Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[sylvester80]

Let's see if Zeev would allow the real story to be told:

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"As minister of defense in 1982, Sharon orchestrated Israel's invasion of Lebanon, a military operation that killed tens of thousands of civilians as Israeli forces sought to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation's infrastructure in the region.

According to the statistics published in the Third World Quarterly (Volume 6, Issue 4, October 1984, pp. 934-949), over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese were either killed or wounded from 4 July 1982 through to 15 August 1982, 40 percent were children.

Israel's stated motive for its "Operation Peace for Galilee" invasion of Lebanon was to bring peace to frontline Israeli communities in Northern Galilee. In fact, the disastrous events of 1982-85 were the very catalysts of the Hizbullah Shi'a resistance movement in South Lebanon. Previous to Israel's military interventionism in the early 1980s, the Shi'a of south Lebanon had not professed any aggression or hostility towards the Israelis.

Ariel Sharon is responsible for the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, on the southern outskirts of Beirut. The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatila took place from the evening of September 16, 1982 until the morning of September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israeli armed forces.

The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Prior to the massacre, Sharon had meetings with the Phalange forces.

For over 60 hours -- aided by an Israeli siege around the camps and guided by the light of Israeli flares -- forces belonging to the Israeli-allied Phalangist militia went through the camps, killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Some were lined up against walls and mown down by machine-gun fire. Others were left in heaps on the floors of their homes or on the streets of the camps. Children were shot dead, women and girls were raped and mutilated and men were disembowelled prior to being executed.

The precise number of victims of the massacre may never be exactly determined. The International Committee of the Red Cross counted 1,500 at the time of the massacre but by September 22 this count had risen to 2,400. On the following day 350 bodies were uncovered so that the total then ascertained had reached 2,750.

Israeli military intelligence estimated that 700 to 800 were killed. UN Resolution UNSC 521 (1982) of 19 September 1982 offered uneqivocal condemnation of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, although it avoided naming any perpetrators at this early stage.

The question of direct Israeli involvement in the massacre is one that has never been fully resolved. However -- despite denials -- it is not credible that Israeli troops surrounding the two camps were unaware of what was going on inside:

>From 5-5.30 am low level flights of Israeli planes over Sabra and Shatila took place, after which shelling promptly commenced." (Source: The New York Times, 16 September 1982, quoting Dr. Witsoe, Gaza hospital.) "The Israelis established observation posts on top of multi-storey buildings in the north-west quadrant of the Kuwaiti Embassy. From these posts, the naked eye has a clear view of several sections of the camps, including those parts of Shatila where piles of bodies were found." (Source: Newsweek, 4 October 1982, Ray Wilkinson; The Guardian, 20 September 1982; and The New York Times, 26 September 1982.) "Throughout the night flares lit up the sky. They were fired at the rate of two a minute, as reported by an Israeli soldier from a mortar unit." (Source: The Jerusalem Post, 21 September 1982.)

A Jewish-American registered nurse, Ms. Ellen Siegel, was working in Gaza hospital in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut, where she and a medical team treated the first victims of the massacre. She and other health workers were lined up against a bullet-riddled wall by Phalangists who were about to execute them, with rifles aimed, when an Israeli officer came running to stop this possible execution. She told The Electronic Intifada that: "I spoke with Zeev Schiff [a military affairs correspondant for Ha'aretz newspaper] in person about this incident. The wall was located just outside the camp but obviously if the commander could see this, he could see other things.

We were taken to the area of the FCP [Forward Command Post]. From there one could look down onto the camps. My understanding is that the IDF had sophisticated visual equipment. There was a BBC film made in '92 ("See No Evil"). In this film they interviewed Israeli soldiers who were at the camps. They clearly allude to knowing what was going on."

An official Israeli commission of inquiry -- chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court -- investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings.

The Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre, although it carefully sidestepped any accusation of direct involvement in the massacre and chose not to attempt to reconcile much of the contradictory testimony.

The commission's report stated in pertinent part:
"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps.

In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defence Minister was charged."

The Commission also concluded: "In his meeting with the Phalangist commanders, the Defence Minister made no attempt to point out to them the gravity of the danger that their men would commit acts of slaughter.... Had it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real supervision could be exercised over the Phalangist force that entered the camps with the IDF's assent, his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The usefulness of the Phalangists' entry into the camps was wholly disproportionate to the damange their entry could cause if it were uncontrolled." The Commission further noted: "We shall remark here that it is obstensibly puzzling that the Defence Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister [Menachem Begin] privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps."