[Peace-discuss] Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon

[David Green]

Subject: Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon


Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military
commander 

responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of
the 20th 

century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush
acclaims Ariel 

Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was
shed at Sabra and 

Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the
Zionist nation. As 

Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his
political career over, 

how will history judge him?


By Robert Fisk


Extracted from The Great War For Civilisation: The
Conquest of the 

Middle East, by Robert Fisk.


01/06/05 ""The Independent"" -- -- I shook hands with
him once, a 

brisk, no-nonsense soldier's grip from Sharon as he
finished a 

review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood
in the 

barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have
thought, I 

asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers -
the men who 

butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and
Chatila 

refugee camps only a few weeks earlier - had their
origins in the 

Nazi Olympics of 1936. That's when old Pierre Gemayel
- still alive 

and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon - watched
the "order" 

of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this
"order" to 

Lebanon. That's what Gemayel told me himself. Did
Sharon not 

understand this. Of course, he must have done. 


Back on 18 September that same year, Loren Jenkins of
The Washington 

Post and Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television and I
had clambered 

over the piled corpses of Chatila - of raped and
eviscerated women 

and their husbands and children and brothers - and
Jenkins, knowing 

that the Isrealis had sat around the camps for two
nights watching 

this filth, shrieked "Sharon!" in anger and rage. He
was right. 

Sharon it was who sent the Phalange into the camps on
the night of 

16 September - to hunt for "terrorists", so he claimed
at the time.


The subsequent Israeli Kahan commission of enquiry
into this 

atrocity provided absolute proof that Israeli soldiers
saw the 

massacre taking place. The evidence of a Lieutenant
Avi Grabovsky 

was crucial. He was an Israeli deputy tank commander
and reported 

what he saw to his higher command. "Don't interfere,"
the senior 

officer said. Ever afterwards, Israeli embassies
around the world 

would claim that the commission held Sharon only
indirectly 

responsible for the massacre. It was untrue. The last
page of the 

official Israeli report held Sharon "personally
responsible". It was 

years later that the Israeli-trained Phalangist
commander, Elie 

Hobeika, now working for the Syrians, agreed to turn
state's 

evidence against Sharon - now the Israeli Prime
Minister - at a 

Brussels court. The day after the Israeli attorney
general declared 

Sharon's defence a "state" matter, Hobeika was killed
by a massive 

car bomb in east Beirut. Israel denied responsibility.
US Defence 

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Brussels and
quietly 

threatened to withdraw Nato headquarters from Belgium
if the country 

maintained its laws to punish war criminals from
foreign nations. 

Within months, George W Bush had declared Sharon "a
man of peace". 

It was all over.


In the end, Sharon got away with it, even when it was
proved that he 

had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the
civilians of the 

camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder
of their 

leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told
these ruthless 

men that the Palestinians had killed their beloved
"chief". Then he 

sent them in among the civilian sheep - and claimed
later he could 

never have imagined what they would do in Chatila.
Only years later 

was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who
survived the 

original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis
and then handed 

back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the
coming weeks.


So it is as a war criminal that Sharon will be known
forever in the 

Arab world, through much of the Western world, in fact
- save, of 

course, for the craven men in the White House and the
State 

Department and the Blair Cabinet - as well as many
leftist Israelis. 

Sabra and Chatila was a crime against humanity. Its
dead counted 

more than half the fatalities of the World Trade
Centre attacks of 

2001. But the man who was responsible was a "man of
peace". It was 

he who claimed that the preposterous Yasser Arafat was
a Palestinian 

bin Laden. He it was who as Israeli foreign minister
opposed Nato's 

war in Kosovo, inveighing against "Islamic terror" in
Kosovo. "The 

moment that Israel expresses support...it's likely to
be the next 

victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand
that the region 

in which they live be recognised as an autonomous
area, connected to 

the Palestinian Authority..." Ah yes, Sharon as an
ally of another 

war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic. There must be no
Albanian state in 

Kosovo.


Ever since he was elected in 2001 - and especially
since his 

withdrawal of settlements from the rubbish tip of Gaza
last year, a 

step which would, according to his spokesman, turn any
plans for a 

Palestinian state in the West Bank into "formaldehyde"
- his 

supporters have tried to turn Sharon into a
pragmatist, another 

Charles de Gaulle. His new party was supposed to be
proof of this. 

