Don't forget Sharon's role in Lebanon

Israel is fighting a war to colonise Arab land with colonies for Jews only, argues ROBERT FISK in Beirut.

Three score and five in a day? This was the regular casualty figure during the Lebanese civil war, the average cull of lives in another conflict in which America called for "restraint", another war in which Israel could blast down apartment blocks with impunity while pursuing its war against "terror".

We still forget what happened then. In June 1982, Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners were executed by the Israelis and secretly buried in Sidon; Israeli jets bombed Palestinian hospitals.

Yes, a PLO anti-aircraft gun was positioned on the roof of a hospital in Sidon. But the Israelis went ahead and destroyed the hospital anyway - and all the patients inside it. The Palestinians murdered prisoners - let's not have any romanticism here - and they tortured and executed Arabs who were working as Israeli collaborators.

But what we have now in the occupied territories and Israel is a civil war, a Muslim-Jewish war, a shameful, revolting struggle that mirrors, more and more, the Algerian war of independence of 1954-62. There, too, guerrilla destruction turned into assassination, murder into reprisal, slaughter and massacre into mass killing.

Last Christmas, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told French President Jacques Chirac that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria", the difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay". And there you have it.

Israel, in Sharon's own words, is fighting a colonial war - not the "war against terror" which he tries to mimic in miniature with the United States, but a war to colonise Arab land with colonies for Jews and Jews only, as the colonised ("terrorists", of course) rise up against them.

But why should the Israelis worry? The US will do nothing to stop them. The American press made much of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's criticism of Sharon. But read what Powell actually said. He asked whether Sharon's military policy - of killing more Palestinians - would work. One of his spokesmen, speaking a few days ago, announced that "we had to make clear to him [Sharon] that there is simply no evidence that approach will succeed".

Powell and his minions were not attacking Sharon because the Israeli policy was immoral. They were not criticising him because the idea of inflicting "more losses" - Sharon's own words - was morally objectionable. It was the military ineffectiveness of killing Palestinians - not the abuse of human rights that this embodies - to which the Americans took objection.

And why should anyone be surprised when the Israelis kill paramedics in ambulances? In 1996, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a missile into a Lebanese ambulance - clearly marked - killing three children and two women. The aircrew claimed a Hizbollah guerrilla was travelling in the vehicle. The statement was totally untrue.

Yes, of course, the Palestinians have crimes to answer for. Who decided that Israeli civilians should pay the price for the war against occupation, as Hanan Ashrawi has bravely asked? Who gave them the right to slaughter Israeli kids in pizza parlours?

But Israel is America's ally and President George W. Bush is doing nothing to end this monstrous war.

Bush has allowed the world to forget that Sharon is the man held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission for the massacre of 1700 Palestinian civilians in Beirut in 1982. But the world may start to remember now.

- INDEPENDENT

Feature: Middle East

Map

UN: Information on the Question of Palestine

Israel's Permanent Mission to the UN

Palestine's Permanent Observer Mission to the UN

Middle East Daily

Arabic News

Arabic Media Internet Network

Jerusalem Post

Israel Wire

US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process