Anjalisa — Fisk — Ariel Sharon
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Anjalisa — Fisk — Ariel SharonAriel Sharon
Israel’s Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible
for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues
Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as ‘a man of
peace’, yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a
stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken
in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge
him?
By Robert Fisk
01/06/05 “”The Independent”” — — I shook hands with him once, a
brisk, no-nonsense soldier’s grip from Sharon as he finished a review
of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square
at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then,
that this same bunch of murderers – the men who butchered their way
through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few
weeks earlier – had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That’s
when old Pierre Gemayel – still alive and standing stiffly to
attention for Sharon – watched the “order” of Nazi Germany and
proposed to bring some of this “order” to Lebanon. That’s what Gemayel
told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this. Of course, he must
have done.
Back on 18 September that same year, Loren Jenkins of The Washington
Post and Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television and I had clambered
over the piled corpses of Chatila – of raped and eviscerated women and
their husbands and children and brothers – and Jenkins, knowing that
the Isrealis had sat around the camps for two nights watching this
filth, shrieked “Sharon!” in anger and rage. He was right. Sharon it
was who sent the Phalange into the camps on the night of 16 September
– to hunt for “terrorists”, so he claimed at the time.
The subsequent Israeli Kahan commission of enquiry into this atrocity
provided absolute proof that Israeli soldiers saw the massacre taking
place. The evidence of a Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky was crucial. He was
an Israeli deputy tank commander and reported what he saw to his
higher command. “Don’t interfere,” the senior officer said. Ever
afterwards, Israeli embassies around the world would claim that the
commission held Sharon only indirectly responsible for the massacre.
It was untrue. The last page of the official Israeli report held
Sharon “personally responsible”. It was years later that the
Israeli-trained Phalangist commander, Elie Hobeika, now working for
the Syrians, agreed to turn state’s evidence against Sharon – now the
Israeli Prime Minister – at a Brussels court. The day after the
Israeli attorney general declared Sharon’s defence a “state” matter,
Hobeika was killed by a massive car bomb in east Beirut. Israel denied
responsibility. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to
Brussels and quietly threatened to withdraw Nato headquarters from
Belgium if the country maintained its laws to punish war criminals
from foreign nations. Within months, George W Bush had declared Sharon
“a man of peace”. It was all over.
In the end, Sharon got away with it, even when it was proved that he
had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the civilians of the
camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder of their leader,
President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told these ruthless men that
the Palestinians had killed their beloved “chief”. Then he sent them
in among the civilian sheep – and claimed later he could never have
imagined what they would do in Chatila. Only years later was it proved
that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were
interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to
be slaughtered over the coming weeks.
So it is as a war criminal that Sharon will be known forever in the
Arab world, through much of the Western world, in fact – save, of
course, for the craven men in the White House and the State Department
and the Blair Cabinet – as well as many leftist Israelis. Sabra and
Chatila was a crime against humanity. Its dead counted more than half
the fatalities of the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001. But the man
who was responsible was a “man of peace”. It was he who claimed that
the preposterous Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian bin Laden. He it was
who as Israeli foreign minister opposed Nato’s war in Kosovo,
inveighing against “Islamic terror” in Kosovo. “The moment that Israel
expresses support…it’s likely to be the next victim. Imagine that
one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be
recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian
Authority…” Ah yes, Sharon as an ally of another war criminal,
Slobodan Milosevic. There must be no Albanian state in Kosovo.
Ever since he was elected in 2001 – and especially since his
withdrawal of settlements from the rubbish tip of Gaza last year, a
step which would, according to his spokesman, turn any plans for a
Palestinian state in the West Bank into “formaldehyde” – his
supporters have tried to turn Sharon into a pragmatist, another
Charles de Gaulle. His new party was supposed to be proof of this. But
in reality, Sharon had more in common with the putchist generals of
Algeria.
He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against
a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel’s
participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the
Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a
vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron
agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel’s retreat from
Lebanon in 2000. By 2002, he had built 34 new Jewish colonies on
Palestinian land.
And he was a man of peace.
There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon’s
responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is
that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist
allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists”
who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, President-elect
Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange
would massacre the Palestinians.
