13 January 2014
From A World
to Win News Service;
When Ariel Sharon (אריאל שרון) died 11 January after eight years in a
coma, most Western politicians and media, if they were critical at all, called
him "controversial" or "divisive, mainly referring to Israeli
public opinion. Nevertheless they treated the occasion with great solemnity and
respect. It was like "a death in the family", U.S. Vice President
Joseph Biden lamented at the the memorial ceremony in Tel Aviv, notable for the
empty seats and hilltops that the public failed to fill.
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What Israeli and Western statesmen felt
should be considered most memorable and unifying about Sharon was his qualities
as a "warrior" – his "courage" and his "North
Star", as Biden put it, his commitment to the Zionist cause. This reveals
much of what the Palestinian people are up against. There is no controversy
about the facts. Sharon built an identity as a butcher on a mass scale. There
are no two conflicting sides to his story, just two different sides in the real
world, divided by whether or not the Palestinian people should be crushed.
Sharon's military career started with the
Naqba, the armed expulsion of Palestinians from their homes that marked the
establishment of Israel in 1948. Later, as a rapidly rising young officer, he
founded and commanded the Israeli Army's Unit 101. Its mission was to carry out
reprisal raids against villages outside of what was then Israel, punishing
civilians for harbouring "infiltrators" – Palestinian fighters,
smugglers and often unarmed people trying to get back home. In 1953, he lead an
assault against a village called Qibya.
The village was guarded by a dozen or less
armed men. Sharon's unit, with hundreds of soldiers, blocked off the village on
all sides, fired mortars and rockets and then went in. They killed 69 people.
More than half (The New York Times, 13 January 2014) of the dead and
perhaps as many as two-thirds were women and children. Many died in their
homes, which soldiers shot up and then demolished without checking to see who
was inside. The attackers suffered only one slightly wounded
soldier. This is the "battle" that brought Sharon to prominence as
Israel's signature "warrior", to quote the title of his
autobiography.
Sharon was a cold-blooded strategist,
however, not just a monster, and he understood the political aims of his war.
"The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to become an example for
everyone," wrote Israeli historian Benny Morris in Israel's Border
Wars. That was Sharon's creed as a soldier: to make a special point of
killing not just fighters but civilians in order to demonstrate Israeli power
and ruthlessness, to terrorize the Palestinian people into submission. The UN
condemned the massacre but Sharon was promoted to help reorganize and shape the
Israeli army. Unit 101 was disbanded, but it became a model for the tactics and
spirit of the Israeli armed forces.
Real courage in the pursuit of justice lay
with Israel's enemies. After those years Sharon himself was not directly
involved in fighting Palestinian fedayeen, who won some important tactical
victories against overwhelming odds, for instance the celebrated battle of
Karameh in 1968. Sharon's most famous campaign was when he led the
invasion of Egypt in 1973. In the city of Suez, factory workers and other
people, armed and hastily organized by nationalist army officers and leftists
in the Popular Resistance Committees, came out to stop the Israeli army from
taking the city.
In 1982, Sharon repeated Qibya on an even
more massive scale. With U.S. backing, he launched and led an invasion of
Lebanon. The pretext was that Israel was protecting its own security by
clearing Palestinian fighters along the border. Then the Israeli armed forces
moved far north into Beirut, where they forced the Palestine Liberation
Organization leadership and thousands of its fighters to leave the country by
ship.
The U.S. and Israel hoped they could run
the country through an alliance with the Christian-based Phalangist party,
whose head Bashir Gamayel was set to become the country's president. Bashir had
agreed to let Israel take over southern Lebanon, which they did. But then he
was assassinated.
The Israeli army surrounded the adjacent
Palestinian refugee camps known as Sabra and Shatila. They prevented anyone
from leaving, but let Phalangist militiamen move in. Israeli flares lit the
night sky. The Phalangist leader of the operation, Elie Hobeika, and
the Israeli field commander on the scene, Brigadier General Amos Yanon, were
stationed together on an overlooking rooftop.
An Israeli lieutenant later told a Knesset
(Israeli parliament) commission that an hour after the Phalangist militia
entered the camp's narrow streets, an officer in the camp radioed for
instructions about what to do with the women and children. Hobeika answered,
"This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that. You
know exactly what to do." The Israeli general was aware of this exchange
(see indictsharon.net). When twenty years later, a Belgian court prepared to
try Sharon, Yanon and Hobeika for the massacre, the Phalangist said that in his
own defence he would testify that the Israelis knew and approved of everything.
He was killed by a car bomb and the case was dismissed at the U.S.'s
insistence.
There is also evidence that the Israeli
army itself killed many Palestinians, even after the massacre had ended in the
camp. Only about 600 bodies were found in Sabra and Shatila, while almost 2,000
people are known to have disappeared and the actual toll may have been higher.
