greater Israel"
drive to permanently annex all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the
Golan Heights and resettle these areas with Russian and other Jewish immigrants,
after the Palestinians have been eliminated.
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- 'Landscam' (click for more)
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- Sharon entered the Knesset in December 1973, at the
very moment that the Israeli government lifted the ban on private sales
of West Bank land to Israelis. The Knesset decision was brought about
by a heavy lobbying effort by Sharon colleague and former Police Minister
Yehezkel Sahar. The very first "private" purchase was for the
construction of a residential community for retired IDF officers. The
partners in the deal included Sahar, Gen. Reshavam Ze'evi, Sharon publicist
Eli Landau, and Avraham Mintz, a founder of the fanatical settlers movement
Gush Emunim.
In June 1974, Sharon personally led a group of settlers to establish an
illegal outpost near the West Bank town of Nablus. It was the first of
many such ventures that Sharon would sponsor, under the rhubric of the
drive to "Judaize the territories."
Sharon's political career continued to advance. In 1975, Prime Minister
Rabin appointed Sharon as his personal security adviser. Then, the Likud
was swept into power in the 1977 elections, and Prime Minister Menachim
Begin named Sharon as Minister of Agriculture. In that capacity, Sharon
launched a massive expansion of Jewish "agricultural settlements"
throughout the West Bank and Gaza. During 1977-81, more than 25,000 new
settlers mostly members of the Gush Emunim moved into the occupied territories.
The Gush Emunim settlers formed into death squads explicitly modelled
on Sharon's old "Unit 101." They would play a pivotal role in
a filthy Anglo-American Zionist criminal enterprise known as "Landscam"
(click for more).
In 1979, the Israeli Supreme Court ratified the private land purchases
in the occupied territories, and immediately, Sharon's mafia cronies set
up several real estate ventures, under such names as Jumbo, Samarea and
Judea, and Meteor. In 1980, Sharon and Yuval Ne'eman formed an organization,
Prevention of Emergence of Another Arab Country in Eretz Israel (PEACE),
to press the issue of permanent Israeli annexation of the occupied territories.
The group included a number of notables from Israel and the United States,
who would remain part of the extended Sharon mafia family for years to
come: Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, Jewish Defense League
(JDL) founder Joseph Churba, Young Israel director Harold Jacobs, Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai Brith general counsel Arnold Forster, right-wing Knesset
member and Rabbi Meir Kahane patron Geula Cohen, and Roni Milo.
Sharon toured the United States in 1980, lining up financing for a massive
real estate grab. But first, Sharon launched a campaign of terror against
the Palestinians in the West Bank, to literally scare them into leaving
their land. In the Spring of 1982, Sharon hosted a planning meeting at
his Negev desert ranch, which had been purchased for him by Riklis. Riklis,
Henry Kissinger, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, Rafi Eytan, General Ze'evi,
Arieh Genger, Herbert Brin, and Eli Landau attended the session, according
to an eyewitness account. Within days of the meeting, Gush Emunim and JDL
terrorists began attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. "Landscam"
was under way.
"Landscam" coincided with Sharon's invasion of Lebanon, which
began on June 4, 1982, and was aimed at wiping out the Palestine Liberation
Organization (click for more), which had established its base in several
camps near Beirut. Between June 4 and Aug. 31, 1982, the IDF, under Sharon's
direction (Begin had named him Minister of Defense the previous year),
killed a total of 19,025 Palestinians and wounded 30,032 in a military
campaign that Sharon called "Operation Peace in Galilee." Under
immense pressure from the Reagan Administration (click for more), Sharon
abandoned plans to assassinate Arafat, and, on Aug. 21, 1982, he allowed
the PLO to evacuate 15,600 fighters from Lebanon, under an American-brokered
cease-fire.
On Sept. 15, Sharon broke the cease-fire agreement, and the next day,
launched a "purification" campaign against the refugee camps
of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj El Barajneh. Falangist death squads protected
by the IDF, which encircled the camps massacred unarmed women, children,
and elderly.
On Sept. 19, 1982, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution
521, harshly condemning the massacres at the camps. In a distant mirror
of the current genocide in Jenin, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, Sharon ignored
the international condemnations. Today, Sharon faces war crimes prosecution
in court in Belgium (click for more) for his role in the Sabra and Shatila
massacres, as the result of a lawsuit filed on June 18, 2001 by 23 survivors
of the attacks.