But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians
killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were
involved in Gemayel’s death. It might seem odd in this new war to be
dwelling about that earlier atrocity. I am fascinated by the language.
Murderers, terrorists. That’s what Sharon said then, and it’s what he
says now. Did he really make that statement in 1982? I begin to work
the phone from Jerusalem, calling up Associated Press bureaus that
might still have their files from 19 years ago. He would have made
that speech – if indeed he used those words – some time on 15
September 1982.
One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem. It’s from an
Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro bombing. An American
Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me – foreign journalists are
being insulted by both sides with ever more violent language – and
this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He’s smiling and cheerful
and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the phone, he says he’s taking
the El-Al night flight to New York with his wife. Would I like to drop
by for tea?
He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the King David
Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the outside security
buzzer, that he’s a rabbi. He’s angry because a neighbour has just let
down a friend’s car tyres in the underground parking lot and he’s
saying how he felt like smashing the windows of the neighbour’s car.
His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies, says that her
husband – again, he should remain anonymous – gets angry very quickly.
There’s a kind of gentleness about them both – how easy it is to spot
couples who are still in love – that is appealing. But when the rabbi
starts to talk about the Palestinians, his voice begins to echo
through the apartment. He says several times that Sharon is a good
friend of his, a fine man, who’s been to visit him in his New York office.
What we should do is go into those vermin pits and take out the
terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said, vermin, animals. I
tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed from a refugee
camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the first 20 houses
close to the road. If there’s another stone, another 20 ones. They’d
soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell you this. Stones are
lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I’ll shoot you. I have the right
to shoot you.
Now the rabbi is a generous man. He’s been in Israel to donate a
vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly expensive medical centre
to the country. He is well-read. And I liked the fact that – unlike
too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a “we-only-want-peace”
routine to hide more savage thoughts – he at least spoke his mind. But
this is getting out of hand.
Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. “If you
throw a stone at me, I will shoot you.” But if you throw a stone at
me, I say, I won’t shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot
you. He frowns. “Then I’d say you’re out of your mind.”
I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments
have just collided. The rabbi’s dad taught him about an eye for an eye
– or 20 homes for a stone – whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning
the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any
surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For
despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being “people of the
Book”, Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews.
The sickening Hamas references to Jews as “the sons of pigs and
monkeys” are echoed by Israelis who talk of Palestinians as
cockroaches or “vermin”, who tell you – as the rabbi told me – that
Islam is a warrior religion, a religion that does not value human
life. And I recall several times a Jewish settler who told me back in
1993 – in Gaza, just before the Oslo accords were signed – that “we do
not recognise their Koran as a valid document.”
I call up Eva Stern in New York. Her talent for going through archives
convinces me she can find out what Sharon said before the Sabra and
Chatila massacre. I give her the date that is going through my head:
15 September 1982. She comes back on the line the same night. “Turn
your fax on,” Eva says. “You’re going to want to read this.” The paper
starts to crinkle out of the machine. An AP report of 15 September
1982. “Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing
[of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying: “It symbolises
the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and
their supporters.”
Then, a few hours later, Sharon sent the Phalange gunmen into the
Palestinian camps. Reading that fax again and again, I feel a chill
coming over me. There are Israelis today with as much rage towards the
Palestinians as the Phalange 19 years ago. And these are the same
words I am hearing today, from the same man, about the same people.
In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places –
above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount – accompanied by about a
thousand Israeli policemen. Within 24 hours, Israeli snipers opened
fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the
grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were
killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later
confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians
“were felt to be endangering the lives of officers”. Sixty-six
Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel
bullets. The killings came almost exactly 10 years after armed Israeli
police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in
an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the
United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War.
