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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 Israel's war crimes: then and now On July 31, in yet another war crime, Israeli missiles hit the West Bank town of Nablus. When the dust cleared, eight Palestinians lay dead, two of them small children in the area. Also among those killed were two leaders of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement, whose military wing has taken responsibility for many suicide bombings. The next day, 100,000 Palestinians rallied to mourn the Hamas leaders and to pledge revenge. These assassinations of presumed terrorists serve only to strengthen the hand of the most rejectionist, intolerant elements within the Palestinian movement. So reactionary has the State of Israel become in the eyes of the world that it has been forced to hire a lawyer to defend its Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, against international charges of war crimes originating in a Western European bourgeois democracy, Belgium. These charges are being made under the same laws that were recently used, to great international acclaim, to prosecute and convict some of the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In fact, Israel itself used similar legal avenues in 1961 when, in a secret operation, it captured the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to trial in Israel. The Belgian courts are investigating Sharon for his role in the September 1982 massacre of at least 800 Palestinians at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps near Beirut, Lebanon. Sharon, the overall commander of Israel's invasion of Lebanon that year, allowed virulently anti-Palestinian Christian Phalangist militias to rampage through the camps for two days. An official investigation, headed by the Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court, found Sharon personally responsible for the massacre, forcing him to resign as Minister of Defense. However, Sharon was never prosecuted for complicity in murder, as he should have been. Today, 23 Palestinian survivors are taking legal action in the Belgian courts against Sharon, under the concept of "universal jurisdiction" for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In recent months, Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet narrowly escaped extradition to Spain for crimes against humanity under similar laws. Former Nixon administration official Henry Kissinger has also come under investigation in Europe for his role in Chile. While we heartily applaud these efforts to bring these criminals to justice, we also note something odd: In the Sharon case, no attempt is being made also to prosecute those directly responsible for the 1982 massacre, all of them right-wing Christian Arab militiamen, many of them still living in Lebanon. Nor is it mentioned that the Lebanese Army also "investigated" the 1982 massacre, totally absolving the Phalangists. There is a similar silence around Syria's role in the equally horrific massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christian militias at the Al-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976. Such omissions reinforce a mythic version of Arab history that, like the Israeli one of a heroic Zionism fighting against a much stronger foe, makes the necessary compromises between two nations inhabiting the same land much harder. |
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