Author Archives: News Sources

Senators led by AIPAC on a ‘march towards war’

The New York Times reports: With the United States and Iran about to embark on a critical phase of nuclear talks, President Obama is waging an intense rear-guard action to prevent Senate Democrats from supporting strict new sanctions that could upend his diplomatic efforts.

Sponsors of the bill, which would aim to drive Iran’s oil exports down to zero, have secured the backing of 59 senators, putting them within striking distance of a two-thirds majority that could override Mr. Obama’s threatened veto. Republicans overwhelmingly support the bill. So far 16 Democrats have broken with the president, and the bill’s sponsors hope to get more.

The struggle is casting a long shadow over the talks, which administration officials say will be even harder than those that resulted in the six-month interim agreement, signed Sunday, that will temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program in return for limited sanctions relief.

Iranian officials have threatened to leave the bargaining table if the United States enacts any new sanctions during the negotiations.

The White House has cast the issue in stark terms, saying that a vote for new sanctions would be, in effect, a “march toward war” and challenging those lawmakers who support the bill to acknowledge publicly that they favor military action against Iran.

“It just stands to reason if you close the diplomatic option, you’re left with a difficult choice of waiting to see if sanctions cause Iran to capitulate, which we don’t think will happen, or considering military action,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. [Continue reading…]

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The cost of misusing American might

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: The U.S. military is like the highly skilled, gadget-toting contractor who promises to give your kitchen a nifty makeover in no time whatsoever. Here’s the guy you can count on to get the job done. Just look at those references! Yet by the time he drives off months later, the kitchen’s a shambles and you’re stuck with a bill several times larger than the initial estimate. Turns out the job was more complicated than it seemed. But what say we take a crack at remodeling the master bath?

That pretty much summarizes the American experience with war since the end of the Cold War. By common consent, when it comes to skills and gadgets, U.S. forces are in a league of their own. Yet when it comes to finishing the job on schedule and on budget, their performance has been woeful.

Indeed, these days the United States absolves itself of any responsibility to finish wars that it starts. When we’ve had enough, we simply leave, pretending that when U.S. forces exit the scene, the conflict is officially over. In 2011, when the last American troops crossed from Iraq into Kuwait, President Obama proudly declared that he had made good on his campaign promise to end the Iraq war. Sometime late this year, when the U.S. terminates its combat role in Afghanistan, he will waste no time consigning that war to the past as well. [Continue reading…]

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Remembering Aaron Swartz

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Parker Higgins writes: One year ago, we lost Aaron Swartz, a dear friend and a leader in the fight for a free and open Internet. The shock was, and remains, a profound one. It’s a testament to the power of his commitments and ideals that both in life and in death he has inspired millions around the world, including all of us at EFF, to redouble our own efforts to advance the causes that he believed in, and to untangle the twisted and brutal computer crime laws that were used to persecute him.

Aaron was a passionate activist, but he also stood out as a technologist whose ambitions were always aligned towards a better, more just future. His pioneering work demonstrated a passion for harnessing technology to advance the public interest. As the Internet community confronted massive new challenges to free speech and privacy in 2013, there were many moments when we wondered quietly about what Aaron would have said and done.

Sadly, we are left to wonder. We know from his work on the software that would become SecureDrop that Aaron believed in making the world a safer place for whistleblowers to expose injustice and wrongdoing. We are all worse off without the passion and curiosity he surely would have brought to Edward Snowden’s continuing disclosures about NSA spying. We are reminded of Aaron as we push forward in our court cases against the NSA, help organizing against the spying with the stopwatching.us coalition, evaluate the Congressional proposals and, of course, as we continue to build and support technologies that let people take their privacy into their own hands. Aaron understood deeply that, more than ever in a world where information is power, both legal and technical protections for privacy are essential to keep people from being rendered powerless. [Continue reading…]

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NSA phone record collection does little to prevent terrorist attacks, group says

The Washington Post reports: An analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”

In the majority of cases, traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case, according to the study by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

The study, to be released Monday, corroborates the findings of a White House-appointed review group, which said last month that the NSA counterterrorism program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that much of the evidence it did turn up “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.” [Continue reading…]

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Tunisia tweets its way to democracy

Noah Feldman writes: At the Philadelphia convention of 1787, James Madison alone took complete notes in a rapid shorthand, a self-appointed job that he said almost killed him. But today, constitutional debates are recorded in Twitter bursts — and in Tunisia, where the constituent assembly is compiling that nation’s new constitution, the children of the Arab Spring are using the full range of technological tools to ensure a degree of transparency never seen before in such political processes.

