Livia Rokach - Israels Sacred Terrorism

1. In his Diary Sharett reports consultations with the Israeli ambassador to Brazil, David Shealtiel, concerning the settlement in that country, of half a million Palestinian refugeesone hundred thousand in the first stage. Sharett expresses enthusiasm for the project.

2. Negotiations on the implementation of a U.N.-approved plan for the division of Jordan River water among Israel, Syria and Jordan were conducted at the time by President Eisenhowers special envoy Eric Johnston, Israel, however, was rapidly nearing the completion of its own deviation project. No agreement was ever concluded.

3. In September 1979, following the publication of Sharetts Diary, an Israeli citizen on a radio debate asked Arik Sharon about the massacre, in which sixty-nine civilians were killed. Sharon, who personally commanded the Kibya action, and who was a loyal member of Mapai in the 1950s, according to Sharett, is today the minister in the Begin government responsible for the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza. A report on this radio discussion in the Histadrut Labor Party newspaper Davar, of 14 September 1979, gives the following comments:

The responsibility for the killing of 69 civilians in Kibya, according to Sharon, falls on the victims themselves. At that time the Arab population was used to the Armys reaching just the edge of the village, dynamiting just one house, and leaving. Therefore, the people stayed in their houses. Thus, any attempt to claim that in Kibya there was a cold-blooded action to murder women and children should be described as a completely unfounded accusation.

Sharon decided personally to give an energetic character to that action. He instructed that 600 kilograms of explosives be taken along. Forty-five houses in the village were marked to be blown up, among which was the school. The task force did not know that people were hiding in the cellars and the upper floors. The houses were blown up after a superficial examination of the ground floor alone. This is why the number of victims was so high.

Kibya was, according to all evidence, a tragic error. A more cautious commander may have avoided it. Had Arik Sharon changed for the better since, he would have now said that he was sorry. He did not.

Davar editorialist Nahum Barnea ostensibly attacks Sharon, but in fact he obviously tends to excuse the murderous operation. Kibya was no tragic error but a deliberate crime, as the context of Sharons story proves. Before going into action, Sharetts soldiers, moreover, were given a dramatic description of a previous incident in Yahud (an Arab village repopulated with Israeli Jews) in which a woman was killed. Yahud served as a pretext for the Kibya attack, although it was known that Kibya had no other relation to the earlier episode. Clearly, the intention was to incite the soldiers emotionally to exterminate the greatest possible number of civilians and have no qualms about the killing of women and children. Significantly, upon his return from Kibya, Sharon reported the number of victims to have been ten to twelve: We counted only the military dead, the soldiers of the Jordanian Regions garrison, he said in the above broadcast.

4. At that time Israel was literally flooding the world with propaganda in which it catastrophically pictured itself as threatened in its daily existence by growing Arab power. It is also significant that the above disclosures were made confidentially to American Zionist leaders, who thus became involved in Israels two-faced strategy. The use of the term Western Eretz Israel is particularly illuminating. It implies that, in contrast with their official statements at that time, the concept of an Eastern Eretz Israel (i.e., Jordan) has never been eliminated from the political vocabulary of the Israeli leadership.

5. See Haaretz of 29 June 1979, commenting on a recent wave of terrorist actions in Syria attributed to the Muslim Brothers: If Syria assumes its Sunni character again, as it was prior to the rise of the Baath and the Alawites to power, new and varied opportunities may open up to Israel, Lebanon and the whole Middle East. In view of such a possibility, Israel must keep vigilant and alert: It must not an opportunity which might be unrepeatable. A quarter of a century later, the same formula is being used. In general, a close reading of the Israeli press through 1979 suggests that Israel is again deploying efforts in various directions to bring about the fall of Assads regime, and to install a Damascus regime which would go along with Israeli policies. Israel is aiming at installing a Sadat in Damascus, one Israeli political figure told us in September 1979.

6. This is not to say, obviously, that no alliance between Israel and the US existed prior to 1967. Through the fifties collaboration was particularly close between Israels special services and the CIA. It is certainly not accidental that following the Israeli leaderships outlining of plans to disrupt Lebanon, the U.S. according to CIA director William Colby in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees in July 1976supplied arms in the fifties to Christians in Lebanon in the framework of the use of religious and ethnic minorities in the fight against communism. However, starting in the summer of 1956, and going well into the sixties, Israel was dependent on France for arms supplies and could not have acted openly against Frances wishes. The end of Frances colonial war against Algeria and De Gaulles growing impatience with Israels arrogance led to the termination of the French-Israeli special relationship in 1967, and to its substitution by the exclusive U.S.-Israel one.

7. Israels systematic genocide in Lebanon for over a decade, which has recently reached a degree of cynical brutality unequaled in contemporary history outside of U.S. action in Indochina, bears no justification in any case. In the light of the documentation we have presented, Israels pretense of acting in self defense and in defense of Lebanons Christians against PLO terror becomes even more ridiculous as well as outrageous. This pretense is all too often supported by Western media and governments. Undoubtedly, Israels permanent representative to the U.N., Yehuda Blum, counts cynically on the ignorance of the general public when he says: Lebanons fundamental problems date back many years. The situation in the South should be considered only a byproduct and a symptom of those problems (The Nation, 15 September 1979). This is how, he describes Israels direct massacre of civilian populations and the other daily attacks, devastation and torture, carried out with U.S.-made arms and under Israeli protection by Israels isolationist Maronite puppets commanded by Major Saad Haddad.

8. Sharett hinted that the report was clandestinely intercepted by the Israelis. He also aired the possibility that Hutcheson intended to refer to elements from the Irgun, acting against his government and then rejected this hypothesis. In this connection it is interesting to recall that in a debate in the Knesset (Divrei Haknesset Hashnya, p. 654) on January 25, 1955, a Herut spokesman, Arie Altmann, attacked the government for its weaknesses and added: If the government will not comply with its duties in the security field, dont be surprised if one day you will be confronted with the surprising phenomena of private initiatives, and not one initiative, but a very complex and ramified one.... In his Mistraim VeHaa Fedayeen (see note 20) Ehud Yaari mentions the existence at that time of a terrorist group operating in border areas under the name of Tadmor Group of whichhe saysno details are yet available. These disclosures suggest that a close cooperation existed at that time, on an operative-clandestine level, between the pre-state terrorist Zionist organizationsthe Irgun and the Stern gang, which were officially dissolved in 1948 but in fact continued to act militarilyand regular army or security units such as the paratroopers corps and Sharons Unit 101. The latterYaari recallsoperated its own unpublicized infiltrations into the Gaza Strip..... accomplishing actions such as the attack on the refugee camp at Al Burj, near Gaza, on August 31, 1953. Further research on this subject might reveal that the extent of the acts of aggressive provocations by Israeli forces across the armistice lines were much vaster than has ever been known publicly. However, the most important aspect of these relations lies in their political significance, which offers a completely new key to the interpretation of the history of the Zionist state. In fact, they constitute a decisive refutation of the accepted thesis according to which a distinct division, marked by ideological, political and pragmatic antagonisms, existed at least up to 1965 between labor Zionism and the so-called irrational Zionism of Revisionist origin.