[CTRL] When War Criminals Play The Victim, And The World Nods in Agreement

[eric stewart]

-Caveat Lector-

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq24.html

The Blood on Israel's Hands - When War Criminals Play
The Victim, And The World Nods in Agreement

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

I. State Terrorism: Intrinsic to Israel�s Zionist
Ideology

II. A History of Systematic Aggression

III. The Invasion and Occupation of Lebanon

IV. Who is Ariel Sharon?

Conclusions

I. State Terrorism: Intrinsic to Israel�s Zionist
Ideology

�A war of terrorism was forced on us�, announced
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a live
televised broadcast outlining Israeli war plans in the
wake of the weekend suicide attacks within the Zionist
State. �If you ask what the aim of this war is, I will
tell you. It is the aim of the terrorists� to exile us
from here.� He added that: �This will not happen. We
know who is responsible� Arafat is responsible for
everything that is going on.�[1]

We should contrast this with the eye-witness report of
New York Times journalist Chris Hedges in Gaza,
published in Harpers Magazine:

�It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its
breath. And then out of the dry furnace air, a
disembodied voice crackles over a loud speaker. �Come
on dogs,� the voice booms in Arabic. �Where are all
the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!� I stand up. I
walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew:
�Son of a bitch!� �Son of a whore!� �Your mother�s
cunt!�



�The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to
the electric fence that separates the camp from the
Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored
jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with
loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the
dunes in anticipation of what is to come.



�A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more
than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running
clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of
sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no
sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers.
The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end
through the children�s slight bodies. Later, in the
hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs
ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.



�Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young
men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One
was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven year
old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more,
three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been
shot in other countries I have covered - death squads
gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers
with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria,
and Serb snipers put children in their sights and
watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo -
but I have never before watched soldiers entice
children like mice into a trap and murder them for
sport.�[2]

Does this sound like a �war of terrorism� was forced
on Israel by Palestinian children - or more like the
other way round?

According to the American Heritage Dictionary,
�terrorism� is defined as follows:

1. The use of terror, violence, and intimidation to
achieve an end.

2. Fear and subjugation produced by this.

3. A system of government that uses terror to rule.

In light of this authoritative, lucid and
comprehensive U.S. definition of �terrorism�, Sharon�s
words take on a new light. It so happens that the
facts are exactly the opposite to his claims. Contrary
to Sharon�s spin, it is a matter of record that
throughout the history of the State of Israel, the
regime has consistently foisted wars of terrorism on
the indigenous Palestinians in order to secure the
State�s expansion and consolidation. As early as 1940,
the noted Zionist Yossef Weitz, Director of the Jewish
National Fund affiliated to the World Zionist
Organization, wrote that:

�It should be clear for us that there is not room for
two peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave it,
there will be enough for us� There is nothing else to
do but to remove them all; we mustn�t leave a single
village, a single tribe... We must explain to
Roosevelt and all the heads of friendly states that
the land of Israel isn�t too small if all the Arabs
leave and if the borders are pushed back a little to
the north, as far as the Litani, and to the east, on
the Golan Heights.�[3]

It is therefore not the Palestinians who desired to
expel all the Jews from the region. On the contrary
Jews and non-Jews had lived in peace for thousands of
years in the land of Palestine. It was the foreign
Zionist movement which at its inception envisaged the
complete �exile� of the non-Jewish Palestinian people
from their ancestral homeland, to make way for the new
Zionist regime. Israeli historian Professor Benny
Morris of Ben-Gurion University records the little
known fact that: �Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few
Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He
hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his
colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September
and October [1948].�[4] What was the principal
methodology Israel planned to use to ensure the
expulsion of Palestinians from their own homes?
Nothing less than brutal, violent, indiscriminate,
cold-blooded terrorism. Professor Morris elaborates
that:

�During May [1948], ideas about how to consolidate and
give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to
crystallize, and the destruction of villages was
immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving
this aim� [Even earlier] On 10 April, Haganah units
took Abu Shusha� The village was destroyed that
night�Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on April
20�Abu Zureiq was completely demolished�By mid- 1949,
the majority of the [350 depopulated Arab villages]
were either completely or partly in ruins and
uninhabitable.�[5]

The Zionist leadership had thus clearly planned from
the very beginning to absorb the entirety of Palestine
in accordance with consolidating the State of Israel.
In internal discussion in 1938, the first Israeli
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared that:
�[A]fter we become a strong force, as a result of the
creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and
expand to the whole of Palestine� The state will only
be a stage in the realisation of Zionism and its task
is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the
whole of Palestine.�[6] He also articulated Israel�s
opposition to the United Nations Partition Plan: �The
State of Israel considers the UN resolution of 29
November 1947 to be null and void.�[7] A later Israeli
Prime Minister Menachim Begin elaborated that:

�The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will
never be recognized. The signature of institutions and
individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It
will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and
will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the Land of
Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel. All
of it. And forever.�[8]

As a consequence of this dogmatic mentality, the
policy of pursuing the mass ethnic cleansing of the
indigenous population from their own land was an
integral Israeli military strategy, although this was
never widely publicised to avoid international and
historical condemnation. Tzvi Shiloah, a senior
veteran of the Mapai Party and a former deputy mayor
of the town of Hertzeliyah recalled that �in 1948, we
deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war,
expelled Arabs. Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we
expelled many Arabs.�[9] Israeli historian Ilan Pappe,
associate Professor in Middle East History at the
University of Haifa, concurs that: �There was an
unwritten Zionist plan to expel the Arabs of Palestine
in 1948.� From 1 April 1948 to the end of the war,
�Jewish operations were guided by the desire to occupy
the greatest possible portion of Palestine.�[10]

Unprovoked and systematic genocidal massacres of
Palestinians in their villages subsequently occurred
as a consequence of these operations, as has been
documented by the Israeli military historian Aryeh
Yitzakhi � Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Eretz
Yisrael Studies at Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and
Senior Lecturer in Military History in Israeli Defence
Force (IDF) courses for army officers. Yitzahki is
particularly qualified in this area due to his
in-depth acquaintance with IDF archives, on which his
conclusions are based. In the 1960s, Yitzakhi served
as Director of the IDF archives within the framework
of his IDF service in his capacity as historian. He
records that:

�In almost every conquered village in the War of
Independence, acts were committed, which are defined
as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings,
massacres and rapes� For many Israelis it was easier
to find consolation in the lie, that the Arabs left
the country under orders from their leaders. This is
an absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of
their flight was their fear from Israeli retribution
and this fear was not at all imaginary. From almost
each report in the IDF archives concerning the
conquest of Arab villages between May and July 1948 -
when clashes with Arab villagers were the fiercest - a
smell of massacre emanates.�[11]

One of the biggest but least publicised massacres is
that of al-Dawayima village in Hebron District
(population 4,300). On the afternoon of Friday, 29th
October 1948, three units of the 89th Battalion (8th
Brigade) entered the village from three directions,
leaving the east open, and occupied it �without a
fight� according to an Israeli soldier�s testimony.
The soldier continued:

�The first wave of conquerors killed about 80 to 100
Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by
breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a
house without dead. One woman, with a newborn baby in
her arms was employed to clean the courtyard....
(they) shot her and the baby.... This was not in the
heat of battle.... but a system of expulsion and
destruction�.[12]

The 1948 war of Zionist terrorism thus resulted in a
large-scale Palestinian refugee problem, with at least
750,000 men, women and children forced to flee from
their homes, many of them forcibly expelled by the
Israelis. More than 300,000 Palestinian refugees went
to the West Bank, and some 200,000 went to Gaza Strip,
to settle in squalid, crowded, barren refugee camps
managed by United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA). After 1948 Palestinian refugees attempted to
return to what had by then become the State of Israel,
in violation of the Zionist regime�s concocted �Law of
Return�. An estimated 2,700-5,000 of them were
subsequently killed by Israeli troops while crossing
the borders - only very few succeeded. Dubbed
�infiltrators� by Israel, the returning refugees had
clashed with Israeli settlers, army and police, during
which the number of Israeli casualties amounted to
approximately 190-220 dead during 1949-1954.[13] To
stave off the return of the indigenous population, the
Israeli army had began launching attacks on
Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Benny Morris has documented extensively the
numerous killings committed by Israeli forces during
this period.[14]