On Oct. 15, 1982, a month after the 1982 massacres, Sharon held meetings
in the Chouf Mountains of Lebanon and at his Negev ranch with Falange
leader Camille Chamoun, Uri Dan, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Douglas-Home,
and others, to move the "Landscam" West Bank real estate grab
forward. On Nov. 15, 1982, a final meeting took place on several real
estate purchases, mostly through Arab middle-men, to push the massive
expansion of Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank at a handsome
profit. Attending the meeting at Sharon's ranch were: Kissinger, Lord
Harlech (Sir David Ormsby-Gore), Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, Tory Parliamentarian
Julian Amery, Sir Edmund Peck, and MI-6 Mideast mandarin Nicholas Elliot.
The Kahane Commission, an Israeli body convened to investigate the Sabra
and Shatila mass murders, found Sharon to be complicit in the crimes,
and he was fired by Prime Minister Begin as Defense Minister shortly after
the report's release. But Sharon landed on his feet. In 1984, after the
fall of the Begin government and the establishment of a Likud-Labor national
unity government, Sharon was appointed Minister of Trade and Industry,
a position he held until 1990, when he was named Minister of Construction
and Housing, a post that enabled him to continue as the leading sponsor
of the massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
During Sharon's tenure in various government ministries, the number of
Jewish settlers soared to more than 110,000.
In January 1986, Edgar Bronfman, the Jewish mafia don and president of
the World Jewish Congress, admitted, in a New York Post interview, that
he was negotiating on behalf of the Israeli government with Moscow, to
secure Soviet permission for 400,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel in return
for massive shipments of grain to the Soviet Union. The deal was cynically
dubbed "Jews for wheat," in recognition that this scheme was
leading to the annexation of the occupied lands by Israel. A year earlier,
in another sop to the American- and British-based Jewish criminal interests
bankrolling Sharon's "Judiazation" scheme, the Knesset had passed
laws dropping all restrictions on cash flows into Israeli banks so long
as the money was invested in Israel.
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- Hamas: Another Sharon Asset
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- During his postings in the Likud governments during
1977-92, Sharon had not only been the "rabbi" of the Gush Emunim
and Kach Movement/JDL Jewish underground terrorist organizations. He also
played a pivotal role in the creation of Hamas (click for more), the
Palestinian Islamist group, which was formally founded in 1988. Under the
Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, an estimated 800
"licenses" were handed out to Palestinians, to create schools,
infirmaries, food kitchens, and other social service programs. Sharon
made sure that all these licenses were given to Islamists, many of whom
would be Hamas founders, as a way of creating a "countergang"
ruling structure to eventually supplant the power of the PLO inside the
occupied territories. Sharon's sponsorship of Hamas has become a public
scandal in recent months, particularly since the publication of stories
in EIR in the past year, exposing these links, and detailing Sharon's
plans to use Hamas as part of his "Jordan is Palestine" drive
for mass transfer.
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- Killing the 'Peace of the Brave'
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- When Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1992,
the former Sharon ally in the war on the Palestinians had the courage
to admit that his underlying assumptions were wrong, and would lead to
the destruction of Israel. He entered into secret peace talks with Arafat,
which culminated in the August 1993 signing of the Oslo Peace Accords,
in the presence of U.S. President William Clinton at the White House.
Instantly, Sharon declared war on the Oslo Accords and on Prime Minister
Rabin (click for more). The entire "Landscam" gang joined Sharon
in assailing the peace initiative. On Sept. 11, 1993, Kissinger told CBS
News interviewers that Oslo was "unworkable." Several weeks
later, Kissinger told the Institute for Jewish Affairs in London that
Jordan would soon fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists and Olso
would be crushed a not-so-veiled reference to Sharon's Hamas assets, which
would soon launch a terror wave against Oslo in tandem with Sharon's Jewish
underground.
On Oct. 11, 1993, Bertram and Herbert Zweibon, co-founders of Americans
for a Safe Israel, a Sharonist front, held a conference in Crystal City,
Virginia to launch a campaign to destroy Oslo and its sponsors. Five days
later, Sharon delivered a speech calling for the settlers to launch a
resistance to the sellout.
