| April
10, 2004
Ariel Sharon and The Rise of
Fascism
By Luis
Tijerina/HispanicVista.com
Ariel Sharon and
Israeli imperialism is the result and
consequence of one man’s insatiable
drive for power. It was
shortly after the contentious struggle
between the United States and the Soviet
Union, which ended with the collapse of
Soviet hegemony, that the imperial
leaders of America begin to maneuver
politically and military for control of
the Middle East. This strategy has
actually been an on going process since
the end of World War II.
Although it was the
British Mandate that provided the first
stage in the completion of Western
domination over the region of Palestine,
after its failure to bring a peace to the
Arabs and Israelis, the crises was handed
over to the United Nations to bring about
a partition of the disputed lands.
It was after the
latter stages of the Second World War,
that Ariel Scheinerman (Sharon) joined
the Haganah, which was a covert Israeli
militia that was especially created for
the recruitment of Jewish youth. According
to the authors of “Sharon
Israel’s Warrior-Politician”,
“Soon he was transferred into the
“Signallers,” an elite force
that also received training from the
Jewish Settlement Police…. Later he
joined the Gadna, acronym for “Youth
Battalions”, where he got of his
first tastes of concentrated military
training…. Sharon thus received
military training from the British as
well as from the Haganah—’’
which reveals the historical starting
point of Sharon’s militarist taste
for adventurism in military operations.
It would be later in his life that Sharon
would receive political and military
support from the United States
Government.
Sharon’s
military adventures or ‘expeditions’
can be assessed as having historical
significance to being categorized as
either a debacle or criminal in outcome.
In 1948, he led a guerrilla type of
incursion against Bir Addas, an Arab
village that had been turned into a
military stronghold. His guerrilla
group was unable to take this village not
far from Kfar Malal, which was towards
Jerusalem. Although the attack was
a failure, and the Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) commanders were shrewd to withdraw,
the temperamental Sharon was quarrelsome
towards his commanders about the outcome
of the operation. In another
military incursion, Sharon was committed
to warring against the Jordanians at the
village of Latrun, which was near the Tel
Aviv-Jerusalem highway leading into the
Old City of Jerusalem. Again, the
IDF was defeated. It was at Latrum
that Sharon was seriously wounded and
lost the majority of his platoon, because
they were not prepared enough to
encounter the Jordanians on their own
craggy and rocky terrain. Another
factor, was Sharon’s despair after
going into the attack. His forces
arrived over five hours late to the
starting point. Sharon would later
write that he “was eaten up by
despair and the shame of defeat.”
In 1948, he would fight in the vicinity
of Faluja and Iraq el Manshiyeh. Later
he was to be promoted to intelligence
officer for the Golani Brigade. It
was during a war games operation, that he
disobeyed orders by taking over the
brigade to counter the unit of Southern
Command that was led by the future great
commander, Moshe Dayan. Sharon’s
superiors reprimanded him verbally.
I show these first military actions of
Sharon to allow the reader to see the
thread of egotism, adventurism, and anger
towards authority that had developed in
this man.
There would be
other more obvious debacles. In
October of 1953, Sharon would lead his
Unit 101 as well as IDF paratroopers into
a retaliatory raid at Kibeyeh, a village
controlled by the Jordanians near the
Israeli border. In this raid,
Sharon’s men killed sixty-nine
civilians that included mostly women and
children. He would later claim that
the Kibeyeh villagers had kept quiet so
as not to reveal themselves to the
Israelis troops. During the
so-called Sinai Campaign in the autumn of
1956, Sharon intended to move rapidly
across the Sinai desert deep behind
Egyptian lines. His mission was to
capture the Mitla Pass, which was part of
an overall campaign initiated by British
and French governments in order to
destroy Nasser’s plan to nationalize
the Suez Canal. After moving close
to the pass, Sharon was told by
headquarters that he was not to enter
into the pass, but he would not listen
and engaged the enemy. He did
capture Mitla Pass, but only after
thirty-eight paratroopers were killed,
along with the wounding of one hundred
and twenty Israeli infantry. There
was an inquiry into the needless battle
and loss of Israeli lives, when it was
revealed that the majority of Egyptian
forces had abandoned the area. Even
as Sharon’s convoy had entered the
Mitla Pass, there had been no
reconnaissance of the fissures and cliffs
hidden on the sides of the pass. Out
of seventy organized raids led by Sharon
during the early years of Israeli
nationhood, Sharon was responsible for
the deaths of many his countrymen. During
the Lebanon invasion, “nearly two
hundred reservists” and other
military leadership within the Israeli
army showed their opposition to Sharon’s
vitriolic behavior towards the Beirut
Muslims who had died by fire and aerial
bombardments.
