A Pact With The Devil

The King of Israel is dead. Here’s to the demise of his appalling legacy.

Images by Carlos Latuff, friend of Salem-News.com in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

(LONDON) - Those of you who are familiar with my thoughts and writings will know by now that I loathe invoking any religious edict to make my point. In this case the exception is justified.

You would have to be living in the deepest recesses of the Amazonian jungle or the farthest reaches of Outer Mongolia not to have heard of the death of ‘the devil’ that was Ariel Sharon. Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear nor have a decent word to say about the dead but on this occasion I will just refrain from dancing over his grave.

Throughout the years since the Zionist movement first lusted after and gobbled up Palestine there have been many cruel leaders in Israel who appear to have been spawned by the devil himself. They surpassed the wildest of our imaginations in their brutality and inhumanity. None more so than Ariel Sharon, the “King of Israel”.

It would take me forever to list the crimes perpetrated by this devil incarnate against us Palestinians. But I shall try.

Born Arik Scheinermann, the son of Belarus Jewish immigrants, Sharon, from the very beginning of his military and political career, was never interested in peace nor in co-existence with the indigenous Palestinian people. What he was really interested in was to wipe Palestine and Palestinians off the map. In an interview, by Donald Neff, for ‘Time Magazine’ in 1993 he was quoted as saying, “Our forefathers did not come here in order to build a democracy but to build a Jewish State.”

Later, in 1998, he told ‘Agence France Presse’, “It is the duty of Israel to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”

As his career progressed, first as a military commander and then as a politician, Sharon did not spare any opportunity to ethnically cleanse Palestine and took on the task with alacrity. Even Menachem Begin described him as “ a great general but a vicious man”.

1953: Kibya a small Palestinian town where Sharon lead a raid, ruthlessly destroying 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers.

1967: As a General during the 6-day war, Sharon ordered his tank battalion to roll over and crush Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Desert.

1982: Sharon invaded the Lebanon, causing the death of 17,000 civilians and the destruction of most of Lebanon’s infrastructure.

He also presided over the massacre of over 1400 Palestinian refugee children, women and men in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut.

This is an eyewitness account of that massacre:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XbMtJhvfZ0

Such was the atrocity of such an unspeakable act of utter inhumanity it was condemned by the UN General Assembly as genocide. Few, if any world leaders, appeared to notice.

2002: Under his watch the Jenin Massacre of 4 days was perpetrated, when more than 150 Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery, backed by F-16 fighter jets, attacked Jenin refugee camp, home to 15,000 Palestinian refugees, living on one square kilometer of land.

In an article in the London “Times” of 1998 he was quoted as saying, “You don’t simply bundle people on to trucks and drive them away…. I prefer a more positive policy….to create, in effect, a condition that in a ‘positive’ way will induce people to leave.”

In the same year, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party he said; "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."

Sharon devoted a great deal of time and energy to Yassir Arafat. By Arafat’s own count, Sharon tried to have him killed thirteen times. “All the governments of Israel for many years, Labor, Likud, all of them, made an effort to remove him from our society,” Sharon said.” We never succeeded.”

Perhaps, amongst some queuing up in their thousands to pay their respects to his memory are those who believe that, despite a career defined by brutality and destruction, Sharon appeared to play the pragmatist when he forcibly removed 8000 Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip. Quite the opposite. It was not done out of the goodness of his heart. After the withdrawal from Gaza, the enclave has been besieged from land, sea and air; a most brutal and inhumane collective punishment imaginable of 1.7 million Palestinians. As for settlement activities, there are now 40 settlers in the West Bank for every one that was removed from Gaza.

To understand the measure of the man who was known as ‘the bulldozer’ read the words of Gilad Sharon, the son and heir in 2012:

“Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too," he wrote in the Jerusalem Post. Mr Sharon, also urged that the government should force the leadership of Gaza to capitulate by cutting its throat.

"There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they'd really call for a ceasefire," he wrote.

And let us not forget that Ariel Sharon approved the construction of the separation wall that dissects Palestinian land and separates Palestinian families from their farms and communities.

And now he is lying in state and we await the hoards of sycophants and hypocrites to file through while offering their condolences and showering praise and admiration on the ‘King of Israel’ and his legacy.

The King of Israel is dead. Here’s to the demise of his appalling legacy.

Jafar M. Ramini
Salam Wa Laisa Estislam
'Peace Not Capitulation'

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Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer, commentator and analyst on Middle Eastern affairs living in London.

He was born in Jenin, northern Palestine, was educated in England and spent the early years of his working life in the Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. He has traveled far and wide, searching for the answer to a question that still eludes him.

Why does the United States of America support the Zionist line in such a blind folded way while ignoring the legitimate rights of the indigenous Palestinian people? Particularly as the Palestinian people harbour no ill feelings towards America and its people nor has ever caused them any harm. It is, Jafar says, a conundrum.