Republican News · Thursday 21 February 2002

Sharon's war crimes

Sharon doesn't want peace, he doesn't need it. What he needs is a military success to prove the world that he has eradicated the revolt of those he's actually oppressing with cruelty. - Hanan Ashrawi

On 6 March an international human rights court in Belgium will decide whether to prosecute Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The families of 23 survivors accuse him of responsibility for massacres of Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Lebanon: for two days in September 1982, the refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut was attacked by Lebanese Falangists. More than 1500 Palestinians were slaughtered. Elie Hobelka, a former Mossad agent known as the Sabra and Chatila executioner, had promised to testify in Brussels and explain how the Falangists were only an instrument in the Israeli Army arsenal led by the then Minister of Defence, Ariel Sharon. Last Christmas, Eve Hobelka was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Beirut and while there's no doubt he had plenty of enemies in the region, the now Israeli prime minister is the one who most benefits from his death.

Today in Israel there are growing fears that Sharon is leading the country on a road to disaster, without a political opposition (especially since Shimon Peres' Labour Party joined the coalition government). But after a year and a half of being dormant, the Israeli left, youth, ordinary people and pacifists are taking on to the streets asking for an end to the war. Even his close friends in the American administration, by recently refusing to sever contacts with the Palestinian Authority, must be realising that Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people bears no justification. Nothing could justify a state-authorised shoot-to-kill policy using Apache helicopters and F-16 aircraft or the economical apartheid that is killing more elderly and children than the Israeli army itself. Seventeen months into the new Intifada, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 30,000 have been maimed or blinded or scarred for life.

There are, however, some signs of revulsion from within Sharon's own own ranks. On 25 January, 53 soldiers issued a petition to say they would "not take part anymore in the destroying, killing, blockading, starving and humiliating of the entire Palestinian population"; over 400 military personnel, some of them officers from the elite units that carry out executions, have already refused to serve in the Territories under Sharon's orders. The courage of their refusal, in a country where the army is more than an institution, is inspiring.

Unfortunately there's very little signs of redemption among Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Ramallah; heavy tanks patrolling the streets, overlooking road blocks, sleeping at the main junctions, threatening from the adjoining hills: the shape of a fortress and the smell of death, they are not here to fight another army but a civilian population.

A strong taste of revolution diluted by the smells of poverty emanates from derelict houses, the few empty shops still open, the walls covered with photographs of the latest martyrs. Further up the road, Israeli tanks have nested between the rubble of houses they previously demolished. Their engines may be switched off, but the turrets follow everyone's movements with a chilling, electric sound. All around them the muddy road is littered with gas canisters, rubber bullets, stun grenades, empty cases. Israeli special forces have taken all the highest floors in the surrounding buildings, they didn't even bother to conceal artillery and machine guns and a long column of tanks sleeps like a snake two miles down the same road.

All this armoury is pointed at Yasser Arafat's headquarters, just a few hundred yards away. The old lion is not only a hostage of Israeli tanks but is a prisoner of his own people too; the local news bulletin has just announced that the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is splitting away from Al Fatah (Arafat's movement), and by now Hamas appears in full control of key areas such as Jenin, Nablus and Gaza. People in Ramallah remain loyal to him but they blame him for "trying to come to terms with the occupation" and for refusing to call elections in the Territories, delayed since his mandate expired in 1999. Sharon accuses him of not doing enough to stop the suicide bombers and parades his deadly toys outside Arafat' windows. Obviously it is not just the life and career of the Palestinian president that is at stake but the struggle of an entire people for freedom. Which leaves the Israeli government caught in the contradiction of bombing every Palestinian installation (destroying files, preventing movements, etc) of the very same police which they are insisting should be arresting the Islamic militants from Hamas and Jihad. On the contrary, it looks very much like Tel Aviv is effectively trying to get rid of every symbol of Palestinian authority, bombing offices, schools, courts and prisons.

Half a mile from Arafat's office, in a district heavily hit by F-16 jet fighters, a mosaic of craters and debris is all that remains of the police barracks in which two Israeli soldiers were lynched. An elderly couple are searching through the rubble.

Throughout Palestine, Israelis keep uprooting secular plantations, destroying harvests, obstructing water wells with sand, razing local factories, firing at electricity power stations and erecting new settlements which make it impossible for people and goods to travel. Despite eight years of negotiations, approximately 60% of Palestinians are still unemployed. Thousands of them are confined in refugee camps where hundreds of children sleep in shacks, sandholes, tents and derelict houses, between open sewers and piles of rubbish.

It may be internationally recognised, but on the ground Palestine barely exists; it's an area in which over 3 million people are caged in about 220 open prisons scattered throughout the country and under military siege by Israeli tank divisions. Through international indifference, Palestine is dying. How can we possibly accept it?

Israel: The "enemy" within

On Saturday, 16 February, Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organisation representative in Jerusalem, addressed thousands of Israelis at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Nusseibeh spoke Hebrew as he argued that Palestinian leader Arafat - restricted to his West Bank headquarters for two months by Israeli tanks - remained committed to the idea of a Palestinian state living in peace beside Israel.

