Ayoon Wa Azan (Sharon And His Past)
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2005/04/15
When the Arab leaders welcome Ariel Sharon and shake hands with him, while his hands are stained with the blood of children and adults, and send him ministers and ambassadors, they would better remember Sharon's past and present.
I resume with Uzi Benziman's book entitled Sharon: An Israeli Caesar.
- When Sharon became the commander of a battalion, he no longer needed the prior approval from his superior officers to set up ambushes. Thus, he set up one for the women of the Arab village of Katama, whose only sin was that they used to bring water from a well situated on a "territory" Sharon deemed Israeli. Two women were killed, the Jordanian units fired and the UN observers intervened. For years, the battalion officers kept on bitterly remembering this event, because Sharon has carried out an unjustified battle. He reprimanded a soldier who refused to kill two women.
- He undertook a reprisal raid on the village of Nebi Samuil, after other officers refused it, and he destroyed empty buildings.
- He fought the Bedouin tribe of Azazma from the Naqab Desert, in order to force them to leave to Egypt, and some of his soldiers expressed their objections.
- In front of Sharon's insistence to attack El Burj camp in Gaza Strip, he thus killed 15 people, among whom were women and children. When his soldiers protested he answered that "the women are the whores of the Arab infiltrators who have been attacking Israeli civilians."
- Prime Minister Ben Gurion, Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, The Chief of the General Staff Mordecai Maklef and the Chief Operations Officer Moshe Dayan chose in 1953 the town of Kibya to undertake a reprisal raid in return for the murder of an Arab Israeli woman and her two children by Arab infiltrators. Sharon led the attack. Israelis killed 69 people, the majority of them being women and children, and they destroyed 45 houses.
- Sharon undertook several raids against Arab targets without the prior approval of the leadership. He used to deny, lie and hold someone else responsible for them. In February 1955, during a raid on an Egyptian army base, he killed 38 Egyptian soldiers. Gamal Abdul Nasser then stated that following this raid, he became convinced that peace between Israel and Egypt would be impossible, which forced him to sign an arms supply agreement with Czechoslovakia.
- In December 1955, he launched a raid against five Syrian positions. He killed 56 Syrian soldiers and took 32 as prisoners without any provocation.
- The soldiers and officers complained about him, and Haim Bar-Lev presided the tribunal to investigate the complaints, but the investigation was finally dissipated. The leadership wondered why all the operations led by Sharon go beyond the agreed upon terms.
- The leadership's fears were translated into reality upon the attack on Kalkilya. In fact, Dayan, had ordered him to attack a police station. However, he killed 88 Jordanians. Despite the surprise, the Jordanians inflicted big losses among Israelis, and thus killed 18 people and injured 50 others. The magnitude of the losses pushed Dayan to reprimand Sharon, and the relations between them had been strained. Dayan sharply criticized him in his memoirs.
I shall stop here to say that his "failure" in Sinai, during the tripartite attack in 1956, deserves a longer review, infeasible in this column. In brief, after the Israelis reached the Eastern side of the Milta Pass, Sharon asked and insisted to continue. Finally, he was allowed to conduct a reconnaissance patrol, however, he put together a well-equipped fighting unit constituted of tanks, vans, trucks and a jeep. He was trying to occupy the Eastern side of the Pass, to seem a hero, however, the Israelis fell in the Egyptian trap. 38 people were killed and another 120 were injured, some of them were left where they got injured. Despite the intervention of the airplanes, the Egyptian soldiers remained in their places, firing on Israelis.
Benziman said that all the working and former officers sharply attacked Sharon, especially that he stayed in the rear and sent his soldiers to death. It was not the first time he hides, and later on, he went home. They criticized his eating habits that set a poor example for his soldiers, the fact that he gained reputation at the expenses of the paratroopers, that there is a wide gap between courage and audacity, that he is a coward, and that the soldiers will stay will stay with him, despite everything, because he has been successful in getting the approval of the government and the General Staff.
For the next seven years after the Milta Pass attack, Sharon was relegated to secondary positions. He thus resigned his commission and went to study at an officers' training school in Kimberley, Britain. When he came back, he was still offered second line-staff positions, the first one being the commander of the infantry training section. He was suspended because he was caught lying, however, Ben Gurion intervened. When Yitzhak Rabin, who was Chief of the General Staff, appointed him Chief of Staff of the Northern Sector, he immediately started escalating the situation with Syria, saying he wants to crush it. The commander of the Northern Sector, General Meir Zorea, accused him of being like Narcissus, because he loves but himself and hates to see any other officer succeeding.
Sharon had met his wife Margalit when he was 15 years old. She is an immigrant from Hungary, to whom he was married after a love story. They had a son named Gur, who died in a fire incident between kids. Sharon persecuted the responsible family until they went from the moshav. On May 6, 1962, Margalit was driving her car from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, when she suddenly veered out of her lane. A truck approaching from the opposite direction was unsuccessful in avoiding her. She died. Sharon died when he got the news, however, he remained silent during her funerals.
The police investigation found Margalit responsible for reckless and negligent driving. Friends said that she was in love with Sharon and had a strong sense of jealousy of her own youngest sister, Lilly. Lilly had immigrated to Israel as a youngster and spent her first few years ay Sharon's home. When called up to the army, she served in the Paratroopers Brigade, then under Sharon's command.
Margalit's acquaintances note that during the weeks just prior to the accident, Margalit was once depressed and preoccupied, and had confided to a friend that her life had become miserable as a result of her all consuming suspicion of a liaison between her sister and her husband.
Did Margalit die in a common car accident or did she suicide?
A year later on, Sharon married Lilly.
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