Revising History

It's no secret that historians who set out to rewrite particularly awkward chapters in a nation's history get on talk shows and sell books. That's why, in Europe, we hear voices claiming the holocaust never happened, and Japanese scholars saying the rape of Nanking never took place.

Americans have been relatively fastidious about this. So far no one has suggested that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by tidal waves or the Dresden fire storm was caused by German kids playing with matches. That's why it was irksome to watch Ariel Sharon, with a few well-chosen friends, attempt, in an American courtroom, to revise recent Middle Eastern history.

His entire libel suit against Time magazine rested on whether or not a statement that he had discussed "revenge" during a condolence call on the family of slain Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel was contained in a secret annex to the report by the Israeli government's Kahan Commission. The Commission already had found him guilty of "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of at least 800 Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

That was an extra ordinarily charitable verdict considering the fact that Sharon was the Minister of Defense when Israeli forces assembled 150 Lebanese Maronite militiamen who already had a record of massacring Palestinians at places like Tel Zaatar, and trucked them to the site.

Israeli troops then sealed off the two camps, turned back occupants trying to flee, provided a continuous supply of ammunition and food to the militiamen, fired illuminating flares over the camps for two nights running, and for 48 hours disregarded reports that a massacre of women and children was taking place submitted by an Israeli journalist and some Israeli officers and enlisted men who hadn't shed their humanity when they donned their uniforms. Sharon's forces even provided at least two of the bulldozers that were scurrying to scoop all the bodies into mass graves when the world press stormed in.

Nevertheless, Sharon set out to obscure the record, so that he could go back to Israel and say he had been vindicated in America.

Both Israeli and American friends played their parts. When Time wanted Israelis in the U.S. to testify, the Israeli Embassy gave them diplomatic status to keep them out of court.

A New York law firm took on Sharon's case, pro bono. To spend time and money without compensation seems generous indeed until you think about it. Uncompensated expenses will presumably be deducted from the firm's taxable profits. Since the trial was in a Federal District Court, the U.S. taxpayer paid court costs and some of Sharon's own legal costs for his attempt at a political comeback in Israel.

By the time Sharon had finished presenting his witnesses, however, it was so obvious he couldn't win that Time rested its own case without calling any witnesses at all. Federal Judge Abraham Sofaer then gave the jury lengthy instructions directing them not to go for a simple yes or no on whether Time had libeled Sharon, but rather to bring in a three-part verdict, one part at a time.

That enabled Sharon to get favorable decisions on two parts, before he lost on the third, key issue. He then claimed that he was somehow morally vindicated.

To make it harder for future revisionists to support this, let's look at Sharon's record. Israelis used to describe him as "a war waiting to happen." After it happened, they began referring to the 1982 invasion as "Sharon's War" in Lebanon. Up to now it has cost the lives of more than 260 Americans and 600 Israelis, and at least 10,000 Lebanese and Palestinians.

The massacre that accompanied it was no aberration, although Sharon didn't invent the massacre technique for dealing with Palestinians. Menachem Begin did that at Deir Yasin in 1947. But Sharon directed a massacre of his own in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953. His "counter terrorist" elite Unit 101 troops slipped into the village at night, blocked up the doors, and then blew the houses and their occupants to smithereens. Observers counted 60 bodies, but it was like Sabra and Shatila later. When whole families are obliterated, you can only count the bodies you find. You don't know how many others died since there is no one left to report the missing.

The Israeli government claimed for a long time that the massacre was committed by "frontier settlers." It only admitted responsibility after men of Sharon's Unit 101 began bragging to the press about how they had been killing Palestinian civilians in terror raids all over the West Bank.

In the book review in this issue we have a graphic description of one of those raids against Arab civilians in 1955. Heir Har-Tzion of Sharon's Unit 101 and three other paratroop reservists were driven to the border. They slipped across it and seized six Arab shepherd boys.

The Israeli paratroopers forced one boy to watch while they methodically stabbed the others to death, and then released him to tell the parents of the victims how painfully each had died.

The 1956 war that Ariel Sharon was helping prepare at the time, however, almost set back his military career. When it was over, four young Israeli battalion commanders who had served under him, including future army chiefs of staff Mordechai Gur and Rafael Eitan, charged him with exceeding his orders and wantonly sending Israeli soldiers to certain death.

Sharon almost got the U.S. and the Soviet Union into a disastrous confrontation in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Sharon had already taken his troops on a counter attack across the Suez Canal when Egypt and Israel, under pressure from their Soviet and American mentors, reached a ceasefire. Sharon ignored the agreement and continued to cut off Egyptian units from their supply lines. Finally the Soviet Union told the U.S. that if Israel couldn't stop Sharon's private war, Soviet paratroops would. Sharon was stopped.

Sharon started planning his Lebanon invasion when he became Minister of Defense. For 10 months, however, he could not find a pretext to begin it, since Palestinian forces were observing a cease-fire along the Lebanese-Israeli border brokered by the U.S. in the summer of 1981.

Finally, Sharon seized upon the attempted assassination of Israel's Ambassador in London. He prevented an Israeli intelligence officer from informing the Israeli cabinet that the would-be assassins were not from the PLO, so that the cabinet would not abort what he was describing as solely a strike against PLO positions in Lebanon.

An Israeli, Yacov Guterman, whose only son was killed in the battle for Beaufort Castle at the beginning of the invasion, has written:

"If they (Begin and Sharon) have only a spark of conscience and humanity, may my great pain pursue them forever, the suffering of a father in Israel whose world has been destroyed..."

Those are the words of just one victim of Ariel Sharon, whose supporters have helped to revise history so that he can become Prime Minister of Israel. With American friends like these, Israel doesn't need enemies.

—Richard Curtiss