II. A History of Systematic Aggression

The systematic initiation of �wars of terrorism� by
the State of Israel since then is a matter of record.
The 1967 Six Day War, for example, although blamed by
Israel on the dire threat posed to the Zionist State
by the Arabs, was in fact the primary responsibility
of Israel. General Ezar Weizman, then Israeli Chief of
Operations, admitted that Egypt and Syria � which are
conventionally blamed as the initiators of aggression
- had never posed a threat to Israel. �There was never
a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never
been considered in any serious meeting.�[15] General
Chaim Herzog, Commanding General and first Military
Governor of Israeli Occupied West Bank similarly
confessed: �There was no danger of annihilation.
Israeli headquarters never believed in this
danger.�[16]

The 1967 Six Day War was  actually a war of Israeli
aggression, perpetrated to illegally expand the
State�s borders. Yigal Allon, Minister of Labour and
member of Eshkol�s Military Advisory Committee on the
origin of the Six-Day War, had asserted unequivocally:
�Begin and I want Jerusalem.�[17] Mordechai Bentov,
Israeli Minister of Housing has elaborated that: �The
entire story of the danger of extermination was
invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori
to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.�[18]
Indeed, the entire episode was meticulously  planned
by the Israeli military. General Mordichai Hod,
Commanding General of the Israeli Air-Force admitted
that: �Sixteen years� planning had gone into those
initial eighty minutes [of the Six Day War]. We lived
with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan.
Constantly we perfected it.�[19]

Menachim Begin himself has admitted in this regard
that: �In June l967, we had a choice. The Egyptian
Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not
prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We
must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack
him.�[20] The Israeli Defence Minister of the time has
voiced similar revelations. According to the New York
Times: �Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, a
Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer
the Golan�[said] many of the firefights with the
Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the
kibbutz residents who pressed the government to take
the Golan Heights did so less for security than for
their farmland.�[21] Dayan testified that �at least 80
per cent� of two decades of border clashes were in
fact initiated by Israel, under pressure from
land-hungry farmers and army commanders in Northern
Israel.[22] This concurs with the assessment of former
Israeli General Matityahu Peled, who admitted that
more than half of the border clashes before the 1967
war �were a result of our security policy of maximum
settlement in the demilitarized area.�[23]

The details of these clashes have been documented by
British journalist and Middle East scholar David
Hirst, who notes that the Israelis �began by staking
an illegal claim to sovereignty over the zone [on the
Syrian frontier] and then proceeded, as opportunity
offered, to encroach on all the specific provisions
against introducing armed forces and fortifications�

�They repeatedly obstructed the operations of the UN
observers, on one occasion even threatening to kill
them. They refused to cooperate with the Mixed
Armistice Commission, and when it suited them they
simply rejected the rulings and requests of the
observers. They expelled, or otherwise forced out,
Arab inhabitants, and razed their villages to the
ground. They transplanted trees as a stratagem to
advance the frontier to their own advantage. They
built roads against the advice of the UN. They carried
out excavations on Arab land for their own drainage
schemes.�[24]

Swedish General Carl von Horn, head of the United
Nations peacekeeping forces in the region, observed
that all this was �part of a premeditated Israeli
policy to edge east through the Demilitarized Zone
towards the old Palestine border (as shown on their
maps) and to get all the Arabs out of the way by fair
means or foul�

�The Jews developed a habit of irrigating and
ploughing in stretches of Arab-owned land nearby, for
the ground was so fertile that every square foot was a
gold mine in grain. Gradually, beneath the glowering
eyes of the Syrians, who held the high ground
overlooking the Zone, the area had become a network of
Israeli canals and irrigation channels edging up
against and always encroaching on Arab-owned
property.�[25]

U.S. analyst Sheldon L. Richman of the Cato Institute
in Washington DC reports that:

�This policy continued well into the 1950s. Most of
the 2,000 Arabs living in the zone had been forced out
by 1956. Many moved to the sloping land below the
Golan Heights. In response to the expulsion of Arabs
from the zone, the otherwise helpless Syrian forces on
the Heights began firing on Israelis, particularly
when, each year, their tractors plowed further into
the demilitarized zone. General von Horn was convinced
the instances of firing would not have occurred
without the specific Israeli provocations.�[26]

According to Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, the
Israeli settlers �didn�t even try to hide their greed
for their land,� wanting �to grab a piece of land and
keep it until the enemy will get tired of us.�
Describing the idea that Syria was threatening Israel
before the 1967 war as �bullshit�, he affirmed in
detail that: �I know how at least 80% of all the
incidents with Syria started�

�We would send a tractor to plow some area where it
wasn�t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized
area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start
to shoot. If they didn�t shoot we would tell the
tractor to advance further, until in the end the
Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would
use artillery and later the air force also, and that�s
how it was� You do not attack the enemy because he is
a bastard, but because he threatens you, and the
Syrians in the fourth day of the war were not
threatening us.�[27]

As Hirst observes, the most charitable interpretation
of this Israeli policy was that the regime had done
its best to provoke Syria into opening fire. According
to one United Nations observer at the scene: �It was a
premeditated raid of intimidation motivated by
Israel�s desire... to bait the Arab states into some
overt act of aggression that would offer them the
opportunity to overrun additional territory without
censor�.[28] In the words of the Washington Post:
�Israel, with an appetite for land, for political
profit and for strategic depth, was in the Golan
instance� an aggressor, not the victim of
aggression.�[29]

Israel�s war had devastating consequences for the
indigenous Palestinian population who faced the brunt
of the Zionist regime�s policies of intimidation,
provocation and terror. Jewish scholar Alfred
Lilienthal noted that:

�To solidify their gains after the 1967 war, according
to UN figures, the Israelis destroyed during the
period between June 11, 1967 and November 15, 1969
some 7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories
seized during that war; this figure excluded
thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan Heights
that were razed to the ground. In the two years
between September 1969 and 1971 the figure was
estimated to have reached 16,312 homes.�[30]

In its occupation of the Golan Heights, Israel
expelled a total of over 120,000 inhabitants - mostly
Syrians but also several thousand Palestinian
refugees. Israel simultaneously destroyed two cities,
133 villages and 61 farms. Only 6,396 inhabitants
remained in the six villages left standing.[31]

Again and again we find the same policies of
aggression and provocation through terrorism being
adopted by Israel to manufacture a conflict by which
to expand the State�s borders and grab more land. The
Yom Kippur War of 1973, for instance, was provoked by
Israeli intransigence, and was not an attempt to
respond defensively to Arab military threats to the
State�s existence. As Yitzhak Rabin admitted:

�The Yom Kippur War was not fought by Egypt and Syria
to threaten the existence of Israel. It was an all out
use of their military force to achieve a limited
political goal. What Sadat wanted by crossing the
canal was to change the political reality and,
thereby, to start a political [peace] process from a
point more favorable to him than the one that
existed.�[32]

Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris highlights
the context of Zionist intransigence in which this
occurred, noting that according to the memoirs of
several Israeli Labour politicians and officials of
the 1970s: �Israel�s premier, Golda Meir, rejected
reasonable Egyptian peace or non-belligerency offers
in 1970�1, thus �forcing� the Arabs to launch the 1973
October War.�[33] In fact, Israel�s systematic
fabrication and exaggeration of threats to justify the
provocation and initiation of �wars of terrorism�
appears to be official strategy for Zionist expansion.
In Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharatt�s personal
diaries, there is an excerpt from May of 1995 in which
he quotes Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan as
follows:

�[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the
only, instrument with which to keep its morale high
and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it
may, no it must, invent dangers, and to do this it
must adopt the method of provocation � and revenge�and
above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab
countries, so that we nay finally get rid of our
troubles and acquire our space.�[34]

Throughout Israel�s existence, the Zionist State has
thus consistently perpetrated a policy of violent
repression against the indigenous Palestinians. As the
New York-based rights monitor, the Center for Economic
and Social Rights (CESR), reports in summary of the
bloody record of Israeli terrorism: �In the 1948 War
Israel extended its control over 77% of the territory
of the former Palestine Mandate and expelled almost
the entire Palestinian Arab population�

Only 100,000 residents remained of a pre-war
population approaching one million. Israel conquered
the rest of Palestine in the 1967 War, creating
another 300,000 refugees, many of them refugees for
the second time. To build a Jewish state on these
conquered lands and erase the memory of centuries of
Palestinian existence, Israel:



1.       Razed to the ground over 500 Palestinian
towns and villages,

2.       Converted Palestinian-owned land into state
property for the benefit of Jews only (excluding even
Arab citizens of Israel),

3.      Rejected the return of any Palestinian
refugees while recognizing the right to �return� of
any Jewish citizen living in any other country,

4.      Maintained military occupation of Palestinian
land through an explicit �iron fist� policy of
disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance,

5.      Refused to allow economic development in the
occupied territories while re-orienting Palestinian
labor to serve the needs of the Israeli economy, and

6.      Refused to define its own borders (despite
accepting the borders specified in resolution 181) in
order to justify continued illegal expansion.

