Ariel Sharon: A Man Without A Conscience
Ariel Sharon: A Man Without A Conscience
MID-EAST
REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org
By Steven Katsineris
Ariel
Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928, grandson of a Russian
migrant
family and the son of farmers. When he was 13,
his father gave him a knife.
Sharon remembers, "The
knife was symbolic, to protect ourselves from our
enemies. It was a lesson I have never forgotten."
His
first military experience began when he fought in the
underground
Haganah, the largest of the Zionist groups
that fought to seize Palestine in
1948, creating the
state of Israel and dispossessing the
native
Palestinians.
At the age of 22, he led commando
units that specialised in behind-the-lines
raids and
forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.
By the 1950s, he
had become a major and formed an elite
"anti-terrorist"
group called Unit 101. Operating without
uniforms, the group, nicknamed "the
avengers", met
Palestinian resistance attacks with institutional terror.
The
group carried out outrage after outrage, in terror
raids across the Israeli
borders, into refugee camps and
villages.
In one notorious attack on Jordan in 1953, Unit
101, under Sharon's command,
slaughtered 69 civilians,
over half of them women and children, when they
blew up
their homes in Qibia village.
Two years later he was
reprimanded for giving logistical support to four
young
Israelis who took random blood revenge on Bedouins for Arab
attacks on
Israeli settlements. By this time Sharon was a
lieutenant colonel in the
Israeli army.
The
independence of Unit 101, its murderous methods and the free
hand given
to it by the political establishment led to
strong resentment among other
sections of the military
leadership.
In the 1956 Suez war, Sharon disobeyed orders
and sent his paratroopers into
the Mitla Pass in the
Sinai desert. In doing so, he deceived his
superiors,
sacrificed his men for no apparent military
purpose and gained the
displeasure of the Israeli chief
of staff, Moshe Dayan. Four of his junior
officers
accused him of sending men to their deaths for his own
glory.
Sharon's military career went into eclipse. But in
1964, the then chief of
staff, Yitzhak Rabin, resurrected
him. Sharon served Israel well again in
the 1967 war and
afterward was given the job of pacifying the
Palestinian
resistance in the occupied Gaza Strip. With a
brutal policy of repression,
of blowing up houses,
bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, imposing
severe
collective punishments and imprisoning hundreds of young
Palestinians
suspected of being fighters, he managed to
decrease resistance activity
dramatically.
In the 1973
war, as a reserve general, he was recalled to command
a
division. He led a strike across the Suez Canal, behind
Egyptian lines, and
this made him a national hero.
Like
so many Israeli military men, he then went into politics and
was
elected a member of the Likud bloc in the Israeli
parliament. In the first
Begin Likud government, he was
minister of agriculture and settlements. In
politics he
applied the same fanaticism and many of the same techniques
he
used to control the Gaza Strip. Sharon became the
champion and architect of
Israeli settlement in the West
Bank, causing a settlement boom.
Sharon's settlement
campaign was one of the keys to Likud's re-election
in
1981, as he was credited with making swift and
permanent progress in
establishing a perpetual Israeli
presence on the West Bank. After the
election, Begin
appointed Sharon defence minister.
It was said in Israel
that Sharon was "a war looking for a place to
happen".
The war in Lebanon was planned and executed by
Sharon.
In early 1982, he made a visit to the Phalange
Party (Lebanese militia
organisation) to coordinate
long-held plans for the coming conflict. Israel
was to
support and supply the Phalangists, an authentic fascist
party,
formed in 1936 after the founder had returned from
a visit to Hitler's
Germany.
Sharon believed that the
demoralisation of the Palestinians would be
complete if
he inflicted a crushing military defeat on the PLO in
Lebanon.
As for Lebanon, Israeli's aim was to establish a
Phalangist government which
would then make a treaty with
Israel. Phalange Party leader Bashir Gemayel
said that
his party wanted every Palestinian civilian out of Lebanon,
and
Israel wanted them scattered among the other Arab
countries.
In order to rationalise the invasion and the
bombing of civilians, Begin and
Sharon went to great
lengths to dehumanise the Palestinians. Begin
declared
emotively, "If Hitler was sitting in a house
with 20 other people, would it
be correct to blow up the
house?". In a speech tot the Knesset, Begin
described
Palestinians as "beasts walking on two legs". Sharon
described
Palestinians as "bugs" while their refugee
camps were"tourist camps".
