Sharon’s record opened in 1953, when his Unit 101 went into the Palestinian town of Qibya, detonated forty five civilian buildings (including schools) and killed almost seventy civilians (half of them women and children). In his aptly titled memoir, Warrior, Sharon reflected that “Qibya was to be a lesson.” His ruthlessness was to send a message that “Jewish blood could no longer be shed.” The line from Qibya to the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut is not long. In 1982, Sharon would oversee the massacre at those camps for which Israel’s Kahan Commission found him “personally responsible” — the killing, according to Human Rights Watch, of “infants, children, pregnant women, and the elderly, some of whose bodies were found to have been mutilated”. When the victims’ families eventually brought a case in the Belgian courts against Sharon, political pressure resulted in that country’s parliament amending its laws to invalidate the case. Sharon was untouchable.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 12:36:17 +0000