BY ROHAN PEARCE
The brutality of the Israeli government toward Palestinians should be no surprise to anyone aware of the background of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Sharon was born in Kfar Mala in 1928 and joined the Haganah, a military organisation of the Yishuv (the Jewish community within Palestine before 1948) which fought in the "war of liberation" in 1948 — the original Israeli dispossession of Palestinians.
In 1953 he led Unit 101, a commando group which committed numerous atrocities — one of the most notorious was the massacre of 69 civilians, including children, in the West Bank village of Qibya.
Sharon commanded a paratroop brigade during the Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. In 1995, reports emerged of Israeli paratroopers having murdered 273 Egyptian prisoners of war during the Israeli invasion.
Sharon was one of the commanding officers under Arye Biro, a company leader in the 890 paratroop battalion. Brio described the massacre of 49 prisoners by the battalion: "We couldn't take care of anything else before we got done with them. One escaped with bullets in the chest and in the leg, but came back on all fours because he was thirsty. He soon joined his [dead] comrades."
In 1969 Sharon became head of the Israeli Defence Force Southern Command and in this capacity commanded troops in 1971 who destroyed 2000 homes in the Gaza Strip and killed 104 Palestinian resistance fighters.
The crime for which he is most known is the Sabra and Shatila massacres. These occurred during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. At the time, Sharon was minister of defence in a Likud-led government. The invasion cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and left millions homeless.
With Sharon's approval, the Lebanese right-wing Phalangist militia entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and raped, tortured and murdered Palestinian and Lebanese civilians — between 700 (the official Israeli figure) and 3500 (the figure from an inquiry launched by an Israeli journalist) were killed.
In June 2001, 23 survivors and relatives of victims brought charges against Sharon in a Belgian court. (A law passed by the Belgian parliament in 1993 allows violations of international law to be tried in a Belgian court.) Sharon was charged with acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and "crimes against persons and goods protected by the Geneva convention".
In the indictment, a survivor of the Shatila massacre, Mohammed Ibrahim Faqih, described what he had witnessed: "My God, what can I say, what can I tell you? They had demolished the shops in Sabra road and dug large ditches where they had buried the victims. I saw about 400 children's corpses. They upturned the earth and buried them. From the 12 members of our neighbour's family, 11 were killed and only one escaped."
Another survivor, Nadima Yousef Said Nasser said: "I saw a neighbour; they tore open her stomach. Some woman came out of the house opposite and started waving her scarf around saying, 'We must give ourselves up'. Suddenly I heard my sister shouting, 'They've cut his throat!' I thought that my parents had been killed. I rushed to see them, carrying my daughter. They killed my sister's husband in front of me. I went up, I saw them shooting at the men. They killed them all. I fled."
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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