III. The Invasion and Occupation of Lebanon

Israel�s invasion and occupation of Lebanon provides
another outstanding example of the routine nature of
the State�s aggressive initiation of �wars of
terrorism�. The regime�s policy of unhindered
expansion through the violent acquisition of territory
continued in February 1973, when Israel began its
invasion by attacking northern Lebanon from both air
and sea, killing 31 primarily civilian members of the
population. Classrooms, clinics and other civilian
buildings were indiscriminately targeted and
destroyed. In December 1975, over 50 people were
slaughtered in the bombing and strafing of Palestinian
refugee camps and villages by Israeli warplanes. Both
attacks had been without provocation from the PLO. In
November 1977, 70 people were killed when the Lebanese
town of Nabatiye came under Israeli fire - again,
without provocation - being heavily shelled by Israeli
batteries on both sides of the border. By 1978, the
population of Nabatiye had been reduced from 60,000 to
5,000 when Israel invaded, the remainder having fled
in fear of Israeli shelling. Such events were able to
continue with impunity, as well as with the approval
and support of various Western powers, particularly
the United States.[35]

Israel first properly invaded southern Lebanon in
1978, with a force of 20,000. The consequence was that
several thousand Lebanese and Palestinian civilians
were killed, and hundreds of thousands driven to the
north. A notorious event during this invasion was the
slaughter of all inhabitants remaining in the Lebanese
town of Khiam by Major Haddad�s Israeli militia, which
was by now in control of a southern region of Lebanon.
Thanks to Israeli bombing from earlier years, the
population had already been reduced from 30,000 to 32.
The remaining population were ruthlessly massacred by
Haddad�s proxy force, and Khiam was selected as the
site of its new Ansar I prison camp, whose �hideous
conditions� and �savage torture� resembled that of the
Nazi concentration camps. By August 1979, the Lebanese
government reported that almost a thousand civilians
had been killed in subsequent Israeli attacks.[36]

One may refer to two important statements that
unequivocally expose the nature of these, previous and
subsequent Israeli wars. General Mordechai Gur
admitted in an interview when asked about Israel�s war
on Lebanon:

�I am not one of those people who have a selective
memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what
we have done all these years? What did we do the
entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half
refugees! Really: where do you live? We bombarded
Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, Port Fuad. A million and a
half refugees. Since when has the population of South
Lebanon become so sacred? � After the massacre at
Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed�
Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan
had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the
war of attrition [1969-70]? � When I authorized
Yanouch [diminutive name of the commander of the
northern front, responsible for the Lebanese
operation] to use aviation, artillery and tanks [in
the invasion], I knew exactly what I was doing.  For
30 years, from the War of Independence until now, we
have been fighting a war against a civilian [Arab]
population that lives in villages and cities�.[37]

He also observed that the Israeli Army had been
responsible for extensive looting subsequent to its
April 1948 attacks on Jaffa and Haifa; bombing Arab
villages and the city of Irbid in Jordan; �cleansing�
the Jordan Valley of its entire population; driving a
million and a half civilians from the area of the Suez
Canal in 1970. Noting Gur�s remarks, the Israeli
military analyst Zeer Schiff further commented:

�In South Lebanon we struck the civilian populations
consciously, because they deserved it... the
importance of [General] Gur�s remarks is the admission
that the Israeli Army has always struck civilian
populations purposely and consciously... the Army, he
said, has never distinguished civilian [from military]
targets... [but] purposely attacked civilian targets
even when Israel�s settlements had not been
struck�.[38]

It is hard to imagine a clearer admission of the fact
that Israeli military strategy has always and will
always employ terrorism, not defensively, but entirely
offensively by initiating aggression regardless of
alleged security concerns. It is therefore not
surprising that Israel�s justification for  the
occupation of south Lebanon was the maintenance of a
�Security Zone� there for the protection of its
northern sector. The reality is slightly different -
one of the most crucial strategic reasons for the
invasion was that Israel wished to secure unimpeded
control over the water of the Litani river. The United
Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western
Asia reported that Israel had been using water from
the Lebanese Litani River via an 11 mile tunnel it had
drilled, as well as from Lebanon�s Wazzani
springs.[39]

The UN Security Council reacted to the 1978 invasion
of Lebanon by issuing resolutions 425 and 426, calling
for the unequivocal withdrawal of Israeli forces, and
establishing UNIFIL to oversee this withdrawal
process.[40] But in July 1981, Israel continued the
pattern of violating cease-fires, by instigating
further provocative attacks on Lebanese civilian
targets in accordance with the strategy indicated by
Moshe Dayen. Palestinian retaliation followed, to
which Israel responded by heavy bombing, resulting in
the massacre of 450 Arabs - mostly Lebanese civilians.
According to U.S. correspondent Edward W. Miller in
the Coastal Post: �[In] July 1981, Israel, using a
supposed arms buildup by the Palestinians as an
excuse, again subjected Lebanon to terrorist attacks.
Israel bombarded Beirut killing over 450 citizens and
wounding 800 more.�[41] Jewish academic Noam Chomsky,
Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
documents the fact that the PLO rigorously adhered to
the mid-1981 ceasefire, while Israel escalated
flagrant violations of the agreement, �bombing and
killing civilians, sinking fishing boats, violating
Lebanese airspace thousands of times, and carrying out
other provocations to elicit some PLO response that
could be used as a pretext for the planned
invasion�.[42]

The context of the ensuing unprecedented invasion of
1982, masterminded significantly by then General Ariel
Sharon, has been outlined by Miller lucidly as
follows:

�Things were reasonably quiet for a time but in
February, 1982, Israel�s Major General Yehoshua Saguym
Chief of Israel�s Intelligence, met with Pentagon
officials and Secretary of Defense Haig to outline
Israel�s plans for a major invasion and Lebanon.
Following this meeting Israel took delivery of
$217,695,000 worth of military equipment from the
U.S., whereupon our media began to prepare Americans
for the military operation by �revealing� the PLO was
receiving Soviet rockets and other supplies supposedly
to threaten Israel.�[43]

Israel attempted to justify its operation by claiming
that the PLO had been engaged in terrorism on the
State�s borders. In fact, the border had been quiet
for eleven months, apart from retaliations to Israeli
provocations, as noted by Professor Stephen Shalom of
the Department of Political Science at William
Paterson University in New Jersey.[44] Having failed
miserably in provoking the desired defencive response
from the PLO, which it was hoped could be exploited to
justify a wholesale invasion of Lebanon, Israel simply
invented an excuse to bring its plans to subjugate the
country to fruition. The Zionist State claimed that
the invasion was a response to an attempt to
assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to London. Yet the
PLO had nothing to do with this attempt. As Israel and
the international community was well aware, this
assassination attempt was actually carried out by the
terrorist Abu Nidal organisation that had been at war
with the PLO for years. Abu Nidal did not even have
any sort of presence in Lebanon.[45]

An estimated 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians
were killed, over 30,000 injured, the capital city of
Beirut and much of southern Lebanon destroyed, water
and electricity supplies cut off, and innumerable
subsequent atrocities carried out by Israeli troops
throughout the invasion. This sequence of events was
able to occur primarily due to unfailing U.S. support
of the Zionist regime, which included the continual
vetoing of Security Council efforts to halt the
terror.[46] �In the prolonged negotiations that
followed,� reports Miller.

