'Thanking' Sharon
By Mike Odetalla
Hanini.org
1-7-6
Since the so-called Gaza disengagement, US President George W Bush has reiterated his call that people ought to be "thanking Ariel Sharon" for keeping Israel's word about dismantling its occupation of Palestinian territory.
What does Sharon's history tell us?
Sharon's first documented sortie in the role George W Bush describes as as "man of peace" was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of "Unit 101" records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20.
Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's Unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett (aka Shertok), confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack.
The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
