Ariel Sharon: By Karma Nabulsi..

[General Duke]

The strong man

 

Sharon is no statesman and his motives have never been opaque - conquest by military means

 

Karma Nabulsi

Friday January 6, 2006

 

Everybody knows that Ariel Sharon had a dark past. For us Palestinians, for me as a Palestinian, he is our dark present. The entire destruction of the fabric of our civic and political society over the past five years has had the looming presence of Sharon at its black heart. That single moment when in the year 2000 Sharon went to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) to light the chaotic, atavistic fuse of his return to political power - the moment that sparked our revolt against everything that he represented, and which began his rise to power - that single moment was the essence of his persona, the uniquely ruthless, relentless dynamic of his role as conqueror.

 

With the return of this man, we were lost, again, and one could not let his return be witnessed without an active daily resistance to it, and the fate he had in store for us. It was this single fact that mobilised me to work again in the political realm. Having lived in Beirut with my family and friends, and having worked, and fought, and stayed alive throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Sharon engineered in the spring and summer of 1982, I had no doubt what he had in store for us when he began his final climb back to power. And just so: in February of 2001, within three days of being elected prime minister, he was replaying across the West Bank and Gaza his dark arts, a mad echo of his practices of 20 years before in Lebanon: the assassination and destruction of the fighters, the local defence committees, the refugee camps. Women and children and young men killed, our buildings demolished, our institutional infrastructure, our records, our art, broken, gone. And, of course, our leadership encircled and besieged.

 

If he destroyed our leader, he believed, he would destroy our collective aspirations for freedom and for an independent Palestine. His vision of our destiny was quite simply one of apocalyptic proportions, he was no politician, nor elder statesman. To us, he was always the classic military conqueror and adventurer - we never found him "controversial", nor his motives opaque. He never left us guessing. His practices, his aims, his intentions were made clear through his policies. Every Palestinian man, woman and child witnessed, lived, or died under that vision, and they each understood it well.

 

But during the new war launched by Sharon against our people, the generation of 1982 that I was part of were more scattered, further flung to the four corners of the world, farther away from being able to do anything to help, even more powerless than before. So to those of us who had fought in those earlier battles and were still living, his return did something more cruel than simply bring back haunting reminders of those days, and of how many friends had died. It changed the look of what we did, our luck, our motives, how we had failed to stop him when we were younger.

 

Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who evokes this terrible reaction.

 

I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return to public office.

 

To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and above all our national liberation movement. He did not want us to have a national framework, his desire was to reduce us to small quarrelling groups and factions trapped under his prison rule, disorganised, disintegrated, or co-opted; he planned actively and provocatively (and carefully) to create such an impoverishment of our people's public and private life.

 

This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination, imprisonment, violent military invasion. His fate for us was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what he had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.

 

His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel, but now turned into a tragedy of heartbreaking proportions, a destroyed place, corrupted beyond description by the devastation of Israel's terrible role there since 1967.

 

We Palestinians saw how he well he understood the west, how far he could push it - he had an almost magical ability to measure how craven the response could be to his violations of common decency and international law, how much he could get away with. He would test, and test the limits of his actions, would he get a red light? Would the Americans stop him?

 

I watched him at this, day after day, during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, from besieged Beirut, which was in flames. Every time he would break the ceasefire, break his word to the Americans. We, on the other side of this equation, were waiting, hearts in mouths, for international protection, intervention, help of any kind not to be left at his mercy. How many times in these last years did he break the ceasefire in Gaza through a provocative assassination, an aerial assault, a military raid killing dozens of civilians to provoke Hamas to attack Israel? His pattern was set in stone, a stone around our necks.

 

Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.

 

I have talked a lot about those days with old friends who survived the camps, exiles now living far away in snowy northern Europe. What it meant to have left under orders, what it meant to have been trapped behind. For the ones who had to stay behind when the fighters left, you see, already understood Sharon well.

 

· Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and a former PLO representative