Sharon showed no remorse. “The state of Israel,” he told CNN, “cannot
afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his
country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around
the world.” He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen
this moment – immediately after the collapse of the “peace process” –
to undertake such a provocative act. Stone-throwing and shooting
spread to the West Bank. Near Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot
dead an Israeli soldier and wounded another – they were apparently
part of a joint Israeli-Palestinian patrol originally set up under the
terms of the Oslo agreement. “Everything was pre-planned,” Sharon
would claim five weeks later. “They took advantage of my visit to the
Temple Mount. This was not the first time I’ve been there…”
Jerusalem is a city of illusions. Here Ariel Sharon promises his
people “security” and brings them war. On the main road to Ma’ale
Adumim, inside Israel’s illegal “municipal boundaries”, Israelis drive
at over 100 mph. In the old city, Israeli troops and Palestinian
civilians curse each other before the few astonished Christian
tourists. Loving Jesus doesn’t help to make sense of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Gideon Samet got it right in Ha’aretz. “Jerusalem looks like
a Bosnia about to be born. Main thoroughfares inside the Green Line…
have become mortally perilous… The capital’s suburbs are exposed as
Ramat Rachel was during the war of independence…” Samet is pushing
it a bit. Life is more dangerous for Palestinians than for Israelis.
Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. “I suggest that we repeat to
ourselves every day and throughout the day,” Sharon tells us, “that
there will be no negotiations with the Palestinians until there is a
total cessation of terrorism, violence and incitement.”
Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege, struck by F-16s
and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often powerless – there are
now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza – it’s as if Arafat
and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon. Sharon used to
call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It’s important not to become
obsessed during wars. But Sharon’s words were like an old, miserable
film had seen before. Every morning in Jerusalem, I would pick up the
Jerusalem Post. And there on the front page, as usual, will be another
Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers. Palestinian Authority terror.
Murderous terrorists.
Within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States,
Ariel Sharon turned Israel into America’s ally in the “war on terror”,
immediately realigning Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian version of bin
Laden and the Palestinian suicide bombers as blood brothers of the 19
Arabs – none of them Palestinian – who hijacked the four American
airliners. In the new and vengeful spirit that President Bush
encouraged among Americans, Israel’s supporters in the United States
now felt free to promote punishments for Israel’s opponents that came
close to the advocacy of war crimes. Nathan Lewin, a prominent
Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader – and an
often-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship – called for the
execution of family members of suicide bombers. “If executing some
suicide bombers’ families saves the lives of even an equal number of
potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically
permissible,” he wrote in the journal Sh’ma.
When Sharon began his operation “Defensive Shield”, the UN Security
Council, with the active participation and support of the United
States, demanded an immediate end to Israel’s reoccupation of the West
Bank. President George W Bush insisted that Sharon should follow the
advice of “Israel’s American friends” and – for Tony Blair was with
Bush at the time – “Israel’s British friends”, and withdraw. “When I
say withdraw, I mean it,” Bush snapped three days later. But he meant
nothing of the kind. Instead, he sent secretary of state Colin Powell
off on an “urgent” mission of peace, a journey to Israel and the West
Bank that would take an incredible eight days – just enough time, Bush
presumably thought, to allow his “friend” Sharon to finish his latest
bloody adventure in the West Bank. Supposedly unaware that Israel’s
chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, had told Sharon that he needed at least
eight weeks to “finish the job” of crushing the Palestinians, Powell
wandered off around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco, Spain,
Egypt and Jordan before finally fetching up in Israel. If Washington
firefighters took that long to reach a blaze, the American capital
would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course, the purpose of
Powell’s idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin to be turned to
ashes. Mission, I suppose, accomplished.
Sharon’s ability to scorn the Americans was always humiliating for
Washington. Before the massacres of 1982, Philip Habib was President
Reagan’s special representative, his envoy to Beirut increasingly
horrified by the ferocity of Sharon’s assault on the city. Not long
before he died, I asked Habib why he didn’t stop the bloodshed. “I
could see it,” he said. “I told the Israelis they were destroying the
city, that they were firing non-stop. They just said they weren’t.
They said they werent doing that. I called Sharon on the phone. He
said it wasnt true. That damned man said to me on the phone that what
I saw happening wasn’t happening. So I held the telephone out of the
window so he could hear the explosions. Then he said to me: ‘What kind
of conversation is this where you hold a telephone out of a window?'”