�PLO officials and other Palestinian refugees were
evacuated by ship to Tunmis and other Arab countries.
Some of their families, who were to follow and who
were promised safe-keeping by the U.S. were then
massacred by the Phalanges forces under Israeli
orders. Over 1,000 women, children and old men were
thus butchered in the Sabra and Shatila refugee
centers.�

Ariel Sharon was strongly criticised for his role in
this war crime. Thousands of Israeli citizens marched
in the streets to protest. To appease the public
outcry Sharon was relieved of his immediate command,
�but rewarded by a cabinet post in the Knesset.� This
invasion �which killed some 30,000 civilians,
devastated Beirut where over 500,000 were driven from
their homes. As those who had not been killed by
Israel�s �cluster bombs� fled to surrounding villages,
President Reagan�s U.S.S. New Jersey sitting offshore,
fired shells into these towns. Beirut today is still
in the process of rebuilding� as late as 1996 - over a
decade after the invasion. �The U.S. involvement in
Israel�s 1982 war destroyed what little credibility we
had in the Mideast, cost our taxpayers billions plus
almost 300 U.S. Marine lives, but left Israel still
occupying southern Lebanon despite the UN Security
Council directive to get out.�[47] Then U.S. President
Ronald Reagan assured Zionist leaders that U.S.
sanctions would not be imposed against Israel. But,
fearful of the increasingly bad image the regime was
developing through its policies of terror, he also
warned then Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir:
�Should these Israeli practices continue, it will
become increasingly difficult to defend the
proposition that use of U.S. arms is for defensive
purposes�.[48]

Indigenous resistance to the Israeli occupation began
to emerge and solidify by 1982. The principal group of
local fighters was known as �Hizbullah�. They
eventually developed into the most potent fighting
force in the region, going on to secure the support of
other countries in the region. As the U.S. journalist
Edward W. Miller points out:

�[T]the much-vilified Hezbulla organization was formed
in 1982 after that terribly destructive invasion,
specifically to protect southern Lebanon from further
acts of Israeli violence. Iran was party to its
formation and has maintained some degree of support as
has Syria�s Assad, which is one reason our Israeli
lobby in Washington has pressed Congress to isolate
Iran and vilify Syria. It really makes little
difference who supports Hezbulla. Israel�s smoke and
mirrors campaign to vilify the two Muslim countries
and their leaders is intended to distract the world�s
attention from her intent to continue the economic
destruction of Lebanon as well as to steal vital
irrigation waters from the Litani River. Most Mideast
authorities agree the Lebanese will need Hezbulla�s
support until Israeli troops have left the
country.�[49]

Between 1985 and 86, Israel began developing a new
iron fist policy for the country to eliminate the
resistance movement that had formed to drive out
Israeli occupying forces. The basic plan was to invade
Lebanese villages and massacre their inhabitants, with
the view to force Hizbullah out of South Lebanon. This
would be achieved by bombarding the area north of
Israel�s zone of occupation, in the hope that people
who lost their homes would turn against the
resistance.[50] As usual then, terrorism was to be the
primary military strategy. The New York Times observed
that: �Israel�s goal has been to create an
unimaginable number of refugees in Lebanon... to
restrain Hizbullah�s attacks�.[51]

Accordingly, on 25th July 1993, Israel launched what
the media has called the �biggest military assault on
Lebanon� since 1982. Israel justified the attack by
claiming it had been provoked by Hizbullah guerrilla
attacks on Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon,
where seven Israeli soldiers were killed. A more
redundant - or inaccurate - excuse for Israel�s 1992
onslaught is hard to imagine. Contrary to conventional
opinion, indigenous populations suffering under
regimes of occupation have the right, guaranteed under
the international law, to resist that occupation
through military means if necessary.[52] Israel has
always responded to indigenous resistance targeted
specifically at the regime�s military forces of
illegal occupation with brutal terrorism against not
only combatants, but innocent civilians. U.S.
political scientist Stephen Shalom, a Professor at
William Paterson University, has pointed out that:

�For many years the pattern has been that when
Lebanese guerrillas strike at IDF soldiers occupying
southern Lebanon, Israel responds with what can only
be called terrorism. For example, when 3 Israeli
soldiers were killed in April 1993, �Israeli
helicopters fired at least 15 missiles into three
houses, a bakery and a valley outside the zone, as
tanks and artillery slammed 200 shells around a string
of villages in the region,� wounding eight civilians
and a UN soldier (NYT [New York Times], 14 Apr. 1993,
A13).�[53]

While Israel had thus continued to indiscriminately
and deliberately target civilians, Hizbullah for the
most part had refrained from doing so. Indeed, the
resistance only began doing so by firing at the
civilian sector in northern Israel as a consequence of
Israel�s ongoing systematic terrorism of Lebanese
civilians. In this respect, we should note Human
Rights Watch�s (HRW) comparative review of Israeli and
Hizbullah operations. Analysing a sample of 45
incidents during the period between the July 1993
understandings and the commencement of Operation
Grapes of Wrath in April 1996, HRW concludes that all
Hizbullah attacks on northern Israel are retaliatory.
The consistent sequence of military actions is as
follows: Hizbullah strikes Israel�s occupying forces
in south Lebanon; this is followed by Israeli attacks
on Lebanese civilians north of the security zone; this
is then followed by Hizbullah�s rocketing of northern
Israel. In other words, Hizbullah would only rocket
northern Israel in response to Israel�s bombardment of
civilians in Lebanon.[54] Commenting on this sequence
of events, Professor Noam Chomsky recorded that:

�The �security zone� is a region of southern Lebanon
that Israel has occupied in one or another form since
its 1978 invasion. In recent years, it has been held
by a terrorist mercenary army (the South Lebanon Army
of General Lahd) backed by Israeli military forces.
Any indigenous resistance to the rule of Israel and
its proxies is considered �terrorism�, which Israel
has a right to counter by attacking Lebanon as it
chooses (retaliation, preemption, or whatever) - what
General Barak chooses to call �firing back at the
attackers�. But the resistance has no right to
retaliate by shelling northern Israel. These are the
rules; one goal of Israel�s July [1993] attack was to
enforce them� The U.S. government agrees that these
are to be the operative rules, while occasionally
expressing qualms about the tactics used to enforce
them - meanwhile providing a huge flow of arms and any
required diplomatic support. It is unnecessary to ask
what the reaction would be if any state not enjoying
Washington�s favor were to carry out comparable
atrocities, in gross violation of international law
and the UN Charter, were such trivialities considered
relevant.�[55]

On 30th July, a Hizbullah announcement called for �the
complete and permanent halt of aggression against
villages and civilians and the stopping of Israeli
attacks from air, land and sea on all Lebanese
territory� as a condition for the cessation of its
rocket attacks on northern Israel. The proposal, which
basically offered to halt reprisals against Israeli
civilian sectors as long Israel ceases to initiate
bombardments against Lebanon including civilians and
civilian infrastructure, �received a testy response in
Jerusalem� according to the New York Times. The
proposal was dismissed without consideration. �The
rules�, noted Chomsky, �are that Israel is allowed to
strike �villages and civilians� at will, anywhere, if
its occupying forces are attacked in southern Lebanon.
Since these rules are also accepted by Washington, the
Hizbollah statement was dismissed here as well.�[56]
By 31st July, when a U.S. arranged cease-fire was
established, 500,000 Lebanese civilians had been
driven from their homes and an estimated 119 had been
killed, as well as 3 Syrians and 3 Israelis.[57]

It is noteworthy that the rise of militancy among
Palestinian resistance groups in general is thus a
consequence of daily Israeli terrorism. New York Times
correspondent Chris Hedges, former Jerusalem-based
Middle East Bureau Chief for the Dallas Morning News
from 1988-1990 and former Cairo-based Middle East
Bureau Chief for the New York Times from 1991-1995,
noted that:

�If Oslo had led, as many had hoped, to a two state
solution, and thereby given Palestinians some glimmer
of a better life, it is a fair bet that Hamas would be
a marginal force in Gaza. But Israel�s occupation and
Arafat�s mismanagement have made it only a matter of
time before the militants come to power� Hamas is
primarily known outside Israel for its suicide bomb
attacks against Israeli civilians. The Sheikh tells me
that Hamas orders suicide bombers, under its military
wing, Iz al-Din al-Qassam, to attack Israeli civilians
targets because Israeli troops and armed settlers
routinely attack Palestinian civilians. �As long as
they target our civilians we will target their
civilians,� he says. �When they stop we will stop.��

Hedges further notes that this policy did not exist
for over a decade during the occupation, but emerged
in the aftermath of consistent Israeli terror attacks
on Palestinian civilians. �From 1987 to 1993, during
the first intifada, Hamas targeted only Israeli
soldiers and settlements. It began to attack
individual Israeli civilians after a Jewish settler,
Baruch Goldsrein, gunned down twenty-nine Muslim
worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.�[58]

In continuation of the periodic policies of terror and
aggression, on 11th April 1996 Israel launched yet
another wave of illegal attacks on southern Lebanon
and the heart of Beirut. The Coastal Post reported
during the commencement of the operation:

�With President Clinton safely in Japan, Israel,
obviously with a green light from the U.S.
administration, felt free to carry out �Grapes of
Wrath�, her fifth major terrorist attack on her old
killing fields in southern Lebanon. Using as an excuse
a few Katyusha rockets aimed at her military (who have
been illegally occupying and threatening the southern
Lebanese people since 1978), Israel�s army on the
anniversary of the Holocaust, bent on murder and
mayhem, is presently destroying millions of dollars in
property, killing civilians and creating chaos as she
stampedes populations as far north as Beirut.�[59]

In the initial stages, four U.S.-supplied Apache
helicopters swooped over densely populated areas in
Beirut and fired at least seven missiles. Civilian
homes and cars both in Beirut and in southern Lebanon
were destroyed. As usual, blame was laid on Hizbullah
by the U.S. Secretary of State for firing rockets at
Israel�s northern border. This claim, however, ignored
the fact that Israel had been relentlessly engaged in
the systematic terrorisation of Lebanese civilians,
continually violating cease-fires and while attempting
to consolidate its illegal occupation in contradiction
to UN resolution 425�s call for the unilateral
withdrawal of its forces from the region. Hizbullah�s
activity was a response to Israel�s illegal military
occupation of Lebanese territory, and in this case to
Israel�s own violation of the rules of the unwritten
1993 agreement by initiating the shelling of south
Lebanese villages.[60]

According to British Middle East correspondent Robert
Fisk, relying on United Nation sources, Hizbullah had
legitimately fired upon an Israeli patrol placing
booby-trapped roadside bombs in the village of
Bradchit on 18th April 1996. Ten days earlier, a
Lebanese boy had been killed by a roadside bomb in the
same village planted by Israeli forces. As Fisk
observed, Hizbullah�s action was a justified response
to the planting of bombs at a civilian site north of
the security zone by an Israeli patrol. Hizbullah�s
retaliation elicited the Israeli attack on the UN
refugee camp at Qana, in which the April 1996
bombardment culminated.[61] Operation Grapes of Wrath,
as the attack on Qana was dubbed, succeeded in
unleashing the customary devastation. Seventeen
villages were flattened, over half a million people
were rendered homeless, more than 100 were murdered,
and hundreds were wounded.[62]

As far as Israel and countries which support the
Zionist regime are concerned, the indigenous
population has no right to defend itself when the
occupying aggressor plants bombs on its territory.
When such defence is initiated, it elicits an even
more devastating act of terror on the civilian
population. Reporting from the scene, Robert Fisk
described the resultant carnage in The Nation: �When I
reached the compound the blood was flowing in streams,
running down the road near me. Inside I found heaps of
bodies, a baby without a head, a dismembered woman, a
Figian UN soldier holding in horror a headless
child.�[63] In the London Independent, he further
noted that:

�Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent
slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and
children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or
legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were
well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a
head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as
they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that
they were safe under the world�s protection...
Israel�s slaughter of civilians in this terrible
10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so
cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will
forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance
attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the
day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an
Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday,
the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the
youngest was a four-day-old baby - when Israeli
helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs
only 250 metres from a UN convoy on which I was
travelling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air in
front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut to file my
report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the
civilian cars on the river bridge north of Sidon�[64]

The UN Security Council, in response to international
anger at the attack, sent Netherlands�s Major-General
Frank van Kappen with other experts to the scene. Van
Kappen reported to the United Nations that Israel�s
slaughter �was purposeful.� Israel�s military had been
informed the previous day that the UN shelter was full
of refugees. Established �as early as 1978�, the UN
command compound had been identified �on every Israeli
military map�. Israel�s artillery was also �controlled
by a pilotless drone plane delivering TV images to the
gunners� - these images could even be seen on
videotapes replayed by CNN. �Israeli gunners switched
to M-732 proximity fuses (anti-personnel bombs)�,
after the first barrage of four regular detonation
bombs narrowly missed the camp. The bombs were
specifically targeted at the shelters within the
compound, resulting in the gratuitous and deliberate
slaughter of men, women and children. At the UN,
America and Israel attempted in vain �to first deny
the report, and then to buy it�.[65] Describing the
entire 1996 operation, Human Rights Watch reported
that it included: �Bombing whole villages without
specific military objectives and without regard for
civilian casualties�; �Specifically targeting the
civilians as well as the civilian infrastructure,
including power stations and water reservoirs�; and
�Deliberately targeting ambulances and civilian
vehicles�.[66]

In the bleak aftermath of this brutal massacre, Fisk
condemned the international community�s silence,
observing that �neither America nor Europe are going
to condemn a country which pounded the refugees of
Qana with 155mm shells for 12 minutes...

�On the coast road back to Beirut last night there
were burning cars, civilians deliberately targeted by
Israeli warships north of Sidon, three of whom had
been badly wounded. Had this been a Syrian warship
shelling Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road,
of course, Mr Clinton himself would have deplored -
rightly - an act of �international terrorism�. But not
a word of criticism about this scandalous targeting of
Lebanese civilians was uttered by the foreign
ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy�.[67]

Israeli violence against the civilian population of
territories under its occupation is routine. Terror
bombing of Lebanon, for instance, continued regularly
throughout Israel�s illegal occupation of the country.
Examples are numerous. On 25th June 1999, Israel
embarked on a 10-hour bombing campaign targeting
Lebanon�s civilian infrastructure. Eight civilians
were killed and another 62 were wounded, leaving much
of Lebanon�s road and power networks in tatters. Among
the targets were the northern Metn power station at
Bsalim; Beirut�s main electricity grid; the Jiyye,
Zrarieh and Awali bridges; and the Cellis cellular
telephone company�s main relay station in Jiyye. All
were bombed, leaving only rubble and destruction. The
night-time destruction of Beirut�s electricity network
was particularly devastating, plunging the capital
city into blackness.