On June 5, 1982, tens of
thousands of Israeli troops poured across the
border and
fought their way up the Lebanese coast. Heavy Israeli sea,
air
and land bombardment had a devastating impact, laying
waste to a substantial
portion of southern Lebanon.
The
cities of Sidon and Tyre were a scene of desolation, with
much of the
cities levelled by Israeli tank and artillery
shells. Palestinian refugee
camps around Tyre and Sidon
bore the brunt of the colossal destruction.
Ain Hilweh
(Sweet Spring), the largest Palestinian refugee camp in
southern
Lebanon with 25,000 residents, was razed. Nearly
half a million people were
made homeless by the
invasion.
One week later, Israeli forces laid siege to
Beirut, shelling, bombing and
trying to break stiff
Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. By the end of
July,
the Lebanese government (as well as church and aid groups)
stated that
at least 14,000 people had been killed and
twice that number seriously
wounded. Over 90% of those
killed were unarmed civilians.
After three months of war,
an agreement was reached under the sponsorship of
US
envoy Philip Habib. The PLO pledged to withdraw its fighters
from Beirut,
after receiving US and Lebanese government
promises that multinational
forces would secure the
safety of the Palestinian and Lebanese
civilian
population. And Israel would not enter
Beirut.
The last contingent of defenders left the city on
September 1, 1982. Two
days later, the Israeli army
occupied a new position at the southern
entrance of the
city and thus dominated the Palestinian refugee camp
of
Shatila. The USA did nothing. On September 7, the
Israeli army advanced
again, and again the USA did not
react. On September 15, the Israeli army
entered Beirut,
just after the departure of the US marines, who had
stayed
only 16 days.
Ariel Sharon declared that Israel
had entered Beirut in order to dislodge
2000 Palestinian
fighters who had remained in the city. The task of
purging
the camps Sharon had given to the Phalange.
The
same day that Israel occupied Beirut, the chief of staff of
the Israeli
army, Raphael Eytan, quoted in the Israeli
daily Ma'ariv, stated that only
a
handful of fedayeen
fighters remained with their families, as well as a
small
staff of the PLO bureau. General Drori telephoned Ariel
Sharon and
told him, "Our friends are going to the camps.
We have coordinated their
entry." Sharon replied,
"Congratulations, our friends' operation has
been
approved".
So the massacre of defenceless
Palestinian and Lebanese civilians began.
Whole families
were murdered, many raped and tortured before being
killed.
Because many bodies were heaped into lorries and
taken away, or buried in
mass graves, the exact toll will
never be known. It was estimated that at
least 2000
people were killed.
After an international outcry, Israel
established an inquiry headed by
Supreme Court Chief
Justice Kahan. Despite its shortcomings, the
commission's
report was a damning indictment of Sharon and a number of
his
colleagues. The commission said that Sharon had
received intelligence
warnings that the Phalangists might
go on the rampage if allowed into the
camps. "In our
view, even without such a warning, it is impossible
to
justify the minister of defence's [Sharon's] disregard
of the danger of the
massacre."
"... responsibility is
to be imputed to the minister of defence, for
having
disregarded the danger of acts of revenge and
bloodshed by the Phalangists
against the population of
the refugee camps and having failed to take this
danger
into account when deciding to have the Phalangists enter the
camps.
"In addition responsibility is to be imputed to the
minister of defence for
not ordering appropriate measures
for the prevention of the massacre."
(Kahan Report)
The
commission's conclusions constituted the minimum that could
be deduced
from the evidence. The facts warranted a
finding of more than just indirect
responsibility:
The
Phalangists militia was "ordered" into the camps by Israeli
chief of
staff, Lieutenant General Raphael
Eytan.
Phalangist commanders met with General Amir Drori,
commander of Israeli
troops in Lebanon, and General Amas
Yaron, commander for West Beirut, to
"coordinate the
militia's entry into the camps and arrange
communications".
The Phalange were given logistical
support by the Israeli army during the
massacre.
The Phalange took orders, salaries and training directly from Israel.
Sharon and the Israelis knew that the Phalange
leaders planned to expel most
of the Palestinians from
Lebanon by committing some atrocity.
The Phalangists were
at all times under Israeli army orders. "Only one
element
of Israeli Defence Forces will command all forces in the
area",
revealed the Kahan report. The Israeli head of
intelligence quoted
commented, "This means that all
forces in the area, including the
Phalangists, will be
under IDF command and will act according to
its
instructions". [Green Left Weekly]
ENDS