Issue No. 605
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26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605 Special |
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Replaying lost battles
After orchestrating the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, Sharon is now trying to win the war he lost against the Palestinian leadership in Lebanon by other means. Michael Jansen* writes
There is a saying that army generals always refight the campaigns they had previously lost. This is certainly true of Ariel Sharon. Today he is refighting his 1982 "Peace for Galilee" offensive against the Palestinians in Lebanon. But this time the battle ground is the occupied Palestinian territories. His current adversary is his old enemy, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Sharon succeeded in forcing him to leave Lebanon in 1982 by taking Beirut hostage and bombarding its inhabitants for 69 days from land, sea and air. Over the past 10 months Sharon has held the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza hostage, assaulted them with tanks, patrol boats and aircraft, curfew and blockade, all with the aim of ending the Al- Aqsa Intifada, exiling Arafat from Palestine and finishing off the Palestinian dream of statehood, personified by Arafat.
Although Sharon won the "Battle of Beirut", he lost the war against Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Arafat lived to fight another day and to make peace by means of the Oslo accords. In 1982 Sharon lost the war because he made a major strategic mistake: the Sabra-Shatila massacre.
The Sabra-Shatila operation, dubbed "Iron Brain", was meant to be the centre-piece of the "Peace for Galilee" campaign. The Israelis began their assault on Lebanon by bombarding the Palestinian camps in the Sidon and Tyre area to soften them up for a ground assault. Then the Israelis dropped leaflets on the camps (as they did in Jenin this spring) telling the residents to leave. Once they had, the Israelis moved in with armour and bulldozers, levelling the largest Palestinian camp, Ain Al-Hilweh, and inflicting serious damage on other camps in the south. During the siege of Beirut, Israel did the same to the camps in its southern suburbs, focusing on the largest, Burj Al- Barajneh. According to Red Cross records, 18,000- 19,000 people were killed and at least 300,000 Palestinians, Lebanese and stateless people were rendered homeless just ahead of the massacre. Sharon believed that being homeless means rootlessness.
Sharon planned "Iron Brain" with Phalangist leader Bashir Jemayel, who had been elected to the presidency by parliament meeting under Israel's tank guns. Jemayel decided that his militiamen would go into the camps on 24 September, the day after he was inaugurated.
The declared objective was to purge the camps of some 2,000 Palestinian "terrorists" who Sharon claimed remained there after the bulk of Palestinian fighters were evacuated at the end of August. Sharon and Jemayel agreed that relays of 200 Phalangist militiamen would enter the camps to carry out the cleansing. This modus operandi demonstrated clearly that the camps did not contain 2,000 hardened Palestinian fighters: a mere 200 Phalangists would never have been deployed to tackle so many fighters.
The operation was brought forward by Jemayel's assassination on 14 September in an explosion at his party's headquarters. The Israeli army moved into Beirut at dawn on the following day, claiming it had to maintain security. By mid-day Israel forces had surrounded and sealed-off all four camps in the area, Burj Al-Barajneh, Mar Elias, Sabra and Shatila. Israeli troops were posted 50-300 metres from the perimeters of the camps and Israeli officers set up their headquarters in a high building overlooking Sabra and Shatila. Phalange militiamen lined up along the airport road on the 16th. The first units were introduced into Sabra and Shatila that evening. The militiamen, armed with automatic rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and bludgeons fanned out and began a 40- hour killing spree.
After dark the Israelis fired flares over the camps, turning night into day. Camp residents who tried to flee were turned back by the Israelis. The Phalangists went from house to house raping, killing and mutilating old men, women, children and babies.
Warnings about what was going on were ignored by Israel's Defence Ministry; Sharon refused to receive calls from journalists told by Israeli soldiers what was happening. On the 17th the Israelis provided the Phalangists with bulldozers to collapse houses on the living as well as conceal the dead. The Phalangists also brought out hundreds of people and bore them away in lorries before the eyes of the Israeli troops. The people the Phalangists took away were never seen again. The toll of dead and missing was at least 1,800. The killing stopped only because the US intervened. When journalists entered the camps at about 11am on 18 September corpses were still bleeding.
According to Israeli intelligence sources quoted by Ha'aretz (28 September 1982), the objective of "Operation Iron Brain" was "to create panic, to provoke an exodus, en masse, of Palestinians towards Syria and to convince the Palestinians in Lebanon that they were no longer safe in that country".
The goal was no less than the "expulsion of the whole Palestinian population of Lebanon, beginning with Beirut", the paper added. Sharon's plan for the Palestinians of Lebanon was part of a grandiose scheme also involving the expulsion of the bulk of the Palestinian population of the West Bank into Jordan, which would become "the Palestinian state". Indeed, he believed an exodus from Lebanon would spark a mass flight of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Sabra-Shatila was modelled on the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre during which 254 Palestinians were slaughtered by members of Menachem Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi militia while the underground Jewish army, the Haganah, surrounded the village. Deir Yassin and other mass killings forced 250,000 Palestinians to flee their homes in the run up to the declaration of the Jewish state on 15 May 1948.
While Sharon has clearly decided not to commit the strategic mistake he made in 1982, he and his premiership remain haunted by Sabra-Shatila. He cannot afford another massacre. This is why he reacted strongly to charges that Israeli troops massacred Palestinian civilians during the siege and reoccupation of Jenin last April.
Since taking power in March 2001, Sharon has restrained his natural impatience and bent for excess and waged a stealth campaign rather than a blitz. He opted for a gradually escalating war-of-attrition against the Palestinian resistance, Arafat and the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.
As during the "Battle of Beirut", he justifies his war by claiming Arafat and Palestinian civilians are harbouring "terrorists". This time he intends to "win" the war for possession of Palestine not just the battle for the occupied territories. He has had considerable success so far: he has finished off the peace process, abrogated the Oslo accords, paralysed Washington, Europe and the UN, reoccupied Palestinian self-rule enclaves, demolished the Palestine Authority and sidelined Arafat.
By stealth rather than slaughter, Sharon has also initiated the Palestinian exodus he failed to achieve in 1982. Since the beginning of the year, 80,000 Palestinians have left the occupied territories and 50,000 are waiting to depart.
Sharon has reverted to the policy of surreptitiously pushing the Palestinians across the frontiers advocated by Theodor Herzl, the father of the Jewish state, rather than sticking to the Deir Yassin-Sabra-Shatila tactic.
The code-name of the present operation targeting Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah is a "Matter of Time". One Israeli commentator wrote that its aim is to force the Palestinians to raise the blue and white flag of Israel rather than the white flag of surrender.
* Michael Jansen co-authored The Battle of Beirut with GH Jansen, the first book to be published on Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
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