Such operations even occurred during peace talks. For
instance, during the talks between Israel and Syria
between 1999 and 2000, launched by U.S. President Bill
Clinton in December 1999, Israel�s proxy militia the
South Lebanon Army (SLA) shelled a school in Arab
Salim - a village just outside the occupied zone in
southern Lebanon. At least 18 children were wounded by
flying glass and shrapnel in the mortar bomb attack
described as a �nightmare� by a 45 year old teacher,
Mohamad Farhat. Some were rushed to hospital and one
was in critical condition with a punctured lung. �I
was near the blackboard explaining the lesson when I
heard the explosion, immediately followed by
screaming,� stated Farhat after the attack. �I looked
behind me to see some of the kids in pools of blood. I
don�t remember how I carried some of them outside. It
is a real crime.� According to a BBC report, Israel
had earlier described the shelling as a �mistake�. Yet
the same report confirmed later on in the text that
the shelling was in fact deliberate: �Israel said the
SLA artillery attack was a response to an assault by
Hezbollah guerrillas from the village.� There can no
longer be any doubt about the attitude behind Israeli
military strategy, not to mention the
indifferent/complicity international community that
supports it: Israel should be allowed to invade,
occupy and terrorise any region it likes without any
form of protest from the indigenous population, and
any attempt by them to drive out the occupying
aggressors justifies the infliction by the Zionist
invaders of further brutalities upon them.[68]

IV. Who is Ariel Sharon?

The current Prime Minister of the Zionist State of
Israel, Ariel Sharon, is no one to complain about
terrorism. His unconscionable attempt to subvert the
truth by characterising Israel as a nation �under
terror�, the principal victim of terrorism in the
ongoing Middle East conflict, is probably best exposed
by reference to Sharon�s own systematic involvement in
grotesque acts of terrorism in Palestine.

In 1953, Ariel Sharon founded and led Unit 101, a
special commando unit which conducted attacks on
Palestinian villages, killing women and children.[69]
Perhaps the most notorious massacre occurred in the
West Bank village of Qibya. On 14th October 1953
Sharon�s forces blew up 45 houses, murdering en masse
69 Palestinian civilians, around half of whom were
women and children. Even the U.S. State Department
issued a statement on the massacre four days later,
articulating its �deepest sympathy for the families of
those who lost their lives� in the attack. The
statement further asserted that the perpetrators
�should be brought to account and that effective
measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in
the future.�[70]

In 1956, Sharon became a commander of a paratroop
brigade and fought as such in the Sinai campaign. It
was not long before his impact was felt. Following is
a report on the subsequent massacre that occurred
under Sharon�s command, worth quoting from extensively
here, by Ohad Gozani in Tel Aviv:

�Reports of how Israeli paratroopers killed about 270
Egyptian prisoners of war 40 years ago are straining
relations between the two countries. Egypt has
demanded an investigation into the alleged atrocities,
which date back to Israel's involvement in the 1956
Anglo-French campaign to take the Suez Canal. The
killings were revealed in a paper on the Sinai
campaign commissioned by the army�s military history
division. They were described in graphic detail in
newspaper and television interviews.In all, 273
Egyptians, some of them Sudanese civilian road
workers, were killed in three separate incidents,
according to the accounts.



�Arye Biro, a retired army general, admitted shooting
the Sudanese at a quarry two days into the campaign at
strategic Mitla Pass in central Sinai. Mr. Biro, then
a company leader in the 890 Paratroop battalion, said
the 49 terrified prisoners were taken into a quarry
and shot dead. He said: �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.� Mr. Biro said he and his
troops later killed 56 Egyptian soldiers and
irregulars as they were advancing in a truck to the
oil port of Ras-al-Sudr on the Gulf of Suez. �Six
survived the initial bursts of gunfire,� he said.
�They later went to sleep with the rest. Blood was
coming out of every hole in the flatbed truck and in
huge quantities.�



�A witness told the newspaper: �When the rear flap was
lowered, all the bodies poured out in one mass. I
couldn�t bear the thought that we shot people without
a fight.� Another 168 Egyptian soldiers were cut down
as the paratroopers headed South. Mr. Biro�s
commanding officers were Ariel Sharon and Rafael
Eytan.�[71]

By 1969, Sharon had been appointed Head of the Israeli
Defence Force�s (IDF) Southern Command. Once again, it
was not long before he made his presence known.
British journalist Phil Reeves reported that:

�In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon�s
command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip,
uprooting 12,000 people [Palestinian refugees] for the
second time in their lives. Hundreds of young
Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan
and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected
guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of
1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated.�[72]

By 1981, Sharon was appointed to the post of Israeli
Minister of Defence, serving during the Lebanon War.
Sharon orchestrated Israel�s invasion of Lebanon in
1982 that resulted in the mass murder of tens of
thousands of civilians. The Third World Quarterly
(Volume 6, Issue 4, October 1984, pp. 934-949)
published figures estimating that over 29,500
Palestinians and Lebanese civilians were either killed
or wounded between 4th July 1982 and 15th August 1982.
Nearly half of these victims - 40 percent - were
children.[73] Additionally, Ariel Sharon was most
notoriously responsible for the genocidal massacre of
Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, on the evening of
16th September 1982 to the morning of the 18th, in an
area under the control of the Israeli army. The
massacres were carried out by members of the Christian
Lebanese Phalange militia, which was armed by and
closely allied with Israel since the onset of
Lebanon�s 1975 civil war. Ariel Sharon had meetings
with the Phalange forces before the massacres
occurred.

Dr. Ben Alofs, a Dutch doctor working as a nurse in
West Beirut in the summer of 1982, provides a detailed
eye-witness account with some crucial background
information indicating Israeli - and specifically
Sharon�s - complicity:

�The Israeli journalists Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya�ari
describe how Sharon insisted on sending Phalangist
militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatila... To accomplish this, Sharon had held
meetings on September 15th with Elie Hobeika, Fadie
Frem and Zahi Bustani (leaders of the militiamen) as
well as with Amin and Pierre Gemayel, the political
leaders of the Phalangist party. The leaders of the
Israeli army, Sharon included, were very well aware of
the mood of the Phalangists, shortly after the murder
of their leader. Anyone with even the slightest
knowledge of the feelings of the Phalangists towards
the Palestinians knew what would happen if they were
let into the refugee camps.

��Tell al-Zaater� is a well-known name in Lebanon as
well as in Israel. This camp in East-Beirut, where I
met Palestinian refugees for the first time in 1975,
had been besieged for 53 days by the Phalangists and
Maronite Tiger-militiamen during the summer of 1976.
After the Palestinians surrendered, the International
Red Cross, which was to give a �safe passage� to the
camp�s population, was unable to prevent the murder of
over 1000 civilians. Israeli army commanders Eitan,
Drori and Yaron made comments on how obsessed the
Phalangists were with revenge, talking about a �sea of
blood� and �kasach� (Arabic for �slashing� or
�cutting�). As they made these observations Ariel
Sharon gave the green light for the Phalangists to
enter Sabra and Shatila. They did so as dusk fell on
the 16th of September.

�While the massacre was being committed, I was working
in the Gaza hospital in Sabra. The situation was
chaotic and confusing. Many wounded were carried into
the hospital and our morgue was full within a short
time. Most of the victims suffered bullet wounds, but
a few were injured by shrapnel. On September 17th it
became clear that the �Kataeb� (Phalangists) and/or
the militiamen of Saad Haddad (funded and armed by
Israel) were slaughtering the civilian population. A
10-year old boy was carried into the hospital. He had
been shot, but was alive. He had spent the whole night
wounded, lying under the dead bodies of his parents,
brothers and sisters. At night the murderers were
assisted by Israeli flares.

�I was working with a team of Scandinavian, British,
American, Dutch and German doctors and nurses. We had
insisted that the Palestinian hospital staff flee to
the northern part of West-Beirut. On Saturday morning
September 18th, we were arrested by the
Phalangists/Haddad militiamen. They forced us to leave
our patients behind and took us outside Sabra and
Shatila via the main road. We passed by hundreds of
women, children and men who had been rounded up. We
saw bodies in the road and the small alleyways. The
militiamen shouted at us and called us �Baader
Meinhof�. A Palestinian nurse who thought he would be
safe with us, was identified and taken away behind a
wall. A moment later came the gunshots.

�Just before we reached the exit of the camp I saw an
image that will forever be in my mind: a large mound
of red earth with arms and legs sticking out.
Alongside the mound stood an army bulldozer with
Hebrew markings. Just outside the camp we were ordered
to take off our hospital clothing and we were lined up
against a wall� After interrogation in their military
headquarters the Phalangists took us to the Israeli
forward command post just 75 meters (250 feet) away.
It was a 4 or 5 story building at the edge of Shatila.
(Some weeks later I was on the top floor. It offered
excellent views of the destruction in Shatila). The
Israeli soldiers were clearly uncomfortable, being
confronted with more than 20 Europeans and
Americans.�[74]

Phalangist forces had gone through the camps,
slaughtering unarmed civilian refugees
indiscriminately, lining them up and mowing them down
by machine-gun fire. Women and girls were raped
repeatedly and brutally. Children were shot dead and
mutilated. Men were disembowelled just before
execution. The International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) counted 1,500 victims in total at the
time of the massacre. By 23rd September, the body
count had risen to 2,750.