Years later,
Israeli troops would attack Palestinian
civilians on the West Bank and Gaza strip
in the search for what the Israeli
government described as terrorists, and
what the Palestinian revolutionary
leadership would describe as freedom
fighters or those upholding the
liberation of Palestine. Sharon
would describe it as Israel’s fight
against terrorism. His anger did
not merely vent itself upon the Arabs,
but towards Israeli military personnel as
well. In the latter months of 1954,
Sharon was brought before court for
slapping a quartermaster who had refused
to enter military prison for being absent
without leave. Although the charges
were dropped, thereby giving Sharon his
reprieve, he would undertake other
military engagements during the winter
and summers of 1954 to 1956. The
historian Martin van Creveld concluded
that, “ lower-level commanders such
as Sharon…exceeded their
instructions.” It is this
excessiveness, this raw, even brutal over
zealousness by Sharon that would mar his
so-called affable, charismatic character.
The Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling,
writes this about Sharon in analyzing his
military career of that period: “
Sharon went far beyond the scope of what
was ordered, planned, and accepted by his
superiors. He explained these
departures as the result of unexpected
resistance by the enemy, and the need to
save the lives of Israeli soldiers to
avoid leaving behind the wounded and
killed. The fact of the matter was
that Sharon’s expansive actions
caused greater casualties---not only
among the Arabs, but among Israeli
soldiers as well. His practice of
using provocations as a
strategy---inciting Arabs and Jews to
fight one another---became a major
pattern of Sharon’s conduct, one
that he elaborated on and perfected as
his career progressed.”
On March 22nd,
2004, when Sharon ordered Israeli
aircraft, which were American made
F-sixteen fighter jets, to murder the
Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed
Yassin, by missile attack, that scope of
political and military manipulation by
the Israeli Prime Minister revealed
itself in its most grotesque horror.
It only increased the volatile tensions
that could become a brutal regional war,
a conflagration that could become a world
war against terrorism both from without
and within nation-states. As the
United States invites Sharon to visit
American government leaders in the month
of April 2004, as the Arabs place
political balm over the death of Sheik
Ahmed Yassin, Sharon went on talking
about withdrawing his Israeli military
forces from the Gaza strip. However,
Ariel Sharon has no intention of allowing
the militant revolutionary Arab force,
Hamas as well as other Palestinian
militant organizations to control the
West Bank and Gaza strip.
In another
war, one that Sharon lost because of his
strong-headed adventurism and general
disarray of operational strategy, an
Israeli writer, Uzi Benziman, in his
work, “Sharon An Israeli Caesar”,
wrote, “His immense energy, his
indefatigability and his stubborn zeal in
seeking high office were always offset by
his parallel drive towards destruction,
even self-destruction. Thirty years
after he blueprinted the raids of the 101st
commando unit, he was able to blueprint
Israel’s large-scale invasion of
Lebanon. And he failed. He
failed precisely in his alleged area of
competence: war. Over the years,
this military architect lost his ability
to lead his men in war, to urge them on
in battle, to have them keep faith with
him. Intoxicated by the enormous
power given into his hands, he was unable
to curb his passions or restrain his
appetite for immediate and impressive
results.” It is this same
immature attitude towards war and
politics that the military leaders of the
IDF as well as members of the Knesset,
the parliamentary leadership of Israel
has been unable to control. Sharon,
with his impetuous orders, had an old man
in a wheel chair, a paraplegic, no less,
assaulted in a cold, blooded “targeted
killing”. In April of
1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
authorized the killing of Admiral
Yamamoto, the grand military strategist
of the Pacific War. Unlike Sheik
Ahmed Yassin, who was more of a spiritual
voice for the Palestinian people,
Yamamoto implemented practical military
thought and plans to the war for Japan.
What should be remembered is that it was
a declared war between two belligerent
nations. Sharon does not play by
the international codes of war. And
again, he threatened to kill Yasir
Arafat, the nominal leader of the
Palestinian people. And again, with
the same imperious, imperial monotony,
American envoys return to the region of
the Middle East to bring about peace
discussions and negotiations. I am
reminded of another instance in late
ancient history, when the Athenians
attempted feebly to control the overly
dramatic aspirations of Corcya, which
sought to rebel against Corinth. The
complaints and counter-complaints
resulted in endless recriminations.
The debates and the internal fratricide
became the undoing of the whole region of
the Peloponnesian societies.
In so-called
postmodern times, terms like militarism,
democracy, and fascism have taken on a
new fashionable, de-sensitized coda that
many people throughout the ‘civilized’
world accept with indifference. Therefore,
it is easier for nation-states like
Israel and America to demonstrate their
military power without fear of reprisals.
