A couple of lessons we learn from the Holocaust are that mass murder should not be rationalized and uncritical nationalism should not be glorified. Leon Cohen’s comments on Ariel Sharon in his February 2014 Editor’s Desk column do both.
Sharon was a war criminal. In 1953, Unit 101 under Sharon’s command massacred 69 innocent civilians in the Arab village of Qibya and was responsible for other similar massacres of Arabs in the 1950s.
When he illegally occupied Lebanon, he supported the fascist Phalange organization and was complicit in the massacre of Arab civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, not to mention the bombing of civilian areas in and around Beirut.
He was an architect of the settler movement that illegally occupies the West Bank, steals Palestinian land and property and denies Palestinians the same right to national self-determination we insist on for Jews.
None of this constitutes tactics “to defeat brilliantly efforts to carry out a new genocide of Jews.” All of these jeopardized the viability of a Jewish state and are morally repugnant. To argue that Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization committed atrocities, while true, does not demonstrate that Sharon’s atrocities are acceptable.
Sharon’s military prowess also has been criticized. In the 1956 war, his failure to follow orders got 38 soldiers killed at the Mitla Pass in Sinai.
I have spoken with soldiers who crossed the Suez Canal in 1973 under Sharon’s command who believed his tactics unnecessarily got many soldiers killed. The way he waged war in Lebanon, where my brother served in the Israel Defense Force, was brutal, disorganized and ultimately failed. It gave us Hezbollah.
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