There should not be any doubt that Israeli troops
surrounding the refugee camps were fully aware of the
atrocities being committed inside. Dr. Witsoe who was
at Gaza Hospital at the time, testified to the New
York Times that from 5-5.30AM there were low level
flights of Israeli planes over Sabra and Shatila,
�after which shelling promptly commenced.�[75]
Furthermore, according to Newsweek: �The Israelis
established observation posts on top of multi-storey
buildings in the north-west quadrant of the Kuwaiti
Embassy. From these posts, the naked eye has a clear
view of several sections of the camps, including those
parts of Shatila where piles of bodies were
found.�[76] The U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East
at the time, Morris Draper, testified to the BBC that
U.S. officials were horrified when told Sharon had
allowed Phalange militias into West Beirut and the
camps �because it would be a massacre.� Shortly after
the killings began he cabled Defense Minister Sharon,
urging to him: �You must stop the slaughter�. The
situation is absolutely appalling. They are killing
children. You have the field completely under your
control and are therefore responsible for that
area.�[77] His plea was to no avail.

An official Israeli Commission of Inquiry chaired by
Yitzhak Kahan, President of Israel�s Supreme Court,
investigated the massacre and found Ariel Sharon,
among other Israelis, responsible. In February 1983
the Kahan Commission released its findings that:

�It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed
to the Minister of Defence for having disregarded the
danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the
Phalangists against the population of the refugee
camps, and having failed to take this danger into
account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter
the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be
imputed to the Minister of Defence for not ordering
appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the
danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists�
entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the
non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defence
Minister was charged� [I]n his meeting with the
Phalangist commanders, the Defence Minister made no
attempt to point out to them the gravity of the danger
that their men would commit acts of slaughter.... Had
it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real
supervision could be exercised over the Phalangist
force that entered the camps with the IDF�s assent,
his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The
usefulness of the Phalangists� entry into the camps
was wholly disproportionate to the damange their entry
could cause if it were uncontrolled� We shall remark
here that it is obstensibly puzzling that the Defence
Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister
[Menachem Begin] privy to the decision on having the
Phalangists enter the camps.�[78]

The former Chief Prosecutor to the International War
Crimes Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Judge
Richard Goldstone, agreed that Ariel Sharon �should be
tried for war crimes in connection with the 1982
massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon.�
Speaking in an interview with BBC Panorama, Judge
Goldstone observed that: �If the person who gave the
command knows, or should know... that there�s a
situation where innocent civilians are going to be
injured or killed then that person is as responsible,
in my book more responsible even, than the people who
carry out the orders.� The London Independent further
reported that:

�Mr Sharon was Defence Minister when Israel invaded
Lebanon in 1982, and Israeli forces allowed their
allies in the Lebanese Christian militias to enter the
Sabra and Chatila refugee camps and massacre up to
2,000 people. An Israeli inquiry held Mr Sharon
responsible. Judge Goldstone said it was regrettable
that no criminal prosecutions had been brought.�[79]

Indeed, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International have echoed the call for Sharon to be
tried for war crimes. This is a responsibility of the
international community under international law.
Article 146 of the Geneva Convention relative to the
Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War
stipulates that each High Contracting Party �shall be
under the obligation to search for persons alleged to
have committed, or to have ordered to be committed�
grave breaches of the Convention, �and shall bring
such persons, regardless of their nationality, before
its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in
accordance with the provisions of its own legislation,
hand such persons over for trial to another High
Contracting Party concerned, provided such High
Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case.�
Article 147 of the Convention clarifies that the grave
breaches noted in Article 146 include wilful killing,
torture or inhuman treatment, including biological
experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or
serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation
or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected
person, compelling a protected person to serve in the
forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a
protected person of the rights of fair and regular
trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of
hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation
of property, not justified by military necessity and
carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

Conclusions

Israel since its inception has been a colonial
terrorist entity that has aimed to marginalise and
exile the indigenous population through terror,
intimidation, repression and slaughter. Genocide and
its justification appears to be built into the State�s
military and ideological institutions. Terrorism is an
integral aspect of the State�s military policy,
designed to secure its strategic and ideological
objectives in unhindered territorial expansion at the
indigenous population�s expense. It is noteworthy that
the intensification of indigenous resistance in the
form of the rising activity of groups such as
Hizbullah and Hamas has occurred as a direct
consequence of brutal Israeli terrorisation of
Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Clearly, the
targeting of civilians cannot be condoned and must be
condemned by any decent human being. Yet neither
Hizbullah nor Hamas initiated the policy of targeting
civilians, but only began doing so in response to
Israel�s longstanding policy of terrorism. Such
policies on the part of the resistance groups should
be condemned and labelled correctly as acts of
terrorism, but understood in the context of a much
more brutal, repressive and extensive system of
genocide and terror implemented by the Zionist regime
against the indigenous population. It is an
unfortunate but undeniable fact that violence only
breeds violence.

Given the historical record, it is unsurprising that
the current Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, is a
war criminal of the highest order, of similar rank to
war criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam
Hussein, whose grave acts of genocide and terror have
led to them being frequently compared to Hitler by
many commentators. It is reasonable to therefore
conclude that whereas Milosevic and Saddam were the
�Hitlers� of the 20th Century, Sharon is the Hitler of
the New Millenium.

The grim irony of the situation is accentuated in
light of Israel�s claim to be the principal victim of
terrorism in this conflict. The fact of the matter is
that the primary aggressor is the Zionist regime,
responsible throughout its history for the systematic
manufacture of �wars of terrorism� against the
indigenous Palestinian population. Unless Israel�s
illegal occupation, coupled with its increasingly
brutal system of apartheid (for extensive discussion
and references see our report, Apartheid in the Holy
Land: Racism in the Zionist State of Israel available
at http://mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq11.html), is
dismantled, the conflict will not end. What is needed
in the region is willingness to return to the basic
ethical values that inform not only the essence of a
just and peaceful community, but of decent human
relations. But this will only develop in the wake of
the recognition and removal of the fundamental cause
of the conflict - Israeli apartheid, illegal
occupation, socio-economic repression and systematic
terrorism in Palestine. And that means the
dismantlement of the structures that have contributed
to these, both in relation to the current Israeli
regime, and the repressive Palestinian Authority, to
establish a new system of justice for all.

Notes:

[1]  Reuters, �Israel�s Sharon Vows to Defeat �War on
Terrorism��, 3 December 2001.
[2] Hedges, Chris, �A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the
Palestinian Uprising�, Harpers Magazine, October 2001.

[3] Weitz, Yossef, Journal, (Tel Aviv), 1965.

[4] Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee
Problem 1947-1949, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1987.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, The Fateful Triangle: The
United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Pluto
Press, London, 1999.

[7] New York Times, 6 December 1953.

[8] Begin, Menachim, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun,
p. 335.

[9] Modelet, no.12, October 1989.

[10] Pappe, Ilan, The Making of the Arab-Israeli
Conflict 1947-1951, I. B. Tauris, London, 1992; Loos,
Baudouin, �Interview of Ilan Pappe�, Le Soir
(Brussels) 29 November 1999.

[11] Cited in Erlich, Guy, �Not Only Deir Yassin�,
Ha�ir, 6 May 1992.
[12] Soldier�s testimony cited in Morris, Benny, The
Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem 1947-1949, op.
cit., p 222.

[13] Morris, Benny, Israel�s Border Wars 1949-1956
(Hebrew version), Tel Aviv, 1996, p. 156; ibid., p.
113-114.

[14] See ibid.

[15] Ha'aretz, 29 March 1972.

[16] Ma'ariv, 4 April 1972.

[17] Haber, Eitan, Menahem Begin: The Legend and the
Man, Delacorte Press, New York, 1978, p. 271.