But in reality, Sharon had more in common with the
putchist generals 

of Algeria.


He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979.
He voted 

against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He
opposed 

Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference
in 1991. He 

opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement
in 1993. He 

abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He
voted against 

the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner
of Israel's 

retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002, he had built 34
new Jewish 

colonies on Palestinian land.


And he was a man of peace.


There was a story told to me by one of the men
investigating 

Sharon's responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila
massacre, and the 

story is that the then Israeli defence minister,
before he sent his 

Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it
was 

Palestinian "terrorists" who had murdered their newly
assassinated 

leader, President-elect Gemayel. Sharon was to say
later that he 

never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the
Palestinians.


But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that
the 

Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In
reality, no 

Palestinians were involved in Gemayel's death. It
might seem odd in 

this new war to be dwelling about that earlier
atrocity. I am 

fascinated by the language. Murderers, terrorists.
That's what 

Sharon said then, and it's what he says now. Did he
really make that 

statement in 1982? I begin to work the phone from
Jerusalem, calling 

up Associated Press bureaus that might still have
their files from 

19 years ago. He would have made that speech - if
indeed he used 

those words - some time on 15 September 1982.


One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem.
It's from an 

Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro
bombing. An American 

Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me - foreign
journalists 

are being insulted by both sides with ever more
violent language - 

and this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He's
smiling and 

cheerful and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the
phone, he says 

he's taking the El-Al night flight to New York with
his wife. Would 

I like to drop by for tea?


He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the
King David 

Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the
outside security 

buzzer, that he's a rabbi. He's angry because a
neighbour has just 

let down a friend's car tyres in the underground
parking lot and 

he's saying how he felt like smashing the windows of
the neighbour's 

car. His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies,
says that her 

husband - again, he should remain anonymous - gets
angry very 

quickly. There's a kind of gentleness about them both
- how easy it 

is to spot couples who are still in love - that is
appealing. But 

when the rabbi starts to talk about the Palestinians,
his voice 

begins to echo through the apartment. He says several
times that 

Sharon is a good friend of his, a fine man, who's been
to visit him 

in his New York office.


What we should do is go into those vermin pits and
take out the 

terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said,
vermin, animals. 

I tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed
from a refugee 

camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the
first 20 

houses close to the road. If there's another stone,
another 20 ones. 

They'd soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell
you this. Stones 

are lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I'll shoot
you. I have the 

right to shoot you.


Now the rabbi is a generous man. He's been in Israel
to donate a 

vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly
expensive medical 

centre to the country. He is well-read. And I liked
the fact that - 

unlike too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a
"we-only-want-

peace" routine to hide more savage thoughts - he at
least spoke his 

mind. But this is getting out of hand.


Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts
again. "If you 

throw a stone at me, I will shoot you." But if you
throw a stone at 

me, I say, I won't shoot you. Because I have the right
not to shoot 

you. He frowns. "Then I'd say you're out of your
mind."


I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old
and New 

Testaments have just collided. The rabbi's dad taught
him about an 

eye for an eye - or 20 homes for a stone - whereas
Bill Fisk taught 

me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping
against 

Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and
Islam are 

crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of
Christians and 

Jews being "people of the Book", Muslims are beginning
to express 

ever harsher views of Jews. The sickening Hamas
references to Jews 

as "the sons of pigs and monkeys" are echoed by
Israelis who talk of 

Palestinians as cockroaches or "vermin", who tell you
- as the rabbi 

told me - that Islam is a warrior religion, a religion
that does not 

value human life. And I recall several times a Jewish
settler who 

told me back in 1993 - in Gaza, just before the Oslo
accords were 

signed - that "we do not recognise their Koran as a
valid document."


I call up Eva Stern in New York. Her talent for going
through 

archives convinces me she can find out what Sharon
said before the 

Sabra and Chatila massacre. I give her the date that
is going 

through my head: 15 September 1982. She comes back on
the line the 

same night. "Turn your fax on," Eva says. "You're
going to want to 

read this." The paper starts to crinkle out of the
machine. An AP 

report of 15 September 1982. "Defence Minister Ariel
Sharon, in a 

statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader
Gemayel] to 

the PLO, saying: "It symbolises the terrorist
murderousness of the 

PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters."


