JANUARY 2006

Sharon is no statesman and his motives have never been opaque - conquest by military means

Karma Nabulsi
Friday January 6, 2006
The Guardian
·

Everybody knows that Ariel Sharon had a dark past. For us Palestinians, for me as a Palestinian, he is our dark present. The entire destruction of the fabric of our civic and political society over the past five years has had the looming presence of Sharon at its black heart. That single moment when in the year 2000 Sharon went to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) to light the chaotic, atavistic fuse of his return to political power - the moment that sparked our revolt against everything that he represented, and which began his rise to power - that single moment was the essence of his persona, the uniquely ruthless, relentless dynamic of his role as conqueror.

With the return of this man, we were lost, again, and one could not let his return be witnessed without an active daily resistance to it, and the fate he had in store for us. It was this single fact that mobilised me to work again in the political realm. Having lived in Beirut with my family and friends, and having worked, and fought, and stayed alive throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Sharon engineered in the spring and summer of 1982, I had no doubt what he had in store for us when he began his final climb back to power. And just so: in February of 2001, within three days of being elected prime minister, he was replaying across the West Bank and Gaza his dark arts, a mad echo of his practices of 20 years before in Lebanon: the assassination and destruction of the fighters, the local defence committees, the refugee camps. Women and children and young men killed, our buildings demolished, our institutional infrastructure, our records, our art, broken, gone. And, of course, our leadership encircled and besieged.

If he destroyed our leader, he believed, he would destroy our collective aspirations for freedom and for an independent Palestine. His vision of our destiny was quite simply one of apocalyptic proportions, he was no politician, nor elder statesman. To us, he was always the classic military conqueror and adventurer - we never found him "controversial", nor his motives opaque. He never left us guessing. His practices, his aims, his intentions were made clear through his policies. Every Palestinian man, woman and child witnessed, lived, or died under that vision, and they each understood it well.

But during the new war launched by Sharon against our people, the generation of 1982 that I was part of were more scattered, further flung to the four corners of the world, farther away from being able to do anything to help, even more powerless than before. So to those of us who had fought in those earlier battles and were still living, his return did something more cruel than simply bring back haunting reminders of those days, and of how many friends had died. It changed the look of what we did, our luck, our motives, how we had failed to stop him when we were younger.

Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who evokes this terrible reaction.

I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return to public office.

To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and above all our national liberation movement. He did not want us to have a national framework, his desire was to reduce us to small quarrelling groups and factions trapped under his prison rule, disorganised, disintegrated, or co-opted; he planned actively and provocatively (and carefully) to create such an impoverishment of our people's public and private life.

This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination, imprisonment, violent military invasion. His fate for us was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what he had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.

His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel, but now turned into a tragedy of heartbreaking proportions, a destroyed place, corrupted beyond description by the devastation of Israel's terrible role there since 1967.

We Palestinians saw how he well he understood the west, how far he could push it - he had an almost magical ability to measure how craven the response could be to his violations of common decency and international law, how much he could get away with. He would test, and test the limits of his actions, would he get a red light? Would the Americans stop him?

I watched him at this, day after day, during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, from besieged Beirut, which was in flames. Every time he would break the ceasefire, break his word to the Americans. We, on the other side of this equation, were waiting, hearts in mouths, for international protection, intervention, help of any kind not to be left at his mercy. How many times in these last years did he break the ceasefire in Gaza through a provocative assassination, an aerial assault, a military raid killing dozens of civilians to provoke Hamas to attack Israel? His pattern was set in stone, a stone around our necks.

Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.

I have talked a lot about those days with old friends who survived the camps, exiles now living far away in snowy northern Europe. What it meant to have left under orders, what it meant to have been trapped behind. For the ones who had to stay behind when the fighters left, you see, already understood Sharon well.

· Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and a former PLO representative

Sharon - the End of an Era?

by Henry Lowi

January 7, 2006
[newdemocracyworld.org]
 

Much has already been written by way of summary of the career of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

My own perspective on Sharon is defined by 2 events:

The first was the October 1973 "Yom Kippur" war. I was an infantry soldier serving my compulsory service in the Southern Command. Sharon was a division commander.

The previously ridiculed Egyptian armed forces had shown that they had the ability to cross the Suez Canal and overrun the IDF's Bar-Lev Line. The Egyptians themselves didn't believe their own success, and clearly had no plan to defeat the IDF or to assist the Palestinians in their quest for national self-determination. After the successful crossing, the Egyptians basically dug in. The tactical aim of the war had been achieved. Peace negotiations, to return Sinai to Egypt, could be undertaken.

