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 25^th 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 30^th 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 31^st 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 11^th 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 18^th 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 25^th 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]

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 14^th 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 4^th July 1982 and 15^th 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 16^th September 1982 to the morning of the 18^th, 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 23^rd 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.

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 20^th 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.