Whether or not he recovers from the
massive stroke he suffered on January 5, it is clear that Ariel Sharon’s
political life has come to an end.In
the hours after Sharon was rushed to hospital, a
number of world leaders issued statements praising Sharon as a man of peace and wishing for his
full recovery. Such statements fly in the face of reality.Sharon’s
main aim, both as a military leader and a politician, has been to extinguish
the national rights of the Palestinian people.
As an army officer in the Israeli Defence
Forces (IDF) during the 1950s, Sharon
set up one of the units established for the purpose of ethnic cleansing of
dozens of Palestinian towns and villages, both within the newly-formed Israeli
state as well as within areas at the time under Jordanian rule. The unit under Sharon’s command killed 69 Palestinian civilians and blew
up 45 houses in the West Bank village
of Qibya in 1953, a fact
duly recorded in Israeli military history books.
Following this operation, Sharon began
his rise through the ranks of the IDF.He was a commander during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and then served as
commander of Israeli forces in Gaza,
before taking a break from the military to enter politics as one of the founders
of the Likud Party.It was during this
time that he was instrumental in the birth of the settler movement. He returned
to the military to lead Israeli forces during the 1973 war.
Sharon also planned and led the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982.During the
invasion, an estimated 20,000 civilians lost their lives.Sharon was also instrumental in organizing
the massacre of 2,000 Palestinian refugees, including women, children and the
elderly, living in Lebanon in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.He was forced to step down as commander of
the IDF after an impartial Israeli body set up by the Israeli parliament to
investigate the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, the Kahane Commission of Inquiry,
found that Sharon bore personal responsibility for these crimes.However, even after his forced resignation, Sharon remained active in
Israeli right-wing politics.
In 1988, shaken by the outpouring of
international support for the first Palestinian intifada, Sharon
made a now infamous speech to a settler gathering in which he urged them to
“run and grab every hilltop” to ensure the Judaization of the occupied
territories. He was also a staunch opponent of the Oslo peace process and spent most of the
1990s fundraising and proselytizing in support of the Israeli settler movement
and against a negotiated peace settlement with the Palestinians.
It was his visit in 2000 to a joint
Muslim and Jewish holy site in East Jerusalem,
surrounded by hundreds of Israeli bodyguards and soldiers, that is believed to have triggered the second Palestinian
intifada, when soldiers opened fire on Palestinians demonstrating against his
visit.In 2001, he returned to politics
as leader of the Likud Party.Elected
Prime Minister, he moved quickly to get American approval for a plan to
entrench settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from
the Gaza Strip.He also began
construction on a separation wall that has effectively redrawn the boundaries
of Israel to include much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.He overrode opposition within his own party
and the settler movement that he nurtured from its infancy to unilaterally
withdraw from Gaza in the summer of 2005, arguing that it was the only way
Israel could hang on to the bigger settlements in the West Bank.In essence, Sharon’s actions have sought to
ensure that any future Palestinian state will not be economically or
geographically viable, in keeping with his lifelong ambition to extinguish the
Palestinians’ national aspirations.
It
is for all these crimes that Ariel Sharon will be remembered by history.