Among Israeli soldiers, and civilians, a sense of desperation was prevalent. IDF reservists were furiously called up for the blocking ("blima") battle. Then Arik Sharon came along, and ordered his units across pontoon bridges thrown across the Suez Canal, and eventually surrounded the Egyptian 3rd Army Corps. Ceasefire negotiations were conducted at the Kilometre 101. In 1977, President Anwar Saadat made his dramatic visit to Jerusalem, and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement was signed after negotiations at Camp David.

I was not in the units that crossed the Suez Canal in that operation by Sharon's division. But the story is well-known, and it was at the time. Hundreds of young IDF soldiers were sacrificed in that accursed crossing, under massive and effective Egyptian artillery bombardment (I might add that, from the Egyptian point of view, this was legitimate defence of the Egyptian homeland). I know Israeli survivors of that operation. They will gladly strangle Arik Sharon with their bare hands.

I learned an important lesson about Sharon, and about Zionism, in October 1973: For Arik Sharon, Jewish lives are not worth anything except to the extent that they serve the interests of Zionist expansionism.

Sharon wantonly sacrificed his young soldiers and officers in crossing the Suez Canal for the glory of Arik Sharon and to preserve the conquests of Zionism.

After the 1973 war, a movement arose among IDF reservists challenging the government's decision-making process prior to and during the war. This protest movement gave rise, on the one hand, to the Agranat Commission, and on the other hand, to the "Peace Now" movement. In those days, the idea of an Israeli grassroots movement of soldiers, challenging the government's policy on matters of war and peace, was a new one.

I will always remember Arik Sharon as the son-of-a-bitch general for whom his own soldiers were truly only cannon fodder.

The second event was the invasion of Lebanon ("Peace for Galilee operation") that began with aerial bombardment on June 5, 1982. The invasion had been prepared for months, politically and militarily. The actual pretext was the attempted murder of an Israeli diplomat named Argov. Sharon, as part of the Begin government, and with the "peace-maker" cover of the recent Egyptian peace treaty, had been inciting relentlessly against the "Palestinian terror state" in southern Lebanon. Sharon, and all the Israeli media after him, spoke about a "limited operation, 20-25 kilometres into Lebanon", to target and destroy the Palestinian armed organizations, and bring "Peace to Galilee". The precedent cited was the limited "Litani operation" of 1978. Political support for the 1982 invasion was quite broad among the Zionist parties, including of course the "Labor" party. Over the years, much has been written about the Sabra and Shatilla massacre of September 1982. Not much is said of Sharon's war crimes -- the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees dead and Lebanese civilian dead, in the IDF bombing operations -- of June to September 1982. With hindsight, we know that Sharon probably misled Prime Minister Menahem Begin about the true objectives of the war: regime change in Beirut, and mass murder/expulsion of the Palestine refugees. While the PLO did a pathetic job of organizing Palestinian self-defence in Lebanon (having already adopted the strategic perspective of seeking a diplomatic deal with Israel, based on limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip only), the Sharon-led invasion elicited individual cases of Palestinian heroism. Notable were the steadfast positional defence of Beaufort Castle by PFLP fighters (which shocked the IDF soldiers and Begin), and the "RPG kids" -- Palestinian youth who used guerrilla tactics and guerrilla weapons to hamper, hinder and harass the IDF invaders. Both the defenders of Beaufort Castle and the RPG kids provided role models for future generations of Palestinian fighters for their noble cause.

Sharon's "20-25 kilometres" did not define the end-point of the invasion (For Saadat in 1973, the Bar-Lev line was the intended end-point; for Sharon in 1982, the "20-25 kilometres" was brilliant propaganda in the service of unbridled militarism). Sharon was determined to go as far as he could, just as the IDF had done in 1948 and 1967. Once Sharon's deceit had become evident, IDF reservists began to circulate petitions, from the front, in Lebanon, protesting. After a few short weeks of war, IDF reservists began attending demonstrations organized by the "Committee Against the Invasion of Lebanon" (This committee had formed very quickly by the activists of "Committee in Solidarity with Bir Zeit University" and "Committee in Solidarity with the Syrian Residents of the Golan Heights"). Active-duty reservists attending anti-war demonstrations, and anti-war activists serving in the IDF began to create a powerful sentiment against Sharon's thuggery and dishonesty, and generated sympathy for the Palestinian and Lebanese defenders. Notably, Eli Geva, the commander of an IDF armor regiment that was ordered to break into West Beirut, asked (politely, and publicly) to be relieved of his command. (His argument, essentially, was: "In order to fulfill the order, I must do one of 2 things. Either, prior to the attack, I must bombard civilian neighbourhoods of Beirut, causing an enormous loss of innocent lives. Or, if I attack without prior bombardment, I put my own soldiers at risk. Both outcomes are unacceptable to me. I ask to be relieved of the regimental command. I can participate only as commander of an individual tank.") Eli Geva's very public position created space for questioning the tactical directives of the senior command. When I was called up as a reservist, in a tank unit destined for Lebanon, my initial anti-war agitational slogan was: "Let's all be like Eli Geva!" At the time, the disgust with Arik Sharon was so great, and the distrust of the justice of the war was so prevalent, that this and many other anti-government demands were well-received. At the same time, the "Labor" party's "defence" spokesman, Itzhak Rabin, criticised Sharon from the right (!!), calling for "intensification of the siege of Beirut", cutting off electricity, water, etc.