Sharon’s involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres continues
to fester around the man who, according to Israel’s 1993 Kahan
commission report, bore “personal responsibility” for the Phalangist
slaughter. So fearful were the Israeli authorities that their leaders
would be charged with war crimes that they drew up a list of countries
where they might have to stand trial – and which they should
henceforth avoid – now that European nations were expanding their laws
to include foreign nationals who had committed crimes abroad. Belgian
judges were already considering a complaint by survivors of Sabra and
Chatila – one of them a female rape victim – while a campaign had been
mounted abroad against other Israeli figures associated with the
atrocities. Eva Stern was one of those who tried to prevent Brigadier
General Amos Yaron being appointed Israeli defence attaché in
Washington because he had allowed the Lebanese Phalange militia to
enter the camps on 16 September 1982, and knew – according to the
Kahan commission report – that women and children were being murdered.
He only ended the killings two days later. Canada declined to accept
Yaron as defence attaché. Stern, who compiled a legal file on Yaron,
later vainly campaigned with human rights groups to annul his
appointment – by Prime Minister Ehud Barak – as director general of
the Israeli defence ministry. The Belgian government changed their law
– and dropped potential charges against Sharon – after a visit to
Brussels by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who famously
referred on 6 August 2002 to Israelis’ control over “the so-called
occupied territory” which was “the result of a war, which they won”.
Rumsfeld had threatened that NATO headquarters might be withdrawn from
Belgian soil if the Belgians didn’t drop the charges against Sharon.
Yet all the while, we were supposed to believe that it was the
corrupt, Parkinson’s-haunted Yasser Arafat who was to blame for the
new war. He was chastised by George Bush while the Palestinian people
continued to be bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan,
the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred to Palestinians as
“cockroaches in a glass jar”. Menachem Begin called them “two-legged
beasts”. The Shas party leader who suggested that God should send the
Palestinian “ants” to hell, also called them “serpents”.
In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli chief of staff
Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation”
and equated the military action in the occupied territories with
“chemotherapy”. In March 2001, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem
Zeevi, called Arafat a “scorpion”. Sharon repeatedly called Arafat a
“murderer” and compared him to bin Laden.
He contributed to the image of Palestinian inhumanity in an interview
in 1995, when he stated that Fatah sometimes punished Palestinians by
“chopping off limbs of seven- and eight-year-old children in front of
their parents as a form of punishment”. However brutal Fatah may be,
there is no record of any such atrocity being committed by them. But
if enough people can be persuaded to believe this nonsense, then the
use of Israeli death squads against such Palestinians becomes natural
rather than illegal.
Sharon was forever, like his Prime Minister Menachem Begin, evoking
the Second World War in spurious parallels with the Arab-Israeli
conflict. When in the late winter of 1988 the US State Department
opened talks with the PLO in Tunis after Arafat renounced “terrorism”,
Sharon stated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that this
was worse than the British and French appeasement before the Second
World War when “the world, to prevent war, sacrificed one of the
democracies”. Arafat was “like Hitler who wanted so much to negotiate
with the Allies in the second half of the second world war…and the
Allies said ‘No’. They said there are enemies with whom you don’t
talk. They pushed him to the bunker in Berlin where he found his
death, and Arafat is the same kind of enemy, that with whom you don’t
talk. He’s got too much blood on his hands.”
Thus within his lifetime Sharon was able to bestialise Yasser Arafat
as both Hitler and bin Laden. The thrust of Sharon’s argument in those
days was that the creation of a Palestinian state would mean a war in
which “the terrorists will be acting from behind a cordon of UN forces
and observers”. By the time he was on his apparent death bed yesterday
that Palestinian “state”, far from being protected by the UN, was
non-existent, its territory still being carved up in the West Bank by
growing Jewish settlements, road blocks and a concrete wall.
Largely forgotten amid Sharon’s hatred for “terrorism” was his
outspoken criticism of Nato’s war against Serbia in 1999, when he was
Israeli foreign minister. Eleven years earlier he had sympathised with
the political objective of Slobodan Milosevic: to prevent the
establishment of an Albanian state in Kosovo. This, he said, would
lead to “Greater Albania” and provide a haven for – readers must here
hold their breath – “Islamic terror”. In a Belgrade newspaper
interview, Sharon said that “we stand together with you against the
Islamic terror”. Once Nato’s bombing of Serbia was under way, however,
Sharon’s real reason for supporting the Serbs became apparent. “It’s
wrong for Israel to provide legitimacy to this forceful sort of
intervention which the Nato countries are deploying… in an attempt
to impose a solution on regional disputes,” he said. “The moment
Israel expresses support for the sort of model of action we’re seeing
in Kosovo, it’s likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day
Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be
recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian
Authority…”
NATO’s bombing, Sharon said, was “brutal interventionism”. The Israeli
journalist Uri Avnery, who seized on this extraordinary piece of
duplicity, said that “Islamic terror” in Kosovo could only exist in
“Sharon’s racist imagination”. Avnery was far bolder in translating
what lay behind Sharon’s antipathy towards Nato action than Sharon
himself. “If the Americans and the Europeans interfere today in the
matter of Kosovo, what is to prevent them from doing the same tomorrow
in the matter of Palestine?
