Behold, our dear and costly ally, Israel, whom we can refuse nothing, now has a war criminal as head of state!
Yet no one, certainly not our political leadership, dares mention this aspect of Ariel Sharon, who is simply characterized as "tough" and a "war hero," a description that might also fit Hermann Goering, whom he physically resembles.
Sharon's election should perhaps come as no surprise, since Israel has already twice had known terrorists as Prime Ministers. Menachim Begin, prime minister from 1977-83, led the notorious Irgun, which, among other crimes, blew up the King David Hotel in 1946, killing 103 people, many of them Jews.
He was followed by Yitzhak Shamir in 1983, who became prime minister again from 1986-92, and led the even more vile Stern Gang, which, along with the Irgun in 1948, destroyed the Arab village of Deir Yassin, murdering 254 unarmed civilians, 145 of them women. This seems incredibly ironic for a state that justifies so much of its behavior in terms of its struggle against terrorism.
But Sharon is different. Most of the blood of innocents covering his hands was spilled in the service of the state of Israel, in his capacity as general or minister, and his crimes possess at least the appearance of approval by the governments for which he worked.
Born in Palestine in 1928, Sharon joined the Haganah, later the Israeli Defense Force, and quickly rose through the ranks, a clever and brutal leader. In 1953 he led Force 101, a commando unit of 300 men, on a raid against the Jordanian village of Kibya, where they dynamited 41 houses and a school, killing the 53 civilians known to be cowering within them. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion simply denied the action was carried out by the defense force.
Three years later, Sharon demonstrated that his disregard for human life did not stop with Arabs, when in 1956, during Israel's completely unprovoked attack on Egypt (along with Britain and France), he defied orders and attacked the Mitla Pass, producing the only serious Israeli casualties in the war.
In 1977, Sharon became agricultural minister, using his post to develop the settlement program in the Occupied Territories, a blatant violation of international law (U.N. Charter, Fourth Geneva Convention, etc.) the United States has pledged to uphold. A year later he told a reporter his plan was to move 100,000 Jews into the territories, and when queried about the Palestinians, he replied, "We'll keep enough for labor," reminding some of Heinrich Himmler's plans for Poland and the Ukraine.
But this was all child's play. As defense minister under Begin, Sharon masterminded Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the goal of which was to eliminate the Palestinian Liberation Organization and install an obedient minority government of Maronite Christians. Sharon even asked for, but was refused tactical control of, Israel's nuclear weapons.
During the assault, which lasted until 1985, approximately 12,000 Lebanese civilians were killed, most during Israel's nine weeks of indiscriminate bombing of West Beirut. On Aug. 11 1982, despite his government having agreed to a withdrawal plan, Sharon launched an 11-hour barrage that killed at least 300 civilians on that "Black Thursday."
Worse was to come. On Sept. 16, 1982, the Israeli Defense Force suggested that its Lebanese ally, the Phalange, comb the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps for guerillas, knowing full well what was likely to happen. For three days, while Israeli troops watched from towers and obligingly lit the camps with flares at night, the Phalange slaughtered as many as 2,000 men, women and children. After the first day of killing, Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, a member of the Barak government, congratulated the Phalange leaders on their "good work" and offered a bulldozer for burying the corpses.
World reaction was too strong even for the Reagan administration and Begin to ignore, and in Israel the Kahan Commission found the Israeli Defense Force at least partly responsible for the massacre, particularly singling out Sharon, who was found to have "personal responsibility" for the atrocity. Sharon lost his job, but he and the other officers named in the affair all held and, in some cases, continue to hold posts in subsequent administrations.
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And now this man, who has committed the sort of crimes for which we have been rounding up Nazis for the last 50 years, is prime minister of Israel and will receive the unqualified support of our government. Such is another shameful result of our servile attachment to Zionism and Israel, precisely the sort of "passionate attachment" that George Washington warned us of two centuries ago.
