- Since the so-called Gaza disengagement, US President
George W Bush has reiterated his call that people ought to be "thanking
Ariel Sharon" for keeping Israel's word about dismantling its occupation
of Palestinian territory.
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- What does Sharon's history tell us?
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- Sharon's first documented sortie in the role George W
Bush describes as as "man of peace" was in August of 1953 on
the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of "Unit
101" records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege
15 or 20.
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- 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 (aka Shertok), 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 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.
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- 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 threshold, 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 October1953 (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 neighboring
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, 2001.
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- "More than thirty years have elapsed since Ariel
Sharon was the head of the Israel Defense 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.
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- 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 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.
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- 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.
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- The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered
and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. (Was Lebanon spared
a nuclear assault? Just as the 1982 war was getting under way, Sharon approached
Menachem Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control
over Israel's atomic weapons trigger to him. Begin refused.)
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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. This was published
without Appendix B, which remains secret until now. Never acknowledged
in Israel, despite its exposure at the time by Radio France's Beirut correspondent,
is the role --- inside Sabra and Shatilla, alongside the Phalange gangs
--- of Sayerret Maskal, the Israeli army's version of the British SAS.
This unit was been implicated in marking for assassination the residences
of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists and any others suspected of having
or likely to have connections beyond the camp including access to international
media.
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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 the danger of acts of vengeance
and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee
camps, and having failed 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".
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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. 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. According to Nehemia Strasler (Ha'aretz, January
18, 2001): Back 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 approved 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 before the "elections" that
brought Sharon to power as Prime Minister as leader of the Likud, when
he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheba. "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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- Sharon was indeed "elected" Prime Minister
of Israel and true to his ghoulish blood-soaked history, he continues to
slaughter, destroy and torment the Palestinian people. His policy of death,
murder, and oppression has earned him the titles of "Man of Peace"
and "visionary" from George W. Bush, and "Butcher of Beirut"
from the rest of the world's people.
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- Mike Odetalla..."A seed in the eternal fruit of
Palestine"
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