“Sharon has made it crystal-clear to the world that there is a
similarity and perhaps even identity between Milosevic’s attitude
towards Kosovo and the attitude of Netanyahu and Sharon towards the
Palestinians.” Besides, for a man whose own “brutal interventionism”
in Lebanon in 1982 led to a Middle East bloodbath of unprecedented
proportions, Sharon’s remarks were, to say the least, hypocritical.
As Sharon sent an armoured column to reinvade Nablus, still ignoring
Bush’s demand to withdraw his troops from the West Bank, Colin Powell
turned on Arafat, warning him that it was his “last chance” to show
his leadership. There was no mention of the illegal Jewish
settlements. There was to be no “last chance” threat for Sharon. The
Americans even allowed him to refuse a UN fact-finding team in the
occupied territories. Sharon was meeting with President George W Bush
in Washington when a suicide bomber killed at least 15 Israeli
civilians in a Tel Aviv nightclub; he broke off his visit and returned
at once to Israel. Prominent American Jewish leaders, including Elie
Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz, immediately called upon the White House
not to put pressure on Sharon to join new Middle East peace talks.
“This is a tough time,” Wiesel announced. “This is not a time to
pressure Israel. Any prime minister would do what Sharon is doing. He
is doing his best. They should trust him.” Wiesel need hardly have
worried.
Only a month earlier, the Americans rolled out their first S-70A-55
troopcarrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the Israelis. Israel
had purchased 24 of the new machines, costing $211m – most of which
would be paid for by the United States – even though it had 24
earlier-model Black Hawks. The log book of the first of the new
helicopters was ceremonially handed over to the director general of
the Israeli defence ministry, the notorious Amos Yaron, by none other
than Alexander Haig – the man who gave Begin the green light to invade
Lebanon in 1982.
Perhaps the only man who now had the time to work out the logic of
this appalling conflict was the Palestinian leader sitting now in his
surrounded, broken, ill-lit and unhealthy office block in Ramallah.
The one characteristic Arafat shared with Sharon – apart from old age
and decrepitude – was his refusal to plan ahead. What he said, what he
did, what he proposed, was decided only at the moment he was forced to
act. This was partly his old guerrilla training, a characteristic
shared by Saddam. If you don’t know what you are going to do tomorrow,
you can be sure that your enemies don’t know either. Sharon took the
same view.
The most terrible incident – praised by Sharon at the time as a “great
success” – was the attack by Israel on Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader,
which slaughtered nine children along with eight adults. Their names
gave a frightful reality to this child carnage: 18-month-old Ayman
Matar, three-year-old Mohamed Matar, five-year-old Diana Matar,
four-year-old Sobhi Hweiti, six-year-old Mohamed Hweiti, 10-year-old
Ala Matar, 15-year-old Iman Shehada, 17-year-old Maryam Matar. And
Dina Matar. She was two months old. An Israeli air force pilot dropped
a one-ton bomb on their homes from an American-made F-16 aircraft on
22 July 2002.
What war did Sharon think he was fighting? And what was he fighting
for? Sharon regarded the attack as a victory against “terror”.
Al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, believed that people who
did not believe themselves to be targets were now finding themselves
under attack. “There’s a network of Israeli army and air force
intelligence and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each
other information. They can cross the lines between Area C and Area B
in the occupied territories. Usually they carry out operations when
IDF morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low
spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a ‘spectacular’
to show what great ‘warriors’ they are. Now the IDF morale is low
again because of the second intifada.”