Then, a few hours later, Sharon sent the Phalange
gunmen into the 

Palestinian camps. Reading that fax again and again, I
feel a chill 

coming over me. There are Israelis today with as much
rage towards 

the Palestinians as the Phalange 19 years ago. And
these are the 

same words I am hearing today, from the same man,
about the same 

people.


In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim
holy places - 

above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount -
accompanied by about a 

thousand Israeli policemen. Within 24 hours, Israeli
snipers opened 

fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling
with police in 

the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock.
At least four 

were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda
Wilk, later 

confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when 

Palestinians "were felt to be endangering the lives of
officers". 

Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by
rubber-coated 

steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly 10
years after armed 

Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and
wounded 

another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a
slaughter 

that almost lost the United States its Arab support in
the prelude 

to the 1991 Gulf War.


Sharon showed no remorse. "The state of Israel," he
told 

CNN, "cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not
be able to 

visit part of his country, not to speak for the
holiest for the 

Jewish people all around the world." He did not,
however, explain 

why he should have chosen this moment - immediately
after the 

collapse of the "peace process" - to undertake such a
provocative 

act. Stone-throwing and shooting spread to the West
Bank. Near 

Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot dead an
Israeli soldier and 

wounded another - they were apparently part of a joint
Israeli-

Palestinian patrol originally set up under the terms
of the Oslo 

agreement. "Everything was pre-planned," Sharon would
claim five 

weeks later. "They took advantage of my visit to the
Temple Mount. 

This was not the first time I've been there..."


Jerusalem is a city of illusions. Here Ariel Sharon
promises his 

people "security" and brings them war. On the main
road to Ma'ale 

Adumim, inside Israel's illegal "municipal
boundaries", Israelis 

drive at over 100 mph. In the old city, Israeli troops
and 

Palestinian civilians curse each other before the few
astonished 

Christian tourists. Loving Jesus doesn't help to make
sense of the 

Arab-Israeli conflict. Gideon Samet got it right in 

Ha'aretz. "Jerusalem looks like a Bosnia about to be
born. Main 

thoroughfares inside the Green Line... have become
mortally 

perilous... The capital's suburbs are exposed as Ramat
Rachel was 

during the war of independence..." Samet is pushing it
a bit. Life 

is more dangerous for Palestinians than for Israelis.
Terrorism, 

terrorism, terrorism. "I suggest that we repeat to
ourselves every 

day and throughout the day," Sharon tells us, "that
there will be no 

negotiations with the Palestinians until there is a
total cessation 

of terrorism, violence and incitement."


Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege,
struck by F-16s 

and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often
powerless - there are 

now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza - it's
as if Arafat 

and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon.
Sharon used 

to call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It's
important not to 

become obsessed during wars. But Sharon's words were
like an old, 

miserable film had seen before. Every morning in
Jerusalem, I would 

pick up the Jerusalem Post. And there on the front
page, as usual, 

will be another Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers.
Palestinian 

Authority terror. Murderous terrorists.


Within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the
United States, 

Ariel Sharon turned Israel into America's ally in the
"war on 

terror", immediately realigning Yasser Arafat as the
Palestinian 

version of bin Laden and the Palestinian suicide
bombers as blood 

brothers of the 19 Arabs - none of them Palestinian -
who hijacked 

the four American airliners. In the new and vengeful
spirit that 

President Bush encouraged among Americans, Israel's
supporters in 

the United States now felt free to promote punishments
for Israel's 

opponents that came close to the advocacy of war
crimes. Nathan 

Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish
communal leader - 

and an often-mentioned candidate for a federal
judgeship - called 

for the execution of family members of suicide
bombers. "If 

executing some suicide bombers' families saves the
lives of even an 

equal number of potential civilian victims, the
exchange is, I 

believe, ethically permissible," he wrote in the
journal Sh'ma.


