The Death of the Butcher - Ariel Sharon of Israel
The former Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, known as the Butcher, died Saturday. Very few people outside Israel had any knowledge
that he was in a vegetative state at the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv since suffering a stroke in January 2006. It’s
rather unusual, not incredible though, for someone to have been in coma this
long! The 85-year-old former general defied such odds but like any mortal had
to eventually die.
Sharon was born
Ariel Scheinerman in 1928 in Palestine, which was then under a British mandate.
His parents had settled there after fleeing
the pogroms in Russia. At the age of 14, he joined the
Haganah, the underground Jewish militant organization, specializing in sabotage
and guerilla tactics. In the 1940s the group had carried out anti-British
operations in Palestine, such as the bombing of the country's railroad network,
and sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British Palestine
police. It also continued to organize illegal immigration of Jews.
Six years later,
in 1948, Sharon, as the commander of an infantry company, was already
ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people from their ancestral homes when David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist
Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, had unilaterally
declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, to be known as the
State of Israel, before the British Mandate for Palestine had ended. In August 1953, he founded and commanded Unit 101, a commando unit of the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), on orders from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The unit was known for raids against Arab civilians and
military targets. In one
such raid, in the fall of 1953, on
the border village of Qibya, Sharon’s men dynamited 45 Palestinian houses and a
school and killed 69 people (many of whom were children). Under international
pressure, Ben-Gurion publicly apologized for his troops' excesses.
In the 1956 Suez War, Sharon’s Israeli forces spearheaded an
attack into the Egyptian territory on the Sinai Peninsula in support of the
British and French forces. A total of
260 Egyptian and 38 Israeli soldiers were killed during the battle at Mitla.
His troops however were accused of
shooting their Egyptian prisoners but Sharon denied any knowledge of these
alleged atrocities. This bloody battle was condemned even by Moshe
Dayan, army's Chief of Staff, as unnecessarily brutal.
The Mitla incident hindered
Sharon's military career for several years. However, when Yitzhak Rabin became
Chief of Staff in 1964, Sharon began again to rise rapidly in the ranks,
eventually achieving the rank of Major General. In the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel launched a pre-emptive
strike on its Arab neighbors, Sharon
commanded the most powerful armored division on the Sinai front. In 1969, he
was appointed the Head of IDF's Southern Command. He had no further promotions
before resigning from the Israeli army in
June 1972 to pursue a career in public life. But
his promising political career was temporarily put on hold when he was recalled
to active service following the October 1973 War against Egypt and Syria. Sharon’s strategy in undermining the Egyptian Second Army
and encircling the Egyptian Third Army is regarded by many Israelis as the
turning point of the war in the Sinai front.
After the war,
Sharon joined the Likud party, which he had helped to create with Menachem
Begin – who was considered a terrorist by the British authorities. In December of
1973 he was elected to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, as a Likud member. He served
as defense adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before being appointed
minister of agriculture by Rabin's successor, Menachem Begin, in 1977. He
greatly expanded the ministry's influence developing a plan for permanent
Jewish settlements in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. "I
believe that if we establish these settlements," he said at the time,
"we will feel sufficiently secure to accept risks for the sake of
peace." On his settlement policy,
Sharon said while addressing a meeting of the Tzomet party: "Everybody has
to move, run and grab as many (Judean) hilltops as they can to enlarge the
(Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. ...
Everything we don't grab will go to them."
He opposed the 1978 Camp David peace accord between
President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Begin. But he remained, and prospered,
in the Israeli government. In June 1982, as the defense minister, he ordered an
invasion of Israel's northern neighbor Lebanon to push out the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters who were based there. After two months, 14,000 PLO and
Syrian fighters agreed to leave Beirut. But tens of thousands of Palestinian
refugees remained behind in camps such as Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut.
Sharon broke his promise
given to the Americans and sent his troops into West Beirut, saying that 2,000
PLO fighters were hiding in the camps. Then the fateful event of September
16-18 happened. A day earlier, Lebanon's President-elect, Bashir Gemayel,
had been assassinated by a fellow Christian with no PLO involvement. However,
Sharon tried to put the blame on the PLO. While
his forces surrounded the camps,
blocking camp exits and providing logistical support, he let the PLO's foe, the Phalangist
Christian militia, to go inside the camps. Nearly 3,300 Palestinian unarmed
refugees were massacred in a murderous orgy and many others were raped and
tortured. Sharon was called the Butcher. But Sharon refused to accept
any responsibility for the tragedy.
The following year an Israeli commission of inquiry (Kahan
commission) ruled that Sharon carried personal responsibility for disregarding
“the danger” of massacre and failing to prevent it in the camps, and
recommended that he resign from office.
In the face of
global condemnation, he refused to resign from the government, but stayed in
the cabinet as a minister without portfolio (1983-84). In the subsequent years
(1984-92), Sharon's political career suffered somewhat; but he did not
disappear, and held less important ministerial positions within the government.
After Likud's 1999 election defeat, the party chose him to succeed its former
leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
On September 28, 2000,
as if by some ulterior design to provoke the Palestinian Muslims to start their
Second Intifada, Sharon paid a controversial visit to the holy site in
Jerusalem known as the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims. He declared that the complex
would remain under perpetual Israeli control. As expected, within six months of
that event, he swept
into power in February of 2001.
As Prime Minister
he fortified Jewish settlements in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestine by
erecting an illegal wall, which remains unacceptable to the world community. To
the surprise of many hard-core Zionists who believed in their ever expansionist
and apartheid policy, he pulled Jewish settlers and troops out of Gaza while maintaining control of its coastline and airspace. This policy was an attempt to
define, on Israeli terms, the borders of the state and provide security for
Israel, even before a final settlement with the Palestinians. His unilateral
measures alienated him from many of the extremists within the Likud Party. Tired
of the opposition from within his own party over the withdrawal, in November
2005 he resigned from Likud to form a new centrist party, Kadima.
In December 2005,
Sharon suffered a mild stroke. A second, major stroke in January 2006 sent him
into a coma from which he never awoke. Israeli press reports say there
will be a state memorial service at the Knesset on Monday, after which Sharon
will be buried at his private farm in the southern Negev desert.
Like other Zionist
leaders, past and present, that has ruled Israel since its unholy birth, Sharon
is guilty of practicing its criminal expansionist and apartheid policy that
helped to uproot nearly a million Palestinians from their ancestral land and
building illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Recognized by many
Israelis as a war hero and a brilliant strategist, he would mostly be
remembered outside Israel as one more unrepentant war criminal who did not face
the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity. The
only solace they would have is that there is one less war criminal alive today!
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