Ariel Sharon

Part 1

Ariel Sharon
New Internationalist magazine, May 2001

Israel's newly elected Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, ~ knows a thing or two about power. The white-haired old warrior had been languishing on the political margins and was widely assumed to be drifting into welcome retirement on his 400-hectare ranch, said to be the largest private agricultural land-holding in the country. But then Benjamin Netanyahu was trounced at the polls by Labour's Ehud Barak in 1999. When Netanyahu resigned, the wily former general was appointed transitional leader of the right-wing Likud Party and quickly saw a chance to make his mark.

The peace talks between Israel and the PLO had stalled and the question of who would control Jerusalem was one of the big stumbling blocks. What better time for the pugnacious brawler to announce a visit to Islam's third-holiest site, the Haram alSharif in old Jerusalem? - a site which is also one of Judaism's most sacred spots, the Temple Mount.

The move was deliberate and well orchestrated - and Sharon got exactly what he wanted. Palestinian anger exploded at the deliberate provocation and the intifada was reborn: hundreds died as Arab demonstrators clashed with Israeli soldiers in the months that followed. Then, in the subsequent elections the Israeli electorate, confused and frightened by the Palestinian protests, returned the 72 year-old Sharon to power in a sweeping victory.

For the bellicose Prime Minister this was further proof of his fundamental credo: when in doubt, escalate. Sharon has always been a firm believer in upping the ante. 'In the muddle resulting from an increase in violence, he will always come out the winner,' writes Israeli political scientist Avishai Margalit. He knows 'how to create a situation in which people turn to him because he is self-confident and he knows what he wants'.

The short, husky Sharon has been a presence in Israeli politics since he joined the Haganah, a Jewish self-defence force, at the age of 14. From there he moved to the armed forces, eventually leading an Israeli commando attack on the West Bank village of Qibya, just east of Tel Aviv, in October

Sharon's unit blew up 45 homes and massacred 69 people, more than half of them women and children according to a later UN Security Council report. Undaunted, the plucky Sharon then went for broke in the 1956 Sinai War - ignoring direct orders, he sent his paratroopers into an Egyptian ambush, resulting in the death of 38 Israeli soldiers.

That temporarily derailed his military career until the 1967 Six Day War against Egypt when he engineered a stunning victory in the Sinai and became an instant war hero. After that, as leader of Israel's Southern Command in the early 19705, he systematically wiped out Palestinian guerrilla cells in the Gaza Strip, bulldozing hundreds of homes in the process. That was followed by further military success in the 1973 Arab-lsraeli war and then another spate of Arab home-wrecking in the late 19705. As Minister of Agriculture in the Likud Government from 1977 to 81 the ebullient Sharon zealously promoted Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza, building so many roads to encourage settlers that he was nicknamed the 'bulidozer'.

But the blackest stain on Sharon's record and the one that confirms his status as a war criminal in the eyes of the Arab world and beyond is the mass murder of Palestinian refugees outside Beirut in 1982. As Defence Minister in Menachem Begin's Government Sharon was determined to wipe out the PLO in neighbouring Lebanon. The solution? Provoke a border conflict, then bomb the place and send in troops.

The Israeli army was assisted by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia which had been armed by Israel since the beginning of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Israeli soldiers surrounded the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps outside the city. Sharon then personally sent in the Phalange to flush out suspected PLO fighters. A three-day massacre followed in which 2,000 refugees were murdered, including women, children, the elderly and hundreds of men in their twenties and thirties. Sharon would henceforth be known by Arabs and Palestinians as 'the butcher'.

An official Israeli commission of inquiry found the defence minister guilty of 'blunders' and held him and others directly responsible for the slaughter. Sharon was forced to resign his defence brief but continued to serve as a minister in all the Likud governments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Though he was not a frontline player he still ventured forth occasionally to spell out his hardline approach to Palestinian statehood and the peace process: no concessions and more force. During the recent election campaign he elaborated on his belief that Israel needs to take the offensive, hinting at the use of selective assassination of key Palestinian officials. The no-nonsense fighter is in his element. And he has now got the political power to make his point.