When Sharon began his operation "Defensive Shield",
the UN Security 

Council, with the active participation and support of
the United 

States, demanded an immediate end to Israel's
reoccupation of the 

West Bank. President George W Bush insisted that
Sharon should 

follow the advice of "Israel's American friends" and -
for Tony 

Blair was with Bush at the time - "Israel's British
friends", and 

withdraw. "When I say withdraw, I mean it," Bush
snapped three days 

later. But he meant nothing of the kind. Instead, he
sent secretary 

of state Colin Powell off on an "urgent" mission of
peace, a journey 

to Israel and the West Bank that would take an
incredible eight 

days - just enough time, Bush presumably thought, to
allow 

his "friend" Sharon to finish his latest bloody
adventure in the 

West Bank. Supposedly unaware that Israel's chief of
staff, Shoal 

Mofaz, had told Sharon that he needed at least eight
weeks 

to "finish the job" of crushing the Palestinians,
Powell wandered 

off around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco,
Spain, Egypt and 

Jordan before finally fetching up in Israel. If
Washington 

firefighters took that long to reach a blaze, the
American capital 

would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course,
the purpose of 

Powell's idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin
to be turned to 

ashes. Mission, I suppose, accomplished.


Sharon's ability to scorn the Americans was always
humiliating for 

Washington. Before the massacres of 1982, Philip Habib
was President 

Reagan's special representative, his envoy to Beirut
increasingly 

horrified by the ferocity of Sharon's assault on the
city. Not long 

before he died, I asked Habib why he didn't stop the
bloodshed. "I 

could see it," he said. "I told the Israelis they were
destroying 

the city, that they were firing non-stop. They just
said they 

weren't. They said they werent doing that. I called
Sharon on the 

phone. He said it wasnt true. That damned man said to
me on the 

phone that what I saw happening wasn't happening. So I
held the 

telephone out of the window so he could hear the
explosions. Then he 

said to me: 'What kind of conversation is this where
you hold a 

telephone out of a window?'"


Sharon's involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila
massacres 

continues to fester around the man who, according to
Israel's 1993 

Kahan commission report, bore "personal
responsibility" for the 

Phalangist slaughter. So fearful were the Israeli
authorities that 

their leaders would be charged with war crimes that
they drew up a 

list of countries where they might have to stand trial
- and which 

they should henceforth avoid - now that European
nations were 

expanding their laws to include foreign nationals who
had committed 

crimes abroad. Belgian judges were already considering
a complaint 

by survivors of Sabra and Chatila - one of them a
female rape 

victim - while a campaign had been mounted abroad
against other 

Israeli figures associated with the atrocities. Eva
Stern was one of 

those who tried to prevent Brigadier General Amos
Yaron being 

appointed Israeli defence attaché in Washington
because he had 

allowed the Lebanese Phalange militia to enter the
camps on 16 

September 1982, and knew - according to the Kahan
commission report -

that women and children were being murdered. He only
ended the 

killings two days later. Canada declined to accept
Yaron as defence 

attaché. Stern, who compiled a legal file on Yaron,
later vainly 

campaigned with human rights groups to annul his
appointment - by 

Prime Minister Ehud Barak - as director general of the
Israeli 

defence ministry. The Belgian government changed their
law - and 

dropped potential charges against Sharon - after a
visit to Brussels 

by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who
famously 

referred on 6 August 2002 to Israelis' control over
"the so-called 

occupied territory" which was "the result of a war,
which they won".


Rumsfeld had threatened that NATO headquarters might
be withdrawn 

from Belgian soil if the Belgians didn't drop the
charges against 

Sharon.


Yet all the while, we were supposed to believe that it
was the 

corrupt, Parkinson's-haunted Yasser Arafat who was to
blame for the 

new war. He was chastised by George Bush while the
Palestinian 

people continued to be bestialised by the Israeli
leadership. Rafael 

Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred
to 

Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass jar". Menachem
Begin called 

them "two-legged beasts". The Shas party leader who
suggested that 

God should send the Palestinian "ants" to hell, also
called 

them "serpents".


In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli
chief of staff 

Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a "cancerous


manifestation" and equated the military action in the
occupied 

territories with "chemotherapy". In March 2001, the
Israeli tourism 

minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a "scorpion".
Sharon 

repeatedly called Arafat a "murderer" and compared him
to bin Laden.


He contributed to the image of Palestinian inhumanity
in an 

interview in 1995, when he stated that Fatah sometimes
punished 

Palestinians by "chopping off limbs of seven- and
eight-year-old 

children in front of their parents as a form of
punishment". However 

brutal Fatah may be, there is no record of any such
atrocity being 

committed by them. But if enough people can be
persuaded to believe 

this nonsense, then the use of Israeli death squads
against such 

Palestinians becomes natural rather than illegal.