Sharon rushed to the United States and embarked on a nationwide tour on
Nov. 14, 1993, in which he declared that the 150,000 Jewish settlers were
the "only barrier to a Palestinian state." Sharon was accompanied,
throughout the tour, by Yechial Leiter, a leader of the JDL in the West
Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. While in the United States, Sharon raised
millions of dollars for the Kiryat Arba "resistance" from such
right-wing Zionist patrons as Florida and California bingo parlor magnate
Irving Moscowitz and former Reagan Administration Ambassador to Austria
and perfume heir, Ronald Lauder.
Sharon's fundraising paid off. On Feb. 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an
IDF reservist and leader of Kiryat Arba, massacred 50 Palestinian worshipers
at the Cave of the Patriarch holy site. Goldstein had been Rabbi Meir
Kahane's Knesset campaign manager at Kiryat Arba.
In March 1994, some 200 rabbis, led by Avraham Shapira, staged a rally
at Kiryat Arba and issued a religious edict, ordering resistance against
any attempt by the Rabin government to dismantle any settlements. On March
31, 1994, Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, the former Likud Prime Minister and
Stern Gang terrorist, led a rally of 10,000 people attacking Oslo. ADL
National Chairman Abe Foxman told the Jerusalem Post on April 2, 1994
that Rabin was "undermining organized Jewish clout" in America,
through his peace antics.
Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a West Bank settler, Yigal Amir,
who came from Sharon's terror hub, Kiryat Arba (click for more).
On Jan. 26, 1997, Sharon returned, triumphal, to Kiryat Arba, to deliver
new marching orders to the heirs of "Unit 101." If Arafat declared
a unilateral Palestinian state in the territory of the West Bank and Gaza
under Palestinian Authority control, the settlers should join in the drive
to annex all of Judea and Samaria. At the time, Sharon was Minister of
National Infrastructure, a super-ministerial post that had been created
for him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's sometimes ally
and sometimes rival for power in the Likud. During 1996-99, Sharon's tenure
as Minister of National Infrastructure, the settlers population in the
occupied territories soared to more than 200,000.
Netanyahu's fall from power in 1999, and his replacement by a Labor government
headed by former IDF chief Ehud Barak, signalled that the Oslo peace process
that Sharon was dedicated to destroying, was back on the table.
After the failure of the July 2000 Camp David II negotiations to reach
a final settlement, more intense private negotiations between the Barak
government and the Palestinian Authority began under a number of venues.
Talks took place in New York City, and later, at the resort of Taba, Egypt,
producing a final accord, in draft, that would have formed a just and
viable basis for two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine. The thorny
issues of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the status of the
holy sites in Jerusalem, and of creating two capitals within the extended
city limits of Jerusalem, were, according to several Arab and Israeli
diplomatic sources, worked out in principle by January 2001. These final
points, memorialized in the talking points brought to the final sessions
by President Clinton, could be revived today as a basis for reaching a
just solution, in the view of many Mideast diplomats familiar with the
document.
But Sharon and his backers would have nothing of this.
In September 2000, Sharon visited New York City, where he met with Lauder
and other supporters and financiers. He returned to Israel, reportedly
with a large amount of cash to be disbursed to settlers' terrorist cells.
Sharon personally staged the decisive provocation, by visiting the Islamic
holy sites on al-Haram al-Sharif (click for more), what the Israelis call
the Temple Mount, on Sept. 26, 2000 (click for more). Sharon was accompanied
by more than 1,000 Israeli troops and paramilitary police. It was a flagrant
provocation, an assertion of Israeli permanent control over the sacred
sites of Islam, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
With that visit, Sharon provoked the "Al Aqsa Intifada," and
within days, the entire Holy Land was again awash in the blood of Palestinian
protesters. By January 2001, the Barak government would fall, and, on
Feb. 6, 2001, Sharon, who had taken over the Likud party in September
1999, was elected Prime Minister of Israel (click for more), ready to
launch his final drive for "Greater Israel." (see ``The Insane
Fascism of Ariel Sharon,'' by Lyndon LaRouche)
http://www.larouchepub.com/pr/site_packages/2002/sharon/020430sharon_crime_hist.
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