Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Forty-seven years ago, Ariel Sharon led a raid on a West Bank village that killed about 70 men, women and children, most of them civilians. The villagers have not forgotten.
Feb 6, 2001 | The rubble is still visible among the outgrown weeds in the center of this scraggly Palestinian village in the West Bank. In a commando raid here almost 50 years ago, Ariel Sharon had about 70 Palestinians killed, most of them civilians and many of them women and children, by blowing up their houses with TNT while they were cowering in cellars and backrooms.
On Tuesday, Sharon will probably be elected prime minister of Israel.
Polls give the veteran right-wing politician a double-digit lead over incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- a sign that Sharon's tough-talking, hard-hitting style has struck a chord in the Israeli public shaken by more than four months of violent clashes with Palestinians. More than 360 Palestinians and over 50 Israeli Jews have died since the Palestinian uprising started in September.
Israelis seem to be looking to Sharon to do the same thing he did 50 years ago: retaliate against Palestinian terrorism and restore Israel's deterrence power. Whether Sharon can or will take similarly brutal and decisive action once in office remains to be seen.
"There is security for me in the peace of Ariel Sharon" reads a campaign banner draped across an intersection leading to Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But for the Palestinians of Kibya a few miles down the road, Sharon's seemingly unstoppable rise to power is a nightmare come true. The commando leader who leveled several dozen stone houses and wiped out whole families in their village is about to rule their land, Israeli-occupied since 1967.
"If there was real justice, Sharon would be in jail by now. He's responsible for massacres not just here but in Gaza and Sabra and Shatila [a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon]," said Hammed Ghidan, a retired schoolteacher who was 5 when Sharon led a commando unit and a paratrooper battalion into Kibya. "Israel is rewarding a criminal."
The story of the raid is a painful reminder of the unhealed wounds that stand in the way of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. It is also a cautionary tale for observers who try to predict the nature of Sharon's future term in office.
Every fall in Kibya during the olive harvesting season, the memory of the raid is kept alive in mourning ceremonies and speeches by survivors. A modest memorial plaque behind the village mosque honors the raid's 73 victims. Sixty-nine dead is the figure used in Israel. But, the tally notwithstanding, the facts of the raid are fairly well established.
According to villagers, historians and Sharon's own account in "Warrior," an autobiography published in 1989, Israeli soldiers carrying 1,300 pounds of explosives crept under the cover of darkness on Oct. 14, 1953, across the border between Israel and the West Bank (then ruled by Jordan) in what was to be the first major Israeli retaliation against Arab terrorism. They fought their way in, killing about 10 village guards and two Jordanian soldiers, then set out to methodically destroy civilian homes.
The previous night, an Israeli woman and her two small children had been murdered in their sleep by Arab infiltrators. Kibya, because of its proximity to the border, was believed to be a haven for terrorists. Sharon, then only 25 years old, was eager to prove himself by flexing the muscles of the newly created commando unit he headed.
Until then, Israeli retaliation had consisted in blowing up a few outlying buildings in enemy territory and getting out. But Sharon was determined to inflict more lethal damage. He wanted to prove that "Jewish blood could no longer be shed with impunity. From this point on there would be a heavy price to pay," he wrote in his memoirs.
No one had told the villagers, however, that Sharon was about to change the rules of retaliation. So, although many fled to neighboring villages when they heard the first shots that night, many also chose to stay behind, hiding in haystacks, cellars or sheltered rooms to weather the Israeli attack.
Safiya Ashayeb, a villager in her 80s, remembers that her 11-year-old son hid in a barrel of sewage. "We heard people running, trying to leave the village, but we stayed put because we didn't have the courage to run," she said. Luckily her house was spared -- but not that of her cousins, who died under the rubble.
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