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Ariel Sharon - "The Bulldozer"
Rocky Mountain News
April 13,2002
Nicknamed "The Bulldozer," Israel's prime minister is a
soldier-politician whose career has been dogged by persistent
accusations of war crimes.
What kind of man is Secretary of State Colin Powell trying to persuade
to
make peace with the Palestinians?
At 74, Ariel Sharon may be the last Israeli leader who fought for the
Haganah, politely described as part of the "underground" that helped
create the Jewish
state in 1948.
Often overlooked is that the Haganah and its offshoots, Irgun Zvai Leumi
and the Stern Gang, were once considered terrorist organizations that
bombed Arab
bus stops, attacked Arab villages and killed quite a few
Britons in
fighting to end the British Mandate of Palestine.
It should also be noted that two other former prime ministers of Israel,
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were leaders of the Irgun and the
Stern Gang
respectively. Among the atrocities these groups were
responsible for was
bombing the King David Hotel and massacring 250 Arab
villagers in Deir
Yassin.
So it can safely be said that some of Israel's earliest patriots were no
different from the Palestinians they call terrorists today.
The Haganah, which Sharon joined at 14, formed the nucleus of Israel's
new army when the Jewish state came into being. The Israeli Defense
Force, as it is
called, is now the world's fourth-strongest military
machine.
Besides an awesome array of American-supplied weapons, it has the
largest
and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal outside the five declared
nuclear
powers --
the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain -- estimated
at up
to 2,000 warheads. These include nuclear artillery shells and
nuclear-tipped
medium-range ballistic missiles (the Jericho 1 and 2).
The man who now controls those nukes has devoted his entire life to
Israel's security, and ruthlessly so.
Sharon earned a bloody reputation in the 1950s when he led retaliatory
attacks against Jordanian villages accused of harboring Palestinians who
mounted
cross-border raids on Israel. After the 1967 war, when Israel
occupied
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sharon pursued a hunt for guerrillas
that
destroyed
hundreds of Palestinian homes.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Sharon was held indirectly
responsible for a massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel's Christian
Phalange allies.
Eyewitness accounts by journalists and relief workers
in the Sabra and
Shatilla refugee camps, including a Dutch doctor and a
Jewish American
nurse, said
Israeli army bulldozers helped dig mass
graves for more than 800 dead.
That cost Sharon his job as Israel's defense minister and is the basis
of
war crimes charges filed by 29 survivors in a Belgian court.
During the Lebanese invasion, Sharon gave a revealing interview to Amos
Oz, an Israeli author and one of the leading figures in the Israeli
"Peace Now"
movement. Sharon explained his military doctrine and railed
against
pacifist Jews who thought he was being too tough. It was published
in
the daily Davar on
Dec. 17, 1982. Excerpts:
"You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer. . .
. Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint.
"Even if you prove to me that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty
immoral war, I don't care. Even if Galilee is shelled again by Katyushas
in a year's time, I
don't really care. We shall start another war, kill
and destroy more and
more, until they will have had enough.
"Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand
that
we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal,
that we
might go
crazy if one of our children is murdered, just one! If anyone even
raises his hand against us we'll take away half his land and burn the
other half, including the
oil. We might use nuclear arms.
"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel,
to
kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn
them, to
have
everyone hate us. . . . And I don't mind if after the job is done you
put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me
if you want, as a war
criminal.
"What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not
finished yet, far from it."
Twenty years later, Sharon is still applying that brutal philosophy to a
captive West Bank. And he is so obsessed with destroying Israel's
enemies he won't
listen to friends, including the president of the
United States.
MORE JENSEN COLUMNS �
Copyright 2002, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
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