At the heart of the technological openness is a Tunisian nongovernmental group called Al Bawsala, which means, roughly, the Compass. Bawsala staffers are 20-something Tunisians dressed in the same skinny jeans and sweaters worn everywhere by young people too cool to be called hipsters. Their look alone marks a contrast with the formally dressed delegates of the National Assembly whom they supervise.

And supervise they do. From the balcony of the main chamber of the National Assembly, in the parliament building called the Bardo, the Bawsala posse keeps an eagle eye on every moment of the proceedings. When an assembly member speaks, at least one Bawsala member tweets a precis of the speaker’s comments in real time — translated into French. The speed and quality of the summaries are amazingly impressive. I’ve been sitting in the balcony myself, and whenever I’ve had trouble following the assembly members’ Arabic — sometimes speakers shift from formal standard Arabic into Tunisian dialect — I would look over a colleague’s shoulder at the Bawsala feed. Invariably, it was already posted and immensely clarifying. Everyone around me was following it, from journalists to international observers. It was the first draft of the first draft of history. It also meant that anyone outside the hall could follow the debates, even without access to Tunisian television. [Continue reading…]

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‘Man of peace’? Ariel Sharon was the champion of violent solutions

Avi Shlaim writes: Ariel Sharon, who died on Saturday after eight years in a coma, was one of Israel’s most iconic and controversial figures. His long and chequered career as a soldier and politician largely revolved around one issue: the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours. As a soldier he was involved at the sharp end of this bitter conflict. As a politician he became known as “the Bulldozer” on account of his contempt for his critics and his ruthless drive to get things done. Sharon was a deeply flawed character, renowned for his brutality, mendacity, and corruption. Yet despite these flaws he holds a special place in the annals of his country’s history.

Sharon was an ardent Jewish nationalist, a dyed-in-the-wool hardliner, and a ferocious rightwing hawk. He also displayed a consistent preference for force over diplomacy in dealing with the Arabs. Reversing Clausewitz‘s famous dictum, he treated diplomacy as the extension of war by other means.

The title he chose for his biography aptly summed him up in one word – Warrior. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Sharon was essentially a fighting machine. His critics denounced him as a practitioner of “gun Zionism”, as a perversion of the Zionist idea of the strong, fair-minded, and fearless Jew. To the Palestinians Sharon represented the cold, cruel, militaristic face of the Zionist occupation. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt army chief considers presidential bid

Al Jazeera reports: Egypt’s army chief has indicated that he may run for president in elections slated for later this year, according to state media.

General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who led a military coup last July to depose the country’s first democratically-elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, said on Saturday that he would run for the top post if the Egyptian people and army want him to.

“If I run then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army… We work in a democracy,” Sisi said during an army seminar in Cairo. [Continue reading…]

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Hagel’s cozy relationship with Egypt’s new dictator

Shadi Hamid writes: Since the July 3 military coup in Egypt, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has spoken to General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi – the country’s charismatic strongman – more than 25 times. The two men reportedly first bonded somewhat over a two-hour lunch in April. Apparently, Sissi liked Hagel’s “bluntness.” Their relationship, forged during one of the worst spells of violence in Egypt’s modern history, provides an interesting, if unsettling, window into the strategic drift of U.S. policy in Egypt as well as the broader region.

Since that first lunch, Hagel and Sissi have spoken often. Out of the 30 or so total calls, the U.S. government has provided 15 official readouts over six months, each with a similar set of messages to Sissi: Try to be less repressive and more inclusive. Egypt is the only country where Hagel has a regular, direct line of communication not just with the minister of defense but also the (effective) head of state, since Sissi happens to be both. With each passing month, the readouts become more surreal, with Hagel asking what has become one of the region’s more brutal, repressive regimes to be “democratic.” Although there are certainly competitors—Syria and Israel-Palestine come to mind—it is difficult to think of another case where U.S. policy is so completely divorced from realities on the ground.

There is little to suggest that Hagel’s exhortations have had even a minimal effect on Sissi and the Egyptian government’s conduct. Since the coup, there have been four mass killings, including the worst massacre in decades; some 10,000 people have been arrested or detained; and opposition protests have been banned. The crackdown has extended to secular activists as well, with three leading revolutionaries sentenced to three years in prison. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian refugees starving in Damascus

Electronic Intifada reports: “There is profound civilian suffering in Yarmouk with widespread incidence of malnutrition and the absence of medical care, including for those who have severe conflict-related injuries,” Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees says.

