Daylight at night -- remembering Sharon

By Graham Usher
At a recent dinner for the Israeli Federation of Chambers of Commerce, Ariel Sharon was asked about his responsibility as then defence minister for the Sabra and Shatila massacre during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. "I had nothing to do with what happened there," he said. "Christian Arabs killed Muslim Arabs, and as a result of the atmosphere of hysteria in Israel, I was forced to leave my post."
That was not quite the conclusion reached by the official Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the slaughter. Released in February 1983, it "imputed responsibility" for the massacre to Sharon for "having failed to take the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the refugee camps." Moreover, the commission found it "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."
The commission also recommended that Sharon "never again" be given a post as senior as defence minister.
Outraged by Sharon's amnesia, Knesset member Zahava Gal On petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice to have the commission's secret annexes on Sharon's operational role in the massacre de-classified. The election campaign of Ehud Barak threatened to do the same. "Sharon's role in the Lebanese war must be revealed to the public," said Barak's campaign manager Elie Goldschmidt.
But that was two months ago and, as Sharon waits on the cusp of becoming Israel's next prime minister, the plan to expose him appears to have been shelved. Some say this was due to Sharon's counter-threat to reveal Barak's own role in the Lebanese war, which reportedly not only supported the invasion but also called for its "widening" to include Syria. Others suggest such mutual defamation would only get in the way of the two men if and when they sit down to form Israel's next national unity government.
But for the survivors of the massacre, ideas of remembering, truth and justice cannot be so finely tuned to the exigencies of Israel's electoral politics. Abu Mujahid is a Palestinian refugee from a village near Safed and today runs a youth centre in Beirut's Shatila camp. On the evening of 16 September 1982 he tried to reach his home in Sabra but was prevented by the massive Israeli army presence around the camps. "The thing I remember most was the army's phosphorescent flares. It was like daylight at night."
For the next 62 hours -- aided by that siege and guided by those flares -- forces belonging to the Israeli army and Israeli allied Phalangist militia went through the camps, killing anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians (the exact figure has never been determined). Some were lined up against walls and mown down by machine-gun fire. Others were left in heaps on the floors of their homes or on the streets of the camps. Children were shot dead, women and girls were raped and mutilated and men were disembowelled prior to being executed.
Abu Mujahid finally reached home on the third day. "I saw corpses so bloated by the sun that fathers could not recognise sons. The Israeli soldiers were still at the camp entrances. I remember them taking people from Sabra's Gaza hospital to the sports stadium."
When recounting the massacre, Abu Mujahid says he feels "seared" by an overwhelming sense of guilt. "Because I survived, I feel I am less than those who died -- the thousands who died. That's why we can never forgive or forget the massacre. It is not ours to forgive or forget."
And it should certainly not be up to Sharon to erase that history, no matter how much he may seek to do so in the election and as Israel's next leader. At least this is the view of a recent campaign to indict Sharon as a war criminal sponsored by Arab, European, American and Canadian lawyers and academics.
In a statement released on 29 December, these signatories noted that it was the obligation of nations who are parties to the Geneva Convention to hold Sharon accountable, "irrespective of whether he is a private citizen of Israel, a cabinet minister or the head of government." They also recall that "recent developments in the emerging system of international justice -- including the cases of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic and the perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda -- provide compelling reasons for ending the impunity that Ariel Sharon has so far enjoyed."
It remains to be seen whether the "indict Sharon" campaign will fly or whether it will again prove that the world is never so negligent of its obligations as when the culprit is Israel, including an Israel led by a Sharon.
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