Palestinian security officers in Gaza were intrigued by the logic
behind the Israeli killings. “Our guys meet their guys and we know
their officers and operatives,” one of the Palestinian officials tells
me. “I tell you this frankly – they are as corrupt and indisciplined
as we are. And as ruthless. After they targeted Mohamed Dahlan’s
convoy when he was coming back from security talks, Dahlan talked to
foreign minister Peres. “Look what you guys are doing to us,” Dahlan
told Peres. “Don’t you realise it was me who took Sharon’s son to meet
Arafat?” Al-Wazzir understands some of the death squad logic. “It has
some effect because we are a paternalistic society. We believe in the
idea of a father figure. But when they assassinated my dad, the
intifada didn’t stop. It was affected, but all the political
objectives failed. Rather than demoralising the Palestinians, it
fuelled the intifada. They say there’s now a hundred Palestinians on
the murder list. No, I don’t think the Palestinians will adopt the
same type of killings against Israeli intelligence.
“An army is an institution, a system; murdering an officer just
results in him the great war for civilisation 573 being replaced…”
The murder of political or military opponents was a practice the
Israelis honed in Lebanon where Lebanese guerrilla leaders were
regularly blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet
execution squads, often – as in the case of an Amal leader in the
village of Bidias – after interrogation. And all in the name of
“security”.
Throughout the latest bloodletting, the one distinctive feature of the
conflict – the illegal and continuing colonisation of occupied Arab
land – was yet again a taboo subject, to be ignored, or mentioned in
passing only when Jewish settlers were killed. That this was the
world’s last colonial conflict, in which the colonisers were supported
by the United States, was undiscussable, a prohibited subject,
something quite outside the brutality between Palestinians and
Israelis which was, so we had to remember, now part of America’s “war
on terror”. This is what Sharon had dishonestly claimed since 11
September 2001. The truth, however, became clear in a revealing
interview Sharon gave to a French magazine in December of that year,
in which he recalled a telephone conversation with Jacques Chirac.
Sharon said he told the French president that: “I was at that time
reading a terrible book about the Algerian war. It’s a book whose
title reads in Hebrew: The Savage War of Peace. I know that President
Chirac fought as an officer during this conflict and that he had
himself been decorated for his courage. So, in a very friendly way, I
told him: ‘Mr. President, you have to understand us, here, it’s as if
we are in Algeria. We have no place to go. And besides, we have no
intention of leaving.'”
Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the
chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her
almost exactly 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the
survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon – who was then Israel’s defence minister – she stops to search
her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her life.
“The Lebanese Forces militia had taken us from our homes and marched
us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in
the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot
a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach
this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in
front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the
women. That’s when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting,
“Give us the men, give us the men.” We thought: “Thank God, they will
save us.” It was to prove a cruelly false hope.
Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her 30-year-old husband
Hassan, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing
in the crowd of men. “We were all told to walk up the road towards the
Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We
had been separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli
soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It
was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to
the Cité Sportive, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room
and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a
lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The
Israelis went round saying “Sit, sit.” It was 11 o’clock. An hour
later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid the
Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men.”
Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj
to emerge. “Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they
told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then
about four in the afternoon, an Israeli officer came out. He was
wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: “What are you all waiting
for?” He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There
were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn’t
see inside. And there were Jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a
lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared
to be leaving and we were very nervous.
“But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there
was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never
saw my husband again.”
The smashed Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium was a natural “holding
centre” for prisoners. Only two miles from Beirut airport, it had been
an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat’s PLO and repeatedly bombed by
Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant,
smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had
earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground
storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact.
It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At
mid-morning on 18 September 1982 – around the time Sana Sersawi says
she was brought to the stadium – I saw hundreds of Palestinian and
Lebanese prisoners, perhaps well over 1,000 in all, sitting in its
gloomy, cavernous interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by
Israeli soldiers and plainclothes Shin Beth agents and a group of men
who I suspected, correctly, were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat
in silence, obviously in fear.
>From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into
Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles – for further
“interrogation”. Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, up
to 600 massacre victims of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee
camps rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the
prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren
Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only
got into the cells because the Israelis assumed – given our Western
appearance – that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the
prisoners had their heads bowed.
Arab prisoners usually adopted this pose of humiliation. But Israel’s
militiamen had been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over,
and at least the Israeli army was now in charge. So what did these men
have to fear?