Eventually, the built-up anti-Sharon sentiment burst out after the Sabra-Shatilla massacres, in the huge 400,000 strong demonstration in central Tel Aviv, and was channeled into the legalistic framework of the Kahan Commission and its report and recommendations.

We are now recovering from Sharon's 2005 "unilateral disengagement from Gaza". This was clearly a code-word for consolidating Israeli control of all of Palestine while reducing its cost. Tragically, no one, in the Israeli peace movement, saw this maneuver as an opportunity to mobilize against the settlers, and create a genuine counter-momentum. They thus reinforced Sharon's self-serving image as Bush's "man of peace".

Despite all the pundits, Sharon has not changed. The only thing "positive" that can be said of him is that he successfully used propaganda to serve the goals of his tactical maneuvers. Idiots of the Zionist "left" follow him from one maneuver to another, and now they are lamenting this great "peacemaker", just like they did with Rabin. I have not seen any serious strategic balance sheet designed to build a movement, among Israelis or Palestinians, that can truly open the road to reconciliation and coexistence.

So, now, while everyone is eulogizing Sharon and speculating on the future of the "peace process" (It is truly amazing how people write this phrase, adjacent to the name Ariel Sharon, and keep a straight face), and the future of his Bonapartist "Kadima" party, I can only say: Long live the demise of Sharon! Down with Sharon-style brutality, lies, and oppression! Let us overcome the Sharon legacy of 1948, 1951, 1953, 1956, 1967, 1971, 1973, 1978, 1982, 2001, and 2002-6. Let us build a movement that can build a future for this small country and its suffering people!

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Political Hemorrhaging: Implications of the Sharon Stroke By Remi Kanazi

Al-Jazeerah, January 6, 2005

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a severe stroke resulting in a cerebral hemorrhage on January 4, 2004. Paramedics rushed Sharon from his ranch in the Negev Desert to a Jerusalem hospital for life saving surgery. From the early news feeds and doctor’s comments things are not looking good. Internal bleeding after six hours of surgery led to another three hours in the operating room. After the second surgery doctors said his vital signs are stable, although his condition is still “grave.”

Pundits and analysts are already grabbing pen and pad to jot down their assessment. Many believe Ariel Sharon's political career is over. Haaretz correspondent, Aluf Benn, stated, "even if he does recover, he will have a very hard time convincing the public of his ability to serve four more years, after undergoing two strokes in two and a half weeks." YNet contributor, Attila Somfalvi, was more forthright: “Following the prime minister's stroke, nothing will bring him back into the political game: Not the surging popularity, not the concern and aching heart of the public, and not even the waves of sympathy.”

While those in the West and Israel naively labeled Sharon a new "man of peace" and fresh corruption charges surfaced, his political career was strong as ever. Sharon was running a one man show going into the March elections with his new Kadima (forward) party. Major polls showed the premier was a shoe-in, but now the question becomes which direction Israel will be headed politically.

On one right you have the hard-line Binyamin Netanyahu. The Likud strongman dished out harsh criticism to Sharon and his “timid” policies concerning the Occupied Territories. Netanyahu fervently objected (and resigned from his post under the Sharon administration) to the "disengagement" of the Gaza Strip. He holds tight the Likud principals: keep the illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories, expand settlements at full pace, continue the Judiazation of Jerusalem and build the wall deep into Palestinian land. On the left you have Amir Peretz, the underdog that beat out Shimon Peres to head the Labor Party. Peretz, a Moroccan Jew, has promised to focus on social justice, the eradication of poverty and the needs of the average Israeli. He also claims to be determined on a two-state solution as a resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and is seen, in Palestinian circles, as much more dovish than his colleagues in the Labor Party. We mustn’t forget the possibility of another resurrection from Peres himself, the man in the middle, who has envied the premiership and has yet to win it legitimately. It is thought that the long time politician would be able to get a leg up through a strong Kadima victory, but one wonders if the movement will die before it ever gets off the ground. Nevertheless, this is just the left, right and middle, with many others looking to fill the shoes of a man who dominated Israeli politics for five years. Time will tell what the Israeli public's reaction will be and who they think should be the next leader of their state. Palestinians and the rest of the world will be watching closely as well to see what direction the Holy Land will be headed.

