Sharon the Terrorist

Note: On the eve of the fateful Israeli elections in 2001, Alex and I wrote a long profile of the vicious, sinister career of Ariel Sharon. In the wake of Sharon’s death, I revamped the essay as a corrective to the drooling eulogies which have gone so far as to label him an “Israeli Moses.” — JSC

Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel on February
6, 2001. Some incorrigible optimists then suggested that only a right-wing extremist
 of Sharon’s notoriety would boast the credentials to broker lasting peace
 with the Palestinians.

Maybe so. History
is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon’s record was not encouraging.
 His crucial role in provoking Palestinian uprisings by his excursions under heavy military protection to holy sites in Jerusalem is well known. A
ittle more faintly perhaps people recall the verdict of an Israeli commission
of inquiry finding that Sharon bore some responsibility for the dreadful Phalangist mssacres in Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut.

But in fact
Sharon’s history as a terrorist, with documented participation in what can be fairly stigmatized as war crimes, goes back to the early 1950s. Here
s a brief resume, culled in part from a two-part series on Sharon in
 the well-respected Hebrew-language Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Sharon 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
ttacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, oe of them very well known, Unit 101’s purpose was that of instilling 
eror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able-bodied 
fgters but on the young, the old, the helpless.

Sharon’s
 first documented sortie as a terrorist was in August of 1953 on the refugee
 camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 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
eapons.”

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.”

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, cited in a petition demanding
retribution against Sharon for war crimes, 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 who inspected 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
ire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’ The slaughter i Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the
 United Nations Security Council dated October 16, 1953…from the Envoy Extraordinary 
n Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 
a :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 had been 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
over their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighboring
 villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department
 of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its ‘deepest
 sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives’ in the Qibya attack
as well as the conviction that those responsible ‘should be brought to
 account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents i the future.’”

Let us move
 next to 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:

“Thirty
 years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon 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
 street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza
 City’s Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, bilt with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting 
o the international community to settle their future. The street acquired
 its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon’s soldiers. 
Ter orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street.
 This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armoured 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
t people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone’s belongings ito 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 
eple, 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 in Wreckage Street but through 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.”

The devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. As Reeves reported:

“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.”

As defense
 minister in Menachem Begin’s second government, Sharon was the commander
who stunned his colleagues by instigating the full-dress 1982 assault on Lebanon,
 with the express design of dispatching all Palestinians to Jordan and making
Lebanon an Israeli client state. From the vantage point of  20 years, we can see it was a war plan that cost untold suffering, many thousands of Palestinian
nd Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over 1000 Israeli soldiers.

Sharon also
engendered the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The slaughter
 in the two contiguous camps took place from 6 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8 in the morning on September 18, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense
 Forces (IDF). The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese
orce that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon’s cvil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants,
 children, women (including pregnant women) and the elderly, some of whom were 
uilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.

To cite only
one post-massacre eyewitness account, that of  pro-Israeli  journalist Thomas Friedman
 of The New York Times: “Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands
nd feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun
fire.”

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 remained secret). The Kahan
Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had direct 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
ppropriate 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.”

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 bloody credentials as a Likud ultra.
 Sharon was always against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely
impossible for Palestinians to accept. 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
e 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 withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Sharon believed
in establishing “facts on the ground.” 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 unwavering position? Not
 another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He would agree
 to a Palestinian state on the existing areas of either total or partial Palestinian control, 42 percent of the West Bank. Israel would retain control of the highways
cross the West Bank and, most crucially, the water sources. Jerusalem would remain under Israeli sovereignty ad he pushed to continue building around the city. The Golan Heights would remain
 under Israel’s control.

It can be argued
 that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without
any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. Ben-Gurion was complicit in the terror
 missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned or overtly supported
 settlements and building around Jerusalem. But that doesn’t begin to confront
 Sharon’s sinister, violent shadow across the past half century.

That shadow
is, perhaps,  best evoked by a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Ariel Sharon when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheva on the eve of the elections.
 The scene was aired on Israeli television. The teenage girl whose father suffered
hell shock during the Lebanon war stood and pointed her finger at the 72-year-old
 Sharon. “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 tat you can now be elected as prime minister.”

Sadly, Ilil
 was wrong. Sharon was elected, not in spite of his savage resumé but because of it. That’s the grim truth of the
situation.

This essay is adapted from a piece that ran in CounterPunch on the eve of the 2001 Israeli elections.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of NatureGrand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.