The rally drew a larger crowd than recent pro-peace demonstrations - Israeli media estimated 20,000 - possibly making it the largest such gathering since violence erupted in September 2000.

As the rally was beginning, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a Jewish settlement, killing himself and two others and wounding 27 people, six seriously. Earlier in the day, four Palestinians were killed - three in a gun battle with Israeli troops and one in a car explosion Palestinians blamed on Israel.

The rally, organised by Israeli opposition leader Yossi Sarid's Meretz Party and other dovish groups, was held under the slogan "Get Out of the Territories." For years, Israel's peace movement made full withdrawal from the Occupied Territories conditional on a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Today, a growing number of Israelis say their country should pull out of at least part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip even without a peace agreement.

"Brother, brother, get out of the territories," chanted the demonstrators.

In the last few weeks, the peace movement in Israel has been gathering strength. Each demonstration represents a new blow against Israel's right wing prime minister Ariel Sharon's proposed military solution to end the Second Palestinian Intifada.

From his first day in office, Sharon diminished the Oslo Agreement and instigated a policy of military strikes and reoccupation of Gaza and the West-Bank. The central point of his election campaign was security, and that was what Israeli people waited for. But it has not been delivered. On the contrary, Sharon's policies have brought an outburst of violence as never seen before.

The beginning of February saw the Palestinian Intifada's death toll reach 1,000. A fourth of those now dead are children. The Israeli death toll reached 256, nearly half of whom are civilians.

But the real coup against Sharon's military solution came from within the military itself. Today, 231 Israeli soldiers, including at least 187 reserve officers have publicly refused to served in the occupied territories, and have declared that though "raised on Zionism and ready to serve in the defence of Israel", they are not ready "to continue to fight beyond the Green Line for the purpose of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people" - the Green Line refers to the pre-1967 Israeli border.

d to increase Sharon's worries, polls showed that at least 26% of the Israeli population supports the soldiers' decision not to fight.

This is not the first time that Ariel Sharon's decisions have been opposed by Israeli soldiers. Twenty years ago, serving as defence minister under prime minister Menachem Begin, Sharon decided to launch an offensive against Arab fighters who were attacking northern Israel from inside Lebanon's border.

What was planned as a 20-kilometre incursion into Lebanon became, under Sharon's orders, the occupation of Beirut. That was the first time that large numbers of reservists refused to join the army in Lebanon. By 1985, this refusal forced the Israeli army to pull back to a narrow strip in southern Lebanon, which was finally abandoned two years ago.

It was at the time of the occupation of Beirut that the massacres of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were carried out by Lebanese death squads allied with Israel. A trial that could see Ariel Sharon indicted for crimes against humanity opened last year in Belgium.

Hanan Ashrawi speaks

On Sunday 10 February two woman soldiers died in a gun attack outside the big Army base in Be'er-Sheva, Israel, in which the two attackers were killed by the Israelis. At twelve o'clock the following day, Israeli Apache helicopters fired eight missiles into Gaza City before leaving the skies to F-16 jet-bombers: they bombed the city and its outskirts for over an hour in which dozens of people were injured and even a nursery school was hit by the Israeli two-ton bombs. Then the tanks moved into the Gaza Strip, leaving a trail of death and destruction also in West Bank cities such as Jenin and Nablus.

Regarded as one of the finest political minds and spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid peace-talks in 1991, Dr Hanan Ashrawi condemns the latest attacks on Gaza and the West Bank: "It's shameful, a cold blooded aggression which is part of a wider plan. Bombings and killings of a civilian population prepare the ground for a reoccupation of the Gaza Strip and gradually, of the West Bank. They're not only a violation of every international principle and of the peace agreements, they're a violation of human dignity."

Tel Aviv is talking about putting in place a 10 km exclusion zone within the Territories to thwart Hamas' missile attacks. "What Sharon really wants is to militarily occupy 10 km of Territories as another step toward his ultimate goal, which is a full-scale reoccupation of the west Bank and the Gaza Strip," says Ashrawi. "In his own terms, a legal extension of military occupation. Needless to say, it would lead directly to a new wave of violence and it would generate more resistance. The missiles provide Sharon with a justification to legitimise the submission of our people."

How would it be then possible to go back to the negotiating table? "It's not just a question of going back to the negotiating table. How could you possibly negotiate with anyone who is sending his tanks and jet bombers to kill a defenceless civilian population, children and innocent people. The aggression must be brought to an end and a new political avenue should be built on that. But it could be useless because Sharon doesn't want peace, he doesn't need it. What he needs is a military success to prove the world that he has eradicated the revolt of those he's actually oppressing with cruelty. Of course we are not terrorists. We are called that only because we try to defend ourselves and our land. We are not asking for the whole of Palestine, we want our state back, within the territories of the pre-1967 Israeli invasion, and we want the right to be treated as human, free from the brutal military repression. There's no other way out for us."