Remi Kanazi is the primary writer for the political website www.PoeticInjustice.net.  He lives in New York City as a Palestinian American freelance writer and can reached via email at remroum@gmail.com

Of Sharon, Arafat, Abramoff, and the Media By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Al-Jazeerah, January 6, 2005

More than a year ago many in the US media focused on how the passing of an ailing Arafat would become the key to unlock the deadlocked peace process (we now know this to be untrue or was vastly exaggerated). There was hardly any US coverage of the nature of his “mysterious illness” (to date there was no diagnosis). There was hardly any coverage the good wishes he received from leaders around the world. Nor was there balanced discussion of his history or even of his Israeli supporters or his Palestinian critics (only Israeli critics were highlighted). Now Sharon is ailing and the contrast in some coverage could not be any more dramatically different. The double standard goes deeper and perhaps relates to the wider problem of US foreign policy credibility around the world.

Arafat, while derided as an obstacle to peace and for cronyism, was imprisoned in his compound in Ramallah by Israeli forces that controlled even his access to food and water. Arafat was actually challenged by nearly half of the Palestinian people for moving away (starting in the 1970s and culminating in Oslo in the 1990s) from national liberation to unbalanced and unfair "negotiations" leading to agreements that failed to protect Palestinian human rights as codified by International law.

Sharon sat as a leader of the fourth or fifth strongest military power in the world (with extensive weapons of mass destruction and significant violations of International law). But Sharon was also responsible for massacres at Qibya in 1953, at Gaza in 1971, at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 (for details, see http://www.indictsharon.net/), and more recently for large scale demolition of Palestinian homes and for targeting civilians (see reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, and Israeli Human Rights organizations like B’Tselem). He was even held “personally responsible” for Sabra and Shatila massacres by Israel’s own investigative commission. More recently legal proceedings were brought against him under Belgium’s Universal Jurisdiction laws and a huge pressure from Israeli and US governments were put on the judiciary in Belgium to drop the case.

Most of the world understood that the major obstacle to peace is Israeli colonization and oppression of a native Palestinians in contravention of International law and over 60 UN Security Council resolutions. Most of the world also recognizes that the support by the US government to Israel was critical in its evasion of International law (e.g. about the need to let Palestinian refugees return to their homes and lands). This support was buttressed by the influence of the Israeli lobby in DC and in some media outlets. Most of the world knows it is mere distractions and delays the approach of peace to personalize issues (around Arafat or Sharon), to focus on the violence of those resisting occupation and colonization (but not the violence of the occupier/colonizer), and to speak of unilateral “solutions” that involve walls and Bantustans as advancing peace. Such distractions were attempted in Apartheid South Africa and failed.

Yet, many in the US media persist in trying to use these fig leafs. It is not easy to understand who benefits from vilifying Arafat and making Sharon's policies of dictating unilateral “solutions” look good. Why would one discuss the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza without explaining that per International Law, Gaza remains occupied or that in exchange for withdrawing the 2% of total settlers (from Gaza), Sharon added 4% settlers in the West Bank? One can understand the media’s concern for the health of an Israeli Prime Minister but what should never be excused is shabby journalism and hypocrisy in covering illnesses of leaders like Arafat versus Sharon.

Perhaps other affairs gives more hints of these double standards. Going back, one could site the dubious reasons for invading Iraq while supporting Israel (Israel was and continue to be in violation of 10 times more UN resolutions than Iraq ever was). More recently the Abramoff affair may also shed some light (and may be the straw that breaks the camels’ back). Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding Native American tribes of million and directing the money through fake charities to gain political influence and to help his pet causes. But why is it that many in the US media (with few brave exceptions) failed to mention that his top “cause” and his passion was Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands. Abramoff for example diverted money (“charity donations”) to Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian lands. His “customers” were told this money is intended for inner city poor Americans. Instead the money bought military hardware to help settlers terrorize native Palestinians. Ironically Native Americans were defrauded into funding oppression and colonization of other native people. Abramoff also used his influence with Congressman Bob Nye to get a government contract worth $3 million to an obscure Israeli security company and on and on.

But why is this information not being highlighted or even mentioned on the pages of major newspapers or discussed in TV programs. Could it be that this could harm the “special relationship” between the US and Israeli governments that is so well guarded now and so detrimental to US public interests. After all, even if one accepts the ludicrous suggestion that Israel is a democracy, why should we give Israel (0.1% of the world population) more money and resources and vetoes at the UN Security council than Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Central America combined? Why should US taxpayers give more federal aid to Israel per capita than many states in the US? One can only be thankful that we have an international mainstream media, some courageous US media outlets that publish such information, and the Internet. Dare we hope that 2006 will be a pivotal year when the avalanche of information and public activism become so large that the fig leafs of misinformation, diversions and double-standards will be swept aside?

Mazin Qumsiyeh http://qumsiyeh.org