...[Ariel] 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 is a brief resume, culled in part
from a recent 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 attacks on Jewish
villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known,
Unit 101's purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous
violence not only on able-bodied fighters 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
weapons."
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 fire to stay inside until their homes
were blown up over them.' The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a
letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated October 16, 1953...from
the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14
October 1953 at 9:30 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 cover 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 in the future.'"
Let us move now 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 Jan. 21 of this year:
"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel's forthcoming election,
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 a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's
Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for
refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community
to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr
Sharon's soldiers. Their 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 at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla!
They threw everyone's belongings into 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 people, 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."
...
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 Sept. 16, 1982 until 8 in
the morning on Sept. 18, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The
perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by
and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims
during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women)
and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were
killed.
To cite only one post-massacre eyewitness account, that of U.S. 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 and feet, and then mowed down
gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire."
n 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 remains secret). The Kahan Commission found that
Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had 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 appropriate 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."
