The real Ariel Sharon

At the Jenin refugee camp this week, we met some people who were praying for Ariel Sharon not to die: Some wished him a longer, more agonizing death; others hoped he would recover so he can be tried in court for war crimes.

—Haaretz Magazine,
Jan. 13, 2006

Jan. 15—Since an 1897 meeting in Basel, Switzerland, the mission of the Zionist movement has been to occupy and colonize Arab Palestine with Jewish people from all over the world.

Not all Jews are Zionists and many Zionists today—especially in the United States and Western Europe—are members of various Christian sects and denominations.

The political-bureaucratic body that directly administers the colonial enterprise is called the State of Israel. While it is recognized as an independent country by the United Nations—and receives billions of dollars a year in financial and military aid from the U.S.—hundreds of millions of people worldwide view it as illegitimate, illegal and in violation of a multitude of international laws as well as the United Nations Charter itself.

The movement has always included many different political parties, factions, coalitions and trends. Some like Meretz are social-democratic, the Labor Party is centrist and others like Yisrael Beytenu are outright fascist. Political formations based in religious communities and others based on the sharing of the same country of origin (e.g. the former Soviet Union) are also active.

Over the years the Zionists have organized and sponsored a constellation of autonomous organizations operating inside Palestine and in other countries to care for the needs of the settlers. Some are focused solely on fund raising while others are concerned with issues like health care, housing, higher education and vocational training. Most are given a special status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which encourages monetary donations.

Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of the Israeli settler state, has been all over the news recently. As of this writing he is in a vegetative coma in a hospital in Jeru salem. His political and military career appears to be over.

Sharon suffered a devastating stroke a few days after news reports that the Israeli police had obtained evidence he had illegally accepted $3 million from an Austrian gambling casino owner.

The Zionist enterprise in Palestine has always required armed bodies to defend itself against the indigenous Palestinian population and its allies in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other Arab countries. Many settlers are armed with handguns and automatic weapons. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are armed by the U.S. with state-of-the-art air, naval and ground weapons systems; the paramilitary Border Police; national and local police formations.

There are also secret police agencies that conduct surveillance and hit-squad operations against Palestinian militants and political activists. They also focus on settlers and their descendants who have broken with the Zionists and identify and struggle with the indigenous Palestinian population.

These armed bodies have always been Ariel Sharon’s base and compass. Maximum territory and minimum Arabs has always been his creed.

Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928 to a family of European settlers. As a junior military officer he founded and commanded the infamous “101” special commando unit, which conducted the My Lai -like operation in the West Bank village of Qibya on October 14, 1953 resulting in the execution of 69 civilians—about half of them women and children.

During the 1956 Arab-Israeli war Sharon commanded a brigade of paratroopers that invaded Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula. As commander he set the tone. The brigade was implicated by one of his subordinates—a company commander who later became a general—in the massacre of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war and 50 Sudanese civilian road workers.

In 1969 he was appointed head of the IDF Southern Command. According to The Independent (Jan. 21, 2001) “In August 1971 alone troops under Sharon’s command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 people for the second time in their lives.”

By 1982 he had become minister of defense in a government led by Menac hem Begin, who was a settler from Poland. Within the government, Sharon successfully pushed for an invasion of Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian political, military and cultural infrastructure that was based in exile in Beirut. The June 1982 invasion resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees. It also gave rise to the Hezbullah resistance movement which after much self-sacrifice defeated Sharon’s army and on May 26, 2000 forced it out of Lebanon in a humiliating retreat.

Between Sept. 16-18, 1982, close to 3,000 Palestinians were massacred in two contiguous refugee camps—Sabra and Shatilla—by Lebanese allies of the Zionist invaders. The IDF had surrounded the camps and lit flares to show their allies the route in. It has been documented by an Israeli investigation that Sharon met with his allies shortly before the massacre took place.

Since then Sharon has continued to be the consummate insider in Zionist politics, serving at various times as Minister of Construction and Housing, Minister of National Infrastructure, Foreign Mini ster, and since March 7, 2001 as elected Prime Minister.

While the corporate press—from CNN to the New York Times—has projected a grandfatherly image of a hospitalized Ariel Sharon, a better description is given by Zakariya Zubeidi, the underground commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin:

“From the day he entered the occupation army to the day he entered the hospital, he hasn’t done one good thing for the Palestinian people. Sharon is a criminal in terms of the Palestinian people. ... He was never a man of peace for a minute. ... Sharon is a good leader for the occupation. Not a good leader for the Israeli people, and not a good leader for the Jewish people, but a good leader for the occupation. ... And we, the Palestinian people, won’t be sorry when this man dies. We would like to see him tried in court and judged for the blood of the Palestinian people that he spilled, but this is how he’s ending up. ... There’s nothing to feel sorry about with a person like Sharon. We say: One of the great leaders of the occupation, one of the worldgreat terrorists has gone. ... I hope that when Sharon dies, the people of the left and of peace in Israel will stand up and take power.” (Haaretz Magazine, Jan. 13, 2006)