Sharon was forever, like his Prime Minister Menachem
Begin, evoking 

the Second World War in spurious parallels with the
Arab-Israeli 

conflict. When in the late winter of 1988 the US State
Department 

opened talks with the PLO in Tunis after Arafat 

renounced "terrorism", Sharon stated in an interview
with the Wall 

Street Journal that this was worse than the British
and French 

appeasement before the Second World War when "the
world, to prevent 

war, sacrificed one of the democracies". Arafat was
"like Hitler who 

wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the
second half of 

the second world war...and the Allies said 'No'. They
said there are 

enemies with whom you don't talk. They pushed him to
the bunker in 

Berlin where he found his death, and Arafat is the
same kind of 

enemy, that with whom you don't talk. He's got too
much blood on his 

hands."


Thus within his lifetime Sharon was able to bestialise
Yasser Arafat 

as both Hitler and bin Laden. The thrust of Sharon's
argument in 

those days was that the creation of a Palestinian
state would mean a 

war in which "the terrorists will be acting from
behind a cordon of 

UN forces and observers". By the time he was on his
apparent death 

bed yesterday that Palestinian "state", far from being
protected by 

the UN, was non-existent, its territory still being
carved up in the 

West Bank by growing Jewish settlements, road blocks
and a concrete 

wall.


Largely forgotten amid Sharon's hatred for "terrorism"
was his 

outspoken criticism of Nato's war against Serbia in
1999, when he 

was Israeli foreign minister. Eleven years earlier he
had 

sympathised with the political objective of Slobodan
Milosevic: to 

prevent the establishment of an Albanian state in
Kosovo. This, he 

said, would lead to "Greater Albania" and provide a
haven for - 

readers must here hold their breath - "Islamic
terror". In a 

Belgrade newspaper interview, Sharon said that "we
stand together 

with you against the Islamic terror". Once Nato's
bombing of Serbia 

was under way, however, Sharon's real reason for
supporting the 

Serbs became apparent. "It's wrong for Israel to
provide legitimacy 

to this forceful sort of intervention which the Nato
countries are 

deploying... in an attempt to impose a solution on
regional 

disputes," he said. "The moment Israel expresses
support for the 

sort of model of action we're seeing in Kosovo, it's
likely to be 

the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee
demand that 

the region in which they live be recognised as an
autonomous area, 

connected to the Palestinian Authority..."


NATO's bombing, Sharon said, was "brutal
interventionism". The 

Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who seized on this
extraordinary 

piece of duplicity, said that "Islamic terror" in
Kosovo could only 

exist in "Sharon's racist imagination". Avnery was far
bolder in 

translating what lay behind Sharon's antipathy towards
Nato action 

than Sharon himself. "If the Americans and the
Europeans interfere 

today in the matter of Kosovo, what is to prevent them
from doing 

the same tomorrow in the matter of Palestine?


"Sharon has made it crystal-clear to the world that
there is a 

similarity and perhaps even identity between
Milosevic's attitude 

towards Kosovo and the attitude of Netanyahu and
Sharon towards the 

Palestinians." Besides, for a man whose own "brutal
interventionism" 

in Lebanon in 1982 led to a Middle East bloodbath of
unprecedented 

proportions, Sharon's remarks were, to say the least,
hypocritical.


As Sharon sent an armoured column to reinvade Nablus,
still ignoring 

Bush's demand to withdraw his troops from the West
Bank, Colin 

Powell turned on Arafat, warning him that it was his
"last chance" 

to show his leadership. There was no mention of the
illegal Jewish 

settlements. There was to be no "last chance" threat
for Sharon. The 

Americans even allowed him to refuse a UN fact-finding
team in the 

occupied territories. Sharon was meeting with
President George W 

Bush in Washington when a suicide bomber killed at
least 15 Israeli 

civilians in a Tel Aviv nightclub; he broke off his
visit and 

returned at once to Israel. Prominent American Jewish
leaders, 

including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz, immediately
called upon 

the White House not to put pressure on Sharon to join
new Middle 

East peace talks. "This is a tough time," Wiesel
announced. "This is 

not a time to pressure Israel. Any prime minister
would do what 

Sharon is doing. He is doing his best. They should
trust him." 

Wiesel need hardly have worried.


Only a month earlier, the Americans rolled out their
first S-70A-55 

troopcarrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the
Israelis. 