Since July, some 20,000 Palestinian and Syrian residents remaining in Yarmouk camp on the outskirts of Damascus, have been under a tight siege by the Syrian army, with persistent reports of people dying of starvation.

Gunness says that women are dying in childbirth and children are suffering from malnutrition-related diseases, including anemia, rickets, and kwashiorkor.

In his full statement below, sent to The Electronic Intifada, Gunness describes the desperate and horrifying situation in the camp. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS execute dozens of Islamist captives

Reuters reports: The al Qaeda-linked Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant executed dozens of rival Islamists over the last two days as the group recaptured most territory it had lost in the northeastern Syrian province of Raqqa, activists said on Sunday.

One of the activists, who spoke from the province on condition of anonymity, said up to 100 fighters from the Nusra Front, another al Qaeda affiliate, and the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, captured by ISIL in the town of Tel Abyad on the border with Turkey, the nearby area of Qantari and the provincial capital city of Raqqa, were shot dead.

There was no independent confirmation of the report.

“About 70 bodies, most shot in the head, were collected and sent to the Raqqa National hospital,” the activist said.

“Many of those executed had been wounded in the fighting. The fact that Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham are ideologically similar to the ISIL did not matter,” he added. [Continue reading…]

Whether ISIS and the Assad regime have direct lines of communication and are coordinating their fight is purely a matter of speculation, but what seems indisputable is that their interests so closely overlap they are essentially fighting on the same side.

Abdallah al-Sheikh, an activist in northern Syria, said Assad’s forces had began bombarding areas from which ISIL had withdrawn, such as the town of Maarat Misreen and parts of Aleppo city.

“ISIL have been doing Assad a huge favour by killing many of the formidable rebel commanders and the regime has chosen to help it by not touching many of the areas it had taken. As soon as it withdrew, the bombing resumed,” he said.

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Syrian city faces closely timed attacks from air strikes and ISIS

EA Worldview: Unconfirmed reports claim that the Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham has taken the town of Al-Bab, near Aleppo.

ISIS attacks followed regime bombing of the town on Sunday.

Activists said six people died and 20 were injured in the airstrikes.

One activist told EA, “ISIS attacked while everyone was busy rescuing victims of the air raids. They are combing house by house now searching for fighters and weapons, and stealing stuff.”

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Syrian refugees no longer know who is fighting let alone who is winning

The Guardian reports: Lugging three plastic sacks full of clothes, Abu Mohammed and his three daughters pulled back the wrought iron border crossing gate, stepped through it into Turkey and smiled.

As one daughter wept tears of relief, her father recounted their 12-hour journey from Aleppo, through some of the most terrifying and volatile scenes of the Syrian civil war.

“It was miserable,” he said, his eyes haggard from the stress and the relentless two weeks of aerial bombardment that preceded it.

“At every checkpoint along the way, we didn’t know who was in charge. There was The Islamic State of Iraq in Sham [Isis, a name given to the main al-Qaida group in the north – the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant], the Free Syria Army, the Islamic Front. It changed every few miles.”

The family had woken early last Friday, sensing the latest outbreak of violence to ravage the north meant a hope of escape. For one week prior, the myriad fighting groups that make up the opposition had been at each other’s throats from Idlib in the north-west, to Raqaa several hundred miles east.

Isis, which had steadily been enforcing a religious tyranny across a broad swath of land, had been ousted from many of its strongholds and was being surrounded in others.

The fratricidal fighting erupted several weeks before a much-anticipated detente scheduled for 22 January in Geneva, adding another layer of complexity to a war that long ago ceased to have two clear-cut protagonists.

“It’s not clear who is winning,” said Abu Mohammed. “It’s not even clear who is fighting. What really matters to us is that we could finally leave.” [Continue reading…]

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Al-Qaeda has no future in the Arab world

Rami G Khouri writes: Many people in the Middle East and abroad are rightly concerned about the rise and impact of hard-line Salafist-takfiri Islamist groups that have recently proliferated and controlled territory in Iraq and Syria. Groups like the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the Nusra Front, and many other smaller ones represent perhaps the fastest growing ideological sector in the region – in some cases attracting tens of thousands of adherents. There are real reasons to be concerned by their behavior, from their beheading and torture of opponents to their imposition of draconian social norms. Yet we should not exaggerate their long-term prospects. I suspect these are essentially short-term phenomena that have no place in a future Middle East, because they are essentially gangs of losers: deeply alienated young men who can only try to establish their fantasy lands of pure Islamic values in areas that have experienced a total breakdown of order, governance, services and security.

These transitional movements have no possibility to control significant territory and set up their own self-contained statelets, principalities or emirates for extended periods, because they have no natural support in society and only operate where they can take advantage of lawlessness and fear. They can do plenty of damage in the short run, because of their ability to stoke sectarian conflict across the Middle East, shatter people’s lives and development, kill and main thousands, and provide scores of recruits with training and battle experience that can later be used to carry out terror operations around the world. But as political movements they are total failures, which is why they can only operate by the gun.

Al-Qaeda itself and its offshoots have tried for decades to mobilize popular support across the Arab world, playing on the same grievances (Palestine, corruption, foreign aggressions, domestic injustices and disparities) that have brought millions of adherents to other, nonviolent and locally anchored Islamist movements such the Muslim Brotherhood or the Nour movement in Egypt. ISIS and other Al-Qaeda-like groups have totally and repeatedly failed the test of popular legitimacy. They have never achieved any anchorage because their violent, oppressive operating methods are deeply repulsive and alien to the overwhelming majority of Arab men and women. So we see their presence only in ravaged lands, zones of chaos and ungoverned areas, in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan’s border areas, rural Yemen, Somalia, Mali and parts of Libya, Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon where governance and order are weak or nonexistent. In the short term, groups such as ISIS can control small patches of land by stabilizing security situations and providing basic services such as food and medical care, allowing them to impose their brand of harsh justice. The populations under their control appreciate the provision of basic human needs, because they do not want to live under the law of the jungle. But neither do they want to live permanently under Salafist-takfiri rule. Yet they are helpless to speak out against or resist the militants who impose their rule by the gun.

When normal Arab men and women have the opportunity to push back against these abnormal movements, they do so with enthusiasm, as we are witnessing today in the backlash against them that is taking places in parts of northern Syria and western Iraq. A combination of organized but less fanatical Islamists and indigenous armed tribesmen has fought to evict ISIS from some of the areas it recently took over. In parts of Iraq this battle against the extremists has been coordinated with the state’s security agencies. This is a clear sign of things to come elsewhere, and is no surprise. [Continue reading…]

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Gunmen assassinate Libya’s deputy industry minister

Reuters reports: Gunmen killed Libya’s deputy industry minister as he drove home from a shopping trip in the city of Sirte late on Saturday, in an attack officials blamed on hardline Islamist militants.

Libya is still plagued by violence and assassinations more than two years after civil war ousted Muammar Gaddafi. Militants, militias and former rebels often resort to force to impose demands on the fragile government.

The minister, Hassan al-Drowi, was shot several times, a senior security official said, asking not to be identified.

“They opened fire from another car while he was driving, he was shot multiple times,” the official said.

“Later, they found explosives attached to his car. The theory is, the bomb failed, so they shot him instead.”

The official blamed Islamist militants who have been trying to extend their influence in the coastal city of Sirte, which has been more stable recently than the capital Tripoli or the major eastern city of Benghazi.

Sirte was the last bastion of Gaddafi loyalists in the war, and he was killed there on October 20, 2011.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s central government, weakened by infighting and with only nascent armed forces, is struggling to wrest control back from areas where militias are still dominant. [Continue reading…]

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Looking for lessons in Iceland’s economic recovery

Der Spiegel reports: What should one expect from a country in which the sentence, “What an asshole!” is a compliment? Icelanders say “asshole,” or “rassgat,” when they tousle a child’s hair or greet friends, and they mean it to be friendly.

While trudging through a lava field within view of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the guide says: “Iceland is the asshole of the world.” That, too, is a positive statement. It’s also a geological metaphor. In Iceland, which lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and thus on the dividing line of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, the earth has a tendency to relieve itself through various geysers, volcanoes and hot springs.

The island, an unlikely geological accident, has existed for some 18 million years, but has only been inhabited for 1,100 years. A pile of lava pushed out of the Atlantic that could eventually disappear again, it’s affectionately called “The Rock” by residents. Icelanders were traditionally fishermen and farmers until they decided to turn their country into a casino for global capital around the turn of the millennium.

But now they have returned to fishing, and gladly talk about their journey back to financial health. SPIEGEL spoke with an investor, a finance minister and a fisherman, in addition to an economist who says apologetically: “Icelanders are just daredevils.” And then there was a sex and knitting expert who says she believes Iceland has “found its way back to itself.”