British journalist Robert Fisk, who arrived on the scene shortly after the
Phalangists left, wrote that the Israelis brought "probably well over a
thousand" Palestinian men and boys to the nearby sports stadium. When he
returned, they were gone, and their families couldn't find them. After
discussions with witnesses, he concluded that the Israelis killed the prisoners
and buried them in secret graves. (Robert Fisk, The Independent,
reprinted by Counterpunch, 28 November 2001)
The basic facts about Sabra and Shatila
came out in the report of the commission established by the Israeli parliament
after an unprecedented public outcry in Israel in the days following the
massacre. Yet the Kahan commission came to the conclusion that the massacre was
the work of the Phalangists alone, while Sharon and other officers were guilty
of failing to prevent it. That commission held that Sharon bore "personal
responsibility", and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was
"indirectly responsible" for not looking into Sharon's negligence.
That was both a mere slap on the hand and
a cover-up. While Sharon certainly did bear personal responsibility, the
massacre was not due to his negligence or indifference – or even his personal
criminality. It was committed as part of overall Israeli policy toward the
Palestinians and its neighbours, policies that led to three invasions of
Lebanon and continuing horrors against the Palestinians.
Sharon used the various cabinet posts he
occupied to win himself the name of the father of the Jewish settlement
movement. The Israeli government financed and protected Jewish
"settlers" who helped themselves to land still occupied and farmed by
Palestinians in the West Bank. In 1998 he told them to "run and grab as
many hilltops as they can, because everything we take will be ours."
(Reuters, 12 January 2014) These settlements are armed outposts of the Zionist
state in what remains of Palestinian territories.
Even more important was the political
purpose of what Sharon called "disengagement". For Sharon this was a
change of tactics, not change of heart. Tony Blair, who famously lied to the
British public to garner acceptance for the invasion of Iraq and was rewarded
by becoming the envoy for the Quartet, a body established by the U.S.,UK, EU,
UN and Russia to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, shamelessly told
the truth at Ariel Sharon's memorial. Blair said he wanted to correct the
widely-accepted misconception that Sharon "changed from man of war to a
man of peace. He never changed. His strategic objective never wavered. The
state of Israel… had to be preserved for future generations. When that meant
fighting, he fought. When that meant making peace, he sought peace with the
same iron determination."
But what was this talk of
"peace" if not another attempt to crush the Palestinians by other
means? Sharon conducted the evacuation of Gaza unilaterally in order to weaken
and not strengthen the PLO's authority. He considered it a matter of principle
never to negotiate with Palestinians. He had refused to shake hands
with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat when Arafat signed on to the U.S.
plan for a "two-state solution", and kept Arafat a prisoner in his home
until the day he died under circumstances that have never been made clear.
If Sharon had come to believe in the
necessity of a "two-state solution," as the U.S. had by
then – and because of his subsequent stroke no one can know exactly what he had
in mind or what he would have done later – the plan was (and still is) to make
a "Palestinian" state that would amount to nothing more than a big
detention centre. The same vision connected Israel's construction of a wall
around the West Bank, which began under Sharon, and his policy of
"disengagement" that meant that instead of occupying Gaza, Israel
would fence it in and pick off its inhabitants from the air whenever considered
necessary.
Whether or not a Palestinian
"mini-state" is ever allowed to emerge, what Sharon tried to further,
and the U.S. still values, is the "peace process". This
"process" only goes one way – against Palestinians. The number of
West Bank settlers swelled by a third during the years Sharon spent in a coma,
with no end in sight. Further, it is based on an illusion: the U.S. is no more
likely to protect the Palestinians in the future than it did at Sabra and
Shatila. Very importantly, it provides political cover for reactionary Arab
regimes allied with Washington, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
.......Only a few thousand came to Sharon's funeral. Many hated Sharon. Some of them were embarrassed by his naked, joyful brutality, even though they cannot imagine an acceptable alternative to the Jewish state. Others, especially the so-called national religious movement, considered him a traitor. As much as they clash, both currents operate within the limits of the interests of the larger settler state. That's why a sober-minded, secular Zionist like Sharon championed crazed Jewish religious fanatics when that served Israel's goals.
The concept of a multi-national,
non-religious state once championed by the PLO has been blasted off today's
political landscape, in no small due to Sharon and the policies he represented.
He did his part – under the wing of the U.S., of course – to create the
conditions, at times deliberately, in which Islamic fundamentalism is thrusting
itself to the forefront of the struggle against Zionism.
At the memorial for Sharon, the present
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, "Your memory will be
part of this nation forever." That's true: Sharon's criminal deeds were
totally consistent with the criminality of the Zionist project, and will always
be synonymous with Israel and the imperialist powers it serves.
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