Israel had purchased 24 of the new machines, costing
$211m - most of 

which would be paid for by the United States - even
though it had 24 

earlier-model Black Hawks. The log book of the first
of the new 

helicopters was ceremonially handed over to the
director general of 

the Israeli defence ministry, the notorious Amos
Yaron, by none 

other than Alexander Haig - the man who gave Begin the
green light 

to invade Lebanon in 1982.


Perhaps the only man who now had the time to work out
the logic of 

this appalling conflict was the Palestinian leader
sitting now in 

his surrounded, broken, ill-lit and unhealthy office
block in 

Ramallah. The one characteristic Arafat shared with
Sharon - apart 

from old age and decrepitude - was his refusal to plan
ahead. What 

he said, what he did, what he proposed, was decided
only at the 

moment he was forced to act. This was partly his old
guerrilla 

training, a characteristic shared by Saddam. If you
don't know what 

you are going to do tomorrow, you can be sure that
your enemies 

don't know either. Sharon took the same view.


The most terrible incident - praised by Sharon at the
time as 

a "great success" - was the attack by Israel on Salah
Shehada, a 

Hamas leader, which slaughtered nine children along
with eight 

adults. Their names gave a frightful reality to this
child carnage: 

18-month-old Ayman Matar, three-year-old Mohamed
Matar, five-year-

old Diana Matar, four-year-old Sobhi Hweiti,
six-year-old Mohamed 

Hweiti, 10-year-old Ala Matar, 15-year-old Iman
Shehada, 17-year-old 

Maryam Matar. And Dina Matar. She was two months old.
An Israeli air 

force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on their homes from
an American-

made F-16 aircraft on 22 July 2002.


What war did Sharon think he was fighting? And what
was he fighting 

for? Sharon regarded the attack as a victory against
"terror". Al-

Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, believed that
people who 

did not believe themselves to be targets were now
finding themselves 

under attack. "There's a network of Israeli army and
air force 

intelligence and Mossad and Shin Bet that works
together, feeding 

each other information. They can cross the lines
between Area C and 

Area B in the occupied territories. Usually they carry
out 

operations when IDF morale is low. When they killed my
father, the 

IDF was in very low spirits because of the first
intifada. So they 

go for a 'spectacular' to show what great 'warriors'
they are. Now 

the IDF morale is low again because of the second
intifada."


Palestinian security officers in Gaza were intrigued
by the logic 

behind the Israeli killings. "Our guys meet their guys
and we know 

their officers and operatives," one of the Palestinian
officials 

tells me. "I tell you this frankly - they are as
corrupt and 

indisciplined as we are. And as ruthless. After they
targeted 

Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was coming back from
security talks, 

Dahlan talked to foreign minister Peres. "Look what
you guys are 

doing to us," Dahlan told Peres. "Don't you realise it
was me who 

took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?" Al-Wazzir
understands some of the 

death squad logic. "It has some effect because we are
a 

paternalistic society. We believe in the idea of a
father figure. 

But when they assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't
stop. It was 

affected, but all the political objectives failed.
Rather than 

demoralising the Palestinians, it fuelled the
intifada. They say 

there's now a hundred Palestinians on the murder list.
No, I don't 

think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of
killings against 

Israeli intelligence.


"An army is an institution, a system; murdering an
officer just 

results in him the great war for civilisation 573
being replaced..." 

The murder of political or military opponents was a
practice the 

Israelis honed in Lebanon where Lebanese guerrilla
leaders were 

regularly blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back
by Shin Bet 

execution squads, often - as in the case of an Amal
leader in the 

village of Bidias - after interrogation. And all in
the name 

of "security".


Throughout the latest bloodletting, the one
distinctive feature of 

the conflict - the illegal and continuing colonisation
of occupied 

Arab land - was yet again a taboo subject, to be
ignored, or 

mentioned in passing only when Jewish settlers were
killed. That 

this was the world's last colonial conflict, in which
the colonisers 

were supported by the United States, was
undiscussable, a prohibited 

subject, something quite outside the brutality between
Palestinians 

and Israelis which was, so we had to remember, now
part of 

America's "war on terror". This is what Sharon had
dishonestly 

claimed since 11 September 2001. The truth, however,
became clear in 

a revealing interview Sharon gave to a French magazine
in December 

of that year, in which he recalled a telephone
conversation with 

Jacques Chirac. Sharon said he told the French
president that: "I 

was at that time reading a terrible book about the
Algerian war. 