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Part 2

Sharon the ethnic cleanser
by William James Martin
International Socialist Review, August 2002

In 1978, on the occasion of president Jimmy Carter's presiding over a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet-the only non-Jew to have ever chaired such a meeting-Carter was told by then minister of agriculture, Ariel Sharon, that there already was a Palestinian state, that it was Jordan, and that Carter could take for granted that within the next few years there would be 2 to 3 million Jews living in the occupied territories. Sharon added that "even as we speak, Jewish families are migrating into Judea and Samaria."

This statement echoes an earlier one of David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel's first prime minister. In a 1937 letter to his son he writes:

A partial Jewish stare is not the end, bur only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish state will serve as a means in our historical effort to redeem the country in its entirety.... We shall organize a modern defense force... and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means.... We will expel the Arabs and take their place...with the force at our disposal.

A few years later Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting:

I favor partition of the country because when ~j we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine.

As the leader of Israel, it is likely that Sharon's relentless destruction of the Palestinian Authority, the social institutions under Palestinian control, and his persistent subjugation of the Palestinians have less to do with self defense and more to do with the Zionist program of establishing a purely Jewish state in all of Palestine.

On July 8, 2001, Brigadier-General Shaul Mofaz presented to the Israeli government a document tided, "The destruction of the Palestinian forces," which proposed launching an attack intended to smash the Palestinian Authority, force out Yasser Arafat, and kill or detain its security forces. The assault would be timed after the next big suicide bomb attack in Israel that caused widespread deaths and injuries with Israel citing the bloodshed as the justification. The report said "a suicide bomb attack would provide the necessary motive for Israeli troops as well as enabling Israeli ambassadors and other officials to tell concerned countries that military action was a justified response."

The significance of the suicide bombings inside Israel, of which there have been about 60, is that they are an opportunity for Sharon and the Israel Defense Forces to respond by destroying more of the PA and to confiscate more territory. With every suicide bombing, Sharon can blame Arafat, gain support from George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, increase the economic strangle hold of the Palestinians, and destroy more of the underpinnings of a viable Palestinian society, while keeping the focus on Arafat rather than on Israel's disregard for international law.

The relentless establishment of settlements in the West Bank and in Gaza have nothing to do with Israeli security. Israel has populated the Palestinian areas occupied in 1967 with about 400,000 mostly fanatical settlers whose presence in the midst of Palestinian populations enhances Israeli security not one iota. Nor do the 300 miles of bypass highways, on which only Israelis and Jewish settlers can travel, enhance Israeli security. These settlements and bypass highways, which exclude Palestinians, partition the West Bank into approximately 200 disjointed segments, making travel and commerce between them virtually impossible for Palestinians. For their construction, they require the confiscation of Palestinian agricultural land and the demolition of Palestinian residences. There have been about 9,000 Palestinian homes demolished by the Israelis since the beginning of occupation in 1967.

Nor did the recent invasion of Palestinian cities and towns have anything to do with self defense. Operation Defensive Shield featured the destruction and the theft of documents, computer hard drives, and laptops from the Ministry of Education, which housed records of over a million students. They wrecked the Palestinian Cultural Center, the Ministry of Deeds and Records, the International Bank of Palestine, and the numerous non-governmental institutions engaged in human rights, the promotion of health care, environmental protection, and water conservation. This destruction had a purpose, but it was not self-defense. Records of land transactions, years of intellectual effort captured and recorded in files or on computer hard drives-all were carted away by the Israeli army. The destruction and vandalism of infirmaries, libraries, and nurseries cannot be justified as legitimate self-defense.

Every aggression on the part of Israel is advertised as "defensive," but it was not in this case and it has never been in the entire history of Israel's existence. Every Israeli aggression has been launched to destroy the basis of Palestinian society, to erase from memory the Palestinian presence in Palestine.

One should not be fooled by Sharon's multiple uses of the word "terror" or "terrorists" in his every speech to Israeli and American audiences, nor by his constant effort to link the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with a parallel threat from Arafat and the Palestinians.

Sharon knows what he is doing, he always has. He wants to make his statement to President Carter into a reality.

William Martin is a mathematics instructor at North Carolina State University

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