Sharon realised that all he had to do was provoke besieged Palestinians for him to carry out his dastardly acts.
Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister of Israel has finally gone to meet his maker. His death which came last week after an eight-year lapse into coma drew several eulogies from western leaders falling over each other in praising his leadership and his cause for peace.
Just who was this man, an individual who fashioned Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians in a similar manner to that of Adolf Hitler, with ethnic extermination as his guiding principle? In a page from Latheef Farook, a historian, Sharon, the grandson of an early migrant from Eastern Europe was born in a colony created out of the Balfour declaration, the foundation of Zionist principles to drive out the Palestinians and create in their lands an exclusive racist state of Israel for Jews.
In his youth, he was not given books but a knife by his father, a farmer, when Sharon was 13 to terrorise and kill Palestinians and drive them off their lands. This was the guiding principle that permanently ingrained in him hatred towards the lawful occupants of the land.
When he was 14, Sharon joined the Zionist Jewish terrorist organisation Haganah, led by the controversial Menachem Begin, which committed massacre after massacre of Palestinians. Since then Sharon’s history was nothing but genocides, massacres and destruction of Palestinian lives, villages and cities.
In the 50’s, Sharon formed an elite group called “Unit 101”, nicknamed “the avengers”, whose mission was to hunt and kill Palestinians who resisted the occupation in villages and refugee camps with institutional support. In August 1953 he massacred 20 unarmed Palestinian civilians in El Bureig refugee camp south of Gaza.
Two months later he was selected by the Jewish state to kill the Palestinians in the village of Qibya. Sharon’s order to his gangs was ‘maximal killing and damage to property’. There Sharon and his Jewish thugs massacred 70 Palestinian men, women, children and the aged on the night of October 14, 1953. Two third of the victims were women and children. All of them were civilians. They moved from house to house, broke open doors and ‘systematically and senselessly slaughtered’ the residents before blowing up their homes and ‘clearing them’ with fire and grenades.
A UN report at the time confirmed the incident. E.H. Hutchison, a US naval officer serving on the UN armistice monitoring commission, who investigated the slaughter, wrote ‘bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them. Here and there from between the rocks you could see a tiny hand or foot protruding.’
In an interview on Israeli television following the incident, Sharon that ‘the raid was necessary’ and that he would do it again. His ambition to emulate Hitler in exterminating the Palestinians never ceased. Sharon killed two women in cold blood in the Arab village of Katama. When the Palestinians responded, 15 of them were killed. There were instances when he was seen laughing as a junior Jewish terrorist tormented an old Arab and then shot him at close range, trapped and killed a peaceful Bedouin boy shepherding his flock and censured a junior officer for failing to kill two elderly Arabs encountered during a raid.
In a recorded interview some years back with General Ouze Merham, which has since mysteriously disappeared, this is what he had to say: ‘I don’t know something called International Principles. I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child [that] will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is [sic] more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I’ve killed 750 Palestinians [in Rafah in 1956]’.
Sharon’s crime against Palestinians continued when he invaded Lebanon in September 1982 and killed more than 29,500 people — most of them civilians —and laid Beirut and much of the south of the country to waste.
It was during this invasion that Sharon encouraged the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps on the southern outskirts of Beirut. The slaughter in these two contiguous camps took place from the evening of September 16, 1982 until the morning of September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israeli armed forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange Christian militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975. Prior to the massacre, Sharon had meetings with the Phalange forces.
Although the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla was unequivocally condemned by UN on September 19, 1982, no sanctions were imposed as in the case of Iraq and other Muslim countries when UN imposes crippling sanctions.
Sharon realised that all he had to do was provoke the under siege Palestinians for him to carry out his dastardly acts. In 2000, Sharon, guarded by around 1,000 armed Israeli soldiers stormed Islam’s third holiest mosque in occupied Jerusalem and sparked off the Second Intifada that led to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians.
His crimes then were quickly being explained by a sympathetic new US president, George Bush, as steps towards a lasting peace. In 2001, when a group of 28 Palestinian relatives of the victims of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres filed war crime charges under Belgium’s 1993 law that allows Belgian magistrates to try war-crimes cases no matter where they were committed, the Belgian government changed the law and dropped charges against Sharon after being pressured by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfield who threatened that Nato headquarters might be withdrawn from Belgian soil if the Belgians didn’t drop the charges against Sharon. Finally in June 2002, the Belgian court dismissed the case.
Such is the legacy of this butcher. When western leaders burst out with praise for a man not unlike Adolf Hitler in intent, then humanity takes a massive step backwards. For everyone who was in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut on September 18, 1982, Sharon’s name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder.
So no more glowing eulogies please!