It's a book whose title reads in Hebrew: The Savage
War of Peace. I 

know that President Chirac fought as an officer during
this conflict 

and that he had himself been decorated for his
courage. So, in a 

very friendly way, I told him: 'Mr. President, you
have to 

understand us, here, it's as if we are in Algeria. We
have no place 

to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.'"


Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as
she recalls the 

chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that
overwhelmed her 

almost exactly 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As
one of the 

survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli
Prime Minister 

Ariel Sharon - who was then Israel's defence minister
- she stops to 

search her memory when she confronts the most terrible
moments of 

her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia had taken us
from our homes 

and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a
large hole had 

been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into
it. Then the 

militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children
had climbed 

over bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly
shocked by seeing 

this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of
shouting and 

screams from the women. That's when we heard the
Israelis on 

loudspeakers shouting, "Give us the men, give us the
men." We 

thought: "Thank God, they will save us." It was to
prove a cruelly 

false hope.


Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her
30-year-old husband 

Hassan, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed
Ahmed 

standing in the crowd of men. "We were all told to
walk up the road 

towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in
front, the 

men behind. We had been separated. There were
Phalangist militiamen 

and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could
still see Hassan 

and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several
hundred of us. 

When we got to the Cité Sportive, the Israelis put us
women in a big 

concrete room and the men were taken to another side
of the stadium. 

There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no
longer see my 

husband. The Israelis went round saying "Sit, sit." It
was 11 

o'clock. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we
stood around 

outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our
men."


Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for
Hassan and 

Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them
younger than 40, 

and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men
were still 

inside. Then about four in the afternoon, an Israeli
officer came 

out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic:
"What are you 

all waiting for?" He said there was nobody left, that
everyone had 

gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with
tarpaulin over them. 

We couldn't see inside. And there were Jeeps and tanks
and a 

bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it
got dark and 

the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very
nervous.


"But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went
inside. And 

there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three
years married. 

I never saw my husband again."


The smashed Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium was a
natural "holding 

centre" for prisoners. Only two miles from Beirut
airport, it had 

been an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and
repeatedly 

bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut
so that its 

giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare
denture. The 

Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior,
but its vast, 

underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms
remained 

intact.


It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in
Beirut. At mid-

morning on 18 September 1982 - around the time Sana
Sersawi says she 

was brought to the stadium - I saw hundreds of
Palestinian and 

Lebanese prisoners, perhaps well over 1,000 in all,
sitting in its 

gloomy, cavernous interior, squatting in the dust,
watched over by 

Israeli soldiers and plainclothes Shin Beth agents and
a group of 

men who I suspected, correctly, were Lebanese
collaborators. The men 

sat in silence, obviously in fear.


>From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away.
They were put 

into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist
vehicles - for 

further "interrogation". Nor did I doubt this. A few
hundred metres 

away, up to 600 massacre victims of the Sabra and
Chatila 

Palestinian refugee camps rotted in the sun, the
stench of 

decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their
captors alike. 

It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The
Washington Post, Paul 

Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells
because the 

Israelis assumed - given our Western appearance - that
we must have 

been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had
their heads 

bowed.


Arab prisoners usually adopted this pose of
humiliation. But 

Israel's militiamen had been withdrawn from the camps,
their 

slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now
in charge. So 

what did these men have to fear?


Looking back - and listening to Sana Sersawi today - I
shudder now 

at our innocence. My notes of the time contain some
ominous clues. 

We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah
Mattar, among the 

prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him
away with his 

arm around the man's shoulders. "They take us away,
one by one, for 

interrogation," one of the prisoners muttered to me.
"They are 

Haddad militiamen. Usually they bring the people back
after 

interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do
not return." 

Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why
couldn't the 

prisoners talk to me? I asked. "They can talk if they
want," he 

replied. "But they have nothing to say."


All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the
camps. The smell 

of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a
Phalangist Jeep with 

the words "Military Police" painted on it - if so
exotic an 

institution could be associated with this gang of
murderers - drove 

by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed
the Lebanese 

Christian militiamen outside the Cité Sportive. He
also filmed a 

woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called
"Yahya" for the 

release of her husband. The colonel has now been
positively 

identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general
in the Israeli 

army.


Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a
line of Israeli 

Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets,
smoking, watching 

the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos,
some being set 

free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by
Lebanese men in 

drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had
happened 

inside the camps. One, Lt Avi Grabovsky - he was later
to testify to 

the Israeli Kahan commission - had even witnessed the
murder of 

several civilians the previous day and had been told
not 

to "interfere".


And in the days that followed, strange reports reached
us. A girl 

had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist
militiamen and 

taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli
soldier. Then 

the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a
US television 

chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested
her husband. He 

was never seen again.


There were other vague rumours of "disappeared"
people. I wrote in 

my notes at the time that "even after Chatila,
Israel's 'terrorist' 

enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut." But I
had not 

directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité
Sportive. I 

had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a
sports stadium 

in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in
Santiago a few 

years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's
coup d'état, a 

stadium from which many prisoners never returned?


Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to
indict Ariel 

Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On
Friday 17 

September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still
- unknown to 

her - under way inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in
her home with 

her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps.
"Neighbours came 

and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so
we went 

downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese
forces on the road. 

The men were separated from the women." This
separation - with its 

awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica
during the Bosnian 

war - was a common feature of these mass arrests. "We
were told to 

go to the Cité Sportive. The men stayed put." Among
the men were 

Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old
Ali and her 

brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cité Sportive, as the
Israelis told 

us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again."


The survivors tell distressingly similar stories.
Bahija Zrein says 

she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité
Sportive and 

the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother,
were taken 

away. Some militiamen - watched by the Israelis -
loaded him into a 

car, blindfolded, she says.


"That's how he disappeared," she says in her official 

testimony, "and I have never seen him again since." It
was only a 

few days afterwards that we journalists began to
notice a 

discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600
bodies had been 

found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had
been reported 

as "missing". We assumed - how easy assumptions are in
war --that 

they had been killed in the three days between 16
September 1982 and 

the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on 18
September, and that 

their corpses had been secretly buried outside the
camp. Beneath the 

golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these
young people 

had been murdered outside the camps or after 18
September, that the 

killings were still going on while we walked through
the camps, 

never occurred to us.


Why did we journalists at the time not think of this?
The following 

year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its
report, condemning 

Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on
18 September, 

with just a one-line hint - unexplained - that several
hundred 

people may have "disappeared around the same time".
The commission 

interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was
allowed to become 

the narrative of history.


The idea that the Israelis went on handing over
prisoners to their 

bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The
Palestinians 

of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this
is exactly 

what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes
his brother 

Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of 18
September. A 

Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has
recorded how, 

in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken
from the camps 

to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the
newly assassinated 

Christian President-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a
grief-stricken 

Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old
boy in the 

truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at
least four Israeli 

checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare
me, I had even 

met the woman who ordered the boy's execution.


Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended,
Shahira Abu 

Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportive where,
in one of the 

underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man,
watched by 

Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her
evidence might be 

rejected were it not for the fact that she also
expressed her 

gratitude for an Israeli soldier - inside the Chatila
camp, against 

all the evidence given by the Israelis - who prevented
the murder of 

her daughters by the Phalange.


Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportive
were torn down 

and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place,
partly by the 

British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony
of what may lie 

beneath its foundations - and its frightful
implications - will give 

Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.


I had been in the Sabra and Chatila camps when these
crimes took 

place. I had returned to the camps, year after year,
to try to 

discover what happened to the missing thousand men.
Karsten Tveit of 

Norwegian television had been with me in 1982 and he
had returned to 

Beirut many times with the same purpose. Lawyers
weren't the only 

people investigating these crimes against humanity. In
2001, Tveit 

arrived in Lebanon with the original 1982 tapes of
those women 

pleading for their menfolk at the gates of the Cité
Sportive. He 

visited the poky little video shops in the present-day
camp and 

showed and reshowed the tapes until local Palestinians
identified 

them; then Tveit set off to find the women - 19 years
older now - 

who were on the tape, who had asked for their sons and
brothers and 

fathers and husbands outside the Cité Sportive. He
traced them all. 

None had ever seen their loved ones again.


Extracted from The Great War For Civilisation: The
Conquest of the 

Middle East, by Robert Fisk.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11479.htm





		
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