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?
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.
Return of the Terrorist: The Crimes of Ariel
Sharon
Israeli forces had entered the village and
systematically murdered all occupants of houses,
using automatic weapons, grenades and
incendiaries 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".
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".
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."
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).
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.
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.
"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.
"'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."
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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. 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.
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.
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".
Ilil was wrong. He's there. And now the bloodbath
will begin
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?
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.
Return of the Terrorist: The Crimes of Ariel
Sharon
Israeli forces had entered the village and
systematically murdered all occupants of houses,
using automatic weapons, grenades and
incendiaries 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".
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".
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."
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).
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.
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.
"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.
"'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."
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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. 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.
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.
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".
Ilil was wrong. He's there. And now the bloodbath
will begin
Vastaukset 1
Vanhimmat
Varmaan kirjoitat vaikka helsingin
puhelinluettelon tänne?