Sharon's willing accomplices

by Haim Bresheeth
Al-Ahram
May 10, 2004

Like a ventriloquist dummy speaking the words of its master, we heard the world's most powerful man reciting a script written in Jerusalem by one responsible for bathing the Middle East in blood for decades. This most bizarre spectacle -- Bush unable to answer a simple question, repeating key phrases like a broken automaton -- was then followed by the even more bizarre suggestion by Blair that this was not a departure from what was policy in Washington and London for decades.

For those who were shocked by Bush's retreat from his own nonsense programme -- the celebrated roadmap -- let us recall the conditions that led to this creature's birth. It was Tony Blair who worked out that moving towards a political solution on Palestine may elicit Arab favour at a time most needed before the US and the UK went to war on Iraq. The plan worked. Now the roadmap is tossed like a rotten apple. Bush, reading from his new script, dubbed Sharon's plan "historic and courageous", presenting it as a fresh start in Middle East history.

In Sharon's book, Bush is just another pawn. Important as he is at the moment, he serves the master plan of ridding Palestine of its people -- a result to which Sharon has committed his life's work. American presidents come and go while Sharon stands firm for decades, defeating all obstacles in his tireless, barbaric mission. With the help he now gets from Bush and Blair, he may yet complete his mission.

Sharon was the one to pioneer collective punishment and mass murder in the early 1950s as the creator and commander of Israel's first notorious death squad, Unit 101. His early military career was spent in killing: not enemy soldiers but civilians in villages such as Kibyia. In Gaza during the early 1970s, he instigated a reign of terror, supposedly designed to end Palestinian resistance to the occupation. It was really another phase in his lifelong struggle to make as many Palestinians as possible flee their own homeland. He destroyed large parts of Beirut, and killed tens of thousands in his Lebanon war of 1982, in his obsessive hunt of Arafat and the PLO. As is well known, his campaigns have not been fully successful. Gaza has become the centre of Palestinian resistance and Arafat returned to Palestine after Oslo. But one of his other campaigns is about to mature: it is, of course, the grand project of settlements in the occupied territories.


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=5493

The writer is an Israeli academic working at the University of East London. He is the co- editor of The Gulf War and the New World Order , published by Zed Books.

While Mr. Sharon is certainly a leading exponent of the
methods of repression, he hardly invented them, and it is
far more likely he learned them from the USA than vice
versa.