What happened in Iceland from 2008 to 2011 is regarded as one of the worst financial crises in history. It seems likely that never before had a country managed to amass such great sums of money per capita, only to lose it again in a short period of time. But Iceland, with a population of just 320,000, has also staged what appears to be the fastest recovery on record. Since 2011, the gross domestic product has been on the rise once again, most recently at 2 percent. What’s more, salaries are rising, the national debt is sinking and the government has paid off part of the billions in loans it received in 2008 from the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule. It’s a sign of confidence.

But how did they do it when others cannot? Can we learn something from Iceland? [Continue reading…]

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Ariel Sharon: Enemy of peace

Yousef Munayyer writes: There are few individuals in the modern history of Israel/Palestine whose actions have been as consistently destructive as those of Ariel Sharon. Sharon, who died on January 11, had been involved in Israel’s war machine as early as 1948. He was known for his cut-throat attitude on the battlefield, often with wanton disregard for civilian lives. Time and again, Sharon left some of the bloodiest marks on the history of Palestine.

Perhaps the earliest instance in this trend was the events of Qibya in 1953. Qibya is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, located close to the Green Line. In an Israeli attack on the village, led on the ground by Sharon, scores of homes were destroyed while civilians were still inside. The outcome was a massacre that left 69 Palestinians dead, most of whom were women and children.

The attack was internationally condemned and Israel scrambled to control the damage to its image following the massacre. The United Nations condemned the massacre and the US State Department said those responsible “should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future”. None of the officials responsible were held to account, however. This culture of impunity would be a recurring theme – not only in Israeli history but in Sharon’s history in particular.

The massacre at Qibya only foreshadowed what was yet to come at the hands of Sharon. [Continue reading…]

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Sharon: A Jew can only ‘live as a Jew’ in Israel

In a profile of Ariel Sharon written by James Bennet that appeared in the New York Times in 2004, Sharon indicated that he didn’t see Israel as simply a homeland for the Jewish people but rather that the perpetuation of Jewish identity depended on the ability of Jews to isolate themselves from non-Jews.

For those who regard assimilation as a threat, it’s hard to imagine that they can really embrace the idea of peaceful co-existence — be that peaceful co-existence with Palestinians, Arabs, or anyone else. Why? Because peace inevitably leads to the collapse of barriers and if the enduring existence of ones identity is seen as dependent on the perpetuation of such barriers then the enmity which sustains division is preferable to peace.

In the 50’s and 60’s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, took a shine to the brash leader of Israel’s commandos. Much to the irritation of Sharon’s superior officers, Ben-Gurion would invite him for private chats in his office or even his home. Ben-Gurion’s papers reflect a fatherly interest in Sharon, whom he referred to as Arik and whose roguishness both charmed and worried him. During this period, Ben-Gurion was in his 60’s and then 70’s, Sharon in his 20’s and then 30’s. Their chats followed a tender pattern. Sharon would describe and sometimes defend his exploits. He would complain about his superiors. While lending a sympathetic ear, Ben-Gurion would gently relay to Sharon some of those officers’ concerns, and his own, about Sharon’s behavior. Prodded by Israel’s white-haired founder, Sharon would admit that he lacked discipline and even that he lied, sometimes to Ben-Gurion himself.

“An original, visionary young man,” Ben-Gurion noted on Jan. 29, 1960. “Were he to rid himself of his faults of not speaking the truth and to distance himself from gossip, he would be an exceptional military leader.”

On Nov. 24, 1958, Ben-Gurion recorded an unusual encounter with Sharon. Sharon was just back from 13 months of military study in England. “This was the first time he met with Jews, and he is anxious about the future of our relations with them,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his journal. By “Jews,” he meant non-Israeli Jews living in the Diaspora. Born and raised in what is now Israel, Sharon had not encountered such Jews before.

“The Jews in England are not accepted in the English clubs and golf courses, and they have to situate themselves in Jewish institutions,” Ben-Gurion wrote, recounting Sharon’s impressions. Sharon, he continued, was astonished that these Jews nevertheless did not feel “any personal connection of any kind with Israel.”

It was an insight with a great impact on Sharon. He still speaks about it. When I quoted the passage from Ben-Gurion, it triggered an 18-minute monologue about his fears for the survival of the Jews. “I have many worries, but something that really bothers me is what will happen with the Jews in the future — what will happen to them in 30 years’ time, in 300 years’ time, and with God’s help, 3,000 years’ time.” He laughed. “But I don’t think that then I’ll have to take care of that.”