As the Oriental historian, Edward W.
Said, wrote, “Right after the Camp
David conference, Begin started to press
for more settlements, a project he left
in the capable hands of General Arik
Sharon, minister of agriculture and the
country’s most outspoken superhawk,
whose record included several numerous
raids on Palestinian civil settlements.”
We now know that the Camp David accords
were not worth the paper they were
written on. As long as Israel
leaders had access to American finance
and military backing they were loathe to
commitment themselves to actual peaceful
pursuits.
To dominate
their old rivals, the Arab nations, to
eventually control and dominate all of
the Middle East, has been their most
momentous goal. All this has its
history within the Israeli state itself.
In Ehud Sprinazak’s rich academic
work, “The Ascendancy of Israel’s
Radical Right,” it is stated, “A
leading segment within the Israeli
radical right is convinced that Israel’s
military might, which is considerable,
can be translated at any given moment
into political power and national
achievement. This conviction goes
back to the Six-Day War.” Thus,
it is from the very sinews and violent
duel of war against its neighbors, that
Israel hopes to achieve regional hegemony
along side its ally, the Untied States of
America. In other words, Israel, by
means of invasion, political coercion and
assassination of perceived or actual
enemy leadership, desires to force the
Palestinian peoples and other Arab
peoples to submit to its law of order or
face the law of violence. To disarm
the Palestinians of their leadership and
their military arms is Israel’s
final objective.
What can be
asked by the historian and others
interested in the rise of Sharon and what
I would call Imperial fascism in Israel?
Is it recognizable? Is the
destruction of the Palestinians in the
refugee towns of Jenin and Ramallah not
similar to the atrocities committed by
the Nazi panzer divisions, Luftwaffe
aircraft, and Wehrmacht tactical units on
the plains and in the cities of
Czechoslovakia and Poland? And
yet, the historians of the biography of
“Sharon Israel’s
Warrior-Politician” write, “Sharon
said that Arafat was a war criminal with
more Jewish blood on his hands than
anyone since Adolf Hitler. He
called Rabin a traitor who was behaving
like a Nazi…” Yet, Ariel Sharon’s
memory refuses to remember too closely,
too carefully to allow that collective
memory of holocaust become universal for
everyone. In 1982, the Israel
cabinet, then in power, created an
investigating commission concerning the
incredible massacre at Sabra-Shatilla.
Hundreds of
unarmed Palestinian women, and children
were butchered there, their blood running
onto the floors and walls of the
underground shelters, alleyways, and tall
concrete apartment houses. Sharon,
the soldier of many controversial
battles, Sharon the politician, Sharon
the manipulator of great events, was
censored for being “indirectly
responsible” for the human carnage
and tragedy at Sabra-Shatilla camps in
west Beirut in Lebanon. But the
censoring of Sharon for his envolvement
with the murders that took place at
Sabra-Shatilla, while the IDF patrols
looked on, even as Sharon would not stop
the Christian Phalangists in the killing
spree on an arid September day in 1982 at
these camps, did not end this former
general’s ambition for total
political power. As Prime Minister
of Israel in 2003, he could boast that
President George W. Bush remarked that
he, Sharon, had “no better friend
than the United States.”
History is
full of ironies, contradictions, and
facial or cosmetic horrors upon peoples
and lands. Sharon is one of those
leaders in modern times capable of
achieving calculated insidious and inside
maneuvering among his colleagues and the
Israeli people, predominantly between the
Israeli middle class and an Israeli
military oligarchy that resides within
the Israeli army itself. Sharon
has imposed his harsh will on the Israeli
nation. Perhaps, he sees himself as
a Hindenberg, as he may have perceived
himself as a General Patton when he
struck that Israeli quartermaster on the
face during one of Israel’s many
wars. It is too easy to compare him
to Hitler or Benito Mussolini. In
my opinion Ariel Sharon is no different
that many of the petty tyrants that rule
during the time of ideological confusion
among nation-states. Indistinguishable
can be the facade of a small-minded
behavior and attitude which are part of
the general make-up of fascism, but which
can be masked by airs of democratic
gestures and diplomacy. What we
must remember is that the call by Sharon
for a ‘New Order’ in Lebanon
during that war of ethnic and political
hatred ended in futility. The
irony in the state of Israel is that
there
is a 'New
Order' that was brought about by the long
years of diligent work in a war by a man
whom the world calls "Ariel
Sharon", and it is the man with this
name that has been responsible for so
many Israeli and
Arab deaths.
_______________________________________________
Luis L. Tijerina, a
contributing columnist to
HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
has a Masters of Arts Degree in history
from Vermont College of Norwich
University. He lives in Burlington,
Vermont. Contact at andropov@verizon.net
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