Who was Ariel Sharon?
Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of the Israeli regime, was widely known in the Arab and Islam world for his war crimes against Palestinians during deadly years of occupation of Palestine.
Sharon is referred to have been responsible for two massacres that occurred 20 years apart: the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, and the April 2002 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) mass killings in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
However for Israelis Sharon was a hero and all the killings were merely considered as being necessary steps on the path toward Sharon’s objective of a “Final Solution” to the “Palestinian problem,” through the mass expulsion and/or extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living in the occupied lands, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
EIR has “written the book” on Sharon’s blood-soaked career for over 30 years.
The following summary is parts of what was written by Jeffrey Steinberg and published in the Executive Intelligence Review, “As a service to the current worldwide debate on Israel’s fascist actions”. This summary is linked to a compendium of earlier exposés of Sharon and his partners in crime.
The Sharon File
Sharon was born in Kfar Malal in 1928. At the age of 14, he joined the Haganah, and at 20, headed an infantry company in the Alexandroni Brigade during the 1948 War of Independence, during which the Israeli forces drove an estimated 300,000 Palestinians from their land, using some of the same genocidal methods against unarmed civilian populations that were used in the recent IDF invasion of the Palestinian Authority’s Area A territory.
In 1953, Sharon founded “Unit 101,” a secret death squad within the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians. In October 1953, Sharon’s “Unit 101” massacred 66 innocent civilians during a cross-border raid into the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya. Under intense machine-gun fire, local residents were driven into their homes, which were then blown up around them, killing the occupants by burying them alive in piles of rubble. The April 2002 IDF massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin was, in fact, modeled on Sharon’s “Unit 101” operations at Qibya.
On Oct. 18, 1953, the U.S. State Department issued a bulletin denouncing the Qibya massacre, demanding that those responsible be “brought to account.” Instead, Sharon was rewarded for his war crimes by having his “Unit 101” absorbed into the Israeli paratroop corps. By 1956, Sharon had been appointed paratroop brigade commander.
Between Feb. 28, 1955 and Oct. 10, 1956, a Sharon-led paratrooper brigade conducted similar cross-border invasions into Gaza, Egypt, and the West Bank in Jordan. At the West Bank village of Qalqilya, Sharon’s death squad killed 83 people.
During the 1956 joint British, Israeli, and French invasion of the Suez Canal, Sharon and his lifelong collaborator in mass murder, Rafael Eytan, carried out another horrific war crime: In three separate incidents, Sharon- and Eytan-led units murdered Egyptian prisoners of war, as well as civilian Sudanese workers who had been captured. All told, 273 unarmed prisoners were executed and dumped into mass graves. When the story broke, nearly 40 years later, in the Aug. 16, 1995 London Daily Telegraph, it nearly ruptured Israeli-Egyptian relations. This was less than three months before Sharon would bloody his hands once again, by orchestrating the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin, in Sharon’s eyes, had committed the mistake of signing a peace treaty with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
During the 1960s, Sharon’s military career advanced. In 1964, he was appointed to head the IDF’s Northern Command; in 1966, he took charge of the Army Training Department; in 1969, he was named commander of the IDF’s Southern Command.
In 1972, at the urging of American organized crime figure and leading right-wing Zionist Meshulam Riklis, Sharon resigned from the IDF (he was recalled, briefly, to active duty during the 1973 Yom Kippur War) to run for the Knesset (parliament). Henceforth, Sharon would be wedded to leading international organized crime figures associated with the Meyer Lansky National Crime Syndicate in the United States, and allied Jewish mafia figures from Israel and Russia.
Even at the end of his career, Sharon was still running death squads. On Sept. 25, 1997, Israeli Television Channel One interviewed Benny Golan, a veteran of the Rimon Unit, which Sharon had created and deployed in the early 1970s in the Gaza Strip to carry out targetted assassinations of Palestinian “militants.” Golan described the assassination program, and reported that members of the unit frequently “disguised themselves as Arabs” for “special operations.”Other sources reported, at the time, that the “special operations” included terrorist attacks on Israeli Jewish targets to justify “retaliatory strikes” against pre-selected Palestinian and Arab targets.
Far from ending his career of mass butchery, Sharon’s resignation from the IDF coincided with the launching of an even more ambitious criminal enterprise that would see thousands of Palestinians killed and wounded as part of the “Eretz Israel,” or “Greater Israel” drive to permanently annex all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights—and resettle these areas with Russian and other Jewish immigrants, after the Palestinians have been eliminated.