Returning to his stay in England, he recalled how British officers aimed their anti-Semitism at British Jews but not at Israelis. “It was a kind of an attempt to draw a distinction between Israel and Israelis and ‘their own Jews,’ I would say — Jews in the Diaspora,” he said.

“That worried me,” he continued. “It worried me. I didn’t like it.” He added, “I felt it’s going to be a danger.”

That is classic Sharon: the sweep of the sense of duty, the depth of the tribal consciousness, the sensitivity of the antennae to any threat, maybe real, maybe merely perceived. He regards Israel as a worldwide Jewish project, and he did not want to see any divergence in the Israeli and Jewish identities.

After a few years, Sharon thought the problem went away. “I would say the European countries — maybe others as well — they started to treat us as Jews,” he said. In other words, the danger receded as European Christians began treating Israeli Jews with the same prejudice with which they treated Jews at home. It seemed an odd source of comfort.

Sharon plowed on. A Jew, he said, can only “live as a Jew” in Israel. There were many fewer mixed marriages, he said. “All the time I worry — and I check it all the time — that Jews, I would say, might disappear,” he said. That is, the threat to Jews’ survival exists if they are physically in danger or not. If they are safe and welcomed where they are, they are threatened with assimilation.

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The death of Ariel Sharon

Dimi Reider writes: A general, politician, statesman, and to many a notorious war criminal, Ariel Sharon was known to combine dogged personal ambition with strategic acumen and ruthlessness, which together shaped one of the most controversial and remarkable careers in Israeli political history. Born in the community of Kfar Malal in 1928, Sharon joined the Haganah in the mid 1940s, and first saw action in the run-up to the 1948 War, when his unit staged raids against Arab villages around Kfar Malal. He was seriously wounded in the battle of Latrun and temporarily left the army in 1949 to study at the Hebrew University. By personal order of David Ben-Gurion, however, Sharon was recalled to military service and asked to head the newly established Unit 101.

The unit was created specifically for the purpose of retaliatory raids against Palestinian refugee guerrillas who operated across the Jordanian and Egyptian borders. As often as not, the attacks were against civilian targets, including refugee camps and villages in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and Jordanian-occupied West Bank. One such raid, on the village of Qibya in 1953, culminated in a massacre of 69 civilians who were gunned down as they tried to escape their homes or were buried under the rubble of detonated buildings. The public outcry was so severe that Ben-Gurion initially lied to the Israeli public, claiming the act was a spontaneous act of revenge by Jewish civilians retaliating for the death of a Jewish woman in the town of Yahud several days earlier. Internally, however, Unit 101 was highly praised and its experience and tactics were judged successful enough to make the unit the core of the new Paratroopers Battalion, of which Sharon, not yet 30 years old, took command as lieutenant-colonel.

In the Sinai War of 1956, Sharon led his brigade in a disastrous assault on Sinai’s Mitla pass, losing 38 men and earning allegations of impatience and aggression – allegations that would accompany him the rest of his career. He would eventually be put back on the path to promotion, however, reaching the post of major-general in 1967. Sharon played a key role in the ground offensive on the Egyptian front in the Six Day War, and is generally credited with once more breaking through the Egyptian lines during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, separating two Egyptian armies from each other and creating a crucial turning point in the war (both assaults were seen as brilliant acts of tank warfare and were taught in military academias decades later). After returning from the front, Sharon retired from the IDF for the last time and turned to politics, flirting with the center-left before joining the newly-formed Likud.

As agriculture minister in Menachem Begin’s first government, Sharon played a key role in the government’s open endorsement of settling the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Israeli citizens. Although under his patronage the number of Israeli settlers in the territories more than doubled, his most lasting legacy was the revival of the Ottoman laws regarding “mawat” land – land that was not worked for a number of years, was declared “dead” and then given to the state. The move paved the highway for settlement construction and land expropriation in the West Bank from 1979 to this day.

As defense minster in the second Begin government, Sharon became the architect of the First Lebanon War, including (as later investigations established) consistently lying about the scope of the operations to Begin, who favored a much more limited approach. Sharon was found by the Kahan Commission to be indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of over 3,000 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese allies, the Phalanges, and was made to resign – although he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio. Attempts to bring him to trial in international courts over the massacre went to no avail. [Continue reading…]

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