Looking back – and listening to Sana Sersawi today – I shudder now at
our innocence. My notes of the time contain some ominous clues. We
found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the
prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm
around the man’s shoulders. “They take us away, one by one, for
interrogation,” one of the prisoners muttered to me. “They are Haddad
militiamen. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation,
but not always. Sometimes the people do not return.” Then an Israeli
officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn’t the prisoners talk to me? I
asked. “They can talk if they want,” he replied. “But they have
nothing to say.”
All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of
the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist Jeep with the
words “Military Police” painted on it – if so exotic an institution
could be associated with this gang of murderers – drove by. A few
television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian
militiamen outside the Cité Sportive. He also filmed a woman pleading
to an Israeli army colonel called “Yahya” for the release of her
husband. The colonel has now been positively identified by The
Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.
Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli
Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching
the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set
free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in
drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside
the camps. One, Lt Avi Grabovsky – he was later to testify to the
Israeli Kahan commission – had even witnessed the murder of several
civilians the previous day and had been told not to “interfere”.
And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had
been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken
away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the
cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain
complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was
never seen again.
There were other vague rumours of “disappeared” people. I wrote in my
notes at the time that “even after Chatila, Israel’s ‘terrorist’
enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut.” But I had not directly
associated this dark conviction with the Cité Sportive. I had not even
reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of
war. Hadn’t there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few years
before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet’s coup d’état, a stadium
from which many prisoners never returned?
Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel
Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday 17
September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still – unknown to
her – under way inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her
family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. “Neighbours came and
said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs
and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese forces on the road. The men were
separated from the women.” This separation – with its awful shadow of
similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war – was a
common feature of these mass arrests. “We were told to go to the Cité
Sportive. The men stayed put.” Among the men were Wadha’s two sons,
19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. “We
went to the Cité Sportive, as the Israelis told us,” she says. “I
never saw my sons or brother again.”
The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says
she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité Sportive and
the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away.
Some militiamen – watched by the Israelis – loaded him into a car,
blindfolded, she says.
“That’s how he disappeared,” she says in her official testimony, “and
I have never seen him again since.” It was only a few days afterwards
that we journalists began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of
dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila,
1,800 civilians had been reported as “missing”. We assumed – how easy
assumptions are in war –that they had been killed in the three days
between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers
on 18 September, and that their corpses had been secretly buried
outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that
many of these young people had been murdered outside the camps or
after 18 September, that the killings were still going on while we
walked through the camps, never occurred to us.
Why did we journalists at the time not think of this? The following
year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning
Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September,
with just a one-line hint – unexplained – that several hundred people
may have “disappeared around the same time”. The commission
interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the
narrative of history.
The idea that the Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their
bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The Palestinians of
Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly what
happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was
handed to the Phalange on the morning of 18 September. A Palestinian
Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a
truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to the
Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated
Christian President-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken
Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the
truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli
checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I had even met
the woman who ordered the boy’s execution.
Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu
Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportive where, in one of the
underground “holding centres”, she saw a retarded man, watched by
Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be
rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her
gratitude for an Israeli soldier – inside the Chatila camp, against
all the evidence given by the Israelis – who prevented the murder of
her daughters by the Phalange.
Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportive were torn down and
a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the
British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie
beneath its foundations – and its frightful implications – will give
Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.
I had been in the Sabra and Chatila camps when these crimes took
place. I had returned to the camps, year after year, to try to
discover what happened to the missing thousand men. Karsten Tveit of
Norwegian television had been with me in 1982 and he had returned to
Beirut many times with the same purpose. Lawyers weren’t the only
people investigating these crimes against humanity. In 2001, Tveit
arrived in Lebanon with the original 1982 tapes of those women
pleading for their menfolk at the gates of the Cité Sportive. He
visited the poky little video shops in the present-day camp and showed
and reshowed the tapes until local Palestinians identified them; then
Tveit set off to find the women – 19 years older now – who were on the
tape, who had asked for their sons and brothers and fathers and
husbands outside the Cité Sportive. He traced them all. None had ever
seen their loved ones again.
Extracted from The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the
Middle East, by Robert Fisk.