The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon

The 'man of courage and peace' story ignores his bloody and ruthless past

Saturday, January 7, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
(http://www.latimes.com/)

by Saree Makdis

As Ariel Sharon's career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already
underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as "a man of courage
and peace" who had generated "hopes for a far-reaching accord" with an
electoral campaign promising "to end conflict with the Palestinians."

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and
even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old
warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that
miracles don't happen, and only rarely have words and realities been
separated by such a yawning abyss.

>From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of
ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career
are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the
village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with
their occupants - men, women and children - still inside, to the
ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to
Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the
city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by
land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated
the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people - almost all innocent
civilians - were killed during his Lebanon adventure.

Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different
from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home
demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls,
population transfers and illegal annexations - these were his stock in
trade as "a man of courage and peace."

Some may take comfort in the myth that Sharon was transformed into a
peacemaker, but in fact he never deviated from his own 1998 call to
"run and grab as many hilltops" in the occupied territories as
possible. His plan for peace with the Palestinians involved grabbing
large portions of the West Bank, ultimately annexing them to Israel,
and turning over the shattered, encircled, isolated, disconnected and
barren fragments of territory left behind to what only a fool would
call a Palestinian state.

Sharon's "painful sacrifices" for peace may have involved Israel
keeping less, rather than more, of the territory that it captured
violently and has clung to illegally for four decades, but few seem to
have noticed that it's not really a sacrifice to return something that
wasn't yours to begin with.

His much-ballyhooed withdrawal from Gaza left 1.4 million Palestinians
in what is essentially the world's largest prison, cut off from the
rest of the world and as subject to Israeli power as before. It also
terminated the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by
condemning Palestinians to whiling away their lives in a series of
disconnected Bantustans, ghettos, reservations and strategic hamlets,
entirely at the mercy of Israel.

That's not peace. As Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull would have recognized
at a glance, it's an attempt to pacify an entire people by bludgeoning
them into a subhuman irrelevance. Nothing short of actual genocide -
for whichSharon's formula was merely a kind of substitute - would
persuade the Palestinian people to quietly accept such an arrangement,
or negate themselves in someother way. And no matter which Israeli
politician now assumes Sharon's bloody mantle, such an approach to
peace will always fail.

Saree Makdis is a professor of English and comparative literature at
UCLA.