[18] Al-Hamishmar, 14 April 1971.
[19] Lilienthal, Alfred, The Zionist Connection, Dodd,
Mead & Co., New York, 1978., p. 558-9.
[20] New York Times, 21 August 1982.
[21] New York Times, 11 May 1997.
[22] Rosenfeld, Stephen S., �Israel and Syria:
Correcting the Record�, Washington Post, 24 December
1999.
[23] Cited in Richman, Sheldon L., �The Golan Heights:
A History of Israeli Aggression�, Washington Report On
Middle East Affairs, November 1991, p. 23.
[24] Hirst, David, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The
Roots of Violence in the Middle East, Harcout Brace
Jovanovich, 1977.
[25] Cited in ibid.
[26] Richman, Sheldon L., �The Golan Heights: A
History of Israeli Aggression�, op. cit.
[27] New York Times, 11 May 1997; Reinhart, Tanya,
�Dayan Admits Israel Attacked Syria in Land Grab�,
Yediot Aharanot, 6 May 1997.
[28] Cited in Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, op.
cit.
[29] Washington Post, 24 December 1999.
[30] Lilienthal, Alfred, The Zionist Connection II,
op. cit., p. 160.
[31] New Yorkers for a Just Middle East Peace (NYJMEP)
from a letter dating 13 August 1998 sent to Perry
Odak, Chief Executive Officer of Ben and Jerry�s,
protesting an alleged agreement between the U.S. ice
cream company and Eden Springs water company, based on
the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
[32]  Cited in Neff, Donald, Warriors trilogy on U.S.
Middle East Handbook, American Educational Trust
Books.
[33]   Morris, Benny, �A Personal Assessment of the
Zionist Experience�, Tikkun, March-April 1998.
[34] Rockack, Livia, Israel�s Sacred Terrorism,
Arab-American University Graduate Press, Belmont,
Massachusetts, 1986.
[35] For references see Chomsky, ��Limited War� in
Lebanon�, Z Magazine, September 1993.
[36] Ibid.
[37]  Independence Day supplement to Al Hamishar, 10
May 1978.
[38]  Ha�aretz, 15 May 1978.
[39]  United Press International (UPI), 1 June 1994.
[40] Merali, Arzu, Operation Grapes of Wrath:
Revisiting Genocide, Islamic Human Rights Commission,
London, July 1996, http://www.ihrc.org .
[41] Miller, Edward W., �Lebanon, Israel�s Killing
Fields�, Coastal Post, May 1996.
[42] Chomsky, ��Limited War� in Lebanon�, Z Magazine,
September 1993.
[43] Miller, Edward W., �Lebanon, Israel�s Killing
Fields�, Coastal Post, May 1996.
[44] Shalom, Stephen R., �Green Lights and Red
Herrings�, ZNet Daily Commentary, 11 February 2000,
http://www.zmag.org .
[45] Chomsky, Noam, ��Limited War� in Lebanon�, op.
cit.
[46] Ibid.; Shalom, Stephen R., �Green Lights and Red
Herrings�, op. cit.; Merali, Arzu, Operation Grapes of
Wrath: Revisiting Genocide, op. cit.
[47] Miller, Edward W., �Lebanon, Israel�s Killing
Fields�, Coastal Post, May 1996.
[48] Shalom, Stephen R., �Green Lights and Red
Herrings�, op. cit.
[49] Miller, Edward W., �Lebanon, Israel�s Killing
Fields�, op. cit.
[50] Merali, Arzu, Operation Grapes of Wrath:
Revisiting Genocide, op. cit. For more on Hizbullah
see Hamzeh, A. Nizah, �Lebanon�s Hizbullah: from
Islamic revolution to parliamentary accommodation�,
Third World Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1993.
[51] New York Times, 19 April 1996.
[52] According to a proviso within the major United
Nations General Assembly Resolution on terrorism,
which was passed 153-2, �nothing in the present
resolution could in any way prejudice the right to
self-determination, freedom and independence, as
derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of
peoples forcibly deprived of that right...,
particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes
and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial
domination, nor... the right of these peoples to
struggle to this end and to seek and receive support
[in accordance with the Charter and other principles
of international law].� (UN, 42/159, 7 December 1987)
Notably, the two countries who opposed the UN
resolution excerpted above were Israel and America, a
fact which certainly illustrates the extent to which
the partners respect �self-determination, freedom and
independence�. Indeed, their objection to the
resolution reveals their support of �foreign
occupation or other forms of colonial domination� -
particularly by �colonial and racist regimes� - when
this suits U.S. interests.
[53] Shalom, Stephen R., �Green Lights and Red
Herrings�, op. cit.; New York Times, 14 April 1993.
[54] HRW report, Civilian Pawns: Laws of War
Violations and the Use of Weapons on the
Israel-Lebanon Border, Human Rights Watch, New York,
May 1996.
[55] Chomsky, Noam, ��Limited War� in Lebanon�, op.
cit.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Hedges, Chris, �A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the
Palestinian Uprising�, Harpers Magazine, October 2001.

[59] Miller, Edward W., �Lebanon, Israel�s Killing
Fields�, Coastal Post, May 1996.
[60] Fisk, Robert, �Occupied Lebanon�, The Nation,
1996.
[61]  Fisk, Robert, Independent, 1 June 1996.
[62] �The Israeli Massacre of Civilians at Qana�, The
Arab Journal, 18 April 1997. The Higher Relief
Committee reported that in total, 175 Lebanese had
been killed, 300 injured, and 250,000 made refugees
(Higher Relief Committee, 27 April 1996. Also see
United Nations, Damage to the Lebanese Infrastructure
During the Israeli Operation �Grapes of Wrath�, April
1996).
[63] Cited in Miller, Edward W., �Love Thy Neighbor�,
The Coastal Post, June 1996.
[64] Fisk, Robert, �Massacre in Sanctuaries;
Eyewitness�, Independent, 19 April 1996.
[65] Miller, Edward W., �Love Thy Neighbor�, The
Coastal Post, June 1996.
[66] Human Rights Watch, May 1996. Also see AI report,
Israel/Lebanon: Unlawful Killings During Operation
�Grapes of Wrath�, Amnesty International, London,
1996.
[67] Fisk, Robert, �Reality bites for PR men at Qana�,
Independent, 22 April 1996.
[68] BBC News, �Lebanon condemns school shelling�, 16
December 1999. For later developments shortly after
the advent of the new millenium, see �Lebanese PM Says
Israel Adopts Nazi Thinking�, Reuters, 9 February
2000; Redden, Jack, �Israel Strikes at South Lebanon
Again�, Reuters, 9 Februrary 2000. Israeli began
terror-bombing South Lebanon on 7 February. Also see
Margolis, Eric, �Back to Square One in the Middle
East�, Toronto Sun, 28 May 2000.
[69] Official biography of Ariel Sharon, Israeli
Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il .
[70] U.S. Department of State Bulletin, 26 October
1953, p. 552.
[71] Gozani, Ohad, �Israelis Admit Massacre�, Daily
Telegraph, 16 August 1995.
[72] Reeves, Phil, �Sharon�s return puts Wreckage
Street in fear�, The Independent, 21 January 2001.
[73] Third World Quarterly, October 1984, Vol. 6, No.
4, p. 934-949.

[74] Alofs, Ben, �Why Sharon is a War Criminal: An
eye-witness report of the 1982 Shabra and Shatila
massacre�, Media Monitors Network, 6 June 2001,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/drbenalofs1.html
[75] New York Times, 16 September 1982.
[76] Newsweek, 4 October 1982; The Guardian, 20
September 1982; New York Times, 26 September 1982.
[77] Cited in HRW Press Release, �Israel: Sharon
Investigation Urged�, Human Rights Watch, New York, 23
June 2001.
[78] The Kahan Commission�s report can be found online
at http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ign0 .

[79] Butler, Katherine, �Try Sharon, Says War Crimes
Judge�, The Independent, 18 June 2001.

Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a political analyst and human
rights activist based in London. He is Director of the
Institute for Policy Research & Development and a
Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

Source:

by courtesy & � 2001 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed



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